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For centuries, the Chinese have traditionally marked the harvest by lighting lanterns, eating mooncakes, dancing with symbolic dragons, and honoring Chang'e, the moon goddess of immortality. In a provocative collaboration beginning in the 2011-12 season, the internationally-acclaimed Music from Copland House and Music from China ensembles bring together European and Asian instruments and musical sensibilities to celebrate a rich harvest of works that explore the ties and tensions that emerge from melding Eastern and Western sounds, language, identity, philosophy, and mythology. Sounds of the Dragon: A Chinese-American Musical Harvest will jointly premiere at Copland House at Merestead in Mount Kisco, NY (October 30, 2011), Washington's Freer Gallery of Art (November 3), Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (March 23 and 24, 2012), and the Ecstatic Music Festival at New York City's Merkin Hall (March 28). The project will continue at other leading venues around the U. S. in 2012-13.
Journeying across cultures, genres, and the cultivated/vernacular divide, Sounds of the Dragon includes concerts and educational and community outreach activities that examine identity, diversity, and conformity through the work of two generations of post-Cultural Revolution Chinese émigré composers, as well as Americans looking across the Pacific. The Ecstatic Music Festival program features newly-commissioned works by Derek Bermel, Du Yun, Samson Young, and the young electronic and new-media innovator Leung Kei Cheuk (Gaybird). The other concerts include the Bermel work along with vibrant, richly evocative compositions by MacArthur Fellow Bright Sheng, 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winner Zhou Long, Chen Yi, Huang Ruo, and multi-cultural pioneer Lou Harrison. These works merge wildly diverse influences and live at the artistic crossroads of concert music, theater, pop, cabaret, storytelling, and technology. The educational component of Sounds of the Dragon approaches this project musically, historically, and culturally, and explores the distinctions and interaction of the Chinese and European traditions, creativity, and musical instruments.
Music from Copland House, the resident ensemble based at the creative center for American music at Aaron Copland's National Historic Landmark home in New York's Lower Hudson Valley, dynamically champions a wide variety of works by past and present U.S. composers; the ensemble is "all exuberance and bright sunshine ... bracing, beguiling, exciting, and incisive" (The New York Times). Music from China invokes the delicacy and power of both traditional and contemporary Chinese music; "Music from China is music from heaven" (Kansas City Star).Sounds of the Dragon is supported by the Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center in New York, the National Endowment for the Arts, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Friends of Copland House.
