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thingNY
Passover

album out
​OCT 28


Performed by thingNY:
Jeffrey Young 
Dave Ruder 
Erin Rogers 
Paul Pinto 
Andrew Livingston 
Gelsey Bell 

Recording engineered and edited by Zach Herchen
Mastered by Alan Douches
Produced by thingNY and Rick Burkhardt
Album art by Jason Tseng
Text layout by Jason Tseng and Paul Pinto

WATCH  PARTY
​NOV 4

thingNY & Rick Burkhardt - Passover
Innova Recordings #086
released October 28th, 2022 on CD and digital

Passover is a new album documenting ensemble thingNY’s performance of composer-writer Rick Burkhardt’s piece of the same name, in which a sextet of speaking instrumentalists, seated around a dinner table with a double bass lying on it, take turns relating stories of escape.

The album marks the first time in a decade that a recording of Burkhardt’s remarkable compositions have been released, and the first time ever that one of his extended compositions has been released on an album. Burkhardt is an Obie award winner known for his intricate chamber pieces like Great Hymn of Thanksgiving and musically centered theatrical works like Three Pianos. His work fuses explorations of extended instrumental technique as in Helmut Lachenmann, use of compositional linguistics influenced by Kenneth Gaburo, an ear for American speech akin to Robert Ashley, and an experimental approach to narrative inspired by his favorite innovative playwrights, Adrienne Kennedy, David Greenspan, and Wallace Shawn.

Though thingNY are best known for creating their own musically focused multi-media pieces, Passover marks the first time the group commissioned another artist to create an evening-length piece for them to perform. Given Burkhardt’s precision with language, instrumental technique, and gesture, it has been a natural and fruitful fit. thingNY premiered the piece in 2018 and performed it across the Northeastern US, recording it in 2019.

The flow of Passover is loosely based on a Passover seder, in which celebrants recount and embody the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. Each of the five movements in the piece recalls such an exodus, from an emotionally difficult conversation in Movement 1 to the life-threatening traffic stop in Movement 5. The piece nods to Passover traditions like that of four children asking questions of the adults - in Movement 3, Jeffrey Young’s narrative about navigating an ethically dubious job is constantly interrupted by tangential inquiries from the rest of the group.
thingNY. Press Photo by Rueben Radding.
(L-R) Dave Ruder, Andrew Livingston, Paul Pinto, Gelsey Bell, Jeffrey Young, Erin Rogers. Photo by Rueben Radding.
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Passover. Score example.
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Rick Burkhardt. Photo: New Music USA.
About the artists:

Rick Burkhardt is an Obie-award-winning composer, playwright, director, and performer whose original music theater pieces have been performed in over 40 U.S. cities, as well as in Australia, Europe, Taiwan, Canada, and Mexico. He studied Music Composition (PhD 2006) at the University of California, San Diego, with Chaya Czernowin, and playwriting (MFA 2016) at Brown University with Erik Ehn. His plays have been produced by organizations such as New York Theater Workshop, the American Repertory Theater, P. S. 122, LaMama NYC, and River-to-River NYC, as well as numerous U.S. and international festivals, and published by New York Theater Experience. As a songwriter, he has shared stages with artists such as Pete Seeger, the Indigo Girls, Holly Near, and Utah Phillips, and his original songs have been featured on radio programs like NPR's "Morning Edition" and Pacifica's "Democracy Now." As playwright and composer, he has collaborated with theater makers including Lisa D'Amour, Anne Washburn, Erin Courtney, Kristin Kosmas, Dave Malloy, Sylvan Oswald, and Rachel Chavkin. In addition to workshops across the US and in Europe, he has taught full courses in playwriting at Brown University, in music composition at Harvard University, and in music theater at the Evergreen State College.


thingNY is a collective of composer-performers who fuse electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song and installation. Founded in 2006, thingNY performs experimental works created by the core ensemble – alejandro t. acierto, Gelsey Bell, Isabel Castellvi, Andrew Livingston, Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Dave Ruder, and Jeffrey Young – and by adventurous composers such as Jennifer Walshe, Robert Ashley, Rick Burkhardt, Pauline Oliveros, Miguel Frasconi, Vinko Globokar, John Cage, Julius Eastman, Jessie Marino, and Andrea La Rose.  The members of thingNY have collaboratively created three concert-length operas: This Takes Place Close By, Time: A Complete Explanation in Three Parts (with Panoply Performance Lab), and ADDDDDDDDD (self-released as their first album, with accompanying comic book libretto), and in 2020 created subtracTTTTTTTTT and A Series of Landscapes, new pieces created for real time online audiences. thingNY has also released minis/Trajectories (2016) and Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for 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 (2018), both on Gold Bolus Recordings.

Saxophonist and recording engineer Zach Herchen has over 15 years of experience recording/editing/mixing/mastering classical, jazz, and rock music in studio and at live concerts.  Projects have included 20-track live recordings, full studio sessions, noise removal and pitch correction, sound design for video and theater, compliance for television broadcast and more.  His recordings have included a Fulbright Scholarship, Q2's Meet the Composer program, and has worked with Carnegie Hall, PBS, Yefim Bronfman (GRAMMY award winning pianist), Glenn Kotche (Wilco, drummer), Abdullah Ibrahim (renowned jazz pianist/composer), New Focus Records, D’Addario Woodwinds, So Percussion, ETHEL String Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, Meet The Composer, Richard Carrick (Guggenheim Fellow, composer), Sylvana Joyce and The Moment, The Documentary Group, Dohee Lee, Kati Agócs (Guggenheim Fellow, composer), Metropolis Ensemble, Music from China, Devin Gray, A/B Duo, Rhymes With Opera, Aerocade Music, Ibis Productions, Sue Maskaleris, Erin Rogers, Geoff Landman, Kendra Emery, Paul Pinto, Jeremy Lamb, Dave Cohen, David Fetter, Kevin Clark, Driven to Clarity, James Umber, Hungry Man, Jim Brown Productions and more.  Zach and thingNY have previously worked together on the album Patriots.
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PASSOVER has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund. This recording is funded in part by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc. Thanks also to Ginny and Brian Ruder for their home, and Andrew Livingston for the intimate use of his bass, Peggy.