Great Noise Ensemble brings Irreverence to the Atlas Performing Arts Center

Sept. 21, 2012 - PRLog -- Great Noise Ensemble (GNE) makes an irreverent first appearance this season as the New Music Ensemble In-Residence at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on October 19 at 8:00pm. Ironic, edgy, and even confrontational, this program features John Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony, Jonathan Newman’s These Inflected Tentacles and the world premiere of Armando Bayolo's Sacred Cows. This concert also presents GNE’s first collaboration of the 2012-2013 season with the members of Baltimore’s hexaCollective.

Impish Adams
John Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony (2007) is a companion work to his 1992 masterpiece, Chamber Symphony, and like the earlier piece, it is full of the vim and bounce of Adams’s self-described impish side. “The title itself deserves some commentary as a throwback reference to old, sci-fi B-movie sequels,” says GNE Artistic Director & Conductor Armando Bayolo. “The ironic edginess is a bit of a return to an older form for Adams, revisiting some familiar tropes while extending his later, adventurous style and bringing it together with his earlier post-minimalism. The last movement even references the aria “News has a Kind of Mystery,” from act one of Nixon in China!”

Meat-eating Flora
What better inspiration for a composition than experiments with meat-eating flora? Jonathan Newman’s quartet These Inflicted Tentacles quotes excerpts of Charles Darwin’s book Insectivorous Plants, in which Darwin writes about dropping bits of meat, eggs, glass, hair and anything else he can think of on his plants. Just to see what happens.

Question everything
Armando Bayolo had ambitious professional aspirations in elementary school: become the Pope.  Rather than pursuing a faith-based career, Bayolo completed three degrees in the equally challenging and competitive field of music composition. In 2001, motivated by the conclusion of his doctoral studies, Bayolo began reading scholarship about Jesus Christ and Christianity; this ultimately led to the erosion of his faith. Sacred Cows addresses doubt and the ills of blind spirituality with a quasi-pop music feel. Also featured on this work are hexaCollective’s Megan Ihnen, Andrew Sauvageu, Sara MacKimmie, Pamela Terry and Sonya Knussen.

Irreverence will be presented in Atlas Performing Art Center’s Lang Theater, in the heart of D.C.’s H Street Arts District.

Tickets are $25 General and $15 Students with I.D., and are available though the Atlas Performing Arts Center website and at the box office (202.399.7993)

For more information about the program:
www.greatnoiseensemble.com/

For tickets:
bit.ly/GNEIrreverenceAtAtlas

Great Noise Ensemble was born in 2005 through a listing placed on Craigslist.org by composer and conductor Armando Bayolo. Seven area musicians united by their passion for new music answered, and from this core group the ensemble has grown into the twenty instrumentalists and two singers which now comprise its core membership. Since its first concert in January 2006, Great Noise Ensemble has become one of the most important ensembles in the District of Columbia’s burgeoning new music scene, winning The Washington Area Music Association’s 2007 “WAMMIE” Award for Best Chamber Ensemble and presenting concerts in venues ranging from intimate community concert spaces like the Patricia M. Sitar Center to prestigious locales such as the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Gallery and Sculpture Garden and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts