Ne(x)tworks plays Eastman @ Merkin (Ecstatic Music Festival)

Reprising its well-known realization of Julius Eastman's Stay On It, Ne(x)tworks joins a stellar line-up of today's most talked about New Music groups to help kick off the season-long series Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall.

Joan La Barbara - voice
Shelley Burgon - harp, perc.
Cornelius Dufallo - violin
Miguel Frasconi - synthesizer
Steve Gosling - piano
Ariana Kim - violin
Christopher McIntyre - trombone

Guests:
Sara Schoenbeck - bassoon
Danny Tunick - percussion

NY Times Review

"Still, it seemed fitting somehow that the first artists featured during the marathon were outliers. Ne(x)tworks, a new-music collaborative with ties to the New York School of experimentalist composers of the 1950s, performed “Stay on It,” a 1973 work by Julius Eastman, a New York composer who died in 1990. Restored to circulation via a 2005 anthology on the New World label, Mr. Eastman’s once marginalized music has started to find an appreciative new audience.

Here “Stay on It” sounded like a prescient precursor to a sound that has flourished among New Amsterdam-associated composers like Mr. Greenstein and Nico Muhly. Initially bright, affirmative and unanimous in its Minimalist pulsations, the piece grew unruly, with individual musicians breaking away from the dominant ensemble theme for passages of free expression.

As those players rejoined, the sound became increasingly heterodox: distinct voices not fused seamlessly, as in a classical ensemble, but loosely united in joyous common cause. It would be hard to find a more potent metaphor to represent this festival’s intent to celebrate cross-pollination and collaboration." - S. Smith