NMNY: Walt Whitman and the Beat Generation Concert on June 12, 2012

New Music New York is excited to announce their latest project,

Walt Whitman and The Beat Generation Concert
Tuesday June 12, 2012 at 8 pm
Saint Peter's Church @ Citicorp, located at 54th Street and Lexington Avenue (Manhattan)
Suggested donation is $20

We have done it again! Our next adventure is an evening of newly created vocal chamber ensemble works and songs inspired by the texts of Walt Whitman and his long acknowledged poetic progeny, the American Beat Generation of the 1950's and 60's. On June 12th our intrepid NMNY musicians will unveil seven world premieres:

Alexa Babakhanian: Beat by Beat (DiPrima)
William George: Vigil strange I kept on the field one night (Whitman)
William George: Pull my daisy (Kerouac/Ginsberg/Cassady)
Steve Ebel: Cadillac Rain (Ferlinghetti)
Anthony Ocaña: Dog (Ferlinghetti)
Ben Schumann: Calamus Poems (Whitman)
David Sisco: TBA

The new works will be accompanied by songs and vocal chamber works by New York composers Marc Blitzstein, Leonard Bernstein, David Del Tredici, Tom Cipullo, Jerome Kitzke, Charles Naginski, John Musto and more.

We are also cooking up a special event centered around the world premieres - our artists and composers will workshop and discuss the newly created works, and our offsite composers will be beamed in via SKYPE. Interpreters and creators will meet in a virtual face to face, to discuss today's relevance of Whitman, the Beats and the new music they continues to inspire.

Press release, complete list of works, performers and date of special preview concert
will follow shortly.

“The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.”
― Walt Whitman

"Write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitment by same laws operating in his own human mind."
-from Essentials in Spontaneous Prose by Jack Kerouac

Were baaaaack

After a short hiatus, we are now back to our old antics; folks have been returning to our concerts year after year, out of sheer curiosity to know what on earth we will we program next...in July of 2009 we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11th Moon Landing at the Tenri Cultural Center (NYC) in which we premiered three new chamber vocal ensemble pieces by Marga Richter, William George, Scott Gendel and Richard Scarcella Perino. February of 2010 found us with a composer showcase, "Unheard Of" in which we performed the songs, chamber music by New York composer of Ed Windels. We were also guests of an academic symposium at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights in March of 2010, where we performed settings by Charles Naginski, Tom Cipullo, David del Tredici and Jerome Kitzke.

Our next project in the works is a concert of song and vocal chamber ensemble settings by Walt Whitman and the Beats. Walt has long be acknowledged "the grandfather" of the Beats, and we all admired Thomas Hampson's album dedicated to the Good Grey Poet. We knew of the many Whitman settings for voice and piano, but after some poking around, we found composers that were inspired by the Beats as well. Among the new works we will premiere Steve Ebel's setting of Ferlinghetti's "Cadillac Rain" which will feature an electric guitar, a setting of Diane DiPrima "Pieces of a song" for the whole ensemble by Alexa Babakhanian, Anthony Ocana's setting of Ferlinghetti's "Dog", William George's "Vigil Strange I kept on the Field On Night" for voice, piano and violin and Ben Schumann's cycle for baritone, tenor and piano based on Whitman's Calamus poems. Some of the composers will grace our stage, including Alexa and Jerome Kitzke, who will be performing his setting of Ginsberg's "Green Automobile" for amplified speaker pianist...it will be at treat. We are still rounding out the rest of the concert, so stay tuned

Watch This Space

Welcome! This is the blog for New Music New York. Our upcoming concert is June 12 at St. Peter's Church, and will feature premieres of several new works with texts by Walt Whitman and Beat Poets such as Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Diane Diprima.

More details to come!