“In and Out of the Game” on Studio 360 Video

Yet more from the Guidonian Hand’s flurry of activity with Eve Beglarian — here’s a great video produced by NPR’s Studio 360 to accompany last week’s radio program.  We’re so proud!

The Guidonian Hand on NPR’s Studio 360 This Week

A recording of the Guidonian Hand from last week’s performance of music from Eve Beglarian’s “River Project” is currently being broadcast nationwide on the Studio 360 program out of New York!

For details on when the broadcast will reach your neck of the woods, check out Studio 360′s list of participating stations here!

Saturday: The Guidonian Hand Performs Eve Beglarian’s “River Project” in NYC

Our intrepid trombone quartet, The Guidonian Hand, performs Eve Beglarian‘s inspiring new “River Project” this Saturday night (Jan. 21) at the Abrons Arts Center in New York City.  In what’s sure to be a moving exploration of Beglarian’s impressions of the country’s original slow-moving superhighway, Guidonian hand will perform with violinist Mary Rowell and Loadbang in this first night’s program, “The Night of the Sirens,” (“…in which the harsh sound of a warning alarm in Plaquemine, Louisiana, is electronically deconstructed alongside a plaintive text by Rilke about returning home after a long journey without any words to describe it,” says the Abrons).  Subsequent programs on January 27th and 28th include performances by Newspeak, Taylor Levine, and Malcomb J. Merriweather.

Check our event page for more details.

The event was featured in the current New Yorker!

Four Quartets: Variations

“Four Quartets: Variations,” revolving around T. S. Eliot’s inimitable sequence Four Quartets, is a theatrical, musical and poetic tour de force.  Moored by the performances of four vocalizing actors and four poets interacting with excerpted and remixed text of Eliot’s Four Quartets, the project also features byways into performance sets by the Bryant Park Quartet (string quartet) and The Guidonian Hand (trombone quartet), as well as guest artists Iktus Percussion Quartet, which expand the musical reaches and correspondences of the poem.  Emphasizing the profundity and structural revelations of Eliot’s book-length text, the actors and musicians surround the poets’ recitations with extended techniques of all varieties, from improbable instrumental sounds to extremes of vocal and improvisatory production, letting the text re-echo in time past, time present, and time future.  Fare forward, voyagers.

The quartet of actors are Marya Lowry, Phil Timberlake, Corianna Moffatt, and Nate Speare, while participating poets include Thalia Field, R. Dwayne Betts, Cathy Park Hong, Katie Ford, Major Jackson, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Jon Woodward, and Oni Buchanan.

Grateful thanks to the following individuals for their support in producing this project:
Sponsors: Colleen Hovey and Chris Bator, Sirkku Kontinnen and Harri Kytömaa
Contributors: Robin Welte and Art Murray, Paula and Jack Barthel, David and Joella Hricik, Tom and Debbie Bross, Greta and Bob Ingraham, Jan Pechenik, Jaqueth Hutchinson

New Music Announced from Eve Beglarian for the Guidonian Hand!

We’re more than thrilled to announce that one of our favorite composers, Eve Beglarian, has just been commissioned by the Tribeca New Music Festival for a brand new 15-minute work entitled Pump Music. The piece will be composed for trombone quartet, violin, and “electronically transformed recordings of hand pumps that she has collected in campgrounds while traveling down the Mississippi River in 2009.” We’re particularly excited because the music will feature our own trombone quartet (who better?), the Guidonian Hand.

Eve Beglarian has been composing and publishing incredible music since the ‘90s and since then she’s seen her work performed and recorded by groups like the Bang On a Can All-Stars, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and many more. Her 2009 kayak trip down the Mississippi River made headlines when she began it, including an in-depth feature in the New York Times.  This summer, her music was performed at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary American Music.

For more info on the current commission, visit the Meet the Composer site.

Stay tuned for more news as this season gets ready to kick off next week, beginning with a Stephen Drury residency at the University of Idaho!

One Last Look at Summer 2011

It’s hard to believe it, but the layer-worthy temperatures outside don’t lie: summer is finally coming to an end.  While we’re eagerly looking forward to a jam-packed fall of events for ourselves, it’s worth another look back at a few more of our artists’ exploits in these recent months.

Guidonian Hand trombonist Sebastian Vera recently returned from a trip to Haiti to lend his talents to the wonderful Jean Baptiste Dessaix Music School (“Ecole de Musique Dessaix-Baptiste”).  It’s a year-round program backed by international supporters that includes a big summer camp element with teachers and volunteers from all over North America teaching students aged 6 to 25.  The program took a hit with the earthquake in 2010, but is bouncing back in incredible ways!

Meanwhile, the Bryant Park Quartet just finished running a week-long summer chamber music camp at Stony Brook University.  The BPQ has helped spearhead the Stony Brook University Community Music Program as its first ever Ensemble-In-Residence, and the summer camp is a major element of the program’s initiative to work with young musicians at Stony Brook and in nearby public schools. They’ll be headed back for a concert at the end of the month (September 25)!

Meanwhile, Stephen Drury spent the summer with two big projects in Boston — the first being Boston University’s Spectral music workshop with composer Joshua Fineberg (Spectral Summer), which included a world premiere of Fineberg’s “Counterfactual.” Second was of course Drury and his Callithumpian Consort’s annual Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP), which this year featured composer-in-residence Tristan Murail and a world premiere of John Luther Adams‘s “4000 Holes.”

Outside of a handful of New England performances, Duo Orfeo have been busy preparing material for an electric guitars album, which they’ve just announced they’ll be recording this fall. They promise pieces by Arvo Part, John Cage, Erik Satie and Valentin Silvestrov, and those in attendance at this spring’s “Machines” concerts have already had a taste of some of these sounds.  Needless to say, we can’t wait to hear this record.

And of course, don’t forget the bevy of new talent that joined our ranks this summer: the West Shore Piano Trio, Rhonda Sider Edgington, and janus trio!

May you have a great weekend and check back often for updates as this extremely exciting concert season gets underway…

“More interesting, though, was [Conrad Winslow’s] “Dilating Music,” an atmospheric exploration of meaty lower brass textures, complete with subtle slides and juxtapositions of muted and open timbres, expertly played by the trombone quartet Guidonian Hand.”

–The New York Times, Allan Kozinn, September 2, 2009

Simple arithmetic applied to musical terminology demands that if you add up four trombonists, the sum should be called a trombone quartet. So why is it that I have trouble bringing myself to call Guidonian Hand a trombone quartet?…I don’t know, but I can say that Guidonian Hand is simply Guidonian Hand and nothing else because the sum of these four extraordinary musicians–Mark Broschinsky, William Lang, Sebastian Vera, and James Rogers–equals something beyond what the term ‘trombone quartet’ could muster in my imagination. Everyone can hear this musical alchemy in their performances…As in any great performing ensemble, each member is in his own way the center of the group while at the same time no one is the center. That’s the magic of the sum of the parts. Each person brings something unique to the rehearsal besides his abilities on the trombone. Mark, a virtuoso on the alto as well as the tenor instrument, brings his genial humor and shrewd musical common sense–in this way he is the center; Will, skilled in every aspect of trombone playing and a musician of the most intuitive kind, brings his incisive musical insights–in this way he is the center. Sebastian, a gifted player with an especially lyric quality, brings a quiet steadiness and seriousness of purpose–in this way he is the center. James, whose sound as bass trombonist is as grand as his persona, brings his passion for music and his encyclopedic knowledge of the trombone–in this way he is the center. But then again, there is no center. When the four personalities have merged, when what each player brings has been subsumed in the whole, there occurs that something which is always greater than the sum of its parts, the magic of great ensemble playing. That is what one hears at a Guidonian Hand performance.

–J. Mark Stambaugh, Composition Faculty
Manhattan School of Music

“The Guidonian Hand transcends the limitations of the trombone by accepting them. Architecturally sound new music using everything of which the trombone is capable. Brilliant writing, brilliant playing. Loose and yet rigorously precise. Revelatory. A celebration of pure sound, and played from the heart at a very high level. Totally new. Go hear it.”

–Sam Burtis, trombonist, bass trombonist, tubist, composer/arranger, music director, and educator in New York City since 1967

“Machines” come alive at Galapagos Art Space

The “MACHINES” show at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn was a huge success! Thanks to all who attended. The show featured kinetic sculptures and videos by Arthur Ganson and performances by Duo Orfeo, The Guidonian Hand, and Oni Buchanan. Check out the performance videos from the event.