WHO WE ARE.
WHAT WE DO.
MISSION STATEMENT
thingNY is a 501c3 not-for-profit collective of composer-performers who create and perform theatrically charged experimental music, champion the work of avant-garde and contemporary classical composers, and collaborate across disciplines, media and genres.
thingNY is a 501c3 not-for-profit collective of composer-performers who create and perform theatrically charged experimental music, champion the work of avant-garde and contemporary classical composers, and collaborate across disciplines, media and genres.
ABOUT US
thingNY is a quirky collective of New York composer-performers who fuse electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song and installation. Founded in 2006 for an ad hoc festival in the historic Loew’s Jersey City Theater, thingNY performs experimental sound works created collaboratively by the core ensemble - Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Jeffrey Young, Gelsey Bell, Dave Ruder, and Andrew Livingston - and by adventurous composers such as Robert Ashley, Frederic Rzewski, John King, Pauline Oliveros, Miguel Frasconi, Vinko Globokar, John Cage, Julius Eastman, James Tenney, David Snow, and Andrea La Rose.
The musicians of thingNY are a prolific bunch. They’ve collaboratively created three concert-length operas: their latest, This Takes Place Close By, "Blackly Amusing, Sonically Rich" (NY Music Daily) explores the reactions of isolated individuals in the wake of a devastating storm. Premiering September 2015 at The Knockdown Down Center, a 50,000 square-foot space in Maspeth, Queens, the opera toured to Philadelphia, Boston, New Haven, and Edmonton and Calgary (Canada) during its production. ADDDDDDDDD, premiered in 2009 and released on CD in 2010 with a comic-book libretto, and Time: A Complete Explanation in Three Parts, a 2011 performance collaboration with Panoply Performance Laboratory accompanied by a 250-page hardcover book. Later in 2011 thingNY created In House, a sound installation with music created for each of the rooms commonly found in a home, to be played simultaneously. From 2009-2012, thingNY premiered hundreds of works over the course of three marathon performances called SPAM, in which the ensemble sent out a mass call for scores by email and performed every submitted piece. Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Public Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment: an Opera by Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young, a 30-minute, politically-charged, theatrical work, was created and performed by the thingNY members in the title. It premiered in 7 West Coast performances in 2011, and toured to 17 cities in 17 days in June 2013 and to Mexico, Southern California and Mesa Arizona's Oh my Ears Marathon in January 2016. thingNY joined indie superstar, Helado Negro, in the collaborative string-conducted project, Brainfinger, presented by the 2015 Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Hall. thingNY has premiered many compact, high-energy chamber works by individual group members, including Paul Pinto's wildly verbose minis series and Erin Rogers' whimsical Trajectories, which will be released on Gold Bolus Recordings in 2016.
thingNY is a driving force in the New York music community, working to bolster and support new music and experimental performance, curating the New Music Showdown (2013-2014) and the Immediacies Series (2012-2014), putting a swath of performers from NYC and beyond in conversation with one another and allowing them to perform anti-concert-hall, or difficult-to-program works. thingNY has also performed important contemporary works such as Frederic Rzewski's Attica (1971), the New York premiere of Vinko Globokar's rarely staged opera Un Jour Comme Un Autre (1975), and played a large role in Varispeed’s acclaimed site-specific adaptation of Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives (1983).
thingNY has produced some of their most interesting performances in underutilized spaces. In 2014, with the teenage new music ensemble Face the Music, the ensemble created a spatial work on the walkway surrounding the Queens Museum's 9335 square foot Panorama of New York City. Their mobile sound installation In House housed itself, among other places, in an abandoned Lower East Side apartment and an 18th century house museum. And, in an industrious flurry, the group refitted an old taxi garage for a three-day festival of experimental opera in Long Island City in 2012.
thingNY has received multiple grants from the Aaron Copland Fund, the New York Department of Cultural Affairs, Network of Ensemble Theaters, and the Queens Council on the Arts, and residencies at Incubator Arts Project, Standard Toykraft, Orange Theatre, and the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center. In 2013, the ensemble helped launch Spaceworks LIC, with an intimate performance for Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer through the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City. thingNY is featured on Season 3 of the Made HERE documentary series, devoted to the lives of performing artists based in New York City.
thingNY is a quirky collective of New York composer-performers who fuse electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song and installation. Founded in 2006 for an ad hoc festival in the historic Loew’s Jersey City Theater, thingNY performs experimental sound works created collaboratively by the core ensemble - Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Jeffrey Young, Gelsey Bell, Dave Ruder, and Andrew Livingston - and by adventurous composers such as Robert Ashley, Frederic Rzewski, John King, Pauline Oliveros, Miguel Frasconi, Vinko Globokar, John Cage, Julius Eastman, James Tenney, David Snow, and Andrea La Rose.
The musicians of thingNY are a prolific bunch. They’ve collaboratively created three concert-length operas: their latest, This Takes Place Close By, "Blackly Amusing, Sonically Rich" (NY Music Daily) explores the reactions of isolated individuals in the wake of a devastating storm. Premiering September 2015 at The Knockdown Down Center, a 50,000 square-foot space in Maspeth, Queens, the opera toured to Philadelphia, Boston, New Haven, and Edmonton and Calgary (Canada) during its production. ADDDDDDDDD, premiered in 2009 and released on CD in 2010 with a comic-book libretto, and Time: A Complete Explanation in Three Parts, a 2011 performance collaboration with Panoply Performance Laboratory accompanied by a 250-page hardcover book. Later in 2011 thingNY created In House, a sound installation with music created for each of the rooms commonly found in a home, to be played simultaneously. From 2009-2012, thingNY premiered hundreds of works over the course of three marathon performances called SPAM, in which the ensemble sent out a mass call for scores by email and performed every submitted piece. Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Public Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment: an Opera by Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young, a 30-minute, politically-charged, theatrical work, was created and performed by the thingNY members in the title. It premiered in 7 West Coast performances in 2011, and toured to 17 cities in 17 days in June 2013 and to Mexico, Southern California and Mesa Arizona's Oh my Ears Marathon in January 2016. thingNY joined indie superstar, Helado Negro, in the collaborative string-conducted project, Brainfinger, presented by the 2015 Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Hall. thingNY has premiered many compact, high-energy chamber works by individual group members, including Paul Pinto's wildly verbose minis series and Erin Rogers' whimsical Trajectories, which will be released on Gold Bolus Recordings in 2016.
thingNY is a driving force in the New York music community, working to bolster and support new music and experimental performance, curating the New Music Showdown (2013-2014) and the Immediacies Series (2012-2014), putting a swath of performers from NYC and beyond in conversation with one another and allowing them to perform anti-concert-hall, or difficult-to-program works. thingNY has also performed important contemporary works such as Frederic Rzewski's Attica (1971), the New York premiere of Vinko Globokar's rarely staged opera Un Jour Comme Un Autre (1975), and played a large role in Varispeed’s acclaimed site-specific adaptation of Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives (1983).
thingNY has produced some of their most interesting performances in underutilized spaces. In 2014, with the teenage new music ensemble Face the Music, the ensemble created a spatial work on the walkway surrounding the Queens Museum's 9335 square foot Panorama of New York City. Their mobile sound installation In House housed itself, among other places, in an abandoned Lower East Side apartment and an 18th century house museum. And, in an industrious flurry, the group refitted an old taxi garage for a three-day festival of experimental opera in Long Island City in 2012.
thingNY has received multiple grants from the Aaron Copland Fund, the New York Department of Cultural Affairs, Network of Ensemble Theaters, and the Queens Council on the Arts, and residencies at Incubator Arts Project, Standard Toykraft, Orange Theatre, and the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center. In 2013, the ensemble helped launch Spaceworks LIC, with an intimate performance for Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer through the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City. thingNY is featured on Season 3 of the Made HERE documentary series, devoted to the lives of performing artists based in New York City.
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Jeffrey Young is a composer, violinist, and electronic musician from Brooklyn, NY who specializes in experimental, rock, and classical music. Recent performance highlights include tours in Europe and the US as a solo performer and with The World/Inferno Friendship Society, US tours with trio Valerie Kuehne and the Wasps Nests and with composer/performer Paul Pinto, and three shows in Switzerland playing music he composed for Swiss-based theater ensemble stringsaTTached. He has played on national TV shows The Late Show with David Letterman and The Rachael Ray Show, and at the Lucerne Festival Academy, Bang on a Can, National Repertory Orchestra, and Aspen Festivals. [jeffrey-young.com]
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Dave Ruder is an NYC vocalist, clarinetist, guitarist, electronicist, composer, songwriter, writer/librettist, interdisciplinary collaborator, etc. Dave is a key member of the band Why Lie?, the ensembles Varispeed and thingNY, and the storytelling project Dave & Woody’s Chicken Slaughtering LLC. He has regularly worked with Robert Ashley, Anthony Braxton, Kimberly Bartosik, Aaron Siegel, Andrew Lafkas (Eidolon), Abigail Levine, Joanna Kotze, and Panoply Performance Laboratory. Since 2013, Dave has been the driving force behind Gold Bolus Recordings. As a composer, Dave wrote The Gentleman Rests, a meditation on the certification of the 2000 presidential election, with a commission from the Jerome Foundation and Roulette in 2014. Dave holds degrees from Wesleyan University and Brooklyn College. [daveruder.com]
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Erin Rogers is a Canadian saxophonist and composer based in New York City. Her works have been performed by the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, Anubis Quartet, Lost Dog Ensemble, IKTUS Percussion, Project Fusion, and Madrid’s Tribuna Sax-Ensemble. She has played with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Copland House, mise-en, and PRISM, and is a founding member of the New Thread Saxophone Quartet and Hypercube (formerly IKTUS Combo). In 2013, Erin was awarded a Jerome Fund Commission from the American Composers Forum for Mother Earth, a work for flute, sax quartet and electronics, that premiered at Carnegie Hall. Her work Trajectories was featured at the 2015 Ecstatic Music Festival. [erinmrogers.com]
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Paul Pinto is a composer, writer and performer. He makes weird noises sometimes. Sometimes with his experimental music groups thingNY and Varispeed. Other times just in his living room. Sometimes he writes them on paper and makes other people make the weird noises for him. His album with minis/Trajectories is out now, and he's got another one, Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots... [etc etc], on its way. He sang and danced on Broadway in The Great Comet of 1812, and last year, he premiered his opera Thomas Paine in Violence at the HERE Art Center to rave reviews. [pfpinto.com]
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Andrew Livingston is a bassist, cellist and composer/sound artist in Brooklyn. He studied with a bunch of awesome composers and musicians that are widely unknown and a couple that may be (known.) He has a masters in music theory and composition from CUNY. Andrew plays in rock bands and with a bunch of singer songwriters to win bread. He composes music and does sound design for theatre stuff sometimes and frequently collaborates with puppeteer, and performer Daniel Fay in their multimedia theatre group Unitards.[myspace.com/andrewhlivingston]
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Gelsey Bell is a singer, songwriter, and scholar. She is a core member of thingNY, Varispeed, and the Chutneys. She is the 2018 EtM Ridgewood Bushwick Composer-in-Residence. She received a 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award and was an artist-in-residence at Roulette in 2015/16. She has worked with numerous other artists including Robert Ashley, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, Dave Malloy, Kate Soper, Erik Ruin, Rick Burkhardt, John King, Kimberly Bartosik, Yasuko Yokoshi, Miguel Frasconi, Cleek Schrey, and Gregory Whitehead. She has a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU. [gelseybell.com]
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