The Atlas Performing Arts Center
1333 H Street NE
Washington, D.C.

On May 11th, Great Noise Ensemble takes its place as the Resident New Music Ensemble at one of Washington, D.C.’s most exciting venues, The Atlas Performing Arts Center in the burgeoning H Street Arts & Entertainment District. Featured on this program are premieres of new works by Randall Woolf, Andrew Earle Simpson, David Smooke, and the Washington premiere of Stefan Freund’s Three Urban Images.

The pieces featured on this concert highlight not only locales and characters that make life in an urban setting so vibrant, but also the concepts and ideals that contribute to the diversity and fascinating rhythms of life among dense humanity. Stefan Freund’s Three Urban Images features the cast and setting of his first year after returning to living in Rochester, New York after living in a small town, drawing its portraits from the very street corner where Freund lived in that first year. David Smooke’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death springs from a collection of 18 sculptures by Frances Glessner Lee of the same name, each depicting in minute detail the death scene of a particular unexplained demise, now housed in the Office of the Medical Examiner in Baltimore, here translated into a concerto for toy piano and orchestra. Urban Legends is a setting of rhymes by four rap MCs, each of whom was asked by Randall Woolf to create a modern day myth. Andrew Earle Simpson’s Double Concerto for Guitar, Violin, and Chamber Orchestra mixes classical and folk musical styles into each other, creating a distinctive sound-world in which pentatonic melodies, blue notes, extended techniques, fiddling and strumming patterns, tone clusters, open-string drones and other elements create a concerto that is alternately lyrical, melancholy, and joyful.

Tickets: $25 General / $15 Students
Tickets are available via the Atlas Performing Arts Center’s website.

Information and Directions To The Atlas Performing Arts Center

Symphony Space
2537 Broadway
New York, NY 10025-6990

In “Philosphy II,” Great Noise Ensemble explores the beauty and complexity of ideas and the intermingling of thoughts, images, memories and concepts to become art. In the five chamber works featured on the lineup for this concert, GNE spotlights the talents of a compact core of its member instrumentalists on works by Alexandra Gardner, Cornelius Dufallo, Victoria Bond, Carlos Carillo, Matt van Brink and Marc Mellits.

Alexandra Gardner’s The Way of Ideas evokes a “musical landscape that evokes the everyday machinations of the human mind – an environment in which chattering thoughts suddenly fly away or are pulled slowly apart, return again, and change and develop into new forms which travel along different pathways” while Marc Mellits’s Five Machines uses the musicians as the cogs of a musical machine, working together in sync to form a cohesive, grooving whole. Victoria Bond’s Coqui paints a soundscape highlighting the voice of the Puerto Rican Coqui frog, using the instruments of the ensemble to recall and imitate the constant chirping of the rain forest. Neil Dufallo’s Paranoid Symmetry creates music that mimics the lightning-fast synapses of the brain, interspersed with the haunting fragmented melodies of memory and remembrance.

Find out more about the concert and buy tickets at the Symphony Space website: www.symphonyspace.org

Information and Directions To Symphony Space

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

In “Philosphy I,” Great Noise Ensemble explores the beauty and complexity of ideas and the intermingling of thoughts, images, memories and concepts to become art. In the five chamber works featured on the lineup for this concert, GNE spotlights the talents of a compact core of its member instrumentalists on works by Alexandra Gardner, Victoria Bond, Carlos Carillo, Matt van Brink and Marc Mellits.

Alexandra Gardner’s The Way of Ideas evokes a “musical landscape that evokes the everyday machinations of the human mind – an environment in which chattering thoughts suddenly fly away or are pulled slowly apart, return again, and change and develop into new forms which travel along different pathways” while Marc Mellits’s Five Machines uses the musicians as the cogs of a musical machine, working together in sync to form a cohesive, grooving whole. Victoria Bond’s Coqui paints a soundscape highlighting the voice of the Puerto Rican Coqui frog, using the instruments of the ensemble to recall and imitate the constant chirping of the rain forest.

Tickets for this event are FREE for students 17 and younger.

Tickets are available via OvationTix online or at the door:
$15 General / $10 Students & Seniors / Free for CUA students, faculty and staff with CUA ID

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

The Atlas Performing Arts Center
1333 H Street NE
Washington, D.C.

Be the first to hear the lineup for GNE’s upcoming debut CD! In fulfillment of our successful Kickstarter project from last year, GNE will be going into the recording studio immediately following our appearance at the Intersections Festival to record exciting works by up-and-coming composers D.J. Sparr, Rob Paterson and Marc Mellits.

In this concert, Great Noise Ensemble will explore the intersection of machine communication and music. How do we as humans connect via internet dating, as cogs in a musical machine, and through the common experience of musical language? Find out when conductor Armando Bayolo brings GNE to the Atlas Center for the Performing Arts.

Find out more about the festival and purchase tickets at the Intersections Festival website.

Information and Directions To The Atlas Performing Arts Center

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

Great Noise Ensemble returns to Catholic University’s 2012 New Voices @ CUA Festival on January 20th and 21st to present brand new works for voice and ensemble.

On Friday night’s concert, GNE presents works by composers from Catholic’s composition program, featuring composers Jay Parotta, Sarah Horick, Brian Rice, and Joseph Taylor as well as premieres of new works commissioned for GNE by composers Sean Doyle and Cornelius Dufallo.

Dufallo joins the group to perform his work Paranoid Symmetry, bringing a marriage of technology and live instruments to depict the disintegration of the human mind. Sean Doyle’s Letters from Zelda sets texts of letters written to F. Scott Fitzgerald by his wife Zelda to lush orchestrations that evoke the jazz age and the dramatic swings of Zelda’s mental instability.

Tickets are available at the door:
Free for CUA students/faculty/staff with ID
$15 General Admission
$10 Seniors (60 and up) and Students with ID
Free admission for students 17 and under when accompanied by a ticketed adult
Festival Pass (good for admission to all concerts):
$50 General Admission
$30 Seniors and Students with ID

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

Hartke Theater, The Catholic University of America
4120 Harewood Road NE
Washington, DC

In 1883 Carlo Collodi published his completed work, Pinocchio, which has gone on to become one of the classics of children’s literature. On December 9th, Great Noise Ensemble presents a retelling of this favorite story, featuring narrator Pamela Witcher and Great Noise Ensemble members Molly Orlando Palmiero, Katherine Kellert, Chris DeChiara and guest percussionist David Wolf in a tour-de-force evening of music composed by Martin Bresnick. This rarely-performed completed version of the piece features not only the original four scenes featured in Bresnick’s Musica Povera but also the rest of the story, culminating in the marionette’s transformation into a real boy, accompanied by a fascinating range of music from a chamber quartet of clarinets, piano, and a percussion setup that has to be seen to be believed.

This concert is free to children 17 and younger with the paid admission of an accompanying adult. (No limit on number of free childrens’ tickets with each admission– you’re welcome! Bring the whole family! Enjoythe concert!) Free tickets may be requested at Will Call. Groups may reserve free childrens’ tickets by contacting the box office at tickets@greatnoiseensemble.com.

Tickets are available through Ovationtix: General $15 / College students & Seniors $10 / CUA Students faculty and staff free with CUA ID

Information and Directions To Hartke Theater, The Catholic University of America

The Mansion At Strathmore
10701 Rockville Pike
Rockville, MD

Great Noise Ensemble is on a mission: to fight for the performance of new works and promote emerging talent in contemporary music. Since its first concert in January 2006, Great Noise Ensemble has become one of the most important players in D.C.’s burgeoning new music scene, winning the Washington Area Music Association’s “WAMMIE” Award. In this concert, GNE explores American music from the turn of the 21st century, including works by Armando Bayolo, David Lang, Carlos Carillo, Angelica Negron, Eve Beglarian and Pierre Jalbert.

Tickets are available for sale via Strathmore’s website: $10 General Admission.

Information and Directions To The Mansion At Strathmore

GNE is starting a great new program– this year at the following concerts, Great Noise Ensemble will be offering FREE ADMISSION to students 17 & younger as long as they’re accompanied by a ticketed adult. All you need to do is show up to the concert to pick up your regular ticket and let the box office know you have young attendees with you, and they’ll get in free!

Free 17 & Younger tickets are available for the following concerts this year:

September 9. 2011: Lullaby, Eulogy, Homage (The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring)
December 9, 2011: Fairy Tale (Ward Hall, Catholic University)
January 20 & 21, 2012: Poems I & II: New Voices Festival (Ward Hall, Catholic University)
April 13, 2012: Philosophy (Ward Hall, Catholic University)

There may be other concerts with this offer, so stay tuned, and see you at the concerts!

In 2005, when I heard from a friend that a random guy she knew was starting a new music group, I was intrigued, but only passively so. After some thought and a shrug of my shoulders, I sent a message to the email she provided and got back an enthusiastic reply from some guy named Armando that I’d never met—come to rehearsals, bring your friends, we’re going to be doing some really cool stuff, the standard things you’d expect to hear from a young enthusiast with a startup group. Was I interested in maybe playing that really gnarly John Adams clarinet concerto, or maybe some Steve Reich?, he asked, naming a couple of pieces that I knew and one I’d never heard before.

If I wasn’t enthusiastic before, all of the sudden my ears perked up.

I should explain that I come from a pretty standard musical background, and growing up in the Deep South in Birmingham, Alabama, most of the “new music” I heard and experience I had came from the school band room. I was a better than average clarinet player in my area, so I ended up doing lots of of honors bands and clinics, including one that would unexpectedly profoundly change my young perceptions of music: I showed up to a local clarinet symposium as a young high school kid to play in the clarinet choir, and found myself looking at one of the stranger pieces of music I’d ever seen at the time—there were all of these repeated eighth notes, sections and sections and pages and pages of them. I could barely keep track of them and wondered what in the world it was supposed to sound like. The guy’s name wasn’t too weird, Steve Reich, and it probably had to be cool if New York was in the title, I thought to myself. (It was, of course, his famous work New York Counterpoint, which the director of the choir had decided to have us perform completely live instead of as it’s usually done, with one live clarinet and prerecorded track.) When the conductor gave that first downbeat, I can honestly tell you that my world shifted entirely into another frame. My stand partner, a veteran local clarinetist, got the grins at my drop-jawed expression as I listened, completely oblivious to the part I was supposed to playing with her—she knew this was a game changer. By the time we’d reached the end of the first section, I knew I had to know more about this guy, this kind of music. By the end of the piece I was totally and forever hooked—anybody that could take a couple of measures of repeated notes and write them to make them groove that way, and that hard, deserved a more intense examination.

In my college years, it was Steve Reich’s name and that experience that drew me to the Contemporary Ensemble led by conductor Gerald Welker at the University of Alabama, who would become a profound influence in my musical life, introducing me to ever broader vistas of “contemporary” works by Olivier Messaien, Harrison Birtwistle, Terry Riley, and of course Reich and many others through those and other ensemble rehearsals. By the time I transferred to a different school (Arizona State University) in my junior year, I knew I liked “new music” at least in theory, even if not all of it grooved quite as well as some of those sections of New York Counterpoint, and I had enough of an open mind to try some of the newest, craziest stuff coming out that was championed by my teacher there (and one of the best in the performance business, Robert Spring, who to this day inspires me to dare to try music that would scare the pants off most traditional performers.)

All of that history basically boils down to this: Steve Reich’s music was the gateway drug that led me to a love of all of the music I now perform with Great Noise Ensemble. And a powerful gateway drug it is too—there are sections of Music for 18 Musicians that quite literally grab me and shake me bodily (section VI and VII particularly): my head bobs, my feet tap, I shimmy in my chair. I’m sure it’s very entertaining to watch, but I can’t help it nor would I if I could. And if that’s what it does to a hard sell you can tell it’s powerful stuff. Because of the interest his music gave me, I’ve learned that there are more kinds of amazing new music out there to play than just the academic, brainiac stuff that used to kind of drive me crazy in college, that there are composers who write music that grabs my attention and speaks to me very deeply using the very vocabularies I had somehow thought classical somehow missed in translation, from the hard rocking sounds of Marc Mellits to the beautiful and zen flow of many of John Luther Adams’s works. If it weren’t for the genius of Steve Reich I might never have had that door in my mind opened.

So, for that, I owe you my thanks in this year of your 75th birthday Mr. Reich—you’ve given me a very precious gift and for that I will always, always be thankful.

Katherine Kellert is Great Noise Ensemble’s clarinetist and Managing Director. You can find out more about her at Great Noise Ensemble’s website and follow her Twitter feed: @katiekellert. You’ll be able to see her perform Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians with Great Noise Ensemble on Friday, September 9th, 2011 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring.

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

Great Noise Ensemble opens its seventh season with a concert featuring a world premiere, a remembrance September 11th, and a birthday wish to composer Steve Reich.

GNE is proud to open this performance with the world premiere of a brand new work written for us by up-and-coming composer Hannah Lash, entitled Hush. We are also proud to present, as a remembrance near the 10th anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, 2001, Stephen Hartke’s Beyond Words, composed in the aftermath of the attacks. We also take time to celebrate the upcoming 75th birthday of composer Steve Reich with his epic piece Music for 18 Musicians.

This concert is special occasion for Great Noise Ensemble as well, as this concert marks the official debut of conductor David Vickerman in his new role as GNE’s Assistant Conductor, and will be held at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring.

Tickets are available through OvationTix or at the door: $15 General Admission / $10 Students & Seniors / 17 & under free with a regular adult admission.

Information and Directions To The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring