2015 End-of-Year Reading List

Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom. Photo: Focus Features

Don't think of it as homework; think of it as getting a leg up on the upcoming BAM season while putting all those gift cards to good use.

Get lost in Arthur Rimbaud's labyrinthine Illuminations in advance of The Civilians' Rimbaud in New York, read Frank Rich's theater criticism to prepare for his appearance with Fran Lebowitz, get to know the legendary dancer behind the Mariinsky Theatre's upcoming tributes, and much more with this reading list related to BAM in 2016.

Arthur Russell's New York—An Instagram Tour by Devonté Hynes

Musical pioneer Arthur Russell was born 64 years ago today. In honor of his birthday, and in anticipation of next week's Master Mix: Red Hot + Arthur Russell! concert, Devonté Hynes—who has a wealth of musical knowledge, and will be performing in the show—gave us a virtual tour of some of Russell's old haunts on Instagram, and with it, a true education in all things Arthur Russell. We've included the photos and videos below, along with some to dive even deeper.

Hello! This is @devhynes, and I’m taking over the BAM Instagram account today to show you some of music pioneer #ArthurRussell’s old haunts before performing in Master Mix: Red Hot + Arthur Russell! on May 29 & 30, part of @redbullmusicacademy’s #RBMANYC (link in bio) #BAMtakeover To start, here's Arthur with cello having a nice time in Central Park.

A photo posted by BAM (@bam_brooklyn) on May 20, 2015 at 8:41am PDT

BAM podcast: Philip Glass' Etudes

In the inaugural episode of the BAM podcast, Philip Glass and nine world-renowned pianists discuss his piano etudes and what makes them so remarkable and challenging to perform.

Glass, along with fellow composers Timo Andres, Anton Batagov, Tania Leon, and Nico Muhly; new music champion Bruce Levingston; loyal Glass interpreters Maki Namekawa and Sally Whitwell; jazz prodigy Aaron Diehl; and classical virtuoso Jenny Lin performed the etudes in a concert produced by Linda Brumbach and Pomegranate Arts during the BAM Next Wave Festival on December 5 and 6, 2014.

In Context: The Etudes

The Etudes, a performance of Philip Glass's complete piano etudes, comes to BAM on December 5 & 6. Context is everything, so get even closer to the show with this curated selection of articles, interviews, and videos related to the production. Once you've seen it, help us keep the conversation going by telling us what you thought below.

About Last Night: Next Wave Festival Kickoff Party

by Allison Kadin

Philip Glass, Nico Muhly, David Cossin, Timo Andres, and Steve Reich perform Four Organs. Photo: Stephanie Berger

The lobby was abuzz hours before the first notes of the first of three Philip Glass and Steve Reich reunion concerts. The all-ages audience waited anxiously at the Opera House doors, bedecked with Nonesuch musicians, for an historic opening evening of the 2014 Next Wave Festival as well as Nonesuch Records at BAM, a celebration of the label’s 50 years in the industry.  Brad Mehldau inaugurated the Harvey Theater across the street with exhilarating improvisations and interpretations of Stone Temple Pilots, Sufjan Stevens, and more.

After rousing encores, guests found their way to the Lepercq Space (aka BAMcafé) to celebrate the evening, Nonesuch and Next Wave.

BAM President Karen Brooks Hopkins, Philip Glass, Nonesuch President Bob Hurwitz,
Steve Reich, BAM Executive Producer Joseph V Melillo. Photo: Elena Olivo

In Context: The Philip Glass Ensemble & Steve Reich and Musicians

The Philip Glass Ensemble and Steve Reich and Musicians come to BAM from September 9—11 as part of Nonesuch Records at BAM. Context is everything, so get even closer to the show with this curated selection of articles, audio interviews, and videos related to the artists. Once you've seen it, help us keep the conversation going by telling us what you thought below.

Are You Ready to Rock… at BAM?!

by Louie Fleck

A BAM ad from 1969

Rock music has been a big part of BAM—in stand-alone concerts, and as essential elements in multi-genre productions. With this week's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry festival, inquiring minds need to know more!

Mention BAM and you might think of groundbreaking Robert Wilson productions like Einstein on the Beach. But consider that his collaborator Philip Glass created his ensemble on a rock band template. And of other Wilson productions, Time Rocker's score was created by original New York rocker Lou Reed. What about The Forest? The name of that composer is David Byrne! We should also mention the three Tom Waits/Robert Wilson productions: Alice, Black Rider, and Woyzeck.

If you think of BAM as a home for dance, you may recall that Trisha Brown tapped the Grateful Dead's "Uncle John’s Band" for her piece, Accumulation, and Bob Dylan’s "Early Morning Rain" for Line-Up.

Before the Oscars: The Hammies

by Ben Cohen

Dwight Henry and Quvenzhané Wallis of Beasts of the Southern Wild at BAMcinemaFest 2012

You can blame the Academy Awards for all the hoopla associated today with awards shows. The red carpet, the long speeches, and the terrible jokes—the Emmy Awards, the Grammy Awards and the Tony Awards all came after the granddaddy Oscar.

Feeling left out, we decided that we at the BAM blog should give our own honors. But first, we need a good name. In honor of the BAM Hamm Archives, we present to you the first-ever Hammy Awards (affectionately known as the Hammies).

This inaugural Hammy will honor nine nominees who fulfill two criteria:

1. They have all received an Oscar nomination
2. They have appeared at BAM

Einstein on the Blog: A Short Glossary

By Robert Jackson Wood

©Lesley Leslie-Spinks

Whenever a paradigm-shifting work of art like Einstein on the Beach appears, a deluge of new language attempting to make sense of it is often not far behind. This can be unfortunate, particularly when the new words seem better suited as names of rare insect-borne tropical diseases than as helpful descriptors of music or theater.

But the new vocabulary is also often necessary. New works are like riddles that demand solutions from us. And even if those solutions are always inadequate, nothing disarms the sphinx of the new better than finding lucid ways of talking about it. In that spirit, enjoy this glossary of terms, arbitrarily selected and including a few familiar ones redefined, that might be helpful in parsing the glorious enigma that is Einstein on the Beach. 

Minimalism: Intro
It’s been said that there’s nothing “minimal” about an opera that is four and a half hours long. But even the biggest building can be made with just a few big squares and a welcome mat. Minimalism is about just that: the reduction of an artistic vocabulary to its most basic elements, which is an economy that can be experienced in Einstein from one end to the other. Small musical modules repeat with abandon, stage design is reduced to all but the purest geometries and archetypal images, and movement is stripped to its essence.

Where's Glasso?

From David Bowie to Robert Wilson, Philip Glass has collaborated with a multifarious assortment of artists over the years. If you consider all the historical figures and the artists of past eras who are positioned prominently in his work—as well as Glass’ famously diverse set of friends—then you can appreciate the labyrinth of personalities who have populated Glass’ world over the years. So, in the spirit of the Where’s Waldo illustrations, Nathan Gelgud has drawn a condensed version of Glass’ social universe. Can you spot “Glasso” among his friends and collaborators? (If not, Nathan has generously provided a key for those of us whose eyes are stumped.)

—Joseph Bradshaw

Einstein on the Blog: Scores at the Morgan Library

Title page from autograph manuscript, Einstein on the Beach. Collection of Paul Walter,
on deposit at the Morgan Library & Museum. Used with permission. Photography: Anthony Troncale

“I still use pencil and paper,” Philip Glass said about composing. “In fact, it’s become a problem. There are no copyists who work with ink anymore. They don’t exist.”

Glass’s problem, our prize.

Currently spread out on a single wall at the Morgan Library is a rather masterfully inked testament to doing things the old fashioned way: the entire handwritten manuscript for Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. A printed score generated by notation software wouldn’t have played as well near Robert Wilson’s murkily sketched storyboards for the opera, installed across the room, nor with the grainy video of the 1976 premiere playing on a loop in the same space. It wouldn't have been any fun at all—no smudges, no mysteries to solve involving ambiguously placed note heads, no record of the hand in the canvas, as they say. What we have instead is both a sublime visual representation of the music as well as a priceless record of a work's squiggly first step out into the light of day. Note for note, it's also a reminder that these things don't spring from the head of Zeus fully formed. They require painstaking labor, and lots of it.

Tweeting Einstein on the Beach

 Spaceship © Lucie Jansch 2012

Why tweet Einstein on the Beach?

On this day in 1919, there was a solar eclipse that allowed scientists to confirm Einstein’s theory of relativity, upending previous notions of time and space and fundamentally altering the course of history.

In 1976, Robert Wilson and Philip Glass met at a small restaurant on Sullivan Street to discuss collaborating on a portrait of a historical figure. After rejecting Charlie Chaplin, Adolf Hitler, and Mahatma Gandhi, they finally settled on Albert Einstein. And so Einstein on the Beach was born, a work that left an indelible mark on the history of performance that stands as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 20th century.

The experience of Einstein on the Beach is like no other. Four and a half hours in length, the opera eschews traditional narrative in favor of presenting an uninterrupted continuum of sensory data that is loosely constructed around the idea of Einstein, with punctuated, dreamlike staging, dance, densely structured music, and spoken texts scattered throughout.

Untweetable, you say? Well, you might be right. Any Twitter performance of Einstein would fail to capture the “living pictures” of Robert Wilson, the intense choreography of Lucinda Childs, and some of the most beautiful, heart-shattering music that Philip Glass has ever written. Einstein is an alternate universe that requires an extended visit, and that universe simply can’t be reduced to 140 characters.

But we noticed that whenever we have tweeted about the performance, people are compelled to quote the production, or start counting, or both. We've marveled at the contemporary resonance of aphorisms like “prematurely air-conditioned supermarkets” and “it could be so fresh and clean.” Listening to the repeating phrases, we became conscious of patterns and sequences in the language—much like the structures embedded in Glass’ score. We delighted in the pop flotsam and cultural jetsam sprinkled throughout—from Carole King lyrics to references to the infamous Crazy Eddies electronics store.

Written by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson, and Lucinda Childs, the fragmentary, non-linear libretto of Einstein is uniquely suited for Twitter. The spoken text is a work of poetry in its own right, full of rhythmic, alliterative, and allusive phrases that allow an audience to generate its own meanings. Using Twitter as our conduit, we hope people become intrigued by the endlessly rich and imaginative language, and recognize Einstein as an expression of the unconscious poetry of our age.

Starting at sunset tonight (8pm) we will tweet the entire libretto from the handle @EinsteinBeach. Tweets will be sent out every 15 minutes. We encourage you to follow along, retweet your favorite lines, and comment using the hashtag #Einstein2012. The goal? To dive into an ocean of language and paddle around, to hear the poetry already present in our daily lives, and to achieve an Einstein state of grace. Impossible you say? Yes, just as impossible as it is for us to express Einstein's impact.

All these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends...


Einstein on the Beach returns to the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House on September 14.
www.BAM.org/Einstein

Watch the New Trailer for Einstein on the Beach!

The dates for the BAM 2012 production of Einstein on the Beach have been announced (Sep 14—23, 2012)! Watch the official trailer here:



And here's a little tidbit to amuse and delight you, dear BAMblog readers: an excerpt from a conversation between theater critic John Rockwell and Harvey Lichtenstein about the impact of the 1976 production of Einstein on Rockwell's writing.

JOHN ROCKWELL: That was my total immersion, man. I went to auditions on Spring Street.

HARVEY LICHTENSTEIN: Really?

ROCKWELL: I spent three or four weeks in Avignon. I saw all five performances.

LICHTENSTEIN: Really?

ROCKWELL: And then I saw it at the Met. And then I wrote a big, long piece about it for The Village Voice, under a pen name, which is my compilation—actually, one of my better pieces, I must say. But—

LICHTENSTEIN: [Chuckles.]

ROCKWELL: Well, I mean, it reflected a real immersion. I mean, I tried to sell a piece on Einstein in the spring of that year to New York Times Magazine, but they had never heard of Wilson; they had never heard of Glass; they had no interest whatsoever, so I said, “Fuck this,” and I went to The Village Voice and did it under a pen name, and they played it up big.

(For those of you interested in tracking down the piece, it can be found in Rockwell's 2006 collection, Outsider.)

The Executive Files: the first Next Wave show

Joe Melillo (center) with Bob Telson and BAM staff during Next Wave Festival 1983

On my first day on the job to produce the inaugural Next Wave Festival for the autumn of 1983, I arrived in President/Executive Producer Harvey Lichtenstein’s office to start my duties and responsibilities. I was handed a sheet of paper with a list of names of artists and productions. My first management decision was to make a manila file folder with each name from the list, and I began the task of contacting those individuals and researching those productions.

It was clear that I was going to produce The Photographer: Far From the Truth, a three-part, 90 minute work to a Philip Glass score, performed by his ensemble. The first section was theater, the second part a multimedia work of Eadward Muybridge images, and the final section was a dance work. JoAnne Akalaitis, a founding member of Mabou Mines, was engaged to be the director. She also happened to be the ex-wife of Philip Glass. I remember our first meeting to create the production. She had a notebook that she had filled with images, words, and designs. The Photographer had been produced in Holland, but her production was going to be a completely new interpretation.

She selected the writer Robert Coe to write the script for the first act which was going to reference sections from Muybridge’s biography. Wendell Harrington was hired to visualize the second section. She was going to use large-scale projections of the human figure in motion and actually also animate those still photographs. The third section would be choreographed by David Gordon.

Photo: Johan Elbers

Photo: Johan Elbers

It was very much like producing three different works of art, given the discrete art for each section. There were five weeks of rehearsal, a technical week, and the inaugural production of  the first Next Wave Festival opened in the Opera House. New York audiences had never seen a performance work on such a scale—the Philip Glass Ensemble performing his propulsive musical score, and the bombardment of visual material and the kinetic imagistic movement of David Gordon all contributed to a compelling, thrilling evening of contemporary, non-traditional art making that continues in the Next Wave Festival tradition today.

 —Joseph V. Melillo, Executive Producer, BAM

Einstein on the Beach 2012 Tour

Einstein... on the beach

One of the most iconic stage pieces of the 20th century, Einstein on the Beach has a storied history. After composer Philip Glass, director Robert Wilson, and choreographer Andy DeGroat premiered their five-hour collaborative opus at the Festival d'Avignon in March of 1976, Glass and Wilson rented the Met’s opera house for two nights the following November, producing it themselves. While it put both artists in deep debt, it also brought their careers to a new level. No longer relegated to the “downtown artist” ghetto, Glass and Wilson post-Met became international artists, performing their works at the greatest theaters, opera houses, and concert halls throughout the world. In hindsight, Glass’ and Wilson’s then-risky rental of the Met was a sage investment in their careers, and in the genre of opera.

Yet even as Glass and Wilson traipsed around the globe, performing new works throughout the late 70s and early 80s, audiences were still abuzz for Einstein. Eight years later, in 1984’s Next Wave Festival, BAM produced a revival of Einstein (alongside a documentary about the piece, Einstein on the Beach and the Changing Image of Opera). Glass and Wilson brought on a new choreographer, Lucinda Childs, who had danced in the original production, and who had collaborated with Wilson at BAM in her 1981 piece, Relative Calm. In The New York Times, Mel Gussow noted in his review of the restaging that Childs’ choreography “is more like stop-action photography than whirling-dervish movements,” the latter of which is a signature of DeGroat’s.

This Week in BAM History: Between Sun Ra and Philip Glass

Ad from the Village Voice, October 1969

As the 1960s drew to a close, the varying tastes of the psychedelic hippie and civil rights crusader dovetailed across two nights at BAM. On October 10th, 1969, jazz prophet of the outer limits Sun Ra, and the always explosive if precise poet and dramatist LeRoi Jones (who would soon discard his imposed moniker and become Amiri Baraka) graced the opera house stage at BAM. As if this weren’t enough to glut even the most insatiable cultural epicure, the following night brought an even greater bounty as The Band (known then as the backing band behind Bob Dylan’s breakthrough into electric rock) and the legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg took the stage. These two nights in Brooklyn stand as a convergence of some of America’s most radical minds, in what was surely one of the last great near-trysts of a tumultuous era.