INTIMATE LETTERS
September 2011
In the mid-1980s, three decades after the flowering of the Beat Generation brought us Alan Ginsburg’s rhythmic, streaming lament Howl, a poetry appeared in a Chicago jazz club that shared the riveting qualities of it predecessor. This September slam poetry, performance poetry reflecting cultural and personal experience as varied as its individual authors, will form the cornerstone of a week of rehearsal and performances.
Collaborating with the California organization With Our Words, Yellow Barn brings four poets to Putney, Vermont, along with the Parker String Quartet, baritone William Sharp and pianist Seth Knopp, to explore relationships between their words and the music of Lee Hyla, György Kurtág, Gustav Mahler, and Franz Schubert.
Brattleboro, VT | September 20
Boston, MA | September 21
New York, NY | September 22
Washington, DC | September 24
Dallas, TX | September 30
Stockton, CA | October 1
The Beethoven Cello Sonatas
December 2011
April 2012
Beethoven’s five Sonatas for Cello and Piano form the cornerstone of repertoire for that instrumental partnership. Between the two early sonatas, written at the height of his pianistic powers, the great A Major Sonata composed in the wake of his tragic Heiligenstadt Testament, and his two late sonatas, Beethoven revolutionizes the nature of that relationship, creating works that for the first time treat cello and piano as equal partners. Cellist Alice Yoo and pianist Roman Rabinovich explore these great works during their two weeks in residence, presenting them in concert alongside Beethoven’s three sets of variations for the same combination.
Putney, VT | December 16
Putney, VT | April 27
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The Crumb Madrigals Project
March 2012
In March 2012, former Yellow Barn Ensemble-in-Residence Due East (Greg Beyer, percussion, and Erin Lesser, flutes) joins forces with Duo Borealis (Evan Primo, bassist/composer, and Mary Bonhag, soprano) and harpist Jacqui Kerrod to spend a week in residence at Yellow Barn to study the George Crumb masterwork, Madrigals Books I-IV. These five musicians will take the time to create, reflect upon and refine a memorized and semi-theatrical interpretation of this half-hour long cycle, written in the 1965 (Books I and II) and 1969 (Books III and IV).
In this now famous series of works, Crumb sets fragments of beautiful poetry by the Spanish surrealist, Federico García Lorca (1898-1936). The succinct, ethereal texts evoke strong visual possibilities. The musicians of the Madrigal Project will collaborate with video artist, Bart Woodstrup and Lorca scholar, Christopher Maurer, to expand the musical project with video images meant to subtly highlight both music and text. The residency promises to yield an interpretation and performance of this major American work that is both exquisitely detailed and visually elegant and engaging.
Putney, VT | March 24
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Grisey’s Le Noir de l’Etoile
May 2012
In 1967, a young astronomer detected in the heavens a rapidly varying radio signal, in the form of periodic impulses 1.3 seconds apart. The discovery caused a sensation. The impulses were so regular that for a while they were taken to be signals coming from extraterrestrial civilisations. Then astrophysicists revealed a truth that was just as surprising: the signals were being emitted by a pulsar, the fantastic compact residue created by the supernova explosions that long ago disintegrated the massive stars.
— Jean-Pierre Luminet, Astrophysicist at
the Paris-Meudon Observatory
More than twenty years later, inspired by this discovery and those sounds, the composer Gérard Grisey wrote Le Noir de l’Etoile, for six percussionists placed around an audience. Yellow Barn percussionists Eduardo Leandro and Doug Perkins, joined by astronomer Tom Geballé of the Gemini Observatory in Hilo, HI, lead a week-long workshop dedicated to its preparation, culminating with an outdoor performance of this work at sunset on Yellow Barn’s summer campus at the Greenwood School.
Putney, VT | May 25
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