NOTE THAT THE TICKET LINK ABOVE IS ONLY FOR THE LIVE STREAM OF THE EVENT, NOT THE ACTUAL CONCERT
At the performers' request, this concert is now Stream Only.
Wooden Cities celebrates the opening of its 10th anniversary season with the music of Anthony Braxton, a prolific and essential composer of the past several decades. Much of the composer's work focuses on empathy, community-building, and accessibility. The ensemble will perform collections of Braxton's music ranging from improvisation techniques established in what he terms "language music", pulsed structures of Ghost Trance Music, and through-composed pieces spanning over five decades.
Wooden Cities is a collective of performers and composers seeking to increase the performance and awareness of contemporary music in the Western New York area through unique concerts and educational presentations. Formed by director Brendan Fitzgerald in 2011 as a structured improv orchestra, the ensemble has since garnered a reputation for their dynamic performances of both improvised and notated works of new and experimental music from a wide variety of composers. In 2019, Wooden Cities released its first album, WORK, which features works by Cornelius Cardew, Julius Eastman, and a premiere recording of Frederic Rzewski's The Price of Oil. Fall 2020 saw the release of an eponymous documentary about the album, made by the Buffalo Documentary Project.
Central to Wooden Cities' mission is welcoming audiences to new musical experiences and ways of listening. This guides concert programming as well as a devotion to working with young musicians in various modes of creating, performing, and thinking about music. Wooden Cities has led workshops on topics such as improvisation, non-standard notation, game pieces, and composition with the Youth Orchestra of Bucks County, Greece Olympia High School, WNY Book Arts Center, the UB Speech-Language and Hearing Clinic, and at Starlight Studio & Art Gallery, the latter funded by a Decentralization (DEC) Grant awarded by Arts Services, Inc. and the New York State Council on the Arts.
The ensemble has held residencies at Buffalo State College (2017) and Jamestown Community College (2019), both of which featured multiple student workshops on the performance of electroacoustic music. They have led student composer workshops at the University of Buffalo (2012-13) and Butler University (2014). In 2014, Wooden Cities partnered with the University at Buffalo Music Library to present reconstructed works of Lejaren Hiller, Allen Sapp, and other Buffalo-related composers as part of the Inaugural Muriel Wolf and Albert Steger Endowment Concert.
From its first concert (a performance of John Zorn's game piece Cobra) through the present, the ensemble has featured works by composers who integrate performance practices from classical, jazz, improvised, and pop music traditions. This August, Wooden Cities will be celebrating its 10th year as an ensemble. The anniversary season will see the release of PLAY, their second in the WORK/PLAY/REST trio of albums, which features realizations of graphic scores and sound poetry works. The ensemble is looking forward to another decade of experimental and inclusive music-making.
