6660 Manasota Key Road. Englewood
FL
“Voice, Vision, and Verbs”
with Hermitage Fellows Joan La Barbara, Laura Kaminsky and Jacquelyn Reingold
Thursday, January 18 at 5pm
Hermitage beach (entrance at 6660 Manasota Key Road. Englewood, FL )
Register here.
Registration is required. $5 per person.
In a trifecta of innovative musical and theatrical creation, three gifted Hermitage Fellows share how their voice and vision inform their artistic practice across disciplines. Jacquelyn Reingold is a writer for stage and screen whose works include String Fever (Ensemble Studio Theater, NY), “Smash,” “Grace & Frankie,” and “The Good Fight.” Composer and performer Joan La Barbara’s ground-breaking vocal stylings have been heard across the country and around for over four decades. Laura Kaminsky is one of the most-produced composer-librettists in contemporary opera whose work dives into the pressing matters of our time. Together, they represent a profound collective knowledge of the human experience and the multitude of ways it can be expressed in art. Hear some of these insights as well as selections of work spanning medium and style.
Composer/performer and Hermitage Fellow Joan La Barbara is renowned for her unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques (her “signature sounds”: multiphonics, circular singing, ululation, glottal clicks), influencing generations of composers and singers. Awards and prizes: Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ John Cage Award (2016); DAAD-Berlin Artist-in-Residency; Civitella Ranieri, Guggenheim and 7 NEA Fellowships; numerous commissions for chamber ensembles, theater, orchestra, chorus, interactive technology, soundscores for dance, video and film, including an electronic/vocal score for Sesame Street. Her multi-layered textural compositions premiered at Festival d’Automne à Paris, Brisbane Biennial, Lincoln Center, MaerzMusik Berlin, Warsaw Autumn, and many other international venues. Exploring ways of immersing the audience in her music, La Barbara placed the American Composers Orchestra around and among the audience in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, building her sonic painting “in solitude this fear is lived”, inspired by Agnes Martin’s minimalist art. Her music from “Erin” features prominently in the score co-composed with Jóhann Jóhannsson for the feature film “Arrival” (2016). “Eyes of an Eagle; Ears of a Hawk: In the Vortex” for voice, chamber ensemble and fixed media, commissioned by The New York Philharmonic Project 19, premiered in The Appell Room, Jazz @ Lincoln Center, NYC, February 10, 2020. Artist faculty member of NYU and College of Performing Arts/Mannes/The New School. www.joanlabarbara.com
Possessing “an ear for the new and interesting” (The New York Times), Hermitage Alum and Trustee Emeritus Laura Kaminsky frequently addresses critical social and political issues in her work with a distinct musical language that is “full of fire as well as ice, contrasting dissonance and violence with tonal beauty and meditative reflection. It is strong stuff.” (American Record Guide). Her first opera, As One, (2014; co-librettists Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed) is among the most produced contemporary operas since its 2014 premiere with 50+ productions to date in the U.S., Europe, Canada, South America and Australia. The As One team has since been commissioned twice—by Houston Grand Opera for Some Light Emerges (2017) and Opera Parallèle/American Opera Projects for Today It Rains (2019). Hometown to the World (libretto: Reed; Santa Fe Opera) premiered in 2021, Finding Wright in 2022 (libretto: Andrea Fellows Fineberg; Dayton Opera). She is co-librettist (with novelist Lisa Moore) and composer for February, commissioned by Newfoundland’s Opera on the Avalon for 2023. Awarded the 2016 Polish Gold Cross of Merit (Zloty Krzyż Zasługi RP) by the President of Poland for exemplary public service or humanitarian work, Kaminsky has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Opera America, Chamber Music America, USArtists International, CEC ArtsLink International Partnerships, Likhachev-Russkiy Mir Foundation Cultural Fellowship, and has received six ASCAP-Chamber Music America Awards for Adventuresome Programming. Head of composition at Purchase College Conservatory of Music, and a composer mentor for the Juilliard School Blueprint Fellowship program, she leads The American Opera Project’s Artistic Advisory Council and sits on the boards of Opera America and the Hermitage Artist Retreat. Her music is recorded on the Affeto, Albany, Bridge, BSS, Cedille, CRI, Capstone, Mode, MSR, and Navona labels and is published by Bill Holab Music. Kaminsky is a BMI composer.
Hermitage Fellow Jacquelyn Reingold writes for theater and television. Her plays, which include Kiss Me Somewhere Else, String Fever (starring Cynthia Nixon and Evan Handler), Acapulco, I Know, A Story About a Girl, Girl Gone, A Very Very Short Play, 2B (Or Not 2B), and Freeze Tag, have been seen in New York at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Naked Angels, The Working Theater, MCC Theatre; at the Actors Theatre of Louisville; Portland Center Stage, Oregon; Theater J, Washington DC; PlayLabs, Minneapolis; and in London, Dublin, Berlin, Hong Kong. Honors and awards include: Kennedy Center‘s Fund for New American Plays, New York Foundation for the Arts, EST/Sloan Foundation Commissions, New Dramatists’ Whitfield Cook Award, finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Oscar Reubhausen Commission, plus MacDowell, Ucross, and Hermitage Artist Retreat Fellowships. Her work has been published in two Women Playwrights: The Best Plays, several Best American Short Plays, and by Samuel French, Vintage Books, and Smith & Kraus. She wrote the Forward to Applause Books’ 10 Minute Plays by Women+ over 40 and 100 Monologues by Women+ over 40. A collection of her one-acts Things Between Us is published by DPS. Four of her short plays have been recorded for radio/podcast by Playing On Air. In television, Jackie was a Writer/Executive Producer for Paramount+’s critically acclaimed The Good Fight. Other TV writing includes Best of Both Worlds, a pilot for John Wells, East New York, BrainDead, Grace and Frankie, Smash, and all the Mia episodes for Emmy nominated Gabriel Byrne and Hope Davis for HBO’s In Treatment. A member of Ensemble Studio Theater, an alum of New Dramatists, Jackie is also a founding member of Honor Roll! an advocacy group for women+ playwrights over 40, whose goal is inclusion in theater. She has taught dramatic writing at NYU, SUNY Stonybrook-Manhattan, Columbia University, and has been a guest TV or Playwriting teacher, often. She is currently a mentor with Laura Cahill’s Playwriting Workshop for Ukrainian teens, writing about the war.