Recursion and Release

FirstWorks-RI & MASARY Studios present multimedia installation

Recursion and Release

Text: Jack Kornfield, from “A Meditation on Letting Go”

Choral setting: Kitty Brazelton

Live A/V reaction: Jeremy Stewart

on view December 1-3, 2023, 5:00-9:00PM

Grace Episcopal Church, 300 Westminster, Providence RI

This is the first minute of “2. If you let go a little” from Jeremy’s and my collaboration Recursion and Release.

and

Live a cappella performances by Stephan Griffin (baritone), Nathan Halbur (bass), Barbara Hill (soprano), Teri Kowiak (mezzo-soprano) and Eric Christopher Perry (tenor)

on Saturday, December 2, 5:00-9:00PM

Last Minute add to Elegant Modernist Concert! Tomorrow!

I’ve been included on Cygnus’s upcoming tribute to composer and erstwhile mentor Martin Boykan. Marty was married to my flute teacher, Connie Boykan, when I took up the instrument at age 12. My mom drove me to their house on a quiet street in Waltham, MA. Every week she would read a book in a room off their kitchen, Marty would play endlessly and inscrutably in the garret above, and Connie and I would play Baroque duets—because I never practiced.

I met Marty again as a Masters student in Composition at Columbia, when he visited for a semester away from Brandeis. I felt awkward in the austere and pristine atmosphere of Marty’s seminar, as the only female and the only rock musician. Every week Marty would critique my paltry notes proffered—”too many structural downbeats” (silently I reacted: of course there are downbeats, I play at CBGB’s!)—and every week I would rewrite from scratch. Nothing I did was right.

And here I am on a concert with him! With a pop song! How can this be?

Marty was dear, thoughtful and kind, if puritanical. His work is crystalline, of another world to me now, a world that believed perfection was possible. I’m no longer sure that the world can ever be perfect but I am moved and inspired by that modernist hope.

Calvin Wiersma, violin, Susannah Chapman, cello, William Anderson, guitar, Oren Fader, guitar, James Austin Smith, oboe, Tara Helen O’Connor, flute.

Cygnus @ LOFT393

Martin Boykan Tribute with Sharon Harms and Jessica Bowers

Tuesday, October 24th, 7pm

LOFT393
393 Broadway, 2nd floor
New York, NY

Program includes:
Martin Boykan: Diptych (quintet for Cygnus) and Sea Gardens, featuring Sharon Harms, soprano and Joan Forsyth, piano
Kitty Brazelton: El Beso (Grimké)
Richard Festinger: Hidden Spring
Carman Moore: A Village Triptych for guitars, mandolins and soprano (setttings of poems by Gamel Woolsey, Djuna Barnes and Lennox Raphael)

My pop song

From a rehearsal in fall 2022. The two on the left—Sharon Harms, soprano, and Bill Anderson, guitar, play this 2023 version with members of Cygnus. Weld Grimké’s poem “El Beso” is a Lesbian love song, unrequited.

vs.

Marty’s

Deep faith in the transcendent purity of shared thought. The ideal can prevail. I’m now listening to a long-beloved dream from the ramparts of Noah’s ark and the ark is sinking with the weight of what has happened since then.

Martin Boykan, 1931-2021

Two Chamber Pieces on Group Concerts this week!

I am honored to be a part of the Village Trip festival, Sept. 6-24, 2023: https://www.thevillagetrip.com/program/

I get to be in it twice!

1.

First is a song. To be sung Sunday by Soprano Sharon Harms with pianist Joan Forsyth. I’ve set a poem called The Possible by poet Mascha Kaléko, written in German 50 years ago in the West Village. See below.

September 17 @ 3 - 4:30 pm EDT

St John’s in the Village

218 W 11th St, New York, NY, United States

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Born in Chrzanów, Poland, in 1907, Mascha Kaléko grew up in Berlin’s slum district inhabited primarily by “ostjüdisch” (Eastern European Jewish) immigrants. In the 1920s, Kaléko became one of the Berlin literary avant-garde who gathered at the Romanisch Café. Her first two poems, which she published in 1929 in Querschnitt, and the numerous poems that followed over the years made Kaléko a Berlin celebrity. Mascha Kaléko’s witty verses celebrate and satirize urban life in pre-war Germany; they deal with the working world of little people in the big city, social injustice, and the modest happiness of the life of employees, saleswomen, and petty clerks. After Kaléko’s poems were banned by the Nazis, they were hand-copied and circulated secretly. Kaléko died in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1975.

—Ludger Heid, Jewish Women’s Archive: Sharing Stories Inspiring Change

2.

I’m part of a concert called

Uncommon Women

Woohoo! And we’re celebrating my friend Joan Tower.

September 20 @ 7:30 - 9:00 pm

Greenwich House Music School

46 Barrow Street, New York, NY, United States

My piece is 3 1/2 minutes long. Kathleen Supové will play it and I’ve included an excerpt of Kathy playing at Roulette in 1994. It’s called Liszt in the Murk.

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

I wrote Liszt in the Murk in 1986 when I was first admitted to the Masters program in Music Composition at Columbia. I was one of 5 or 6. I was the only woman. I was the only rock musician. Everyone else was properly atonal. And I knew that while I loved writing serialist music, it was too easy. It was like crossword puzzles. I wasn’t dealing. I enjoyed other people’s music generated that way, but I knew I had to get more honest about who I was. Liszt in the Murk was the beginning of writing from the heart, whatever came out. And it had a tonic—to my horror. But it never sounds old to me. It’s me now.

Thank you, Kathy, for playing it for me again.

Sunday 4/23/23 Brattleboro Camerata sings Brazelton...

…Palestrina, Tallis, Victoria, Esmail, Morley and more!

What company I keep!

Director Jonathan Harvey and this warm-voiced concert choir commissioned me last summer to set—

The Want of You

A hint of gold where the moon will be; 

Through the flocking clouds just a star or two; 

Leaf sounds, soft and wet and hushed, 

And oh! the crying want of you. 

—Angelina Weld Grimke (1880-1958), Negro Poets and their Poems, 1923

Stream WFMU: Music For a Free World with special guest Kitty Brazelton

Show aired on 7/8, but you can still listen & post comments HERE.

Kitty Brazelton joins prolific baritone saxophonist and downtown scene stalwart Dave Sewelson Saturday 7/8 on his show Music For a Free World, as part of WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio program.

Kitty and Dave are both veterans of the downtown NYC improvising scene; tune in as they share a freeform selection of music, possibly including a preview of a new piece, plus some live-over-the-internet improvisation, as time (and connection speed) allows!

Dave Sewelson:
"Charles Mingus said jazz was a word invented to separate musicians from their money. Music for a Free World brings us together, drawing listeners to the healing power of smooth free jazz. Each week, surprise guests bring their own sides to spin and their instruments of choice to spontaneously jam."

Read more on Dave's site: Sewelsonics

Essential Prayers Winter 2019-2020 Crowdfunding Campaign: 10 House Concerts for $10k

Thank you to everyone who’s helped us to launch Essential Prayers Project this fall.

We played 5 concerts. 3 were "house concerts"--in the homes of friends. Wow. This is the the way to go!

We want to continue to offer small, personal concerts. Where everyone, audience members as well as musicians, gets “heard”.

We’ve received invitations from 14 potential hosts in the northeast, south and west. We hope to accept 10 of these next spring with your help.

Concerts have been costing me [Kitty] about $1000—on average—to underwrite. Most of my cost is paying my musicians. Who sing for a living.

Other costs come and go. When we traveled to Vermont, our host Sandra baked all day the day before. I did not need to provide food (food being so important for listening!) just travel. So it balanced out.

Passing the hat offset a lot. Everyone was generous.

I'm not sure how the 10 concerts we're planning for spring will work. We're trying to book them in clusters, geographically and time-wise. And asking for help with accommodations & meals...

Thank you. Those of you who came to hear us helped me realize that the whole point--everything we're singing about--is that I can’t do it alone.

I am hoping you will help me to continue.

In gratitude & hope,
Kitty

And… please click on the following buttons for:

Individual artist career development
is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas,
a non-­profit arts service organization.
Contributions for the charitable purposes of
individual artist career development
must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only
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Essential Prayers Project plays its first house concert in N. Bennington

ONE WEEK AGO, on a beautiful clear Saturday morning in Vermont, the Essential Prayers Project realized its dream to debut playing house concerts.

We want to play for smaller audiences. We want to see everyone’s faces and talk afterwards like we did something together. The old 4th wall of music, where everyone sits quietly and listens then leaves, is outmoded. There is an imbalance of perceived roles and their importance. To attend a live concert is a magnificently generous thing to do. To listen and respond from within, to show on your face that response, to breathe in sync with others in the room (because that is what happens)—these actions become huge in the face of our increasingly screen-based lives. User-friendly means that a machine has been programmed to resemble the depth and detail of human response—but still imperfectly. Nothing beats the grace and finesse of actual human interaction!

And this audience delivered. They listened so intently we could hear them listening. They carried us when we got nervous and made mistakes with the newness. Some people even cried. Wow. We felt it all. Exhilarating.

This is a passage from Kitty Brazelton’s re-setting of a 15th c. plainchant hymn “Puer natus in Bethlehem: Alleluia” celebrating the birth of the christ child. "Hic jacet in praesepio" means "lying in a manger". Joyful and rowdy. Christian version of the festival of light. Winter is coming. Fight the dark. Sing out against depression.

We were well partnered in this desire for connection: The Magsamens welcomed our music into their beautiful home on a hilltop in North Bennington overlooking the western flank of the Green Mountains. The home was originally a humble farmhouse dating back several Vermont centuries.

The Music Room where we sang, had its own history. The room itself had once been part of the mansion a few doors across on another magnificent wooded hilltop. That mansion belonged to the Park-McCullough family: built by John McCullough who moved to North Bennington in 1873 after marrying Eliza Hall Park, daughter of Panama Railway president Trenor Park. His father-in-law appointed McCullough vice-president of the distant railway. Through the 1880s McCullough rose to run not only Panama, Chicago, Erie Railroads but Bennington & Rutland Railway which built many of the neighborhoods of North Bennington. He become governor of Vermont from 1902 to 1904.

Esther McCullough and Stell Andersen read a music folio together

But his youngest daughter Esther Morgan Park McCullough fell in love with a woman, international concert pianist Cora Stell Andersen. Esther was a novelist but played the violin. They became lifelong partners. The Park-McCullough parents moved the music room (see video) above in one piece, adding it to the farmhouse, so that the couple could live in privacy.

The acoustics were amazing. The audience members were gorgeous. We broke fast on homemade quiche and sat and talked for almost twice the length of the concert we’d just given. Marvelous. Just what we’d dreamed of.

Sandra Magsamen’s flyer