Guest Artist Recital: Hinge Ensemble

Name: Guest Artist Recital: Hinge Ensemble
Start: 2021-10-22T20:00:00-04:00
End: 2021-10-22

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Friday / October 22, 2021 / 8:00 p.m. (EDT)

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Hinge ensemble presents A Scheme for Brightness, a concert looking for optimism and hope in dark times. Beginning in a place of darkness and expanding out to the stars, this genre-bending program centers around a brand new realization of Julius Eastman’s transcendental Gay Guerrilla and features pieces written for the quartet by Marti Epstein, Nicole Murphy, and Dan VanHassel.

DAN VANHASSEL: Sea Change (2020)*
MARTI EPSTEIN: Seven Sisters, Radiant Sisters (2020)*
NICOLE MURPHY: I-III from Stolen (2019)*
JULIUS EASTMAN (arr. Hinge): Gay Guerrilla (1979)^

*Written for Hinge

^Due to copyright permissions, the performance of Gay Guerilla will not be broadcast online.

The public is invited to watch the livestream. The in-person performance in Studio 401 is only open to the Berklee community (students, faculty, staff) and invited guests.

Program Information

Program Note

“A Scheme for Brightness” takes its name from a poem by Richard James Allen
that also served as the inspiration behind Nicole Murphy’s Stolen. The poem is
about the power of art and self-expression to bring meaning and purpose to a
chaotic and unfeeling world. Needless to say, this poem resonated with me at
this particularly unsettled and uncertain time.

The program begins with my piece Sea Change that depicts a world falling
apart; it starts in a place of calm harmonious repose that is very slowly
swallowed up by raucous noise before the plug is finally pulled at the end. The
pieces that follow offer potential paths back out of the darkness to the light.
Marti Epstein’s gorgeous, meditative Seven Sisters, Radiant Sisters takes its
inspiration from the beauty and immensity of constellations shining in the night
sky. Nicole Murphy’s Stolen breaks this repose with manic energy and
excitement. Finally, we close with Julius Eastman’s powerful and epic Gay
Guerrilla, which portrays nothing less than the universal human struggle to fight
for a better, more just, world. If this utopia is not possible to achieve in physical
reality, then perhaps it can occur, at least for a short time, in the experience of
art and music.

—Dan VanHassel, artistic director