Voices Up! Concert, April 12th
Voices Up! New Music, New Poetry
The 2016 Voices Up! Concert, the seventh in Fordham University’s annual series of events combining music and poetry, will take place at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Tuesday, April 12th, 2016, at 7:30 PM. The venue is the 12th floor lounge of the Lowenstein Building, 113 W. 60th Street (NW corner, 60th St and Columbus Avenue). Admission is free and open to the public.
Voices Up! is devoted to new work by both poets and composers. It is unique in New
York City in its commitment to bringing today’s poetry and music together and to inviting and performing new vocal compositions. The series showcases premieres of newly composed settings of poems from the most recent prizewinning volumes in Fordham University Press’s Poets Out Loud Publication Prize series, together with other newly composed songs and song cycles. The poets are usually on hand to read their work; the audience first hears the poetry in the poet’s own voice and then hears how the composer has reimagined it musically. The concerts to date have featured work by internationally known composers including Victoria Bond, David Dzubay, Paul Moravec, and Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham. Performers have included the renowned tenor Rufus Müller and rising stars including sopranos Sharon Harms and Lucy Dhegrae, the violin-cello duo of Madalyn and Cicely Parnas, and the dynamic young ensembles Contemporaneous and TIGUE Percussion.
Lucy Dhegrae will return for the 2016 concert together with baritone Kelvin Chan and pianist and composer Joshua Groffmann. The program will include both solo songs and duets; settings of poems from the prizewinning volumes by Gregory Mahrer (A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent) and Nancy K. Pearson (The Whole by Contemplation of a Single Bone); a setting by Fordham’s Daniel Ott of two poems by the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gregory Pardlo; and music by Chester Biscardi, Joshua Groffman, Lawrence Kramer, Sky Macklay, Yangzhi Ma, and Aleksandra Vrebalov.
