Make Music New York, the annual daylong festival in New York City, has announced plans for its seventh season, with a complete schedule of events to be posted on May 15 at makemusicny.org. MMNY is a festival of free concerts in public spaces throughout the five boroughs of New York City held on June 21, the first day of summer, and open to professional and amateur musicians who want to participate. In a first for the festival, during the nine weeks before the festival six professional percussionists will make regular visits to Rikers Island, New York City’s main jail complex, to teach music theory and give private lessons to ten inmates. On June 21, students and teachers will perform a concert for family members and other inmates; after their release, selected students will be offered free additional weekly private lessons. Also planned this June 21 are performances of two works by Canadian composer and “acoustic ecology” specialist R. Murray Schafer: Music For Wilderness Lake, performed by Tilt Brass around the Central Park Lake, and the concert-length work Credo, sung by 144 choristers in rowboats in the same lake. This year’s Mass Appeal events will involve guitars and recorders, and there will also be a brass-band “bacchanalia” open to all brass bands performing elsewhere during MMNY. The eighteen-piece indie orchestral band Mother Falcon will join local and amateur performers to perform a Beck “song reader” based on the 2012 album by rocker Beck Hansen. Amateur and professional musicians are invited to take part in the festival by signing up at www.makemusicny.org; registration closes on April 29.
Posted April 22, 2013
