Workers Union:
Music of Louis Andriessen and Nik Bärtsch
New! Watch video of both pieces in the concert, below!
Concert: Saturday, March 20, 5:00 p.m. EDT
Click here to download a PDF of the concert program
The video of Workers Union from Saturday's concert
The video of Modul 22 from Saturday's concert
The video of Friday's Artist Conversation
We are presenting this concert free for everyone. This is a time to come together around a beautiful concert event, and to keep things simple. We do encourage you to make a donation to New Music New College here, to help us to keep our program vital. (Our usual concert ticket price is $15.)
Detail from the score of Worker's Union
The music of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen is visceral, intense, challenging, and kinetic. This concert features two of Andriessen’s most important and influential works, performed by New College of Florida students and professional musicians from the Sarasota Community. These pieces, composed one year apart, are raucous breakthroughs that remain startling over four decades later.
Worker’s Union, from 1975, calls for “any loud-sounding group of instruments” to perform a continuous and propulsive single line of music.
In 1990, Andriessen wrote, “Worker’s Union was originally written for the orchestra De Volharding (Perseverance), in which I myself figured as a pianist at that time. This piece is a combination of individual freedom and severe discipline: its rhythm is exactly fixed; the pitch, on the other hand, is indicated only approximately, on a single-lined stave. It is difficult to play in an ensemble and to remain in step, sort of thing like organising and carrying on political action.”
For more information, we recommend this great listener's guide on Worker's Union from the London Sinfonietta.
All NMNC venues are ramp accessible.
Support for this season was provided by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
