Great Hymn of Thanksgiving

Last updated

Great Hymn of Thanksgiving is a 2003 performance piece, scored for three speaking percussionists, composed by playwright and composer Rick Burkhardt. It has been performed by The Nonsense Company, Ensemble Chronophonie, line upon line, thingNY, and several other contemporary music ensembles.

Contents

The Nonsense Company's performance of the piece is often paired with Conversation Storm , a short play written by Burkhardt.

Summary

According to the composer's program note, Great Hymn of Thanksgiving takes place at a dinner table, where the sounds of conversation have been replaced by fragments of news reports from Iraq, scraps from the Army prayer manual, invented Arab folk tales, and a recurring State of Emergency pointing everywhere and leading nowhere. The sounds of the table itself struggle to bring this “conversation” into a confrontation with material reality.

The piece is a trio between the functions of music, noise, and semantic meaning, wherein each function can mingle with the others, lose itself in reveries (under fields of motive force that assert themselves with varying degrees of insistence), or, when necessary, take a solo.

Film

In 2007, filmmaker H.P. Mendoza was working for the San Francisco Fringe Festival and was able to see a performance of The Nonsense Company's Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm and was determined to meet the troupe. In 2008, Mendoza gave his voice to Great Hymn playwright Rick Burkhardt for his award-winning composition "Calf", performed by the ensemble Ascolta and decided to ask Burkhardt if he would be interested in making a film version of Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm , called "a delicious two-course evening" [1] by Time Out New York.

The film is slated for release in 2015.

Cast (three speaking percussionists)

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeremy Gable</span> British-born American playwright and game designer

Jeremy Joseph Gable is a British-born American playwright and game designer living in Philadelphia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Lang (composer)</span> American composer

David Lang is an American composer living in New York City. Co-founder of the musical collective Bang on a Can, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion, which went on to win a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices. Lang was nominated for an Academy Award for "Simple Song #3" from the film Youth.

The New York International Fringe Festival, or FringeNYC, was a fringe theater festival and one of the largest multi-arts events in North America. It took place over the course of a few weeks in October, spread on more than 20 stages across several neighborhoods in downtown Manhattan, notably the Lower East Side, the East Village, and Greenwich Village. Most of the venues were centered on the FringeHUB. Yearly attendance topped 75,000 people.

Matthew Earnest is an American theater director. He has also written plays, as well as adapted plays from novels, non-fiction books, short stories, and essays, and he has translated works in other languages for his direction.

Gabriela Lena Frank is an American pianist and composer of contemporary classical music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Eaton (composer)</span> American composer and conductor

David Eaton is an American composer and conductor who has been the music director of the New York City Symphony since 1985. He has also been an active composer and arranger, with 100 original compositions and over 900 arrangements and original songs to his credit. He has appeared as a guest conductor with orchestras in Asia, Canada, Israel, Europe, Central and South America, Russia, Ukraine and the United States. His compositions and arrangements have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the United Nations and by orchestras in the United States, Asia, Israel, South America and Europe. He also served at the conductor of the historic Goldman Band from 1998 to 2000 conducting the ensemble in concerts throughout the New York metropolitan area including performances at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In 2022 he self-published his first book, What Music Tells Me: Beauty, Truth and Goodness and Our Cultural Inheritance.

The FRIGID New York Fringe Festival or FrigidFest is an open and uncensored fringe theatre festival founded in March 2007 jointly by New York's Horse Trade Theater Group and San Francisco’s EXIT Theatre. The first year 29 theatre companies performed for more than 2,000 people. The artists are paid 100% of their box office.

American Standard is an early ensemble work by noted American composer John Adams. The work is named for American Standard Brand appliances although Adams says that the title also reflects that the constituent movements are "indigenous musical forms" of the United States.

Rabbit Hole Ensemble is a Brooklyn, New York, United States based, not-for-profit, Off-off Broadway theatre company. Under the artistic direction of Edward Elefterion, the ensemble has produced seven original works throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Gallagher</span> American writer

Mary Gallagher is an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, actress, director and teacher. For six years, she was artistic director of Gypsy, a theatre company in the Hudson Valley, New York, which collaborated with many artists to create site-specific mask-and-puppet music-theatre with texts and lyrics by Gallagher. These pieces included Premanjali and the 7 Geese Brothers, Ama and The Scottish Play. In 1996-97, she directed the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, and she taught playwriting and screenwriting at New York University/Tisch School of the Arts from 2001 to 2010. She is a member of Actors & Writers, a theater company in the Hudson Valley, and the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City. She is an alumna of New Dramatists, where she developed many of her plays and created and moderated the series, "You Can Make a Life: Conversations with Playwrights" from 1994 to 2001.

Conversation Storm is a 2006 play written by playwright and composer Rick Burkhardt and originally performed by The Nonsense Company.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mátti Kovler</span> Musical artist

Mátti Kovler is a Russian-born Israeli-American composer and creator of new music theatre. Called by Steve Smith of The New York Times “a potentially estimable operatic composer in the making,” his music has been compared to Leonard Bernstein's.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">No.11 Productions</span> American non-profit theater company

No. 11 Productions is a non-profit 501(c)(3) theatre company based in New York City. The company's productions have been reviewed by The Washington Post, NYTheatre.com, The Happiest Medium, Broadwayworld.com, and DCTheatreScene.com. No.11 Productions has produced works at the New York International Fringe Festival, FRIGID New York, Kentucky Repertory Theatre, Fringe Wilmington, The Bushwick Starr, @Seaport, Capital Fringe Festival, 14th Street Theatre, Van Cortlandt Park, and SaratogaArtsFest.

Annie-B Parson is an American choreographer, dancer, and director based in Brooklyn, New York. Parson is notable for her work in dance/theater, post-modern dance, and art pop music. Parson is the artistic director of Brooklyn's Big Dance Theater, which she founded with Molly Hickok and her husband, Paul Lazar. She is also well known for her collaborations with Mikhail Baryshnikov, David Byrne, David Bowie, St. Vincent, Laurie Anderson, Jonathan Demme, Ivo van Hove, Sarah Ruhl, Lucas Hnath, Wendy Whelan, David Lang, Esperanza Spalding, Mark Dion, Salt ‘n Pepa, Nico Muhly, and the Martha Graham Dance Co.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave Malloy</span> American composer and actor

Dave Malloy is an American composer, playwright, lyricist, and actor. He has written several theatrical works, often based on classic works of literature. They include Moby-Dick, an adaptation of Herman Melville's classic novel; Octet, a chamber choir musical about internet addiction; Preludes, a musical fantasia set in the mind of romantic composer Sergei Rachmaninoff; Ghost Quartet, a song cycle about love, death, and whiskey; and the Tony Award winning Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera based on War and Peace.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Derek Ahonen</span> American dramatist

Derek Ahonen is an American playwright, director, producer, and filmmaker. He is the founder of The Amoralists Theatre Company in NYC. Ahonen is most known for his plays The Pied Pipers of The Lower East Side, Happy In The Poorhouse, The Bad And The Better, and The Qualification of Douglas Evans which have had numerous runs in New York and have been translated, adapted, and performed across three different continents. His plays are published by Indie Theatre Now and Playscripts Inc.

<i>Yeast Nation</i> 2007 musical by Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis

Yeast Nation (The Triumph of Life) is a musical that premiered in 2007, with music by Mark Hollmann, lyrics by Hollmann and Greg Kotis, and book by Kotis. It serves as the first part of a musical trilogy, with the middle installment being Hollmann and Kotis' previous Tony Award-winning musical Urinetown and the final installment being Welcome to Space.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katie Cappiello</span> American dramatist

Katherine "Katie" Cappiello is an American playwright, director, feminist, teacher, activist and public speaker best known for her plays Slut and Now That We're Men. Gloria Steinem called Slut "truthful, raw and immediate!" and David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker called it "vital, moving, and absolutely necessary". Cappiello is the creator, writer and executive producer of Grand Army.

Arlene Hutton is an American playwright, theatre artist and teacher. She is best known for a trio of plays, set during and after the Second World War, known as The Nibroc Trilogy. The initial play of that trilogy, Last Train to Nibroc, was the first play to transfer from FringeNYC to Off-Broadway. Other works for which she is known include a one-act dramatic work about the aftermath of a sexual assault, I Dream Before I Take the Stand; a one-act musical drama set among the members of a Shaker community in the 19th century, As It Is in Heaven; and a Holocaust-themed work, Letters to Sala, based on actual documents. She has also created plays for young audiences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rick Baitz</span> American composer

Richard Keith Baitz is an American composer, born in 1954. His work incorporates elements of classical, jazz, electronic and world music, and has been extensively utilized for film, television, theatre, dance and the concert stage. He has also served on the faculties of The Juilliard School, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Columbia College Chicago, and is founding director of BMI’s "Composing for the Screen" workshop in New York City.

References

  1. "Time Out New York | New York Events and Things to do All Year". 29 March 2024.