Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor
Joan La Barbara, vocalist
Meredith Monk, vocalist
Jessye Norman, soprano
Marc-André Hamelin, piano
Yuval Sharon, director
Jesse Stiles, electronics
Brandon Collwes, dancer
Andrea Weber, dancer
Solo dancers from Merce Cunningham’s celebrated company perform the lead roles in a new realization of Second Hand, a major collaboration of Cage and Cunningham based on music by Erik Satie. Cage used I-Ching chance operations to deconstruct Satie’s music and reform it into a Dada-esque musical coloring book, asking such questions as: “Of those orchestra instruments that easily play all the notes of the phrase, how many and which actually do?”
MTT, Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk, Jessye Norman, Marc-André Hamelin and NWS musicians join forces for a multimedia production of Cage’s mind-bending and provocative Song Books. With texts by Henry David Thoreau, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie and others, each of the work’s solos explores the boundaries of song, live electronics and theater.
[Source]
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