A Murmur in the Trees

April 21, 2024 at the Haverford College Nature Trail

This performance is a memorial to Robert Black.

Welcome!

Today’s Program

Eve Beglarian — A Murmur in the Trees
For 24 Bassists

During the performance, we highly encourage you to wander along the trail, staying close to the music making and discovering your own version of the piece. Please also take pictures and videos as you do so and share them with us - your pictures and videos will be this production’s documentation. In order to use the form below, you will need a google account. Please email us if you have any questions or issues - kassof@networkfornewmusic.org

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Program Notes

A Murmur in the Trees —

The following program notes are taken from Eve Beglarian’s website about the premiere of A Murmur in the Trees. The premiere was on September 11, 2021 in Brandon, Vermont and was co-produced by the amazing New Music on the Point and wonderful Scrag Mountain Music.

I’m really happy to be collaborating with bassist Robert Black and composer/programmer Matt Sargent to make a piece for twenty-four basses in a grove of trees, called A Murmur in the Trees, after a line of Emily Dickinson. For the 11 September Brandon performance, the performers will be arrayed along the allée of trees on Park Street Extension that once lined the entrance to a golf course now long gone. The next day, the piece will be performed in Hubbard Park in Montpelier.

We are creating the music by treating a piece of birch bark as a musical score, where the lines on the birch bark are notes that are read at the rate of one-third inch per minute, which is said to be the speed at which plant signals travel.

Christie Echols, a student of Robert Black (a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars), will be leading a group of bass players ranging from fellow professionals to local students in the half-hour piece, which will be staged so that audience members can move along the entire length of the allée. You get to shape your own unique experience of the piece and the place. The music will be quite soft (acoustic basses don’t project very far in the open air), and will mix with the natural ambience of a late-summer afternoon.

None of us has ever heard twenty-four basses playing in a grove of trees, and we’re thinking it might be kind of amazing. Basses were once trees, after all, and they might have something really interesting to say to one another.

BIOGRAPHIES

Beglarian’s current projects include a collaboration with writer/performer Karen Kandel and writer/director Mallory Catlett about women in Vicksburg from the Civil War to the present, a piece for twenty-four double basses in a grove of trees, and a song cycle setting texts by and about mid-20th-century women for the Brooklyn Art Song Society. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days, “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress…an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.”(Los Angeles Times)

In 2009, “Ms. Beglarian kayaked and bicycled the length of the Mississippi River [and] has translated her findings into music of sophisticated rusticity. [Her] new Americana song cycle captures those swift currents as vividly as Mark Twain did. The works waft gracefully on her handsome folk croon and varied folk instrumentation as mysterious as their inspiration.” (New York Times)

Beglarian’s chamber, choral, and orchestral music has been commissioned and widely performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the American Composers Orchestra, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the California EAR Unit, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, loadbang, Newspeak, the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble and individual performers including Maya Beiser, Lara Downes, Lucy Dhegrae, and Thomas Feng.

Highlights of Beglarian’s work in music theater includes music for Mabou Mines’ Obie-winning Dollhouse, Animal Magnetism, Ecco Porco, Choephorai, and Shalom Shanghai, all directed by Lee Breuer; Forgiveness, a collaboration with Chen Shi-Zheng and Noh master Akira Matsui; and the China National Beijing Opera Theater’s production of The Bacchae, also directed by Chen Shi-Zheng.

She has collaborated with choreographers including Ann Carlson, Robert LaFosse, Victoria Marks, Susan Marshall, David Neumann, Take Ueyama, and Megan Williams, and with visual and video artists including Cory Arcangel, Anne Bray, Vittoria Chierici, Barbara Hammer, Kevork Mourad, Shirin Neshat, Matt Petty, Bradley Wester, and Judson Wright.

Performance projects include Brim, Songs from a Book of Days, The Story of B, Open Secrets, Hildegurls’ Ordo Virtutum, twisted tutu, and typOpera.

Recordings of Eve’s music are available on ECM, Koch, New World, Canteloupe, Innova, Naxos, Kill Rock Stars, CDBaby, and Bandcamp.

Echols’ music centers around personal experiences and challenges with self-identity in culture, gender, and community. A frequent performer of her own electroacoustic works, she combines extended techniques, vocal melodies, and her own text to create hypnotizing textures. Her acousmatic works employ heavy sound manipulation to create shocking and familiar timbres. Echols enjoys collaborating with other artists and has worked with dancers, animators, and poets to create multi-disciplinary projects. Selected songs from her upcoming composition, The Modification of Oneself, are set to premiere in March 2022, with a full release in April 2022. Recent premieres of acoustic compositions include We Will Not Go Quietly, a chamber work commissioned and premiered by the Hartt School’s Foot in the Door Ensemble; Inherent Exertion, for spoken text and double bass, commissioned by The Uncertainty of Fate Festival and premiered by Robert Black; and Stand up and Listen, commissioned by the Bassists with Boobs Ensemble for International Women’s Day, March 2021. For live-processing performances she uses Ableton Live with the Akai professional APC Key 25 keyboard and the Keith McMillen SoftStep 2 midi controllers.
 
As a bassist, Echols regularly performs with ensembles across the globe. She is currently the assistant principal for the Missouri Symphony and has performed with the Amarillo Symphony, Midland-Odessa Symphony, and Asociación Cultural Carpe Diem Enharmonía. Echols has been featured as an electric bassist for the Hartford Independent Chamber Orchestra and the Other Orchestra, where she premiered works by Gabriel Lubell and The Brecker Brothers, respectively. In 2017, Echols won the Ernst Bacon Memorial Prize for performing Libby Larson’s “Four on the Floor '' for piano quartet with the West Texas A&M Symphony Orchestra on their European tour. Other notable performances include the premiere of Caroline Louise Miller’s “Hydra Nightingale'' for solo bass featured at the 2019 International Society of Bassists Convention and Missy Mazzoli’s “Magic for Everyday Objects'' at the Treefort Music Fest as a member of 208 Ensemble. 
 
Echols’ principal teachers include Robert Black, Gary Karr, Andy Butler, and Nicholas Scales for double bass as well as Gilda Lyons and Ken Steen for composition.

Learn more here.

“This communal sharing of such daring music was a revelation.  It was mind blowing.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I was developing a taste for the 'new', for the 'other' - for all of those peoples, cultures, and musics that I didn't know.  I was forever hooked on 'the possibilities' and 'the unknown.'  The public school system changed my life in other ways.  My Junior High School music teacher suggested I try the double bass. Mr. Gillian showed me how to play my first two notes on the instrument and the next minute I was in the jazz band playing 'Eleanor Rigby'.  I came home from school that afternoon and told my parents that I wanted to play the bass for the rest of my life.  And what a life. The sense of exploration and discovery that I experienced from the radio and on my first day with the bass have never stopped.  

“As a result, I've focused my performing energies on New Music.  New Music - an unending source of challenges and discoveries.  New Music - never sits still, never runs out of ideas, never ceases to thrill, amaze, and engage.  New Music - it has taken me throughout the world, involved me in technology, improvisation, world musics, pop music, and all things traditional and experimental,  It has allowed me to collaborate with actors, dancers, painters and musicians of all sorts.  This same passion for exploration and discovery has led me deeper into the history of the double bass and its repertoire, which has led me deeper into the performance of the Classical Literature and the world of Teaching.  Teaching - another passion.  

“I've had many mentors, people who have reached back and grabbed my outstretched hand, pulled me along and propelled me forward, showing me everything along the way. And now, with my outstretched hand still being pulled, I can reach back and grab the outstretched hands of others, helping them along, propelling them forward, showing them.  

”So the circles complete.  The Helped becomes the Helper becomes the Helped. Performing becomes Teaching becomes Performing.  The New becomes the Old becomes the New.”

Bassists

Special thanks

Each of Network’s programs comes together through the dedicated work of NNM staff, volunteers, and - of course - the performers. But, it also comes together through the generous support of our patrons, donors, and granting organizations, as well as our partners across Philadelphia who share their spaces, time, and resources with us. Building on our long-standing collaboration with Haverford College has been a joy! Working with Nancy Merriam, one of today’s bassists and an amazing member of the Haverford College School of Music, has helped us elevate this presentation to a new level. Haverford’s beautiful arboretum, maintained in part by the work of Jennie Kelly, is a gorgeous location to perform in, but also a location stewarded by enthusiasm and care. So, to Nancy, Jennie, and Efram (a Haverford events coordinator), thank you for making A Murmur in the Trees 2024 such a wonderful event!

We have been constantly inspired by the brilliance, love, and dedication of composer Eve Beglarian and Christie Echols in the exciting, collaborative production of the work. Without them, the bass section leaders, and all the players, this complex, unusual production would have been impossible. The possibilities inherent in these partnerships - new experiences, new people, new sounds - allow us to continue reimaging what new music can mean in our wonderful Philadelphia community! Thank you all for coming today and we hope to see you at our May 5th performance at the Mary Louise Curtis Branch of Settlement Music School!

For a full list of our supporters, please visit our new Donors Page, and if you’d like to join them, donate here!

Sincerely,

Thomas Schuttenhelm (NNM AD), Susanna Loewy (NNM ED), Evan Kassof (NNM Producer), Rachel DiBlasio (NNM Education Coordinator), and the NNM Board (Anne Silvers Lee and Najib Wong, Co-Chairs)