03/25 @ 9:00pm - Barry Seroff’s Quaker Cantata with Anti Social Music

DEMOCRACY

The World Premiere of Barry SEROFF’s Quaker Cantata

Also featuring a performance by Anti-Social Music.

Premiering 9:00pm to 11:00pm, March 25th, 2010 at

ISSUE PROJECT ROOM
located at the OA Can Factory, 232 3rd St. in Brooklyn
(By Subway:  F to Carroll/Smith or R to 9th St/4th Ave)

$15

ANTI-SOCIAL MUSIC:

Anti-Social Music, Inc., is a non-profit collective of composers and performers created for the purpose of presenting new music by emerging, primarily New York-based musicians. Concerts typically feature music written specifically for the ensemble and are additionally intended to not be so gosh-darn serious. This stuff is supposed to be fun, no? This concert will feature both lighter and larger scale works.

DEMOCRACY and Barry SEROFF:

New York based composer and improviser Barry Seroff’s music has been described as “flirting with progressive rock from the perspective of Stravinsky…. (his work) shows a real mastery of the craft of composition and creative insight into making a piece work for the performers and the audience.”  A full-length chamber work for soprano and tenor vox, alto and tenor saxophones, electric guitar, electric bass, double bass, drumset and percussion, Democracy features unlikely instrumentation for what the composer refers to as a ‘Quaker Cantata’.

“The idea was to create a dramatic arc on texts based around the central tenet of Quakerism:  ‘All that lives is holy.’   I wanted to follow that idea through to get a clearer understanding of its consequences,” says Seroff.  Those consequences are explored through the words and philosophies of Quaker preacher George Fox, trancendentalist Walt Whitman and the existentialism of Fredrich Neitzche.

Though the piece’s text is drawn primarily from 19th century works, the music is thoroughly contemporary.  As its title implies, Democracy openly embraces all the music that America has to offer, from innocent folk rock (‘Infant Joy’) to punk-edged modern rock (‘The Mystic Trumpeter’), to grindcore/avant jazz (‘It is Not the Scriptures!’) finally resolving in airy, ambient classical (‘I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer’).  The sounds are certainly disparate, but the transitions are seamless. The composer tells us that, “by utilizing the toolbox of classical composition to link these musical styles, I am endeavoring to speak a uniquely modern language forged out of America’s evolving and robust musical conversation. In much in the same way that diverse texts are connected by a common idea, I want to illuminate how music, politics, spirituality and philosophy are driven by the overarching motivation of our search for the holy.”

Tonight marks the first complete performance of the full-length piece.