Great Noise Ensemble’s fifth season opens with Urban Saloon, a program highlighting works inspired by scenes from evocative locales such as the Deep South and the historic American West, as well as music from the Balkans, India, jazz and John Cage.

Samuel Vriezen’s The Weather Riots opens GNE’s first concert of the season with a classic example of the thought and inspiration that go into live musical performance: the performers choose the sequence of the events individually, leading to a truly one-of-a-kind performance every time the piece is performed. Ned McGowan’s Urban Turban draws on “music from the Balkans and India, as well as John Cage, jazz, Loos, Rudiger Meyer, Musiquantics, serialism and the note E”, combined and re-imagined for saxophone, guitar and piano. Bruce Broughton’s Saloon Music for B-flat cornet and pit orchestra features guest artist Craig Taylor, performing a pyrotechnic suite of music inspired by the traveling musicians of the Wild West. Joel Puckett’s Southern Comforts, with guest violinist Scott Conklin, evokes the composer’s roots in the Deep South, from Faulkner to football to funerals to mint juleps.

This concert will mark the beginning of Great Noise Ensemble’s second year as Resident New Music Ensemble at Catholic University, and will be presented in Catholic’s historic Ward Recital Hall at The Benjamin T. Rome School of Music.

Tickets are available through the GNE website, via phone at 866-811-4111 or at the door.

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring hosts GNE for Twilight Music, a program of works by David Smooke, John Harbison, Roberto Sierra, Masatoshi Mitsumoto and Blair Goins inspired by light, poetry and musical intervals.

David Smooke’s Stillness and Occurrence takes its inspiration from the reverie of a child in a photograph, contrasting the colors of the other subjects with the white space of the landscape between them. John Harbison’s Twilight Music highlights the differences between horn and violin, two instruments with “little in common” in a piece he says is the kind of music he is drawn to, where “the surface seems simplest and most familiar… but some purposeful, independent musical argument is at work.” Piezas Caracteristicas by Roberto Sierra uses different musical intervals as the basis for its five movements for small chamber ensemble, incorporating the bongos and congas of Latin and Caribbean music. In Songs of Innocence, Masatoshi Mitsumoto sets the poems of William Blake in a song cycle for soprano and piano.

Tickets are available through OvationTix or at the door: $25 Adults, $15 Students & Seniors.

Inspiration can come from a myriad of places, and not all of them exist in the realm of the sane or the real or the tangible: GNE’s third concert of the season, Illusions & Hallucinations, features works by composers Armando Bayolo, Andrew Simpson and Geoffrey Gordon inspired by things both imagined and etheral.

Geoffrey Gordon’s Lux Solis Aeterna draws its inspiration from neutrinos and the creation of sunlight, while Andrew Simpson’s lotus and poppy springs from images and personifications of lotus eaters and opium addicts, applied to modern day issues of unjust warfare. Armando Bayolo’s Chamber Symphony: Illusory Airs springs from our increasing connection through the wireless and intangible pathways of the internet and mobile communication, in direct opposition to our ever increasing physical isolation.

Tickets are available at OvationTix: $25 Adults, $15 Students/Seniors, CUA Faculty and Staff free with valid CUA I.D.

Great Noise Ensemble returns to the National Gallery of Art for Colorfield Passions, a program of world premiere works inspired by the paintings of Mark Rothko (Armando Bayolo’s Kaddish:Passio:Rothko) and the music of Claudio Monteverdi (Carlos Carrillo’s Motets from Vespro della Beata Virgine (2010)), in collaboration with the National Gallery Orchestra and Chorus.

This concert is free: for more information visit the site for the Concert Series at the National Gallery of Art.

Colors and shapes, portraits and architecture: the musical reflects the visual in Colors Of Cool, presented by Great Noise Ensemble on March 5 at Catholic University’s historic Ward Hall.

This concert presents the music of five composers:

Geoffrey Gordon’s Cool Red Cool (a jazz and improvisation-tinged response to Andy Warhol’s Self Portrait (1986)),

Jonathan Russell’s Night Dance

Blair Goins’s Chamber Concerto (written for Great Noise Ensemble)

Jacob Cooper’s Not Just Another Piece For Solo Bass Drum

Harold Meltzer’s Brion (inspired by the colors and architectural shapes of the Brion-Vega Cemetery in San Vito d’Altivole, not far from Venice.)

Tickets available through OvationTix.

On April 30th, Great Noise Ensemble presents the world premiere of a brilliant new percussion concerto by composer D.J. Sparr: The 41st Rudiment. Performed by guest soloist Chris Froh on the fantastic percussion instrument sculptures created by sculptor Terry Berlier, Sparr’s concerto combines visual art with compositional mastery and spectacular stage performance for an experience on a myriad of artistic planes.

Also featured on the program are works by Ian Hartsough and Robert Paterson: Ian Hartsough’s City Life portrays the the “frustrations, wonders, and concerns that come with starting a life on one’s own” as seen through the lens of life in Manhattan, while Paterson’s Looney Tunes uses as inspiration and point of departure favorite characters from the cartoons of the same name.

This program is a featured performance in Great Noise Ensemble’s role as resident new music ensemble at The Catholic University of America, and is presented in The Benjamin T. Rome School of Music’s historic Ward Recital Hall.

Tickets:
$25 General
$15 Students & Seniors
Free for CUA Students, Faculty & Staff with valid CUA ID

Tickets are available through Ovationtix:
https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/692545

Great Noise Ensemble is proud to be performing as part of the inaugural New Voices @ CUA festival on September 10th & 11th at the Catholic University of America: the festival will showcase exciting new works by seventeen composers from across the United States and Paris, who were selected by a panel from over 100 entries for their ingenuity and significance to the contemporary repertoire.  The selected compositions mirror The Catholic University of America’s tradition for excellence in musical theatre, opera, art song, and sacred music, highlighting some of the best new contributions to these genres by emerging and established composers.  Tickets, available at the door, are $10 for each concert, or $20 for a Festival Pass that includes all four concerts.  Visit the New Voices festival website for more information and come out to hear the world of these amazing up-and-coming composers.

The National Gallery of Art
4th & Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, DC

On Sunday October 24, Great Noise Ensemble is proud to present one of the great masterworks of modern music, Louis Andriessen’s De Materie, at the National Gallery or Art.

De Materie incorporates eclectic musical influences, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach and Igor Stravinsky to the old Netherlands chanson “L’homme armé” and 20th-century boogie-woogie. GNE stretches the limits of both their personnel roster and their performing ambitions with this opera, which clocks in at over 70 performers including a sixty-member orchestra, chorus, vocal soloists and narrators.

The concert will be presented in the East Atrium of the National Gallery of Art, the perfect setting for a work that celebrates many and varied facets in its composition.

It’s epic. It’s amazing. If you miss it, you’ll regret it. And let’s not forget, it’s FREE. Admission to the concert is on a first-come, first-served basis, so come early and camp out for your seat!

Information and Directions To The National Gallery of Art

Ward Hall, The Catholic University of America
3976 Harewood Rd NE
Washington, DC

Great Noise Ensemble takes a whole different direction with this concert on Friday, December 3 at Catholic University’s Ward Recital Hall: this show features works based on and inspired by pop and rock music from Radiohead to heavy metal. Works by Joshua Bornfield, Stephen Gorbos and Ryan Brown are going to rock the hall, and Steven Mackey’s Deal will feature the guitar stylings of one of our favorite performers, D.J. Sparr. Bring your groove and a friend– this is a show not to be missed.

Information and Directions To Ward Hall, The Catholic University of America

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring
10309 New Hampshire Avenue
Silver Spring, MD 20903

“Quantum physics has recently confirmed what shamans and mystics, poets and musicians have long known: the universe is more like music than like matter. It may well be that our most fundamental relationship to the great mysteries is one of listening. Through sustained, concentrated attention to the fullness of the present moment, we listen for the breath of being, the voice of God.” –John Luther Adams

Composer John Luther Adams is known not only for his compositions that summon and embody the vistas of his home in Alaska, but for his tireless activism and interest in environmental causes and his passion for creating sound spaces that evoke a sense of “vastness, separateness and solitude.” (–Alex Ross)

On April 22, 2011, Great Noise Ensemble and The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring present a program in celebration of Earth Day, featuring John Luther Adams’s Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing. Adams describes the work as “a work of musical contemplation, an attempt to consecrate a small time and space for extraordinary listening (…) My hope has been not so much to compose a piece of music as to create — in essentially musical terms, with no external references — a wholeness of music, a sonic presence somehow equivalent to that of a vast landscape.”

For this performance Great Noise Ensemble is hosted by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring, participants in the Green Sanctuary program of the Unitarian Universalist Association, who are “dedicated, through individual and collective efforts, to becoming better stewards of the Earth”. Visit www.uucss.org to learn more about UUCSS and www.uua.org to learn about Unitarian Universalism and the Green Sanctuary initiative.

Tickets are available online through OvationTix and at the door: $15 General Admission, $10 Students/Seniors.

Information and Directions To The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring