Darkness comes in many forms: some are enlightening, some are peaceful, others are terrifying. Great Noise Ensemble presents a program exploring the darknesses of the human experience from loneliness to rejection to incarceration to dreams with works by Ryan Brown, JacobTV, James Leatherbarrow and Frederic Rzewski.

Ryan Brown’s Thick Skin opens Great Noise Ensemble’s fourth season, entitled Icons Old And New, with a rock-and-roll flavored bang, portraying the many facets of human interaction and its consequences. JacobTV’s Grab It! draws the listener into a duel between saxophone and soundtrack in the “no-man’s-land between language and music”. James Leatherbarrow portrays a more peaceful side of darkness in his Three Nocturnes for tuba and piano, evoking serene images from fireflies to dreamscapes. Finally, Frederic Rzewski’s epic bipartite works Attica and Coming Together! lay out the setting of one of the ultimate wastelands of the human condition on an epic scale through the letters of Attica prisoner Sam Melville, heard in the premiere of a new arrangement of the works by Great Noise Ensemble director Armando Bayolo.

The performance on September 19, 2008 marks not only the beginning of Great Noise Ensemble’s fourth season, but the inauguration of its residency at Catholic University’s Benjamin T. Rome School of Music, and will be presented in its historic Ward Recital Hall.

Admission is $20, $10 for students and seniors, and free for Catholic University students with a Catholic University I.D.