May 10 will feature work-in-progress presentations of Brother Brother by Aaron Siegel and To Scale by Cough Button as well as a full production of Happiness is the Problem by Jason Cady.

May 11 will be devoted to a partly staged production of Borges and the Other by Matthew Welch.

For more information or to buy tickets, visit roulette.org.

Please consider a donation to the Spring Series Fundraising Campaign on IndieGoGo

Cough Button is a creative troika dedicated to exploring the narrative and sonic possibilities of mixing radio transmissions into live performance and installation. Cough Button consists of Aliza Simons, Lynn Levy, & Dave Ruder.

Lynn Levy is a documentary producer who has worked in film, television and radio.  She is currently working for WNYC’s Radiolab.  Lynn graduated from Wesleyan University with a degree in Film Studies and a cardboard box full of blank cassette tapes (still waiting to be used).

Dave Ruder has spent much of the last year performing in, arranging, and creating new mutlimedia & site-specific operas.  He performed in Robert Ashley’s That Morning Thing, co-arranged and performed in Ashley’s Perfect Lives Manhattan as 1/5 of Varispeed, took part in a performance of Aaron Siegel’s Brother Brother, and has worked with Panoply Performance Laboratory on Nature Fetish, Institute_Institut, and TIME: A Complete Explanation in 3 parts (with thingNY).  Dave is an active clarinetist/guitarist/vocalist/electronicist and composer (among other things).  In addition to Cough Button, he is a member of Varispeed (durational performance & opera), Gamelan Kusuma Laras (NYC’s only Javanese gamelan), Sweat Lodge (new music composing/performing squad), Why Lie? (song & storytelling duo), and helps run Performers Forum (a monthly series at Exapno).  Dave studied music at Wesleyan University and Brooklyn College. For more information about Dave, visit his website at:  daveruder.com

 New York City native Aliza Simons wears many different hats: transmission artist, musician, composer, oral historian, championwhistler. A graduate of Wesleyan University, she was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in 2010 to spend a year visiting community radio stations and conducting interviews with radio DJs and journalists in Northern Canada, South America and Western Africa. In 2011, she collaborated in arranging and performing a site-specific adaptation of Robert Ashley’s made-for-TV opera Perfect Lives with composer-collective Varispeed as part of Performa ’11. She also performed in a restaging of Ashley’sThat Morning Thing at The Kitchen as well as the premier of World War III Just the Highlights, alongside baritone vocalist Thomas Buckner. She is a member of Why Lie? the band, WHY LIE? the ensemble and yet-to-be-named duo with percussionist David Grollman.

 Visit the Cough Button website for more information.

To Scale, is a work-in-progress that details the relationship between an architect and her scalies—the two-dimensional characters who populate architectural models.  Co-written by Lynn Levy, Dave Ruder, and Aliza Simons, To Scale explores the gap between creator and created.  The piece will also play with novel techniques to bridge the gap between singer and listener, including the use of localized transmitters, picked up by radios in the audience.

- Steve Smith in TimeOut New York
Full Preview

Jason Cady on East Village Radio sharing excerpts of his opera “Happiness is the Problem”

Review of Matthew Welch’s opera “Borges and the Other” on Megs New Music Blog

Watch Matt, Jason, Megan and Aaron introduce the four operas featured on the inaugural Experiments in Opera Concert at (le) Poisson Rouge on January 16, 2012:

Jason Cady is a composer of experimental vocal and chamber music. The Wire described his one-act opera, Post-Madonna Prima Donna, as, “thoughtful satire, sharp composition.” Cady has an M.A. in composition from Wesleyan University, where he studied with Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton. His undergraduate degree is in Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance from Arizona State University, where he studied composition with Richard Lerman and Harold Budd, in addition to training in visual art. He was born in 1974 in Flint, Michigan and has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 2001.

For more information, visit: numbermadeaudible.com

Regarded as “a composer possessed of both rich imagination and the skill to bring his fancies to life” by Time Out New York, composer and bagpipe virtuoso Matthew Welch (b.1976) holds two degrees in Music Composition, a BFA from Simon Fraser University (1999), and an MA from Wesleyan University (2001), having studied with noted composers such as Barry Truax, Rodney Sharman, Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton. After locating to New York City in 2001, he has worked with a host of other artists such as John Zorn, Julia Wolfe, Zeena Parkins, and Ikue Mori. The eclectic breadth of his interests in Scottish bagpipe music, Balinese gamelan, minimalism, improvisation and rock converge in compositional amalgams ranging from traditional-like bagpipe tunes to electronic pieces, improvisation strategies and fully notated works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, orchestra and non-western instruments. Since 2002, Mr. Welch has been running and composing for his own eclectic ensemble, Blarvuster, whose repertoire the New York Times has claimed as “border-busting music; original and catchy.” Mr. Welch has recorded for the Tzadik, Mode, Cantaloupe, Leo, Porter, Muud, Avian, Newsonic and Parallactic record labels.

For more information, visit: blarvuster.com

Music by Jason Cady; libretto by Nadia Berenstein, Jason Cady, and Amy Cimini; graphics by Nadia Berenstein

2 sopranos, mezzo-soprano, chamber orchestra and rhythm section

“But, I mean, in order to, to actually do human trials you have to go through all this rigmarole, and rent is due, we don’t have time…”

Happiness is the Problem is a two-act opera buffa and comic book about idealism and disillusionment. It presents three young women who sell an elixir of happiness derived from the secretions of slugs which they market as “Euphoressence.”

Happiness is the Problem has had preview performances at The Stone, the Wilmette Theater, and Issue Project Room.

Sample audio from Happiness is the Problem:

Watch Jason introduce Happiness is the Problem in this video from the inaugural Experiments in Opera Concert at (le) Poisson Rouge on January 16, 2012:

A modular dance opera for Blarvuster by Matthew Welch
for 2  Mezzo-sopranos, Baritone, Tenor, chorus, flute/piccolo, viola, 2 electric guitars, piano, bass guitar, vibraphone, drumkit

Watch Matt introduce Borges and the Other in this video from the inaugural Experiments in Opera Concert at (le) Poisson Rouge on January 16, 2012:

Aaron Siegel is one of the most thoughtful and intriguing composers to emerge from New York’s new music renaissance. Siegel’s deep inquisitiveness is matched with an playful sensibility and his work represents a truly personal vision of how we live with and respond to the sounds in our world.

Recent projects include a Fall 2011 video installation entitled “Put Your Hands Together” as part of the Bring to Light Festival and a May 2011 release of Science is Only a Sometimes Friend for eight glockenspiels and organ on LockStep Records. The CD and audio download was celebrated by NewMusicBox as “one continuous ecstatic sonic event that mesmerizes, transfixes, and transports. While you are listening to it, you feel like you have been teleported through a vortex of endless doorways which keep opening but ultimately never go anywhere and that your journey will never end.”

In the Spring of 2012, Mantra Percussion will present an evening of Aaron’s music for percussion as part of their new composer portrait series.

For more information, visit:  aaronsiegel.net

Words and music by Aaron Siegel
for soprano, countertenor, tenor, chorus, 2 vibraphones, glockenspiel, viola, cello and flute

Brother Brother is an operatic work for percussion, strings, choir soloists and actors that explores the enigma of brotherhood.  The story follows the lives of two pairs of brothers-one historical (Orville and Wilbur Wright) and one fictional (Red and Blue)-as they discover the character of their bond to one another.

The performance at Roulette on May 10 will feature two excerpts from Brother Brother for SATB chorus and piano featuring:

Amanda Sidebottom, Soprano
Patrick Fennig, Countertenor
Jonathan Hampton, Tenor
Thomas McCargar, Bass
Emily Manzo, Piano

Sample Audio from Brother Brother Act I, Scene 3: The Silent Puzzle Played:

Watch Aaron introduce Brother Brother in this video from the inaugural Experiments in Opera Concert at (le) Poisson Rouge on January 16, 2012:

Megan Schubert (lead producer, singer – Sextour) recently created the role of Saint Francis of Assisi in a world premiere of Sasha Zamler-Carhart’s opera I Fioretti at La Mama E.T.C., the role of Scientist/Athena in Likeness to Lily’s COMMAND VOICE, sang in the world premiere of James Ilgenfritz’s opera, The Ticket that Exploded, and performed and produced the NY premiere of Georges Aperghis’s Sextuor: L’origine des especes with Avant Media. Recent and upcoming engagements include a set of Eve Beglarian’s works at Joyce SoHo and Wild Project with members of Ekmeles; the New York Premiere of Robert Ashley’s opera, That Morning Thing, at The Kitchen; and a staged performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.

Schubert has performed music by Stockhausen for an audience under umbrellas in a torrential downpour for Make Music New York; world premieres at Carnegie Hall; with robots while locked inside a Van de Graaff Generator at Boston’s Museum of Science; on a bike flying by the audience in an installation piece at McCarren Park Pool, Brooklyn; in a giant potato sack while video was projected onto her frontside at Webster Hall; for inmates at a maximum security prison in Ossining, NY; with puppets at E 4th Street Fab! Fest; for Elliot Carter at a celebration of his 100th birthday; and with many ensembles championing art music and experimental jazz of today. Schubert holds degrees from Bennington College and Manhattan School of Music.

Georges Aperghis was born in Athens in 1945. He has lived and worked in Paris since 1963. In 1971, after a few instrumental pieces more or less inspired by serial technique, Georges Aperghis composed  the tragic story of the necromancer Hieronimo and the mirror (for two female voices: singing and speaking, a lute, a cello).  This piece was his first music theater piece and the source of much of his future investigations into the relationship between music and text, between music and stage.

The creation of the l’Atelier Théâtre et Musique (ATEM) in the Paris suburbs of Bagnolet (1976 to 1991) and Nanterre (at the Theatre des Amandiers from 1992 to 1997) completely renewed Aperghis’ practice as a composer. Using musicians as well as actors, shows with the ATEM were inspired by the everyday social facts translated into a poetic world that was often absurd and satirical. All ingredients (vocal, instrumental, gestural, theatrical …) were treated equally and contributed – outside of a pre-existing text – to the drama. (translated text from Antoine Gindt, official biographer)

The New York Premiere of "Sextuor: L'Origine des esp 2011 (C) Avant Media. All Rights Reserved.

Libretto by François Régnault and Georges Aperghis (based on texts by Charles Darwin and Stephen Jay Gould) and music by George Aperghis

For five singers and speaking cellist

Sextuor is composed like an oratorio, telling the story of life interpreted in fossil records, co-written by François Règnault and the composer, inspired by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life.

“In the beginning… there was not a beginning. The common ancestor is unknown. Between each species and the common ancestor, who is unknown, one must seek, forever seek the intermediate forms” Narrated by the cellist, and also by the singers through straight singing, Sprechstimme, nonsensical syllables evoking the sounds of beginning life forms and fast-forward sound portraiture of evolution, and as instruments, the story unfolds through bouts of rhythmic complexity and quartertones, and each of the performer’s symbolic characters is revealed.

“Immense Nature improbable and unpredictable, contingent nature, where are we going, we who say life was wonderful, we who say life is wonderful?”

Sample audio from Sextuor: l’origine des especes:

PERSONNEL

Sop I, Megan Schubert
Sop II, Christie Finn
Sop III, Gelsey Bell
Mezzo, Silvie Jensen
Contralto, Amirtha Kidambi
Cello, Émilie Girard-Charest
Director, Jeremy Bloom
Lighting Designer, Kryssy Wright
Rehearsal Conductor, Nick DeMaison

Watch Soprano Megan Schubert introduce Sextuor: l’origine des especes in this video from the inaugural Experiments In Opera Festival at (le) Poisson Rouge on January 16, 2012:

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO SUPPORTED OUR SUCCESSFUL KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN!

Experiments in Opera is a composer and performer-driven festival, featuring recent and new works with unorthodox answers to the traditional questions about how to connect words, story and music. This inaugural event at Le Poisson Rouge on January 16, 2012 at 7:30 will feature excerpts from four works:

Borges and the Other with music by Matthew Welch and a text adapted from Jorge Luis Borge

Happiness is the Problem with music by Jason Cady, libretto by Nadia Berenstein, Jason Cady, and Amy Cimini and graphics by Nadia Berenstein

Sextuor: l’origine des especes with music by George Aperghis and
a libretto by François Reginault and Georges Aperghis (based on texts by Charles Darwin and Stephen Jay Gould)

Brother Brother with music and words by Aaron Siegel.

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  Follow Experiments in Opera @expinopera