ALIAS is proud to announce the group’s major new project to feature Guggenheim Fellowship- and Latin Grammy-winning composer Gabriela Lena Frank as the centerpiece.  The overarching project, to take place in 2010, includes a commission of a quartet (for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano) by composer Gabriela Lena Frank; the commission is funded through partnerships with the Music, Authority and Community Project at Vanderbilt University, and with The Schubert Club of St. Paul, Minn.

The project also includes the first-ever ALIAS recording, which will feature Ms. Frank’s chamber works for NAXOS, on its American Classics label. This recording is being made possible with our partnership with Vanderbilt and with support from the Metro Nashville Arts Commission. The recording will include the new commissioned work, and several other works which will be recording premieres.

ALIAS was drawn to Ms. Frank’s music due to her artistic incorporation of folk idioms from the Andes and Peru. She travels extensively and uses the traditional music of South America as inspiration. A date for the recording’s release has not been announced.

“At the time of this announcement, I confess I’ve been in the thick of creating a new piece of music for ALIAS for more than a month,” said the composer, Gabriela Lena Frank. “In these early days of sifting, choosing, discarding, and sometimes rescuing ideas, I’ve frequently been suffused with a feeling of overwhelming gratitude towards these excellent musicians for the confidence and interest they have in my work as a composer. I’m so looking forward to working with them closely in bringing the new work to life, to our recording on the NAXOS label, and to our live performances. ALIAS is exactly why us composers love what we do.”

“We are very excited to work with ALIAS on their upcoming recording featuring the music of Gabriela Lena Frank,” said Lea D. Maitlen, Senior Marketing Manager, Naxos of America, Inc. “This excellent ensemble is an important part of the Nashville community, and I applaud their focus on new composers and lesser known repertoire.”

This commission, as well as the recording, is funded in large part by the ongoing Music, Authority and Community Project, led by Vanderbilt professors Jonathan Neufeld and Jennifer Lena. It combines scholarship from philosophy, sociology and music, and it is an unprecedented means of funding the creation of a new composition. “ALIAS has wanted to commission a new work from Gabriela, and to record it, for a long time,” says Matt Walker, cellist and Executive Director of ALIAS. “We are very grateful that Jonathan and Jenn’s profound academic efforts have helped us bring the idea to fruition.”

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About Gabriela Lena Frank:

Identity has always been at the center of Gabriela Lena Frank’s music. Born in Berkeley, California, to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Frank explores her multicultural heritage most ardently through her compositions. Inspired by the works of Bela Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, Frank is something of a musical anthropologist. She has travelled extensively throughout South America and her pieces reflect and refract her studies of Latin-American folklore, incorporating poetry, mythology, and native musical styles into a western classical framework that is uniquely her own. She writes challenging idiomatic parts for solo instrumentalists, vocalists, chamber ensembles, and orchestras.

For full bio, click here.

Interviews with 2007 Joyce Awards winners, Gabriela Lena Frank and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in Indianapolis.

Video of Gabriela Lena Frank, winner of Hispanic Scholarship Fund’s 2008 Brillante Prize.

Download a PDF version of our flyer by clicking this link: Arts and Flowers flyer.

CLICK HERE to listen to the interviews at VUCast, Vanderbilt University’s News Network.

CLICK HERE for details about the Music, Authority and Community Project at Vanderbilt University.

CLICK HERE for details about the GLF Project.

The program for ALIAS’ upcoming concert boasts four very different pieces for two musicians. ALIAS percussionist Chris Norton will perform one of the Frank works, Danza de los Saqsampillos for two marimbas, joined by Todd Kemp.

Also featured are two duos by French composers: Philippe Hersant’s Eleven Caprices for two cellos, and two songs by Lili Boulangerfor soprano and piano.

Rounding out the program is Introduction and Allegro by Maurice Ravel, which is scored for harp, flute, clarinet and string quartet. This work will bring to the stage guest artists Roger Martin (flute), Rebecca Dorcy (violin) and Daniel Reinker (viola).

“ALIAS is on the verge of a project that will garner national attention – a project that includes a commission by the prominent, young American artist Gabriela Lena Frank and a recording on Naxos’ American Classics label,” said ALIAS Executive Director and cellist Matt Walker. “This concert provides Nashville audiences an opportunity to experience this project in its early stages.”

Artistic Director Zeneba Bowers refines the timeline: “We have been rehearsing Quijotadas since last August; we’ve really grown with it in the past eight months. It is amazing to think that we will be recording it a couple of weeks after this performance.”

General Admission $12

Students w/ID $5

During the past five years, cellist Michael Samis has helped introduce many students and new listeners to the joy of chamber music as ALIAS Education and Community Outreach Coordinator. The Cincinnati native planned and organized the educational outreach and performance programs the ensemble presented at Hume-Fogg High School, the University School of Nashville, Dismas House and through the PENCIL Foundation Gold Star before-and-after-school program. He believes in the importance of developing audiences for chamber music, and for listeners to know music for the sake of the music.

Michael joined the Nashville Symphony in 1999 after graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with longtime Cleveland Orchestra principal cellist Stephen Geber. It was a pretty natural progression for Michael to become a founding member of ALIAS five years ago, because “playing more and more things I love is important to me.”

Michael adds: “I like to live with the music I play – studying it, connecting with it, performing it.” He relishes the music of Beethoven, Brahms and Bach, but also enjoys the challenge of finding interesting compositions that are less frequently played. Highlights for him in the latter category are Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (performed on the second ALIAS concert), Anton Arensky’s String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 35 (on the February 11 concert) and a new work he is learning, Eleven Caprices for Two Cellos (2003) by Philippe Hersant, a contemporary French composer.

Each year since coming to Nashville, Michael has prepared and presented chamber music programs with local assisting artists. His next recital in that series is set for May 7 at Congregation Micah. In addition, he performs with 12 other colleagues in the Gateway Chamber Ensemble, which is associated with Austin Peay University in Clarksville. Off stage, Michael enjoys yoga, cycling, hiking and travel.

The project is one component of the GLF Project, and will feature a series of educational and outreach programs based in Nashville’s Hispanic community during Hispanic Cultural Heritage Month, from Sept. 15 through Oct. 15.

More details, including a schedule, will be available at aliasmusic.org when they become available.

For more details about other Nashville arts organizations that received part of the $1.1 million NEA grants, please click here for a link to the full story at Tennessean.com.

For full details about The GLF Project, including how you can be part of this special event, please click here.

The competition will culminate at the June 25 event at the Terrazzo in The Gulch and feature an exhibit of all entries, as well as  a performance by ALIAS. The artists and florists will be judged for a chance to win “Best of Show,” while attendees will be voting on a special “People’s Choice Award.”

Tickets to Arts and Flowers are $35 in advance, and $45 at the door. They include food, beverages and parking. To reserve your tickets today, please visit our secure site at Brown Paper Tickets:

Advance $35

At the Door $45

The brainchild of ALIAS board member Jim Robert, the event has been his dream for years.

“It’s the perfect event for ALIAS, and one that we hope will become a signature ALIAS event,” Robert says. “What better way to bring visual art and the art of music together? I can only imagine the masterpieces that will result from the union of painters/photographers and florists.

“We’re also thrilled to have this opportunity to introduce ALIAS supporters to Terrazzo,” he adds. “The view from the penthouse is breathtaking…no one will want to miss this event!”

“Tickets for ‘Arts and Flowers’ are very reasonably priced. We want everyone to be able to attend,” Robert says. “All of  the artwork will be on sale with a portion of the proceeds benefiting ALIAS. And the floral arrangements will be available through a silent auction. And, if you sign on as a sponsor, you’ll be invited to a patrons’ party at The Rymer Gallery, which is certain to be another amazing event.”

Arts and Flowers Gallery, Florist, Patron and In-kind sponsorship packages start at $100. All sponsors will be invited to a special patrons party on May 15, 2010; details are provided in the chart below. For sponsorship opportunities and ticket information, please contact ALIAS at info@aliasmusic.org.

Become a permanent part of ALIAS’ recording history by donating $250 to our GLF Project.

In turn, you will secure your spot on our limited listing of GLF Project supporters, which will be printed on the inside of ALIAS’ Naxos CD jacket.

To join the GLF Project, please click the following button, which takes you to our secure donations page at the Network for Good:

Snack time was brutal. They always had this green ceramic plate, and our snack was little chunks of liver. Why couldn’t we even one time have cookies?”

No, it’s not a voiceover line from a screenplay adaptation of Great Expectations. It’s just one of several odd chapters from the strange life and times of Zeneba Bowers, classical musician. Those liver snacks were fed to her regularly by one of several Mennonite babysitters who watched over her when she was a young child in southeastern Pennsylvania. Still perplexed to this day, she wonders aloud, “Why did it always have to be a meat product?”

Currently the assistant principal second violin with the Nashville Symphony, Zen, as she’s known, came to Nashville eight years ago from Miami Beach, where she had been a member of the New World Symphony under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas. (She’d done previous stints with the Syracuse Symphony and the Rochester Philharmonic.) But her greatest passion is Alias, the chamber ensemble she founded which features mostly fellow Nashville Symphony players performing a bold and challenging repertoire spanning the last five centuries.

It makes perfect sense that Alias would wander away from classical music’s beaten path, considering Zen’s offbeat upbringing. How about the time when her news-junkie dad, who had no patience for children’s television, convinced her that those artists’ renderings of criminal trials you see on the network news were actually cartoons. “When I was very small … it must have been kindergarten … that’s where I learned that those court drawings they have on the news are not cartoons, and that cartoons move,” Zen says. “Because my dad would say, ‘This is the cartoon part of the news!’ because it was a drawing. And I was too stupid to know any better.”

For full story at nashvillescene.com, click here.

Spring Concert
Friday, May 14, 2010
8:00 p.m.
Turner Recital Hall
Blair School of Music

Closing out the season, and the Emerging Voices series focusing on women composers past and present, is a remarkable string quartet by Guggenheim Fellowship recipient Gabriela Lena Frank. Also on the program is Frank’s Danza de los Saqsampillos for two marimbas. Soprano Sharon Mabry returns to the ALIAS stage to sing three songs by Lili Boulanger. Rounding out the program is a rarely heard work for two cellos by French composer Philippe Hersant, and the well-loved Introduction and Allegro by Maurice Ravel.

Here is the program, including sample audio clips of the composers’ works:

Philippe Hersant / 11 Caprices for two cellos

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Gabriela Lena Frank / Danza de los Saqsampillos for two marimbas

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Maurice Ravel / Introduction and Allegro for harp, flute, clarinet, and string quartet

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Lili Boulanger / Attente, Le Retour, Reflets, for soprano and piano

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Gabriela Lena Frank / Quijotadas for string quartet

All proceeds benefit Progress, a Nashville-based service organization for individuals with developmental disabilities.

Advance tickets are available through Brown Paper Tickets. Click on their logo to pay by credit card through their secure site, or call anytime at (800) 838-3006.

General Admission $12

Students w/ID $5