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RODA

Saturday, May 18, 2019 | 7:00 pm
Littlefield | 635 Sackett Street | Brooklyn, NY
in association with World Music Institute
18 and over | Seated $25 | Standing $10 | Purchase tickets

— wild new music with Contemporaneous and berimbau sextet Projeto Acromusical —

In this groundbreaking collaboration between Contemporaneous and berimbau sextet Projeto Arcomusical, disparate traditions of string instruments collide in an explosion of radical new music that draws from diverse traditions of ancient string instruments. The program builds a musical atlas of new music drawn from the ancient and disparate traditions of stringed instruments — from the kora to the harp, to the guqin, the cello, and the berimbau.

In world premiere works written for Contemporaneous and Projeto Arcomusical, visionary composers Elliot Cooper Cole and Alexis Lamb stretch the expressive possibilities of the berimbau into a new context. Cole’s piece, Roda, takes its title and its physical energy from the circular formation that audiences form around capoeira martial art performers. New arrangements map the mold-shattering string playing of revered Gambian kora player Alhaji Bai Konte and psychedelic folk singer/harpist Joanna Newsom onto the whole ensemble of Contemporaneous.

RODA gives us the chance to imagine the past and future of our world, bound together across time and space by strings across a resonator.

Program

Alhaji Bai KonteAlla L’aa Ke — world premiere arrangement (arr. David Bloom)

Gregory BeyerKora

Zhou Long: Song of the Ch'in

Alexis Lamb: Ondulação — world premiere, large ensemble version

Elliot Cole: Roda — world premiere, chamber concerto version

Joanna NewsomCosmia — world premiere arrangement (arr. Dylan Mattingly)

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Contemporaneous plays ICEBERG

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Chunky in Heat