Event

PETER FLINT / AVIAN ORCHESTRA

On Friday, Sept. 20th, 2013, Peter Flint and Ben Kaplan present a special live performance of Sheetflow Songs, an extended song cycle without words for accordion, electric guitar, electronics, and video. In addition, the program will open with a set of music by pianist/composer Andrew Shapiro with violinist Gregory Fulkerson.

Created in 2012, Sheetflow Songs is a musical collaboration between guitarist Kaplan and accordionist Flint which responds to Dorothy Simpson Krause's River of Grass series of artworks, inspired by the disappearing landscapes of the Florida Everglades. The work blends accordion, both acoustically and with electronics, with guitars, synthesizers, and video of Krause's art, into an ambient, transporting, and ultimately deeply affecting meditation on the character of natural landscapes and their increasing disappearance. "Sheetflow" is a term referring to a broad, wide, shallow flow of water, and in a loose way the music in this performance mirrors this slow, massive flowing. For Kaplan (rock producer, guitarist, drummer, and the force behind the bandSleepmaps) and for Flint (classical composer and founder of the Avian Orchestra), this is a significant stylistic departure that takes both performers into new and unexpected musical territory.

Shapiro, in collaboration with Fulkerson, will premiere a new piece for violin and piano, entitled Sonata: The Highline, informed by his year of working as a security guard/ranger on the Highline park. In addition, he will play selections from his two albums of solo ambient piano music, which blends his two major influences, '80s New Wave pop and Philip Glass minimalism. Shapiro performs regularly and his music is played on radio throughout North America and Europe. Fulkerson, a major proponent of American contemporary music, performs globally and is a professor of violin at Oberlin Conservatory.