I'll play accordion in Timo Andres' song cycle "Work Songs", featuring Becca Stevens, Gabe Kahane, and Ted Hearne. The concert will also feature original music and songs from each member of the ensemble, all at the origami wonderland that is National Sawdust.
Timo sez:
“Inspired by old American parlor songs, I’ve written a set of “Work Songs” on the general subject of artists writing about their work. The best song cycles, I think, take on the same subject at different angles, and chip away at it until something is revealed. Artists’ working habits have always fascinated me—Matisse sculpting in bed, Charles Ives’s Bach-ian eye-opener—not so much for the insight they provide into the actual work, but more as an idealized template for how an artist should exist in the world."
The text of the piece is drawn from a range of sources: Woody Guthrie’s journals, a Melville poem, and contemporary American poets Mark Levine, Andrea Cohen, and Lorine Niedecker.