20 Vocal Commissions, 3 Shows at The Stone and 6 Video Operas Set for Experiments in Opera's 2015-16 Season

EXPERIMENTS IN OPERA - the curiously refreshing composer collective - announces its Fifth Anniversary Season, featuring 20 commissions of vocal works, 3 shows at The Stone in Alphabet City and 6 new video operas to be screened at Anthology Film Archives.

Season Highlights:

The Travel Agency is on Fire: Burroughs Cuts up the Great Bards

Friday, October 16, 2015, 8:00 p.m. & 10:00 p.m.
A collaborative song-cycle featuring the "cut-ups" of William Burroughs, commissioned from 11 composers including Elliott Sharp and JG Thirwell
The Stone
Corner of Avenue C and 2nd Street
$15 General Admission for each set at the door

Matthew Welch Portrait

Saturday, December 12, 2015, 8:00 p.m.
Welch hosts an evening of short works and scenes from
his opera about his family's time in a Filipino prison camp
Featuring Blarvuster, Welch's longtime band of bagpipes, gamelan & rock
and Mantra Percussion The Stone
Corner of Avenue C and 2nd Street
$20 General Admission at the door

Video Operas

April 2016 (exact date TBA)
Screening of six newly commissioned operas created specifically for video Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, NYC, anthologyfilmarchives.org
$10 General Admission

Experimental Choral Works

Thursday, July 28, 2016, 8:00 p.m.
An evening curated with composer Jessica Pavone,
featuring The Ghostlight Chorus The Stone
Corner of Avenue C and 2nd Street
$15 General Admission at the door
www.experimentsinopera.com

From EiO's Founders: "Ever since we began producing new operas, we have maintained a strong connection to composers and the experimental music community in New York City. In our fifth season we will host three events at The Stone, the ideal place for our aesthetic explorations into the work of William S. Burroughs, operas by Matthew Welch, and experimental choral works. We are also intensifying our investigation into video-based operas-natural vehicles for musical storytelling in the 21st Century. Our intent is to play with the idea of opera and build a strong community of art makers in the process." - Jason, Aaron and Matthew

While the world is awash in new opera ventures, Experiments in Opera stands out from the crowd. A composer-driven collective with an air of mad scientists in the lab, EiO is interested in new formulas, not traditional ones, questioning what opera really can be in the 21st Century.

The company was founded in 2010 by a trio of "talented, fearless, and congenial" (The Brooklyn Rail) composer-performers in Brooklyn: Matthew Welch, Jason Cady, and Aaron Siegel. In the personalities of these three creators, there's a certain amount of anarchy, wit, and invention that guarantees though they may be dead serious, it will be a fun ride.

As Experiments in Opera embarks on its fifth season, it continues to place composers at the forefront as key visionaries of modern-day opera-giving them the freedom to mess with the mechanics of opera itself (as in EiO's Radio Operas), how it's delivered (live or on video), scale and duration (10 minutes to evening-length). Whether it's fully or minimally produced is inconsequential. EiO bypasses the cumbersome traditional production schedule and lets things happen as fast as possible.

EiO's subversive impulses and numerous commissions from both rising and established composers has led The New Criterion to hail the organization as "a vital part of the subculture." This season alone will see 20 world premiere vocal works, from newcomers such as Emily Manzo to experimental master Elliott Sharp.

In addition to performances at The Stone and Anthology Film Archives, EiO will continue to organize What Goes On, an annual publication that features writings on and about contemporary opera, written and edited by other creators of contemporary opera. All of the activity throughout the 2015-16 season will be documented and archived at experimentsinopera.com, a growing library of experimental works.

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IN-DEPTH ON EXPERIMENTS IN OPERA's 2015-16 SEASON:

The Travel Agency is on Fire: Burroughs Cuts up the Great Bards

Friday, October 16, 2015
Two sets at 8:00 p.m. & 10:00 p.m.
The Stone, at the corner of Avenue C and 2nd Street
$15 General Admission for each set at the door
experimentsinopera.com/burroughs

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), of Naked Lunch fame, is known for his challenging and hallucinatory prose, and deeply experimental streak. Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius." Burroughs helped to pioneer the art form of cut-ups: repurposing of previously published materials into new art forms. In celebration of the recently published book, The Travel Agency on Fire (edited by Alex Wermer Colan)-a selection of "cut-up" experiments by Burroughs on texts by a range of canonical writers, including Arthur Rimbaud, William Shakespeare, and James Joyce-EiO has commissioned 11 new compositions for ensemble and voice.

The Commissioned Composers: Travis Just, Charlie Looker, Jason Cady, Aaron Siegel, James Ilgenfritz, Anne Guthrie, Lukas Ligeti, Katie Young, JG Thirwell, Elliott Sharp, and Natacha Diels.

The performers include James Ilgenfritz's Anagram Ensemble with vocalists Meagan Schubert and Michael Douglas Jones.

Burroughs selected the source texts, cut them up, and juxtaposed the fragments to select random word combinations and create new compositions. The resulting texts challenge the 11 commissioned composers to reorganize their musical work around non-linear narratives and ideas and embrace a logic of sound and experience. Each set-8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.-will feature different songs.

Matthew Welch Portrait

Saturday, December 12, 2015, 8:00 p.m.
The Stone, at the corner of Avenue C and 2nd Street
$20 General Admission at the door
experimentsinopera.com/matthewwelch

Experiments in Opera co-founder Matthew Welch hosts a set of music featuring several of his most recent operas, including "The Three Truths" (from 2013's 'New Shorts') and a workshop performance of new scenes from his work-in-progress, "And Here We Are," with a libretto by Daniel Neer. This opera is based on the wartime memoirs of Welch's uncle who was interned in a Filipino prison camp.

Welch's music will be performed by his longtime chamber band Blarvuster-which plays an infectiously ecstatic blend of Scottish bagpipes, Balinese gamelan, minimalism, impov and rock-in collaboration with Mantra Percussion. Welch himself is a virtuoso of the Highland Bagpipe and has been hailed by Indie rockers as "the Eddie Van Halen of the bagpipes." The vocal soloists include Anne Rhodes, Jeffrey Gavett, Daniel Neer and Kate Maroney.

Video Operas

April 2016 (exact date TBA)
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York, NY 10003
$10 General Admission
anthologyfilmarchives.org
experimentsinopera.com/videooperas

Screen shot of Jason Cady's "Dead Inside" from 2014's "Opera Trailers" In the late 1970s Robert Ashley made his opera Perfect Lives for television because he believed that the America of his time was a culture of TV-not opera houses. Today we are in the midst of a transformation of the medium of video and how we consume media, thanks to Youtube, Vimeo, and of course the everpresent smartphone. Experiments in Opera has commissioned six new operas for video that dive into this trend of web video. These video operas will inevitably share the intimate, small-scale production values of web videos and will be created specifically for the medium of video, not songs or stage pieces adapted to video. The six works will premiere at Anthology Film Archives in New York in April 2016 (each performance is a film screening), and then be released on the web through Experiments in Opera's video channel.

The commissioned composers for the Video Operas project include EiO's three 2015-16 Fellows (see below): Matana Roberts, Emily Manzo and Anna Mikhailova, as well as Jason Cady, Aaron Siegel, and Matthew Welch.

Experimental Choral Works

Thursday, July 28, 2016, 8:00 p.m.
The Stone, at the corner of Avenue C and 2nd Street
$15 General Admission at the door
experimentsinopera.com/choralworks

Performance of "When No One Around You Is There" from 2013's "Chorus of All Souls" Experiments in Opera's final event at The Stone is an evening of choral works curated with composer Jessica Pavone. The program will feature a reprise of Pavone's "When No One Around You Is There" (2013's Chorus of All Souls), Jason Cady's choral opera "Nostalgia Kills," and new works by Aaron Siegel and Matthew Welch. The Ghostlight Chorus will be the featured ensemble for this concert.

2015-16 EiO Fellows

Experiments in Opera will work with Emily Manzo, Matana Roberts and Anna Mikhailova in a yearlong fellowship for the 2015-16 season. In addition to having their works performed on the Video Operas program, these three composers will meet for workshops throughout the season to discuss major questions that they are encountering during their writing process. Workshops will be focused around topics including writing for the voice, working with singers as partners, developing characters in music, film production, script writing and producing multi-media works for the web. 2015-16 marks the second year of EiO Fellows. Last year's debut year included composers Nick Hallett, Roddy Bottum, and Gelsey Bell.

What Goes On (what-goes-on.org)

Writings from and about makers of music/theatre/story/sound - Experiments in Opera is one of a cohort of composer and opera-focused organizations participating in What Goes On, a collaborative venture to provide critical feedback to new opera composers. This group, which includes members of Rhymes with Opera, ThingNY and Object Collection, meets regularly to plan reviews, interviews and articles that connect with the current schedule of performances at large throughout the season. What Goes On will be published online with contributions posted on a rolling basis.

Experiments in Opera

Co-founded by composers Matthew Welch, Jason Cady, and Aaron Siegel, Experiments inOpera is a composer-driven initiative, featuring recent and new works with innovative answers to the traditional questions about how to connect words, story and music. EIO's work is playful and funny as well as serious and dark. They catalyze opportunities that make strong connections to life and art in the twenty first century. EIO makes no meaningful distinction between the merit of short works and long works, full productions and concert presentations, live works and works on video. Artists from a variety of styles and backgrounds find common cause with their efforts and feel at home intheir productions.

Since 2011, Experiments in Opera has produced thirty seven new works, collaborating with over one hundred performers, designers and directors from the New York City artist community. Experiments in Opera has presented the work of more than 26 composers including Georges Aperghis, Robert Ashley, Gelsey Bell, Roddy Bottum, the Cough Button collective, Jason Cady, Joe Diebes, Ruby Fulton, Nick Hallett, Gabrielle Herbst, Sam Hillmer, John King, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Daniel Kushner, Jonathan Mitchell, Jessica Pavone, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, Aaron Siegel, Justin Tierney, Leaha Maria Villarreal, Matthew Welch and John Zorn.

Over the last four years, EIO has produced its events at Abrons Arts Center, Le Poisson Rouge, Spectrum, Roulette, and Issue Project Room.

All of the work developed with Experiments in Opera is documented extensively in videos, images and writings that are available in an online catalogue atexperimentsinopera.com. These insightful looks into the origins of artists' ideas and their working habits help to support EIO's mission of building a more robust conversation about how and why opera works the way it does.

Pictured: EiO Founders Matthew Welch, Jason Cady, Aaron Siegel