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Gerald Barry and Julian Anderson at the MoMA Summergarden

Jul. 01, 2015

Gerald Barry and Julian Anderson at the MoMA Summergarden

The Museum of Modern Art’s Summergarden “New Music for New York” series, which has presented jazz and classical music in its Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden since 1971, offers several first New York performances this season. As part of the opening concert on July 5, curator and conductor Joel Sachs leads the New Juilliard Ensemble the U.S. premiere of Gerald Barry’s No people. and the New York premiere of Julian Anderson’s Poetry Nearing Silence.

Julian Anderson’s Poetry Nearing Silence draws upon a peculiar book of drawings and poems by artist Tom Phillips called The Heart of a Humument. Phillips’s work is a poetic treatment of a forgotten Victorian novel in which he preserved individual words and phrases while painting images over the rest. Anderson explores the relationship of Phillips’s words to his own sounds, using silence as a vital tool “in punctuating the music, disrupting it, concluding it, or stopping it in its tracks.”

Gerald Barry’s No people., scored for a nonet of clarinet, bassoon, two horns and strings, is inspired by surrealist poet Raymond Roussel’s 1932 poem New Impressions of Africa. For the poem, Roussel anonymously commissioned 59 illustrations from various artists who, without access to the original poem, were given only brief, unrelated descriptions, such as: Nocturnal landscape. Very starry sky with a thin crescent of moon. (No people.). Barry writes that it is “the juxtaposition of both unknowns – text/drawings – that gives the final work its strange quality.”

For more information about Julian Anderson, visit fabermusic.com and schott-music.com.

More information on Gerald Barry can be found at schott-music.com.

For tickets and concert information, moma.org.

Julian Anderson
Poetry Nearing Silence (1997)
Divertimento after Tom Phillips for chamber ensemble and 7 players
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15’ 

Gerald Barry
No people. (2013)
for nonet
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18’

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