4/23/23 at 3:00 pm Rivers are our Brothers: an Earth Day Celebration
Majel Connery, voice and keyboard
Brad Balliett, bassoon
Doug Balliett, bass and viola da gamba
Rivers are our Brothers Majel Connery
Artwork prize sponsors: Bellia Print & Copy, Century 12 Rauh & Johns, Columbia Bank, Music at Bunker Hill, Sustainable Washington Twp., Washington Twp. Rotary Club.
Majel Connery, voice and keyboard
Brad Balliett, bassoon
Doug Balliett, bass and viola da gamba
Rivers are our Brothers Majel Connery
- I am the air
- I am a cloud
- I am a mountain
- I am snow
- I am a rock
- I am a tree
- I am a river
Artwork prize sponsors: Bellia Print & Copy, Century 12 Rauh & Johns, Columbia Bank, Music at Bunker Hill, Sustainable Washington Twp., Washington Twp. Rotary Club.
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Intermission
Passionate Pilgrim Oracle Hysterical
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Majel Connery: Rivers are our Brothers
“The Rivers are our Brothers” is a narrative song cycle on ecological responsibility told from the point of view of the land. With titles such as “I Am a River” and “I Am a Cloud”, each song is given the power of first-person speech to highlight important elements in the natural world, ascribing human qualities and feelings to water, trees, mountains, rivers, fish, air and rocks.
Oracle Hysterical: Passionate Pilgrim
Passionate Pilgrim is a song cycle by composer collective Oracle Hysterical that brings an all-but-forgotten poem cycle back to life. Once believed to have been penned by a “W. Shakespeare,” the collection was stripped of its stature when the Shakespearean parentage of all but four poems was revealed as a fake. The cycle's original instrumentation includes a mix of Baroque and modern instruments pitched at 415 and 440 hz, respectively.
Bassoonist and composer Brad Balliett ('impressive' - New Yorker) splits his time between a wide variety of musical pursuits. In addition to performing with Signal, Metropolis, and NOVUS, Brad is a frequent guest of the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Ballet, and is Artistic Director for Decoda, the Affiliate Ensemble of Carnegie Hall. He is Professor of Bassoon at The Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, teaches for the Juilliard School Evening Division, and regularly leads creative workshops for incarcerated musicians at Sing Sing, Lee Correctional, San Quentin, and other facilities around the country.
Doug Balliett is a composer, instrumentalist and poet based in New York City. The New York Times has described his poetry as “brilliant and witty” (Clytie and the Sun), his bass playing as “elegant” (Shawn Jaeger’s In Old Virginny), and his compositions as “vivid, emotive, with contemporary twists” (Actaeon). Popular new music blog I Care if You Listen has critiqued Mr. Balliett’s work as “weird in the best possible way” (A Gnostic Passion) and “light-hearted yet dark…it had the audience laughing one minute and in tears the next…” (Pyramus and Thisbe). He composes weekly music for a church on Manhattan's lower east side, and is professor of historic basses at the Juilliard School.
Majel Connery is a vocalist, composer and former musicologist, and makes electro-art-dream-pop with repressed classical influences. Her work has been called “superb” by the New York Times and “thoroughly Schubertian” by the Wall Street Journal. In 2019 she wrote songs about porn, periods, and sad fish for five episodes of Radiolab’s “Gonads” series, released as a digital album on Bandcamp. An artist with a Ph.D., Connery has held positions at institutions including Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Wellesley College, and the University of California Berkeley. She hosts a podcast called "A Music of Their Own" with CapRadio (Sacramento), and tours frequently with her band, Sky Creature.