Black Mountain Songs

Black Mountain Songs
© Rene Cervantes
November 2014 sees the world premiere performance of Black Mountain Songs, an expansive choral/visual work composed by eight composers and curated by Bryce Dessner and Richard Reed Parry, performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus at Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.
Opening the concert, Black Mountain Songs casts us back to a tumultuous, thrilling moment in American history, to the 1930s Bohemian arts colony whose list of alumni and teachers – including composer John Cage, dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, artist Robert Rauschenberg, poet Charles Olson and more – reads like a who’s who of modern art, music and dance.

At North Carolina’s Black Mountain College a spirit of radical democracy prevailed. Students and teachers shared roles and work, boundaries between disciplines dissolved, and art bled into life, nurturing an atmosphere of unfettered creative collaboration. Black Mountain Songs renews that collective thread. 


Dessner, Parry, Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly, Aleksandra Vrebalov, John King, Jherek Bischoff and Tim Hecker—have collaborated with filmmaker Matt Wolf (Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell) to create an unique multimedia experience that celebrates and rekindles Black Mountain’s utopian spirit.

Performance details
20, 21, 22 November | 7:30pm
23 November | 3pm
Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York

More information and tickets available here


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