Into the Thicket

Like a long walk through a thicket, our twenty-first century ears experience a variety of sensations over the course of a musical journey. Often there is plenty of familiarity mixed with the new, but sometimes the layers become so tangled that our auditory experience morphs into a thicket of sound. Once in the middle, there is no turning back – the only way out is to keep going through.
Into the Thicket delves into unexpected musical dialects, where a floating rhythmic instability is often one of the only constants. Each work on the program contains an innate sense of motion, whether that is a driving rhythmic force or a deliberate suspension of movement. The thread that holds this sound world together is a rhythmic language grounded in the history of its compositional predecessors.
Into the Thicket explores the types of motion in contemporary piano works that lie beyond just slow and fast, existing in deeper layers of whimsy, dance and severity of expression. The program includes John Zorn’s rarely performed Carny and world premieres by acclaimed New England composer Stuart Saunders Smith and Bang on a Can’s newest member, Ken Thomson. Lansky’s Three Moves for Marimba (arr. for piano by the performer) has been described by the composer as “a dance that never quite finds its footing.”
Join Anne Rainwater as she explores these elements of intertwined dance and movement, mating exhilaration and peace through the dichotomy of motion and stillness.
Welcome to the journey.
Into the Thicket
PAUL LANSKY: Three Moves for Marimba (1998) (arr. for piano by A. Rainwater)
STUART SAUNDERS SMITH: Thicket (2010 – World Premiere)
KEN THOMSON: me vs. (2012 – World Premiere)
JOHN ZORN: Carny (1989)
 
(No intermission. Concert order subject to change.)
Anne Rainwater
BIO
 
Anne Rainwater is a pianist who, besides music, loves long-distance running, cats, the San Francisco Giants, math, and chocolate. To discover more, please visit annerainwater.com.