Described by the New Yorker as "friendly, unpretentious, idealistic, and highly skilled," eighth blackbird promises - and delivers - provocative and engaging performances to its ever-growing audiences. Combining bracing virtuosity with a fresh and alluring sense of irreverence and panache, the sextet debunks the myth that contemporary music is only for a cerebral few. The ensemble attracts legions of fans to its performances and recordings, which sparkle with wit and pound with physical energy. As a result, these new fans become drawn into the ever-evolving soundworld of new music, which the group inhabits and explores with comfort, conviction, and infectious enthusiasm. eighth blackbird is widely lauded for its performing style - often playing from memory with virtuosic and theatrical flair - and for its winning campaign to make new music accessible to wide audiences. A New York Times reviewer raved, "eighth blackbird's performances are the picture of polish and precision, and they seem to be thoroughly engaged ... by music in a broad range of contemporary styles." Profiled in the New York Times and NPR's All Things Considered, the sextet has also been featured on Bloomberg TV's Muse, CBS News Sunday Morning, St. Paul Sunday, Weekend America, and The Next Big Thing, among others. The group is in residence at the University of Richmond in Virginia and the University of Chicago.
Highlights of the 2008-09 eighth blackbird season encompass collaborations and performances with conservatory students from Oberlin and Los Angeles's Colburn School; debuts in the U.K. (Liverpool), Rotterdam, and Australia (Melbourne); "hometown" concerts at Chicago's Harris Theater with guest artists Glenn Kotche (best known as Wilco's drummer), and the Hilliard Ensemble; and numerous appearances at Virginia's University of Richmond. eighth blackbird takes the reigns as Music Director of the famed Ojai Music Festival in June 2009, and soon afterwards it makes its debut at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, performing a new work written for the ensemble by Mark-Anthony Turnage. "Meanwhile", eighth blackbird's new program for the season, comprises a new work by Stephen Hartke, and pieces by Thomas Adès, Dennis DeSantis, Franco Donatoni, Roshanne Etezady, and Kati Agócs. The ensemble will also continue to perform its popular program "The Only Moving Thing" during the coming season, and will premiere the live version of Reich's Double Sextet.
eighth blackbird's 2007-08 season launched the kinetic program "The Only Moving Thing", with new commissions by Steve Reich and maverick composers David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe: in TOMT's first part, eighth blackbird performed Reich's Double Sextet simultaneously live and pre-recorded; singing in the dead of night - an intrepid collaboration between Lang, Gordon, Wolfe, and seminal New York choreographer Susan Marshall - was the second part. The ensemble performed the TOMT program from coast to coast, taking it from San Francisco and Los Angeles through Chicago to New York and Washington DC, giving sold-out performances at Zankel Hall (another debut for the group) and the Kennedy Center. eighth blackbird also inaugurated its own hometown series at the prestigious Harris Theater at Millennium Park, and made its debut at Pittsburgh's Chamber Music Society.
During the previous two seasons, eighth blackbird debuted at the legendary Kitchen in New York City, and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Houston Friends of Music. The group toured Osvaldo Golijov's song-cycle Ayre with soprano Dawn Upshaw and performed a fully memorized and staged cabaret-opera version of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, in a special collaboration with the Blair Thomas & Company puppet theater and soprano Lucy Shelton.
The sextet has appeared in Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Korea; at nearly every major chamber music venue in North America, with performances at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the Metropolitan Museum, Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, Cleveland Museum of Art, and La Jolla Chamber Music Society; and has been concert soloist with the Utah Symphony and the American Composers Orchestra. During the summer, the group has appeared several times at Cincinnati's Music X, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Caramoor International Music Festival, and Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, also performing at Tanglewood, Ojai, New York's 20th annual Bang on a Can Marathon, and Bravo! Vail. The group is Music Director for the Ojai Music Festival's 2009 season.
Since its founding in 1996, eighth blackbird has actively commissioned and recorded new works from such eminent composers as Steve Reich, George Perle, Frederic Rzewski, and Joseph Schwantner, and has commissioned groundbreaking works from a younger generation (Jennifer Higdon, Stephen Hartke, Derek Bermel, David Schober, Daniel Kellogg, and Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez). The group was honored in 2007 with the American Music Center's Trailblazer Award and a Meet The Composer Award. eighth blackbird received the first BMI/Boudleaux-Bryant Fund Commission, was the first contemporary music group to win the Grand Prize at the Concert Artists Guild International Competition, won the 2000 Naumburg Chamber Music Award and the 2004 NEA/CMA Special Commissioning Award, and has received grants from BMI, Meet The Composer, the Greenwall Foundation, and Chamber Music America, among many others.
The ensemble is enjoying acclaim for its four CDs released by Cedille Records. The most recent - strange imaginary animals, released in November 2006 - won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance, and has garnered an almost unprecedented number of rave reviews, both in the U.S. press and internationally. The Absolute Sound wrote of the album: "Like the band itself, all the music is fresh, vibrant, exciting, and slightly addictive .... I don't know what eighth blackbird has planned for the future [but] whatever comes next, their track record strongly suggests that it will be great." The group's first CD, thirteen ways, featured works by Perle, Schober, Joan Tower, and Thomas Albert, and was selected as a Top Ten CD of 2003 by Billboard magazine. beginnings, featuring Kellogg's Divinum Mysterium and George Crumb's Vox Balaenae, was praised by the New York Times: "The performances have all the sparkle, energy, and precision of the earlier outings. ... It is their superb musicality and interpretive vigor that bring these pieces to life." Of fred, eighth blackbird's third Cedille disc, comprising three Rzewski works, the San Francisco Chronicle reported: "The music covers all kinds of moods and approaches, from dreamy surrealism to caffeinated unison melodies, and the members of eighth blackbird deliver it all with their trademark panache." In 2006, the group debuted on the Naxos label in a performance of The Time Gallery, commissioned by eighth blackbird from 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec.
eighth blackbird is active in teaching young artists about contemporary music and, in addition to residencies, has taught master classes and conducted outreach activities around the country, at the Aspen Music School System (grades K-12), the La Jolla Chamber Music Series, the Candlelight Concert Series, Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa, and throughout the Greater Chicago area.
The members of eighth blackbird hold degrees in music performance from Oberlin Conservatory, among other institutions. The group derives its name from the Wallace Stevens poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". The eighth stanza reads:
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
Visit the ensemble's official web site at http://www.eighthblackbird.com for more information.
+ Matthew Duvall endorses Pearl drums and Adams Musical Instruments.
