After a two-year hiatus, NakedEye is back with new music exploring personal identity, the politics of freedom, and sound. The group premieres two new works. “I Am Waiting”, by NYC-based composer/pianist Jerome Kitzke, a semi theatrical piece based on poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti with guest actor/singer Lisa Karrer; and “The Secret of Growth” for ensemble and video by West Coast-based cellist/composer Theresa Wong. One of America’s great musical poets, George Crumb, passed away on February 6 of this year, and so to pay tribute to him, pianist Ju-Ping Song performs his bewitching “Eine kleine Mitternacht Musik” (A Little Midnight Music) – an inspired nod to Thelonious Monk.
Please join us in person or via livestream.
PROGRAM
George Crumb: Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik (A Little Midnight Music) (2001)
Theresa Wong: The Secret of Growth (2022, world premiere)
Jerome Kitzke: I Am Waiting (2020, world premiere) – based on poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (with guest actor/singer Lisa Karrer)
About Jerome Kitzke (b.1955)
Jerome Kitzke was born in Milwaukee in 1955 and has lived in New York since 1984. Having written his first piece in 1970, his music arises from the North American landscape and celebrates vitality in its purest forms, thriving on the spirit of driving jazz, Plains Indian song, and Beat Generation poetry, where freedom and ritual converge. It is direct, dramatic, and visceral, always with an ear to the sacred ground. Often political and always topical, his music aims at revealing the heart of what it means to be an American in the mid 20th Century and early in the 21st, especially as it relates to how we live on this land and the way we came to live on it. His music has been performed around the world and is recorded on the New World, Mode, Starkland, and Innova labels. His latest recording is “The Redness of Blood”, released in late 2021 on New World Records. Currently he is working on pieces for thingNY and Joel Harrison’s Electric Guitar Quartet. His music is published by Peer Music in New York City and Hamburg.
Jerome Kitzke
I delight in working with language to tell stories or give a point of view, and love working with musicians who are willing to produce vocal sounds as supplements to the usual sounds of their instruments.
My pieces have been written for instrumentations ranging from solo toy piano up to large orchestral choral and have been played around the world, reaching places as far flung from North America as Australia and China.
When last at MacDowell in 2020 I completed a large commission for NakedEye Ensemble called I Am Waiting, an anti-Trump piece using Lawrence Ferlinghetti poems that was to be premiered in May of 2020. Due to COVID-19, the premiere was postponed and will be rescheduled once a vaccine is in general use and things are back to some semblance of normal. Goodness gracious!
→ New Music Box interview of Kitzke by Frank J. Oteri: Stories That Must Be Told
About Theresa Wong (b.1976)
Theresa Wong is a composer, cellist and vocalist active at the intersection of music, experimentation, improvisation and the synergy of multiple disciplines. Bridging sound, movement, theater and visual art, her primary interest lies in finding the potential for transformation for both the artist and receiver alike.
Theresa Wong
Following inquisitive paths into song forms, video, just intonation, movement and visual media, her works include As We Breathe, an installed song commissioned by Long Beach Opera for the 2020 Songbook, She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees, commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill for The Future Is Female project, and Harbors, co-composed with Long String Instrument inventor Ellen Fullman and chosen as one of The Wire’s top 50 releases of 2020. Her multi-media piece, The Unlearning (Tzadik), 21 songs for violin, cello and 2 voices inspired by Goya's Disasters of War etchings premiered in 2013 at Roulette in Brooklyn and was also presented at the 2016 New Frequencies Festival at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Current and past commissions include works for Splinter Reeds, The San Francisco Girls Chorus, Vajra Voices, and Del Sol String Quartet.
She collaborates with many singular artists, including Fred Frith, Luciano Chessa, Annie Lewandowski, Chris Brown, Frantz Loriot, John McCowen, Søren Kjærgaard, Carla Kihlstedt, and filmmaker Daria Martin. In 2018, Wong founded fo’c’sle, a record label dedicated to adventurous music from the Bay Area and beyond, featuring inaugural releases by Ellen Fullman with David Gamper and Stuart Dempster, Chris Brown, Powerdove and the Lijiang Quintet.
She has shared her work internationally at venues including Fondation Cartier in Paris, Cafe Oto in London, Festival de Arte y Ópera Contemporánea in Morelia, Mexico, The Stone in New York City and Centennial Hall in Sydney. Wong is a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow and has also been an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Lijiang Studio and Yaddo. She currently works and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.