THE_OPER& Thursday, March 8–Saturday, March 10 Von der Heyden Studio Theater, Durham www.dukeperformances.duke.edu Going into the premiere of John Supko and Bill Seaman’s THE_OPER&, I didn’t know what to expect, despite having spent two weeks studying it for a preview in last week’s INDY. I knew about its intricate, layered wordplay, full of references to […]
Dan Ruccia
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A Computer-Generated Multimedia Opera Is Premiering at Duke. Not Even Its Creators Know What’s Going to Happen.
THE_OPER& Thursday, March 8-Saturday, March 10 Various times, $10–$28 von der Heyden Studio Theater, Durham www.dukeperformances.duke.edu In Poetics, Aristotle defines tragedy as “the imitation of an action that is serious and also as having magnitude, complete in itself.” The operative emotion in tragedy, he explains, is the strangely pleasurable mix of pity and fear we […]
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Duke Performances’ Ten-day Monk@100 Festival Celebrates the Unbounded Legacy of One of Jazz’s Greatest Architects
MONK@100 Tuesday, Oct. 17–Thursday, Oct. 26, Various times, $10–$25 Durham Fruit & Produce Company, Durham www.dukeperformances.duke.edu Few jazz composers or pianists have had as deep an effect on the form as Thelonious Monk. The North Carolina-born musician built his sound around a fundamental tension between tradition and modernity, between jazz history and a vision of […]
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Monk Matters
Tuesday, Oct. 7–Thursday, Oct. 26 Various venues, Durham www.dukeperformances.duke.edu Thelonious Monk was born in Rocky Mount on October 10, 1917. Although he left the state when he was four, Monk is somewhere within the top three jazz musicians to be born in North Carolina, depending on how you feel about John Coltrane and Max Roach. […]
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Beginning half a century ago, Suzanne Ciani and Laurie Spiegel laid early foundations for electronic music
Laurie Spiegel and Suzanne Ciani have lived parallel lives. Both began exploring the sonic possibilities of modular synthesizers, particularly the Buchla 200, in the late 1960s. Both were at the forefront of the development of electronic music through the seventies and eighties in New York City, seeking ways to make synthesizers more interactive and accessible. […]
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Pulitzer-Winning Composer Caroline Shaw Returns to Her Home State for a Run with the North Carolina Symphony
N.C. SYMPHONY QUARTET WITH CAROLINE SHAW Friday, March 10, 9 p.m., $8–$10 Kings, Raleigh www.kingsraleigh.com N.C. SYMPHONY WITH CAROLINE SHAW Saturday, March 11, 8 p.m., $25 Meymandi Concert Hall, Raleigh www.dukeenergycenterraleigh.com For a little while, it seemed like Caroline Shaw was performing in the Triangle every few months. In the span of a few years, […]
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Live: Philip Glass’s New Eleventh Symphony Makes Its Second Appearance in Chapel Hill
Glass At 80: Bruckner Orchester Linz UNC’s Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill Wednesday, February 1, 2017 New Philip Glass pieces generally fall into two categories: the really good and the really bad. His style is so distinctive, his palette of ideas so stable, that the difference between the two comes down to small decisions of pacing […]
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In a Country Where Most Classical Composers Are Best-Kept Secrets, How Did Philip Glass Become a Household Name?
• Glass at 80: The INDY Interview • The UNC Symphony Orchestra and a Merge Records Supergroup Celebrate Philip Glass’s Connections with David Bowie and Brian Eno • Lucinda Childs, Sol LeWitt, and Philip Glass Transform Concert Dance in a Postmodern Masterpiece In October 1982, composer Philip Glass appeared in an ad for Cutty Sark […]
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Live: Pacifica Quartet and Johannes Moser Unravel Splendid Hopes
Pacifica Quartet featuring Johannes Moser, cello Saturday, November 5 Duke’s Baldwin Auditorium, Durham Both quintets in Saturday’s concert featuring Pacifica Quartet with Johannes Moser began with glowing major chords gradually emerging from silence. From there, each work spun out in a completely different direction: Julia Wolfe’s Splendid Hopes into a tightly wound ball of nerves, […]
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Earth Works: A Composer and a Poet Mine Precious Ores From Thomas Sayre’s White Gold
…TO ME FROM THE EARTH… Friday, Nov. 10–Sunday, Nov. 13, various times, $20–$50 CAM Raleigh, Raleigh “It’s a really long butterfly effect,” composer D.J. Sparr says of his long history of friendship and collaboration with Shawn and Karen Strittmatter Galvin of New Music Raleigh. It began when Sparr’s wife, Kimberly, played in Pittsburgh youth orchestras […]