John Cage News

From June 1-15 in both Philadelphia (Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts) and New York (Roulette in Brooklyn), PRISM-dubbed 'one of America's finest saxophone quartets for three decades' by The New Yorker -- will partner with the PARTCH Ensemble and So Percussion, and composers Ken Ueno, Steven Mackey and Stratis Minakakis to perform, explore, and record a new body of music combining saxophones with a breathtaking range of percussion instruments in COLOR THEORY.

Miller Theatre at Columbia University School of the Arts continues its Composer Portraits series with Hannah Lash, featuring JACK Quartet, loadbang, and pianist Lisa Moore, on Thursday, April 7, 2016 at 8 p.m.

Houston Ballet offers up its Winter Mixed Repertory Program which introduces three masterpieces into the company's repertory in a thrilling evening of dance. 

Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) and the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) today announce their 2016-17 season.

Ensemble ACJW-an inspirational collective of young professional classical musicians that was created in 2007 by Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education-makes its debut at National Sawdust on Tuesday, March 29 at 7:00 p.m. with an ambitious one-hour program of contemporary music. The performance is the first in a three-concert residency at National Sawdust, an exciting new venue dedicated to contemporary music located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with upcoming dates in May and June.

Since their formation 20 years ago, driven by their abiding belief in the musical potential of sound, the duo Matmos (Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt) have created a wide range of imaginative recordings and live performances. In addition to releasing a string of acclaimed electronic music albums, they have played the uterus and reproductive tract of a cow at the San Francisco Art Institute, canisters of helium at Radio City Music Hall while opening for Bjork, and John Cage's personal collection of conch shells at Carnegie Hall.

Boston Ballet Artistic Director Mikko Nissinen announces the programming for the 2016-2017 season at the Boston Opera House, to begin in October. The 53rd season will launch with Le Corsaire, a historically significant work in the world of ballet that originally premiered in Paris in 1856, followed by Mikko Nissinen's "dazzling, dreamy" The Nutcracker (Karen Campbell, The Boston Globe). The season continues with the North American Company premiere of William Forsythe's ARTIFACT, "a work that definitely shows this choreographer as the most influential practitioner of the art form since Balanchine" (Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times). In April 2017, Marius Petipa's quintessential The Sleeping Beauty will return with soaring music by Tchaikovsky. The season will also include two mixed repertory programs with works by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Ji?i Kylian, and Alexander Ekman, as well as a world premiere by Resident Choreographer Jorma Elo. Additionally, Le Corsaire, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty will offer Boston Ballet School students the unique opportunity to appear in Company productions.

Segerstrom Center for the Arts welcomes the return of Les Ballets de Monte- Carlo this weekend, February 11 - 13, 2016, with another American premiere: Jean-Christophe Maillot's Chore, featuring music by Danny Elfman and John Cage.

Washington State native Trisha Brown is considered the most widely acclaimed choreographer of the postmodern era. For over 50 years, she pushed the limits of choreographic movement, changing modern dance forever. At 79, Trisha Brown has choreographed her last dances. In celebration of her life's work, Trisha Brown Dance Company returns to the choreographer's home state to perform the final performances of her works for the proscenium stage as part of a retrospective presented by University of Washington's World Series at Meany Hall.

In its tenth anniversary season, THE CROSSING - the extraordinary chamber choir from Philadelphia, dedicated to new music and conducted by Donald Nally - comes to New York tonight, January 23, 2016 to perform the NY premiere of THE FIFTH CENTURY, a large-scale work for the rare combination of choir and saxophone quartet by the iconic avant-garde English composer GAVIN BRYARS. The event, which will also feature the great sax quartet PRISM and will have Bryars in the audience, takes place at 7:30 p.m. at St. Paul's Chapel at Trinity Church, Wall Street.

The premiere of One Rhinoceros, Three Birds and a Pineapple and the company's critically acclaimed Balkan Dreams will be among five works presented by Tina Croll & Company at the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival, Buttenwieser Hall, Friday, March 18 through Sunday, March 20.

Susan Vencl began choreographing late in life -- when she was almost old enough to collect Social Security -- and she gets philosophical about the passage of time. 'Your past and future are embedded in the present moment,' she says. That idea drives 'Long Before Afterward,' her dance of sliding movement, sweeping turns and Grecian patterns which play with our perspective in sometimes mathematical ways. The Hawkins- and Limon-influenced piece will be performed to a suite of nine expressionistic works by acclaimed composer Arlene Sierra and will be presented by Susan Vencl Dance for its debut February 19, 20 and 21 at 8:00 PM at Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, 55 Bethune Street.

On Friday, February 12 at 9:00 p.m. in Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall presents the innovative ensemble S? Percussion in a program of new collaborative works by composers Glenn Kotche, Steven Mackey, and Shara Worden. With Glenn Kotche, percussionist for the Chicago-based rock band Wilco, S? performs the world premiere of Kotche's Migrations as well as his Drumkit Quartets, a work in the ensemble's repertoire since 2011, set to be released by Cantaloupe Records on February 27. Vocalist/composer Shara Worden is featured in her recent work written with S? Percussion, Timeline, heard here in its New York premiere. S? and Worden will also perform the New York premiere of Steven Mackey's Before It Is Time.

Nigel Redden, Director of Lincoln Center Festival, today announced the line-up for the Festival, which runs from July 13-31, 2016. Artists and ensembles from seven countries, many of them making their Lincoln Center Festival debuts, will gather for the festival, now celebrating its 20th anniversary, and which continues its mission of presenting the finest classical and contemporary arts from around the world.  An array of 49 dance, music, and theater performances will animate seven venues on and off the Lincoln Center campus.

Susan Vencl began choreographing late in life -- when she was almost old enough to collect Social Security -- and she gets philosophical about the passage of time.  'Your past and future are embedded in the present moment,' she says.  That idea drives 'Long Before Afterward,' her dance of sliding movement, sweeping turns and Grecian patterns which play with our perspective in sometimes mathematical ways.  The Hawkins- and Limon-influenced piece will be performed to a suite of nine expressionistic works by acclaimed composer Arlene Sierra and will be presented by Susan Vencl Dance for its debut February 19, 20 and 21 at 8:00 PM at Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, 55 Bethune Street.

The Recording Academy® announced its Special Merit Awards recipients today, and this year's Lifetime Achievement Award honorees are Ruth Brown, Celia Cruz, Earth, Wind & Fire, Herbie Hancock, Jefferson Airplane, Linda Ronstadt, and RUN DMC.

WaterTower Theatre Producing Artistic Director and Loop Executive Producer Terry Martin today announced the line-up for the 2016 Out of the Loop Fringe Festival, February 25 - March 6, 2016, at the Addison Theatre Centre. Six world premieres highlight this year's diverse Festival as well as 2 one-woman cabarets, 4 dance works, 1 circus act, 3 solo shows, 1 musical reading, 2 play readings, 9 theatre productions, 1 interdisciplinary piece, 1 spoken word performance, a 24-hour play festival, and many returning favorites. The Festival is made possible, in part, through the generous support of The Town of Addison and the Texas Commission on the Arts as well as media sponsors, TheaterJones.com and the Dallas Observer. The Festival is produced by Terry Martin and Kelsey Leigh Ervi.

WaterTower Theatre Producing Artistic Director and Loop Executive Producer Terry Martin today announced the line-up for the 2016 Out of the Loop Fringe Festival, February 25 - March 6, 2016, at the Addison Theatre Centre.

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 focuses on how, despite its brief existence, BMC became a seminal meeting place for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become the principal practitioners in their fields of the postwar period. Figures such as Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, Gwendolyn and Jacob Knight Lawrence, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley, among many others, taught and studied at BMC. Teaching at the college combined the craft principles of Germany's revolutionary Bauhaus school with interdisciplinary inquiry, discussion, and experimentation, forming the template for American art schools. While physically rooted in the rural South, BMC formed an unlikely cosmopolitan meeting place for American, European, Asian, and Latin American art, ideas, and individuals. The exhibition argues that BMC was as an important historical precedent for thinking about relationships between art, democracy, and globalism. It examines the college's critical role in shaping many major concepts, movements, and forms in postwar art and education, including assemblage, modern dance and music, and the American studio craft movement—influence that can still be seen and felt today.