RTP-area local music and culture

[mrf AT duke.edu (marc)]

pulsoptional presents "Note the Options, Opt the Notions: Music,
Memory, Resistance"
Saturday, January 17th at 8:00 PM
Nelson Music Room, East Duke Building, Duke University
Free admission

pulsoptional, Durham's band of composers, invites you to a special
evening with Boston-based pianist and composer John McDonald on
Saturday, January 17 at 8 PM in Duke's Nelson Music Room.  In
collaboration with pulsoptional, McDonald will present a
thought-provoking program – artistic meditations on mourning, dissent
and action – in music that spans several centuries.

A "fresh, inventive, urbane, and keen-witted young composer" (Boston
Globe) and "a splendid pianist" "with a born pianist's command of
colors, textures, dynamics" (Boston Globe), John McDonald has earned
international acclaim as a musician.  His compositions have been
widely and frequently performed in the US and abroad.  Recently,
McDonald served as Cultural Specialist in Mongolia.  In his performing
capacity, recent honors include a Duo Recitalists' Grant from the NEA,
an Artistic Ambassadorship to Asia, and an Artists' Residency at
M.I.T. with soprano Karol Bennett, as well as invitations to perform
his works at conferences in Amsterdam, Budapest, Havana, Montreal,
Shanghai, and St. Petersburg.  McDonald's recordings appear on the
Albany, Archetype, Boston, Bridge, Neuma, New Ariel, and New World
labels.  McDonald is Associate Professor of Music at Tufts University.

In addition to seldom-performed works by John Bull and Franz Liszt,
the January 17 concert includes two new works by McDonald (one a
collaborative composition with pulsoptional), an arrangement of
Charles Mingus's Fables of Faubus, and pieces by Durham composers
Anthony Kelley and Jennifer Fitzgerald.

This concert is co-sponsored by the John Hope Franklin Center for
Interdisciplinary & International Studies and pulsoptional, with
support from the Duke University Department of Music.

Full biographical information for pulsoptional and the concert program
follow.  For more information, please contact marc faris
(mrf AT duke.edu) or Caroline Mallonée (cjm7 AT duke.edu).

PROGRAM
Charles Mingus, Fables of Faubus (arr. Hershberger)
Franz Liszt, Funerailles
John Bull, Fantasia
John McDonald, Mooneshinge Obsequy
Jennifer Fitzgerald, Three Lines
Anthony Kelley, sfp
John McDonald/pulsoptional, Road to Soraci's Obsequy

pulsoptional bio
pulsoptional (formerly CSMG) is dedicated to innovative new music
programming.  Since its inception in the spring of 2000, the Durham,
NC new music ensemble and composer's collective has developed a
diverse, devoted audience and continues to attract listeners new to
contemporary music with its boundary- and genre-defying, high energy
concerts of contemporary composition.  pulsoptional creates and
performs new experimental works for its eclectic instrumentation,
commissions new music by emerging composers and maintains a repertoire
of experimental classics.  The ensemble has appeared in music
festivals, rock clubs, dance spaces and other non-traditional venues,
as well as prestigious concert halls throughout the Triangle area.