Alice Shields and WBAI's Janet Coleman will read scenes from Alice Shields' opera Criseyde on WBAI radio, on Monday, August 2, 2010, at 2pm eastern time. The opera is in Middle English, and is a feminist retelling of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, with libretto by medieval scholar Nancy Dean (based on Chaucer). The scenes will air on WBAI's show, Cat Radio Café. WBAI can be heard on 99.5 FM in the New York area, and also streams live at wbai.org. The New York Times calls Criseyde "a rare chance to hear Middle English sung...intense, richly scored work." For more information, visit www.criseyde.com.
Alice Shields' work Komachi at Sekidera will be presented at The Tank in Manhattan on November 18, 2010. The performance, with contralto Christina Ascher, Laura Falzon on alto flute, and Ted Mook on cello, marks the premiere of the version for cello. Komachi at Sekidera is based on a Japanese Noh play about the famous poet Komachi, who has lived beyond her beauty and her literary fame into old age, and has been forgotten. For more information, click here to visit The Tank's website.
Alice Shields' Namasté, for mezzo-soprano and piano, will be premiered by contralto Christina Ascher in her recital with Taka Kigawa (piano) at Tenri Hall in Manhattan, on February 25, 2011. For more information, click here to visit the Tenri Cultural Institute's website.
Neruda Songs will be featured as part of the program, 'Perchance to Dream,' featuring contralto Christina Ascher and cellist John Patrick Popham, on June 27, 2010, at the Tenri Cultural Institute in New York. The Tenri Cultural Institute is on West 13th Street. For more information, click here.
Alice Shields' work for mezzo-soprano, alto flute, and koto, Komachi at Sekidera, will be at The Tank on Thursday, September 17, 2009, as part of NeoLit's series on the music of women composers. Performers are Laurie Rubin (mezzo soprano), Amelia Lukas (alto flute), and Asami Tamura (koto). The Tank is located at 354 West 45th Street in New York. For more information, click here or here.
Three Romantic Scenes from Alice Shields' new opera
CRISEYDE
a feminist retelling of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
with Middle English libretto by Nancy Dean
Sung in Middle English!
with Lorena Guillén, soprano, as Criseyde
Charles Williamson, tenor, as Troilus
Alex Ezerman, cello, Andrew Willis, piano
Dr. Carole Ott, conductor
World Premiere of Criseyde's Aria, Troilus' Aria, and new music from The Consummation Scene
Presented by:
Feminist Theory and Musicology 10 Symposium
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 8pm
Recital Hall, School of Music
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
100 McIver Street, at the corner of W. Market Street
Greensboro, North Carolina
free admission; open to the general public
no tickets required; donations accepted at the door.
Please see http://www.uncg.edu/mus/FTM10/ for more information.
Alice Shields' work for violin and tape, Kyrielle, will be featured at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, performed by internationally renowned violinist Mari Kimura. The concert is on April 2, 2009 at 1:00 PM at Elebash Hall of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Kyrielle was composed in 2005 and is 12 minutes in duration.
Recently, Leonard Schwartz interviewed Alice Shields about Criseyde for his PennSound podcast, Cross-Cultural Poetics (click here to listen to the mp3 of the interview). On December 12, 2008, Schwartz interviews Shields once again. Visit PennSound's homepage to listen.
Mioritza - Requiem for Rachel Corrie, for tombone and computer-generated sound, was presented by trombonist Monique Buzzarté and Ensemble Pi at the Chelsea Art Museum on December 3, 2008. The program, Confrontation: Music in response to violence and oppression around the world, also included works by Dmitri Shostakovich and Elias Tanenbaum.
Alice Shields is the recipient of a CAP copying grant for Criseyde, presented by the American Music Center.
For complete press on Criseyde, please click here to visit the Criseyde website.
"But first, check out these clips from funknroll on YouTube. These informative videos feature the music of Delia Derbyshire & Alice Shields and show clips of the many female heros of electronic music...I personally am smitten with Alice Shields' gem from 1968, Study for Voice and Tape. Listen to her soaring mezzo soprano as it surfs the peaks and valleys of the swirling sinister soundscapes!"
Alice Shields' new work for trombone and computer music on CD, called The River of Memory, will premiere on Saturday, March 15, 2008, at Asbury Hall at Babeville (Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center) in Buffalo, New York. The piece was commissioned by Monique Buzzarté through the Soloist Champions project of Meet The Composer, funded by a commission/grant from the New York State Music Fund. Subsequent performances are the New York City premiere on March 19 at the Sharp Theater at Symphony Space, and a March 24 performance at SUNY Purchase.
For more information on the Buffalo performance, click here for the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center website. To purchase tickets for the New York City premiere, click here for Sympony Space's box office.
Alice Shields' new percussion piece, Percussion Quartet for two glockenspiels, vibraphone and xylophone, will be premiered by The Bay Area Women's Percussion Troupe, directed by Sandra Noriega, on November 4, 2007 at 8pm at the Festival of New American Music 2007. The concert, given with the Sacramento State Percussion Group, will be held at the Music Recital Hall of Capistrano Hall, Sacramento State University in Sacramento, California, and will also feature marimbist Nancy Zeltsman.
For more information about the Festival and directions, click here. For more inforation about the Bay Area Women's Percussion Troupe, click here.
Trombonist Monique Buzzarté has been selected by Meet the Composer as one of eight — and the only brass — "Soloist Champions" in honor of her long distinguished record of commissioning and performing new works. Ms. Buzzarté selected the composer Alice Shields to be the recipient of a $10,000 commission from Meet the Composer for a new work for trombone and tape which Ms. Buzzarté will premiere in March 2008.
Visit Monique Buzzarté's website
Alice Shields has been funded by Meet the Composer, through the New York State Music Fund's Soloist Champions award, to compose a new work for trombone and computer-generated sound for trombonist Monique Buzzarté. The work will be premiered in 2008, at concerts in Hallwalls (Buffalo, NY) on March 15, at Symphony Space's Sharp Theater (New York, NY) on March 19, and at SUNY Purchase (Purchase, NY) on March 24, 2008.
Cal State Fullerton will present Alice Shields' Apocalypse Song as part of "Inner Voices," the sixth annual Woman in New Music Festival. The festival takes place March 1-4, 2007, and features appearances by Meredith Monk, Zeitgeist, and Tania Leon. For more information or to purchase tickets, click here.
Apocalypse (1994) is an electronic opera in two acts by Alice Shields, for three singers, chorus, dancers, electric guitar and electronic music on tape, choreographed by the composer in Bharata Natyam (Indian dance-drama) style. Shields created both music and drama, based on Greek, Gaelic, and Sanskrit texts. The plot concerns a woman on a spiritual journey, who meets her teacher in a goddess called "Seaweed" (a sort of biological Aphrodite covered in green sea-slime), and after taking on the persona of the goddess, has ritualized sex with the god Shiva. The "Apocalypse Song" is sung by the woman before enjoying the final act with Shiva.
WBAI radio's Arts Director Janet Coleman will interview Alice Shields about Mioritza - Requiem for Rachel Corrie, and the March 16 Peace Concert at Judson Church (see listing below), on New York's WBAI 99.5FM on Monday, March 12 from 2 to 3pm, during her program Cat Radio Café. If you're not in the New York metropolitan area, you can stream the show here.
Mioritza - Requiem for Rachel Corrie, for tombone and computer-generated sound, will be presented by trombonist Monique Buzzarté in a Peace concert at Judson Church in NYC, sponsored by Ensemble-Pi, on Friday, March 16, 2007. The program, Thoughts About Peace in a Time of War: In March We Remember, will also include works by Frederic Rzewski, Dmitri Shostakovich, John Harbison, Kristin Norderval, and Philip Wharton. For more information, see Ensemble-Pi's website.
Alice Shields has been awarded a grant from the New York State Music Fund, through Meet the Composer, for a new piece for solo trombone and interactive computer-generated sound, to be composed for trombonist Monique Buzzarté. Title, and performance plans, are pending.
In 2006 New World Records re-issued the classic CD Pioneers of Electronic Music with Alice Shields' The Transformation of Ani.
Albany Records has released a CD of Shields' latest computer music, including Shenandoah, Dust, and Vegetable Karma, funded by the Copland Foundation.
Alice Shields is a Fall 2005 PatsyLu Fund for Women's Music grantee, awarded by the Open Meadows Foundation. The funding was granted to record and distribute to record companies the final version of Requiem for Rachel Corrie — Mioritza, for trombone and tape, with The Azure Ensemble.
Commissioned by trombonist Monique Buzzarté, this work will be premiered by Monique Buzzarté in January, 2004 at the Radica-Technica conference at the University of California at San Diego, followed by performances on March 3, 2004 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and March 18, 2004 at the Eastern Trombone Workshop at Fort Meyer, VA.
Azure, for flute, violin, viola, cello and computer music on tape, commissioned by the Azure Ensemble, was premiered by the Azure Ensemble on April 10, 2003 in Merkin Hall, New York City.
Kirtannam No. 2 for flue and oboe premiered April 15, 2002 at the Centre for Intercultural Music Arts International Festival, Churchill College, Cambridge University, England, with John Robison, oboe and Kim McCormick, flute.
In November and December of 2002, Dust toured India. Performances were on November 30 in Hyderabad, India; on December 3 in Madras, India; and on December 6 in New Delhi, India. A 31-minute-long, work, Dust is composed in Indian ragas with rhythmic patterns from traditional Indian dance-drama (Bharata Natyam).
The Mud Oratorio, a 51-minute-long computer piece and libretto commissioned by Dance Alloy of Pittsburgh and Frostburg State University (MD), with support from Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour, is a collaboration between Shields and choreographer Mark Taylor, based on the book Stirring the Mud by writer Barbara Hurd. After a series of artist residencies beginning in September 2002, the work was premiered at Frostburg State University, Maryland on April 4-6, 2003. In the music and libretto she created, Shields uses her own recorded and electronically-manipulated voice, along with manipulated sounds from the Maryland swamps and a local biologist's imitations of swamp-birds, frogs and toads.
Albany Records has announced that it is going to release a CD of Shields' latest computer music, including Shenandoah, Dust, and Vegetable Karma, funded by the Copland Foundation.
A 12.5-minute-long concert version of Alice Shields' computer piece Shenandoah was premiered at Electronic Music and the Voice, a concert-seminar which took place at SITE Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico on July 25, 2002. The event was produced by the Santa Fe Opera and SITE Santa Fe. Shields was the panel moderator, with fellow panelist-composers Kaija Saariaho, Morton Subotnick and Gershon Kingsley. On July 27 Shields gave a lecture at the Santa Fe Opera on "How Emotion is Communicated in the Voice," on the day of the premiere of Saariaho's opera L'amour de loin.
The July 2002 issue of NewMusicBox, the web magazine of the American Music Center, features a Q&A with Alice Shields ("Can music for dance stand alone?"), as well as a video clip of a choreographic performance of her work, Dust.
About the general subject of composing for dance, Shields says, "The challenge in writing music for dance, as I see it, is to leave psychological and sensory 'space' in the music in which the dance can maintain its own power and presence."
And about this composition specifically, "One of the pleasures for me of working on Dust with choreographer Mark Taylor was being able to use the difficult rhythms of Bharata Natyam with both Western and Indian dancers. After brief consultations at the beginning of my collaboration with choreographers Mark Taylor and Anita Ratnam, I suggested that the overall dramatic form of the work be based around the Tibetan Chöd ritual first described by the intrepid Victorian adventurer-scholar Alexandra David-Neel. Mark and Anita agreed, and I then created the musical structure by which this ritual would be expressed, basing the musical form on the Bharata Natyam dance form known as Tillana."
To read the rest of the article, and view the video clip, click here.
Shields' Shenandoah (2002), a computer score commissioned by the Department of Dance of James Madison University, and choreographed by Mark Taylor, was premiered on March 21 23, 2002 at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, with funding from the National College Choreography Initiative. For this piece Shields recorded oral histories with recent immigrants to the Shenadoah Valley, and used their words in different languages (Mixteca, Spanish, Woloff, Russian, Ukranian, Vietnamese, Arabic).
In April, 2002 Shields' Kirtannam for Flute and Oboe (2002), composed in Todi raga, was premiered at Cambridge University, England at the Centre for Intercultural Music Arts International Festival.
On July 25, 2002 Shields will be participant and facilitator of an Electronic media Seminar at the Santa Fe Opera, with Kaija Saariaho, Morton Subotnick and Gershon Kingsley. On July 27, preceding the Santa Fe Opera Premiere of Saariaho's L'Amour de loin, Shields will give a talk on how love is expressed in music.
New Work (2008)
New work for trombone and computer-generated sound, composed for trombonist Monique Buzzarté and funded by Meet the Composer (through the New York State Music Fund's Soloist Champions award), to be perfomed at Hallwalls (Buffalo, NY) on March 15, 2008; Symphony Space's Sharp Theater (New York, NY) on March 19, 2008; and at SUNY Purchase (Purchase, NY) on March 24, 2008.
Study for Voice and Tape (1968) and Mioritza (2003)
Electronic music concert presented by the Electronic Music Studio of the Department of Music, Stony Brook University (NY), on April 12, 2007, at the Recital Hall of Staller Center for the Arts, included two works by Alice Shields: Study for Voice and Tape, a solo electroacoustic work with electronic music, recorded voice and poem by Shields, and Mioritza — Requiem for Rachel Corrie, for trombone and tape, performed by trombonist Monique Buzzarté, with poem by Shields.
Apocalypse Song (1994)
Excerpt from the opera "Apocalypse," for mezzo-soprano and keyboard, to be perfomed at the 6th Annual Women in New Music Festival, Cal State Fullerton, March 1-4, 2007.
Mioritza - Requiem for Rachel Corrie (2003)
Performance by Monique Buzzarté at Thoughts About Peace in a Time of War: In March We Remember, a peace concert at Judson Church in New York, NY, on Friday, March 16, 2007.
Criseyde (opera in progress, 2006)
Chamber opera for instruments, singers and computer music, commissioned by Nancy Dean, based on Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.
Saundarya Lahari for flute, viola & harp (2006)
Premiere: Fall, 2006 NYC, presented by The Azure Ensemble
Piece for flute, viola & harp (2004).
Performances:
NY Premiere: March 4, 2006 Symphony Space, NYC, presented by The Azure Ensemble
Premiere: December 11, 2004 Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ, presented by The Azure Ensemble
Kyrielle for violin & tape (2005), commissioned by violinist Airi Yoshioka.
In Jan. 2006 Ms. Yoshioka recorded Kyrielle for upcoming commercial release. Kyrielle is based on Gregorian chants to the Virgin Mary.
Performances:
November 12, 2005 Millenium Center, University of MissouriSt. Louis, presented by the Women in the Arts Conference
September 11, 2005 Conservatorio Piacenza, Piacenza, Italy, presented by Airi Yoshioka
July 28, 2005 Concordia College, Montreal, Canada presented by the In and Out Festival
June 24, 2005 Elebash Recital Hall, City University of New York Graduate School, presented by FTM 8 Feminist Theory & Musicology Conference
April 4, 2004 Fine Arts Recital Hall, University of Maryland - Baltimore County, presented by the Music Department, UMD-BC
Mioritza — Requiem for Rachel Corrie, for trombone & tape (2004), commissioned by trombonist Monique Buzzarté.
Funding for the professional recording of Mioritza was awarded in December, 2005 by the Open Meadows Fund. All performances below are by Monique Buzzarté, except where indicated.
June 25, 2005 Silver Center, New York University, presented by FTM 8 Feminist Theory & Musicology Conference
May 26, 2005 International Trombone Festival, New Orleans, at Loyola University
April 7, 2005 University of North Carolina-Greensboro, presented by the UNCG Music Dept., and performed by Brian French
July 2, 2004, First Parish Church, Jamesport, NY presented by North Fork Women for Women Fund, Inc.
June 21, 2004, Garden of Memory, Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland, CA presented by New Music Bay Area
March 18, 2004, Bruckner Hall, Ft. Myer, VA presented by the Eastern Trombone Workshop
February 24, 2004, Renee Weiler Hall, Greenwich House, New York, NY, presented by Monique Buzzarté
February 14, 2004 Deep Listening Space, Kingston, NY, presented by the Pauline Oliveros Foundation
January 31, 2004 University of California at San Diego, presented by Teknica Radika
Aba mane manele for flute, viola & harp (2004)
December 11, 2004 Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ, performed by The Azure Ensemble
Alice Shields' opera CRISEYDE on WBAI Radio