Joan La Barbara Performs "The Wanderlusting of Joseph C." at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

by Ted Gordon on April 11, 2018, 2:42 p.m.

Celebrated composer and vocalist Joan La Barbara has long worked at the nexus between artistic disciplines, collaborating with fellow composers, performers, and artists across a wide spectrum. In 2017, La Barbara premiered a new song cycle, "The Wanderlusting of Joseph C.", inspired by the filmmaker, sculptor, and visual artist Joseph Cornell. Working with novelist Monique Truong, La Barbara has created a song cycle for four singers, singing texts inspired by Cornell's neologism "wanderlusting", which turns the German compound word "Wanderlust"—the desire to travel—into an English gerund, a kind of nominal state that is always-already informed by action. 

On April 13th, La Barbara, accompanied by Lauren Flanigan and Mario Diaz-Moresco, performed three songs from The Wanderlusting of Joseph C., as well as "Windows" and "Habité par ses rêves et les phantasms"—the latter taking its title from a description of Cornell by the painter Dorothea Tanning—at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the galleries housing their exhibition, "Birds of a Feather: Joseph Cornell's Tribute to Juan Gris". This environmental performance puts La Barbara's work in immediate and visceral contact with Cornell's work, provoking connections between music, art, and text. The project was developed in association with American Opera Projects.

Writing in The New York Times, Seth Colter Walls celebrated La Barbara's performance, commenting on her longstanding role in "shap[ing] experimental sound in New York," and praising the unified breadth of La Barbara's style between the extended vocal techniques of "Windows" and the "wounded grandeur" evoked in "The Wanderlusting of Joseph C."   

La Barbara spoke about her long-standing interest in Cornell in 2014, in anticipation of a performance at Roulette. Check out the video below:  

Joan La Barbara Begins 70th Birthday Celebration at Roulette

by Ted Gordon on May 23, 2017, 2:44 p.m.

Now in her 70th year, Joan La Barbara has continued her life's work of composition, collaboration, and performance, and shows no signs of slowing. 2017 has already seen La Barbara performing at ISSUE Project Room, music directing a new production of Robert Ashley's Dust, touring with the "Music for Merce" celebration in Minneapolis and Chicago, and overseeing performances of her piece A Murmuration for Chibok, commissioned by the Young People's Chorus of New York City and performed at the 30th annual Bang on a Can Marathon. 

To continue this multi-faceted year, La Barbara will premiere her new song cycle, The Wanderlusting of Joseph C., performed by the composer herself alongside Ne(x)tworks at Roulette in Brookyln, NY. This new song cycle explores Joseph Cornell's concept of "wanderlusting"—which articulates both the desire to wander and the desire to lust—with text by Vietnamese-American writer Monique Truong. 

Check out a recent interview with Red Bull Music Academy below.