Program Notes - Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Photo: Julieta Cervantes
eighth blackbird
with Nico Muhly
and Bryce Dessner
Tuesday and Wednesday,
April 30 and May 1, 2013
Edlis Neeson
Theater

eighth blackbird
Photo: Luke Ratray
Photo: Jeff Roffman
Artists Up Close
Gain insight into the creative process through
these intimate opportunities to engage with
the artists.
First Night
Tue, Apr 30
Following the first concert, join us for
a conversation with the performers
and composers moderated by Peter Taub,
Director of Performance Programs.
CD signing
Wed, May 1
Meet composer David Lang. After the concert,
the artist signs CDs of his new release, death
speaks (Cantaloupe), his project exploring art
song with Bryce Dessner (guitar), Nico Muhly
(piano), Owen Pallett (voice, violin), and Shara
Worden (voice, bass drum.)
Lang found inspiration for death speaks in
Franz Schubert’s lieder, particularly in the texts
for such songs as “Death and the Maiden” and
“Die schöne Müllerin.” Lang’s libretto draws from
thirty-two different songs, including two that the
artists perform as part of the eighth blackbird
engagement.
EIGHTH BLACKBIRD
with Nico Muhly and Bryce Dessner
Shara Worden, soprano
Bryce Dessner, electric guitar
Nico Muhly, toy piano and
electric organ
eighth blackbird
Tim Munro, flute
Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinet
Yvonne Lam, violin and viola
Nicholas Photinos, cello
Matthew Duvall, percussion
Lisa Kaplan, piano
Tristan Perich
qsqsqsqsqqqqqqqqq (2009)
for three toy pianos
and electronics
Nico Muhly
Doublespeak (2012)
for sextet
Lisa Kaplan
whirligig (2013)
for piano four hands
World premiere
1. off-kilter
2. merry-go-round
3. boogie-woogie
David Lang
how to pray (2002/13)
for sextet, electric organ,
and electric guitar
David Lang
Songs from death speaks (2012)
for soprano, electric guitar,
piano and sextet
1. you will return
2. pain changes
Intermission
Bryce Dessner
Murder Ballades (2013)
for sextet
US Premiere
1. Omie Wise/Young Emily
2. Dark Holler
3. Wave the Sea/Brushy Fork
4. Pretty Polly/
Tears for Sister Polly
Philip Glass
Two Pages (1968)
for sextet, electric guitar,
and electric organ
Steve Mackey
Lonely Motel (2008/12)
for sextet and electric guitar
This performance runs
approximately 110 minutes,
with intermission.
Bryce Dessner’s Murder Ballades
is commissioned by eighth blackbird
and Lunapark and funded by the
Doelen Concert Hall, Rotterdam,
Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam,
and Muziekgebouw Frits Philips,
Eindhoven, with the financial support
of the Van Beinum Foundation,
the Netherlands, with additional
support from the Museum of
Contemporary Art Chicago.
This program is partially supported
by a grant from the Illinois Arts
Council Agency through federal
funds provided by the National
Endowment for the Arts
ILLINOIS
A RTS
COUNCIL
A GENCY

Theater
About the Music
Back to Back Theatre
Ganesh Versus
the Third Reich
May 16–19, 2013
Presented as part of
Bodies of Work Festival
“Courageous, confronting,
intelligent and magisterially
considered theatre…
[a] towering achievement.”
The Age (Australia)
For tickets, visit mcachicago.org
or call 312.397.4010.
Generous support is provided by Lisa Yun Lee.
Photo: Jeff Busby
Tristan Perich
qsqsqsqsqqqqqqqqq (2009)
This piece was named after an excerpt of
commands I type when configuring my drawing
machine, and is for a tightly synchronized canon
of toy piano and electronic parts. Machines
epitomize process, yet always there is a sensitive
membrane between the electronic and the
physical, the abstract and the real. It is to either
side of this divide that we can skirt, loitering in the
conceptual, dallying in the concrete. They call
“muscle memory” what our bodies do without
our minds intervening, fingers glittering above a
keyboard. Machines can only dream of mistakes.
There, where perfection turns imperfect and the
imperfect gains perfection, is where our logic
ends and the other begins. —Tristan Perich
Nico Muhly
Doublespeak (2012)
This piece was written for eighth blackbird for
the Music Now! festival in Cincinnati, in honor
of Philip Glass’s 75th birthday. My mission in
writing the piece was twofold: first, to write 8bb
the most fun piece possible for them, at just the
right length. The second was to in some way tip
my hat to Philip Glass, whom I admire broadly
and deeply. eighth blackbird have played so
much fast, loosely repetitive music over the
years; I wanted to refine this kind of material into
its purest, most delicious form and point back to
the 70s, when classical music perfected obsessive
repetition. The piece begins by applying
an additive process to a small cell on the solo
violin. This is the defining gesture of the piece
and is subject to much variation. Occasionally,
the busy textures give way to drones played by
the soprano recorder, under which we begin
to hear chords from Philip's insanely beautiful
Music in Twelve Parts (1971-74). The piece
unfolds in similar episodes: fast music offset by
slow, melancholic memories of the music of the
late 1960s and 1970s (aren’t those the intervals
from Violin Phase Was that a cell from In C).
Towards the end of the piece, the language of
Music in Twelve Parts becomes more dominant
and gradually overtakes all the busy material
and the piece ends in a stylized dream-state.
—Nico Muhly
Lisa Kaplan
Whirligig (2013)
1. a toy that spins around, for example, a top
or a pinwheel. Another term for merry-go-round
2. a thing regarded as hectic or constantly
changing : the whirligig of time.
3. a small black predatory beetle that swims
rapidly in circles on the surface of still or slowmoving
water and dives when alarmed.
I only like to play four hands piano with people
I really like. This genre, with two players at one
keyboard, should make you laugh and curse,
and delight in invading each other’s space.
(Otherwise, what's the point You might as well
be playing on two separate instruments!)
Nico Muhly and I wanted a four-hands piece to
play together tonight and, rather than find an
existing work, he dared me to write something.
That dare was an inspiration.
whirligig is all about getting up in each other’s
business and relishing in it. The first movement,
off-kilter, is my tribute to Nico and his spunky,
vibrant, and amazingly animated personality.
merry-go-round is both silly wordplay and a
homage to one of my favorite people.
The third movement is an odd-metered

About the Music
boogie-woogie that was stuck in my head
the whole time I was writing whirligig,
and I thought it would be great fun to play.
—Lisa Kaplan
David Lang
how to pray (2002/13)
The reason why the psalms are so central to
religious experience is that they are a comprehensive
catalogue of examples of how to talk
to the Almighty, not by a prophet or a priest but
in the voice of a single person out in the world,
with problems and concerns not unlike those
faced by real people in all times. Of course, it’s
like reading one side of a correspondence—
we can read David’s letters but the letters back
are the ones we really want to see.
I am not a religious person. I don’t know how to
pray. I do, however, know some of the times and
places and formulas that are supposed to make
prayer possible. Sometimes I find myself sending
those messages out. And then I wait, secretly
hoping that I will recognize the response.
My first thought for this piece was that I could
somehow “borrow” my favorite running piano
line from the beginning of Stravinsky’s
Symphony of Psalms, bringing into the concert
the piece that had introduced me to the idea
of psalm setting, many years ago. More recently
I have been setting the entire book of psalms,
in an evening-length work for solo piano called
psalms without words. I have been transcribing
my own cantillation (liturgical setting) of the
psalms—the rhythms, the accents, and the
pacing of the Hebrew. I used a similar strategy
to convert the prayer before saying the psalms
into the music for how to pray. —David Lang
David Lang
death speaks (2012)
Franz Schubert has a lot of songs with texts
where Death is personified—I wondered if
I assembled all of the instances of Death
speaking directly to us then maybe a fuller
portrait of Schubert’s character might emerge.
Most of these texts are melodramatic, hyperromantic
and over-emotional; one of the knocks
on Schubert is that he often saved his best
music for the worst poetry. Nevertheless, I felt
that taking these overwrought comments by
Death at face value just might lead me someplace
worth going. death speaks was commissioned
by Carnegie Hall and Stanford Lively
Arts. —David Lang
Bryce Dessner
Murder Ballades (2013)
When eighth blackbird asked me for a piece,
I immediately knew what to do: let great American
folk music inspire a great American new music
ensemble. With this in mind I started to examine
various strands of American music, both folk
and classical, popular and sacred. Around the
time I was working we had the horrible tragic
shootings in Aurora and Sandy Hook and I
started to think about the nature of violence
in American Identity.
The “murder ballad” has its roots in a European
tradition, in which grisly details of bloody
homicides are recounted through song.
When this tradition came to America, it developed
its own vernacular, with stories and songs
being told and re-told over the generations.
These ballads have long been central to the
American folk tradition.
In Murder Ballades I re-examine several of
these old songs, allowing them to inspire my
own music. “Omie Wise,” “Young Emily,” and
“Pretty Polly” are classic murder ballads, tales
of romantically-charged killings that are based
on real events. “Dark Holler,” my own composition,
is loosely modeled on the clawhammer
banjo style which would have accompanied
many of these early folk songs. “Brushy Fork”
is a Civil War era murder ballad/fiddle tune,
and “Wave the Sea” and “Tears for Sister Polly”
are original compositions woven out of the
depths of the many months I spent inhabiting
the seductive music and violent stories of these
murder ballads. —Bryce Dessner
Philip Glass
Two Pages (1968)
Composers, like all artists, struggle with what
to title their works. Those avoiding creaky terms
such as “symphony” and “concerto” may hint
at a poetic world beyond the notes
(...into the receding mist...) or throw a political
grenade (Workers Union). Some will describe
musical processes (Nico Muhly’s A Long Line)
or attempt in-jokes (the percussion work,
Having never written a note for percussion).
In that company, the title "Two Pages” is either
a unique departure or an indecisive cop-out:
In Two Pages, quite simply, the musicians play
from two printed pages of notes.
Two Pages could last all night, into tomorrow,
perhaps forever. Philip Glass’s early work is
fast, stark, repetitive, hypnotic. The composer
reduces the elements of music to their simplest
forms, a radical move inspired by the static,
meditative language of Indian classical music,
but also a rejection of the complex, dissonant
music by many of his contemporaries.
Two Pages is single unison line of music, and
can be played by any combination of instruments.
—Tim Munro, flutist
Steve Mackey
Lonely Motel (2008/12)
The music of Lonely Motel is drawn from Slide,
a musical theater song cycle written by Steve
Mackey with words by actor/singer Rinde Eckert.
Commissioned and performed by eighth blackbird
(with Mackey on guitar and Eckert singing),
Slide is a character study of Renard, a lovelorn
psychologist who reconsiders his 40 -year- old
experiment utilizing photographic slides to challenge
notions of perception and reality. The songs
of Slide deal with themes of belief and self—
delusion, and the loneliness created by the
attachments we develop to our own fuzzy view
of reality. Lonely Motel was the final song in the
original show, and included the following text:
“It's quiet here. This motel, uncomplicated, this
simple room, controlled a measurable peace.
And I sleep here like a baby, like a baby here
I sleep.” —Tim Munro, flutist

Songs from death speaks
“you will return”
you will return to dust
you till turn
return to dust
turn to the sun
like me, turn to the sun
turn to the light
turn to the light
If there's an eye still open
grieving
sweet sleep
close it for me
turn your heart, your poor heart
it will only find rest
when it has stopped beating
turn to peace
turn to peace
this is the only road that leads you home
enter
I am your pale companion
I mirror your pain
I was your shadow
all those long nights, all those days long past
listen to me
this message is for you
where I am now, all sorrow is gone
where I am now, all lovers are together
where I am now
in my arms only will you find rest
gentle rest
“pain changes”
pain changes every shape
once you are truly lonely
you will never be alone
feel my hand
I feel you
touch my cold hand
I will take you
from her
to your new cold land
I have chosen you
my only love
those others
they search for you
but
where they search
they will never find you
after the leaves fall, spring returns
after love is parted, it returns
all you have to do is
come with me
and wait
one day she will be lowered in the earth
beside you
my hand will guide her home
to the place where love is
and no pain
when that door opens
you will be healed
dearest man, dearest woman
dearest boy, dearest girl
dearest mother, dearest father
dearest son, dearest daughter
you will never leave me
you listen
you are silent
you feel me leaning towards you
nothing escapes me
not the warrior
not the hunter
everything awaits the way it changes
when life falls away
that is the meaning of the swan
and its song
the night can't last forever
nor will this sleep
beyond this sleep is light
forever light
until that light can shine
until you see it shining
sleep sweetly here
in the cool, dark night

About the artists
Bryce Dessner (b. 1976)
is based in New York and is best known as the
guitarist for the rock band the National and as
a composer and guitarist for the improvising
new music quartet Clogs. He has performed
and recorded with musicians Sufjan Stevens,
Bon Iver, Antony Hegarty, Lee Ranaldo (Sonic
Youth); composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass,
Nico Muhly, and Michael Gordon; contemporary
ensembles Kronos Quartet and the Bang on a
Can All-Stars; and visual artist Matthew Ritchie.
As a composer, his commissions include Lincoln
Shuffle, a composition in honor of Abraham
Lincoln’s bicentennial, and The Long Count,
an origins story told in myth, music, and video,
commissioned by BAM for the 2009 Next Wave
Festival. Dessner composed two string quartets,
Aheym and Tenebre, for the Kronos Quartet.
Other recent commissions include a new piece
for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a collaborative
work for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus with composer
Nico Muhly for St. Ann’s Warehouse, and
commissions from the American Composers
Orchestra. In 2012 he cowrote and internationally
toured Planetarium, a collaborative song cycle
with Sufjan Stevens and Nico Muhly. Dessner
is creator and artistic director of the MusicNOW
Festival in Cincinnati, Ohio, and cofounder/owner
of the record label Brassland, which is home to
artists such as experimental rock duo Buke and
Gass, Nico Muhly, and cellist Erik Friedlander.
With sibling Aaron, Dessner recently produced
the AIDS charity compilation Dark Was the Night
for the Red Hot Organization, a recording of
collaborations from David Byrne, Arcade Fire,
Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Jones, Cat Power,
Grizzly Bear, My Morning Jacket, and Spoon.
Dessner serves on the board of The Kitchen in
New York City and is a graduate of Yale College
and the Yale School of Music.
Phillip Glass (b. 1937)
has, through his operas, his symphonies, his
compositions for his own ensemble, and his
wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging
from Twyla Tharp, Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen
to David Bowie, had an extraordinary and
unprecedented impact upon the musical and
intellectual life of our time. Glass studied at the
University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in
Aspen with Darius Milhaud, then in Europe with
the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who
also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and
Quincy Jones). He worked closely with the sitar
virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar.
He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the
Philip Glass Ensemble–seven musicians playing
keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified
and fed through a mixer. The new musical
style that Glass was evolving was eventually
dubbed “minimalism.” Glass disliked the term
and speaks of himself as a composer of "music
with repetitive structures. Much of his early work
was based on the extended reiteration of brief,
elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out
of an aural tapestry. By 1974, Glass’s projects
expanded to music for Mabou Mines Theater
Company, which he co-founded. Notable works
from this time include Twelve Parts and the
opera Einstein on the Beach created with
Robert Wilson. Awards for his film scores include
an Academy Award nomination for Kundun,
directed by Martin Scorsese, and Golden Globe,
Grammy, and Academy Award nominations for
The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry.
David Lang (b.1957)
is a founding member with Michael Gordon and
Julie Wolfe of New York's prominent composer
collective Bang on a Can. Recent projects
include love fail for the early music vocal
ensemble Anonymous 4, with libretto and staging
by Lang, reason to believe; for Trio Mediaeval
and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra;
death speaks, for Shara Worden, Bryce Dessner,
Nico Muhly, and Owen Pallett; Writing on Water
for the London Sinfonietta, with libretto and
visuals by English filmmaker Peter Greenaway;
The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, a fully staged
opera with the Kronos Quartet; Shelter for Trio
Mediaeval and musikFabrik, with co-composers
Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe; and loud love
songs, a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn
Glennie and orchestra. Other projects include
a collaboration with visual artist Mark Dion
and Ridge Theater Company on an opera titled
Anatomy Theater and a complete rewriting of
Beethoven’s opera Fidelio. Lang is winner of
the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his nonreligious
re-imagining of Bach’s St Matthew
Passion titled The Little Match Girl Passion,
commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Paul Hillier’s
vocal ensemble Theater of Voices. Additional
awards include Musical America’s Composer
of the Year, Carnegie Hall's Debs Composer's
Chair, the Rome Prize, the BMW Music-Theater
Prize (Munich), and grants from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary
Performance Arts, and the American Academy
of Arts and Letters. In 1999, Lang received a
Bessie Award for music in choreographer Susan
Marshall’s The Most Dangerous Room in the
House, performed live by the Bang on a Can All-
Stars at the Next Wave Festival of the Brooklyn
Academy of Music.
Steven Mackey (b. 1956)
was born to American parents stationed in
Frankfurt, Germany. His first musical passion
was playing the electric guitar in rock bands
based in northern California. He later discovered
concert music and has composed for orchestras,
chamber ensembles, dance, and opera.
He regularly performs his own work, including
two electric guitar concertos as well as numerous
solo and chamber works and is also active
as an improvising musician.
Nico Muhly (b. 1981)
was born in Vermont and raised in Providence,
Rhode Island. Based in New York, Muhly graduated
from Columbia University with a degree
in English Literature. In 2004, he received a
master’s degree in Music from the Juilliard
School, where he studied under Christopher
Rouse and John Corigliano. Muhly has composed
extensively for choir, including commissions
from the Clare College Choir and the Brooklyn
Youth Chorus. New York’s Saint Thomas Church
commissioned and performed his Bright Mass
with Canons, later recorded on their American
Voices album and on the Los Angeles Master
Chorale’s all-Muhly Decca debut, A Good
Understanding. His orchestral works have been
premiered by the American Symphony Orchestra,
Aurora Orchestra, Boston Pops, New York
Philharmonic, and Chicago Symphony. Muhly’s
film credits include scores for Joshua (2007)
and Best Picture nominee The Reader (2008).
Among his most frequent collaborators are his
colleagues at Bedroom Community, an artist-run
label headed by Icelandic musician Valgeir
Sigurðsson and inaugurated by the release
of Muhly’s first album, Speaks Volumes (2007).
Since then, Muhly has released a second album,
Mothertongue (2008), and worked closely with
label mates Valgeir, Ben Frost, and Sam Amidon
on their respective solo releases.
For 2011, the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center
Theater Opera/Theater Commissions Program,
in a co-production with the English National Opera,

commissioned Two Boys (libretto by Craig Lucas,
directed by Bartlett Sher), Muhly’s first full-scale
opera, followed by Dark Sisters (with a libretto by
Stephen Karam and directed by Rebecca Taichman),
co-commissioned by the Gotham Chamber Opera,
Music-Theatre Group, and Opera Company
of Philadelphia.
Tristan Perich (b. 1982)
finds inspiration in the aesthetic simplicity of
math, physics, and code in writing music that
WIRE magazine describes as "an austere meeting
of electronic and organic." 1-Bit Music, his
2004 release, was the first album ever released
as a microchip, programmed to synthesize his
electronic composition live. His latest circuit
album, 1-Bit Symphony (Cantaloupe, 2010), has
received critical acclaim by New York Press
and the Wall Street Journal. His work coupling
1-bit electronics with traditional forms in both
music (Active Field, Observations) and visual art
(Machine Drawings, Microtonal Wall) has been
performed and presented at international music
festivals Sonar and Ars Electronica as well as
the Whitney Museum and bitforms gallery.
Shara Worden
is best known as the singer/songwriter and multiinstrumentalist
of My Brightest Diamond, a band
that mixes elements of opera, cabaret, chamber
music, and rock. Classically trained as a singer
and composer, Worden received a BA in
Classical Vocal Performance from the University
of North Texas and received private opera training
in New York, where she also studied composition
with Padma Newsome and started composing
music for theater. She formed the music
project My Brightest Diamond in 2006, releasing
two studio albums, Bring Me the Workhorse and
A Thousand Shark’s Teeth, to wide critical
acclaim and earning Worden a nomination for
Female Artist of the Year in the PLUG Independent
Music Awards. Worden also performs and
records as guest vocalist with a number of artists
across a diverse array of genres including
Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, the Brooklyn
Philharmonic, Sufjan Stevens, the Decemberists,
Bon Iver, the National, and St. Vincent, among
others.
eighth blackbird
is a Chicago-based sextet with acclaimed
recordings on Cedille Records, including two
Grammy Awards in 2012 for Meanwhile in the
chamber music category and for composer
Stephen Hartke, who wrote the title piece,
for best contemporary classical composition.
The ensemble’s two earlier Grammy Awards
are for strange imaginary animals (Best Chamber
Music Performance, 2006) and Lonely Motel:
Music from Slide (Best Small Ensemble Performance,
2012).
The wide-ranging commissions by the sextet
include Steve Reich’s off-kilter jam session,
Double Sextet (winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize
for Music); Jennifer Higdon’s pedal-to-the-metal
concerto, On a Wire (2010); and Steve Mackey’s
compelling music-theater work, Slide (2009).
Other commissions include Missy Mazzoli,
Bruno Mantovani, Mark Anthony Turnage and
Joseph Schwantner, Amy Beth Kirsten, Brett
Dean, Aaron Jay Kernis, John Luther Adams
and Mayke Nas.
Highlights of recent performance seasons include
engagements with Carnegie Hall (Zankel
and Stern Halls), London’s Barbican Centre,
DC’s Library of Congress, Stanford Lively Arts,
UT Austin, and the Eastman School of Music.
The ensemble was Music Director of the Tune-in
Festival at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory,
and visited Southern Methodist University four
times as the inaugural recipient of the Meadows
Prize. eighth blackbird performed Jennifer
Higdon’s On a Wire concerto with the symphony
orchestras of Cleveland, Atlanta, Toronto, Vermont,
West Michigan, and for the Cabrillo Festival.
The ensemble’s performance of Schoenberg's
Pierrot lunaire was presented at the Kennedy
Center and the McAninch Arts Center and at MCA
Stage (2000). Chicago appearances include
multiple seasons with MCA Stage (The Music
of Less/More, 2012; PowerFUL/LESS, 2011);
with Contempo in 2008 and New Music Chicago
in 2006; and the Steve Reich Festival at
Millennium Park.
eighth blackbird holds ongoing Ensemble in
Residence positions at the University of
Richmond and the University of Chicago, and
in 2012 the group began a three-year, Mellon
Foundation-funded term as Ensemble in Residence
at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music.
eighth blackbird members hail from America’s
Great Lakes, Keystone, Golden and Bay states,
and Australia’s Sunshine State. The ensemble
name “eighth blackbird” derives from the eighth
stanza of Wallace Stevens's evocative, aphoristic
poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
(1917).
eighth blackbird
Staff
Jen Richards, Managing Director
Kyle Vegter, Office Manager
Rachel Damon, Production Stage Manager
Ryan Ingebritsen, Sound Engineer
Dana Horst, Development Director

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Lois Eisen, Chair
Ellen Stone Belic
Patricia Cox
Pamela Crutchfield
Ginger Farley
Jay Franke
John C. Kern
Lisa Yun Lee
Elizabeth A. Liebman
Alfred L. McDougal
Paula Molner
Sharon Oberlander
Maya Polsky
D. Elizabeth Price
Carol Prins
Cheryl Seder
Patty Sternberg
Richard Tomlinson
Performance Programs
Peter Taub, Director
Yolanda Cesta Cursach,
Associate Director
Richard Norwood,
Theater Production Manager
Cameron Heinze, Manager
Antonia Callas, Assistant
Kevin Brown,
House Management Associate
Phil Cabeen,
House Management Associate
Alicia M. Graf,
House Management Associate
Quinlan Kirchner,
House Management Associate
Lucas Baisch, Intern
Erik Norwich, Intern
Facilities
Dennis O’Shea,
Manager of Technical
Production
Box Office
Matti Allison, Manager
Phongtorn Phongluantum,
Assistant Manager
Molly Laemle, Coordinator
Gabriel Garcia, Associate
Ethan Schleeter, Associate
Nicholas Stephens, Associate
Program notes compiled by
Yolanda Cesta Cursach
Seating
Switch off all noise-making
devices while you are in
the theater.
Late arrivals are seated at the
management’s discretion. Food
and open beverage containers are
not allowed in the seating area.
Reproduction
Unauthorized recording and
reproduction of a performance
is prohibited.
Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago
220 East Chicago Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611
mcachicago.org
General information 312.280.2660
Box office 312.397.4010
Volunteer for performances
312.397.4072
mcastage@mcachicago.org
Museum hours
Tuesday: 10 am–8 pm
Wednesday–Sunday: 10 am–5 pm
Closed Mondays, Thanksgiving,
Christmas, and New Year’s Day