Saul Williams is not someone you’d immediately expect to see sitting onstage with a string quartet playing music rooted in the abstract noise of contemporary classical music. More often, Williams has been surrounded by hip-hop beats and industrial sounds, working with people like Rick Rubin and Trent Reznor. His poetry mixes tightly intertwined literary references […]
Dan Ruccia
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A Famous Novelist and a Duke Composer Combine Their Powers in Project Orfeo
Project Orfeo Sunday, September 25, 4 p.m., $10 (students free) Duke’s Baldwin Auditorium, Durham It’s not surprising that Duke University composition professor Scott Lindroth would rave about Orfeo by Richard Powers. The novel tells the story of Peter Els, a composer who comes of age during the experimental music scene of 1960s and 1970s. Powers’s […]
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Durham’s Sharp 9 Gallery Keeps the Triangle’s Jazz Scene on Point
Industry Lane certainly doesn’t look like a place to find jazz. That corner of southeast Durham, near the intersection of Fayetteville Road and MLK Parkway, is anything but hopping. But if you look closely between the storage spaces, the ignition interlock installation facility, the shoelace manufacturer, and the pair of storefront churches, you’ll find the […]
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Heady Weather: Guitarists Steve Gunn and William Tyler Employ Their Instruments to Bold New Ends
STEVE GUNN Tuesday, July 12, 8:30 p.m., $13–$15Kings, Raleigh WILLIAM TYLER Wednesday, July 13, 7 p.m., $5–$10 (under 12 free)Sarah P. Duke Gardens, Durham On a sunny August afternoon in 2014, guitarists Steve Gunn and William Tyler shared the main stage on an island in the French Broad River in Marshall, North Carolina. It was […]
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Bridging Past and Present, Duke Performances Announces its Tremendous New Season
The 2016–17 performing arts season in the Triangle is shaping up to be a doozy. Carolina Performing Arts set the bar high with a schedule as broad and deep as anything they’ve had in recent years, with a particularly strong selection of orchestras, dance troupes, and international music. And the North Carolina Symphony continues to […]
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UNC School of the Arts Alumni Fight HB 2 Today with a Trans Rights Opera
This afternoon, Ovid—by way of the Afghan War, the Juventas New Music Ensemble, and a pair of North Carolina School of the Arts grads—comes to the North Carolina General Assembly. The occasion is a special performance of Leo Hurley and Charles Osborne’s new opera, The Body Politic, commissioned by the Boston-based Juventas New Music Ensemble, […]
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Antenes Turns Telephone Switchboards Into Modular Synthesizers
ANTENES: THE EXCHANGE The Carrack, Durham May 17–28, free Lori Napoleon had never considered how early phone calls happened. But years ago, while visiting a lighthouse on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, she saw the town’s century-old telephone exchange. The odd arrays of knobs, lights, and buttons evoked the extravagant modular synthesizers of the sixties, which she’d […]
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Live: N.C. Symphony Handles Beethoven—and Addresses HB 2—at Memorial Hall
N.C. Symphony: Beethoven’s Violin Concerto UNC’s Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill Monday, May 2, 2016 Every orchestra concert is, at some level, about Beethoven. Even when he’s not on the program, the institution is built on and around his veneration. This North Carolina Symphony concert at Memorial Hall in Chapel Hill was no different, with one […]
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Art of Cool 2016: Terence Blanchard on Putting Civil Unrest to a Groove
erence Blanchard isn’t afraid of injecting politics into his music. In addition to writing the soundtrack to every Spike Lee film since Jungle Fever, the trumpeter has recorded albums about Malcolm X and Hurricane Katrina. His latest album, Breathless, takes Eric Garner’s last words as a musical call to action, giving Blanchard a chance to […]
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Live: Revelations with Roomful of Teeth in Durham
Roomful of Teeth Duke’s Baldwin Auditorium, Durham Saturday, April 30, 2016 It’s always exciting to see Baldwin Auditorium full, especially when it’s full for a group playing two works written in the past decade. It helps, of course, that the New York-based vocal octet Roomful of Teeth counts the multitalented Greenville native Caroline Shaw as […]
