The Beeline Festival is a new music festival at the MIT Broad Institute dedicated to putting the greater-Boston community into contact with an exciting, spirit-renewed energy and creativity that has been growing across the country in the past few years, a spirit that has sprung out of an intermingling of various new music genres that had previously had far less exchange. Accordingly, the festival is not limited to a single definition of new music, but rather includes - among other things - classical music, contemporary concert music, avant folk, punk jazz, world music, and electronic/mechanical invention. Some of this music is Boston and Cambridge based, but much has had far too little exposure in this area. Co-curators Christine Southworth and Evan Ziporyn have worked hard to devise an eclectic program that brings together a cross-section of diverse artists and music in a synergistic way, with programs that connect to one another, and which will give Cambridge audiences the opportunity to make connections, traverse pathways, and discover new music that they might otherwise not have thought to pay attention to.
The festival will take place April 5-19, 2009, with seven events spread over three weekends. This will begin with two back-to-back concerts - a mini-marathon - by two national groups, the Los Angeles-based Calder Quartet and New York's Gutbucket. The Calder’s concert will feature music by innovators past and present, from Beethoven and Ben Johnston (a 20th century microtonal master) to two young composer/inventors, Christine Southworth and Tristan Perich, both of whom build instruments combining high-level programming with low-tech electronic equipment, and combine these instruments with the classical string quartet. Gutbucket's performance - combining sophisticated formal thinking with virtuosic bebop and elements of punk rock - will be live accompaniment to a 1950s surrealist film, the first ever full-length animated French film, Jean Image's "Johnny the Giant Killer." To break down the barriers between audience and performer, there will be a reception between concerts featuring local honey provided by the greater-Boston beekeeping community, ice cream by Toscanini’s, and tastes from local restaurants. Here the composers and performers will be able to talk to audience members in a relaxed atmosphere.
The second weekend will start off on Friday night, April 10, with a concert by legendary Czech composer and vocalist/violinist Iva Bittova, performing her own solo works and trios with bassist Robert Black and Evan Ziporyn. Bittova's music draws on her own Gypsy heritage, as well as her experience in classical music, jazz, and the avant garde. After this concert there will be a reception which will provide the audience with a rare opportunity to talk with Iva Bittova, who, besides being an amazing performer and brilliant composer, was a film star in Czechoslovakia in her early career. On Saturday afternoon, April 11, in MIT’s Killian Hall, Robert Black will himself perform a solo concert with harpsichord, featuring very old (baroque and early classical) music with very new (20th and 21st century) works for double bass, much of which he himself commissioned and premiered.
The third weekend will feature home-grown Cambridge talent, Ensemble Robot and Gamelan Galak Tika. Ensemble Robot will perform on Friday, April 17 and will feature work by Southworth and Perich, as well as newly commissioned works by computer music pioneer Paul Lansky (recently profiled in the NYTimes), and Jennifer Olivia Johnson. This concert will be followed by a reception after this concert so that our audience can both talk to the artists and look at the machines up close. On April 19, Evan Ziporyn’s group, Gamelan Galak Tika will present a retrospective of music by their Artist in Residence, innovative Balinese composer Dewa Ketut Alit.
