Saturday, August 27, 2022 | 8:00 pm
Roulette Intermedium | 509 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn NY 11217
Free! | Register here
Contemporaneous presents GENEALOGY, a celebration of the diverse and abundant ways in which the fabric of life has been passed from generation to generation through music. Featuring four world premieres commissioned and performed by the 23-member ensemble Contemporaneous, GENEALOGY shares music by creators Eve Beglarian, Pa Bobo Jobarteh, Jali Bakary Konteh, Michael Kropf, and Dylan Mattingly, and will feature legendary radio host Terrance McKnight and violinist Sabrina Tabby as soloists, in this unforgettable celebration of the way we are inextricably connected through time.
GENEALOGY is free for all to attend, and will be followed by an afterparty in Roulette in celebration of the community. Please register in advance here.
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PROGRAM:
Pa Bobo Jobarteh / Jali Bakary Konteh: Jelenka (world premiere arrangement)
Pa Bobo Jobarteh / Jali Bakary Konteh: Sissay (world premiere arrangement)
Michael Kropf: Moses in Nederland (world premiere; Sabrina Tabby, soloist; co-commissioned by Contemporaneous and the Adele and John Gray Endowment Fund)
INTERMISSION
Dylan Mattingly / Thomas Bartscherer: Genealogy (world premiere; Terrance McKnight, soloist)
Eve Beglarian: The Continuous Life (Terrance McKnight, soloist)
AFTERPARTY directly after show
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GENEALOGY will feature the world premiere of a new commission from composer Michael Kropf, curated through Contemporaneous's open call for artists to share their musical dream projects, Contemporaneous: IMAGINATION, and co-commissioned by the Adele and John Gray Endowment Fund. Kropf’s new work is a violin concerto entitled Moses in Nederland, which was composed for Contemporaneous and Sabrina Tabby as soloist. Kropf's great-grandfather Moses was an amateur composer and violinist, who lived in Holland until the 1930s, when he was forced to flee Europe from the Nazis. Michael, who is himself a violinist as well as a composer, discovered a series of manuscripts of melodies written by his great-grandfather in his parents' family home, and has now begun writing this violin concerto as an exploration of his family history and a way to connect to his great-grandfather, using Moses's melodies as the foundational musical material for the new piece.
Genealogy will also feature the world premiere of songs by Pa Bobo Jobarteh and Jali Bakary Konteh in new arrangements for Contemporaneous created by composers Dylan Mattingly and Zachary Ritter in collaboration with Jobarteh and Konteh. Pa Bobo Jobarteh and Jali Bakary Konteh are Gambian griots and bearers of the Mandinka oral tradition — and the grandsons of the legendary jali Alhaji Bai Konte, who was greatly responsible for sharing the kora with a broad audience in the USA in the 1970s. This music will mark the first performances in a multi-year collaborative project between Pa Bobo and Jali Bakary and Contemporaneous to bring their music, carrying the oral tradition of Mandinka culture, to the US. The Mandinka griot kora tradition has been passed down through generations as musical and oral history for hundreds of years, and Pa Bobo Jobarteh and Jali Bakary Konte are current bearers of that cultural legacy.
Giving its name to the full concert is a work entitled Genealogy with music by Dylan Mattingly and text by Thomas Bartscherer, which is drawn from their large-scale in-progress project History of Life, set to premiere in 2024, and will be the first chance for audiences to hear music from this new work. Genealogy recounts a lineage of generations, with vignettes from everyday lives of individuals, from ancient times (the ancestors of Odysseus) to the 20th century, and will feature Terrance McKnight as narrator.
Genealogy will present a performance of composer Eve Beglarian's magnificent work, The Continuous Life. The work, which draws inspiration and its title from a poem by Mark Strand, was commissioned to celebrate the turn of the millenium, and as the composer writes, it is about "the meaninglessness of the idea of a uniquely important moment in time." About the poem, Beglarian writes "[it] is about the rhythm of everyday life, and how long to find meaning in it." Drawing on that imagination of the continuity of life, the piece explores Beglarian's connection to her parents, and draws on music by her father and a folksong sung to her by her mother as a child. The Continuous Life allows for audience participation on acoustic guitar, and all audience members are encouraged to bring an acoustic guitar if they have one.
Genealogy is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and by public funds from The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and support from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, New Music USA, Pacific Harmony Foundation, and the Peter S. Reed Foundation.
