April 13, 2024
7:30pm MST
King Center Concert Hall, MSU Denver / Auraria Campus
$25 General Admission, $20 Senior/Military, $15 Students
https://ahec.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=1743
Join us for our second Colorado Collaborators Showcase (CoCoSho) on April 13th!
A retooling of our annual Colorado Composers Concert, CoCoSho is an event celebrating the work of Colorado artists - including composers, performers, dancers, and visual artists - that helps diversify our collaborator pool.
Following an open call for collaborators and blind selection, this year’s selected collaborator is Denver-based performance artist MG Bernard, who has worked with Playground composer Nathan Hall to create a sound composition that simulates MG's emotional and physical relationship to the medical industrial complex. Their reimagining of a sonic waiting room complicates linear time, pain, comfort, anxiety, and tranquility. "I am so excited to be working with Nathan Hall and the Playground Ensemble to realize a sound composition that simulates the pain, comfort, anxiety, and calm I experience while in the hospital."
Alongside the premiere, The Playground will perform additional works by Colorado-connected composers.
THE PROGRAM
Excerpts from Shades of Colorado by Jessi Harvey
III. A River at the Edge of Extinction
IV. 196 Flavors
VI. On Relationships
Performed by:
Sarah Whitnah, Violin
Emily Lewis, Violin
Allyson Stibbards, Viola
David Short, Cello
III. A River at the Edge of Extinction
The Colorado River Compact established in 1922, based on a miscalculation of the average water flow, divided the river's water to 7 states and Mexico. Each instrument takes the role and percentage of two of its dividends with musical motives derived from each of the state's songs. The Colorado River has been listed multiple times in the “10 Most Endangered Rivers” List and no longer reaches the end of its path, the Gulf of California. Like the river, the performers never reach their terminus.
IV. 196 Flavors
The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project is dedicated to the preservation and continuation of Colorado’s Heritage Apples. Of the over 500 varietals available in 1922, 196, less than 50 percent, remain in the state. This movement lists, in glorious literal form, those 196 apples.
VI. On Relationships
“The life history of many of our common plants, birds, insects, and mammals yet remains to be truly written.” - William Gibson
With the violins acting as insects and the viola and cello playing plants, this movement plays with the variety of relationships possible in the natural and musical world and the ways the two are similar - and not so much.
Echoes from Inside by Stacy Fahrion
Over the past 3+ years, Playground Emeritus Board Member Richard von Foerster has written countless letters to incarcerated individuals, building penpal relationships with many people. He collected recordings of phone calls with incarcerated individuals for this piece, asking a series of open-ended questions, including “What do you want people to know about you?" and “What do you miss the most?” Through a collage of these interview recordings, this piece offers a glimpse into what it feels like to be incarcerated in America.
In order of appearance:
Sean Ryan
Paul Neuman
Windee
Bubba Collins
Johnny
Justin
Rusty Weddle
Norton
Jeremy McCullough
Joey Carroll
Sasha
D Bowen
John Modie
Buried Alive by Stacy Fahrion
Performed by:
Emily Lewis, Violin
Allyson Stibbards, Viola
David Short, Cello
Eric Davis, Narrator
“Buried Alive” is a poem written by Rick Anderson and Nathan Ybanez, published in the book Unlocked Poetry: with Professor Wayne A. Gilbert and the Lyrical Vagabonds.
Rick Anderson is a poet incarcerated in Sterling Correctional Facility. He works in the prison library and typed the entire manuscript of Unlocked Poetry. Writing poetry helps Rick endure the hardships of prison and often returns him to his beloved nature.
Nathan Ybanez spent more than two decades in Colorado’s harshest prisons, and is now free. In prison he learned the art of poetry, which helped him endure the violence and indignities of prison. He continues to write to unlock the magic of deep engagement with daily life. Nathan’s chapbook of poetry, Memory and Form, was recently published by Liquid Light Press.
One goal of this piece is to disturb public apathy around incarceration.
Buried Alive
Written by Rick Anderson & Nathan Ybanez
My contemplative moments
are like motes of dust
swirling in bright beams
burning through the shadows
Each a thing I mean to do:
a regret, an unfulfilled dream,
a tear, a kiss, a goodbye.
I live in these siren flashes
sucking at them like a leech
growing fat on the suffering.
Time is a terrible circle
closing in on itself,
cutting away at an empty heart.
I search in vain for the moment
I grew too large in my loss
when I turned to this flailing morbidity
from an illusive future
to a ransacked past.
There’s no light here - not really.
These nostalgic pyres
are as meaningless
as tears in the rain.
But things continue to grow
and I claw for my salvation.
Across my Rubicon,
alone in my grave,
beholding only echoes of all
the people I used to be,
I wonder what god
would deem it just
for an old man
to suffer the follies
of an arrogant youth.
مبارز by Roohallah Mobarez & Conrad Kehn
Performed by:
Sarah Whitnah, Violin
Ryan Fiegl, Guitar
Deborah Marshall, Clarinet
Conrad Kehn, Electronics
This work is a piece of spiritual healing that Roohallah experienced while engaged in therapy in prison. Years spent running from unresolved trauma, addiction and loss came to a sudden halt once he was rightfully sentenced to prison. While incarcerated, Roohallah experienced a transformative event that allowed him to overcome decades' worth of blocked grief.
~ INTERMISSION ~
Dark Skies by Abby Kellems
Performed by:
Sarah Whitnah, Violin
David Farrell, Electronics
Dark Skies was written for Weathering Steel, the Plein Air Sound Collective's debut album of site-specific music, recorded in May 2023 at the Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Rangely, Colorado. The Tank is an empty steel water cistern with amazing acoustic properties, including a natural decay reverb of up to forty seconds.
Rangely, the town where the Tank is located, is quite remote, and the careful protection of its skies from light pollution has made it a haven for stargazing. Dark Skies celebrates the quiet brilliance of the night sky and those who strive to preserve it. It's a love letter to stargazing amongst friends and protecting special things.
Born Liar by Ron Miles Arr. David Farrell
Performed by:
David Farrell, Electronics
"Born Liar" - a song from Ron Miles's album Woman's Day - grabbed my ear at first listen. As I looked at the score and listened to the recording, I discovered so much space for interpretation. What is definitively notated is just about a page, but contains a virtual universe - the lyrical and the angular, smooth sounds and sharp ones, and an inviting openness. My version - for interactive electronics - tries to hold on to the sounds and feelings of the original recording while bringing in the diverse timbres and textures that characterize computer music.
I'm Waiting for Your Crip Cadence by MG Bernard and Nathan Hall (New Commission Collaboration)
Performed by:
Nathan Hall (he/him), Conductor/Vocals
MG Bernard (she/her), Vocals/Machines
Joshua Sawicki (he/him), Piano
David Short (he/him), Cello
Deborah Marshall (she/her), Bass Clarinet
Conrad Kehn (he/him), Electronics
I'm Waiting for Your Crip Cadence is the collaborative composition and performance by Denver-based artists MG Bernard (she/her) and Nathan Hall (he/him). With help from a quartet of chamber musicians, Bernard and Hall create and recreate an auditory and visual experience of what it feels like to exist in a chronically sick bodymind. Elements of the piece explore ideas of crip time (the disabled experience of non-linear time) and queer experiences through music, and the relationship between doctor and "patient". Together, the artists and performers reveal invisible aspects of Bernard's life to the public through a visceral and juxtaposing display of how she is bound to the medical industrial complex, dependent on uncomfortable relationships of care, and indentured to pain.