Vicky Chow & Guests
Armando Bayolo: Memorias Vagabundas
November 3, 2022 – 8 PM ET
Live Stream!
Bang on a Can Presents: LIVE ONLINE
Armando Bayolo: Memorias Vagabundas
November 3, 2022 – 8PM ET
A World Premiere Commission of 11 Pianists
Organized by Vicky Chow (Bang on a Can All-Stars)
On November 3, Bang on a Can brings you a world premiere video suite from All-Star Vicky Chow and Armando Bayolo, exploring Bayolo’s biography, evoking ancestral Spain, parental Cuba, native Puerto Rico and his life in the United States.
Featuring performances by:
Vicky Chow
Geoffrey Burleson
Mikael Darmanie
Erika Dohi
Timothy Hoft
Blair McMillen
Megumi Masaki
Michael Mizrahi
Winston Choi
Vicki Ray
Ju-Ping Song
Thursday, November 3, at 8pm ET
More info, tickets, and livestream
From Bang on a Can All-Star pianist Vicky Chow:
“This special project came about during the pandemic, when artists were struggling to connect and be “together” in the way we know how: by making music. Armando and I asked our friends and colleagues to be a part of this commissioning project. Everyone that is involved is connected to one another; it feels deeply personal for us as performers, that we banded together to move forward from a very strange place of isolation and anxiety for the future.
Thank you Armando, for this piece, and for giving us something beautiful on which we could collaborate – and be together. To all these wonderful musicians, my friends, salut!”
Check out this excerpt from the piece, Vicky Chow playing “Canción Sentimental”
People
Sruly Lazaros & Tim Thomas – live stream coordinators
Supporters
Bang on a Can is grateful for the support of these crucial Funders:
Bang on a Can’s 2020 programs are made possible with generous lead support from: Amphion Foundation, ASCAP and ASCAP Foundation, Atlantic Records, Daniel Baldini, Stephen A. Block, Bishop Fund, Jeffrey Calman, Charina Endowment Fund, City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, Exploring the Arts, Howard Gilman Foundation, Jaffe Family Foundation,, Alan Kifferstein & Joan Finkelstein, Michael Kushner, Leslie Lassiter, Herb Leventer, MAP Fund, Raulee Marcus, MASS MoCA, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Jeremy Mindich & Amy Smith, Elizabeth Murrell & Gary Haney, National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, New York Community Trust, New York State Council on the Arts (with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature), Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Scopia Capital Management, Matthew Sirovich & Meredith Elson, Maria & Robert A. Skirnick, Jane & Dick Stewart, Sandra Tait and Hal Foster, Trust for Mutual Understanding, U.S Department of State’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, Williamson Foundation for Music, Adam Wolfensohn & Jennifer Small, and Wolfensohn Family Foundation.
Bang on a Can’s Board of Directors: Michael Kushner, president; Sandra Tait, vice-president; Alan Kifferstein, Treasurer; Robert A. Skirnick, secretary. Betto Arcos, Daniel Baldini, Jeffrey Bishop, Michael Gordon, Lynette Jaffe, David Lang, Leslie Lassiter, George Lewis, Raulee Marcus, Elizabeth Murrell, Jane Stewart, Julia Wolfe, Adam Wolfensohn
Bang on a Can Staff:
Artistic Directors: Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe
Executive Director: Kenny Savelson
Development Director: Tim Thomas
Project Manager: Philippa Thompson
Production Manager: Sruly Lazaros
1Beat Co-Directors: Chris Marianetti, Jeremy Thal, Elena Moon Park
1Beat Managers: Kyla-Rose Smith and Ezra Tenenbaum
Accounts Manager: Brian Petuch
Online Store Manager: Adam Cuthbert
Archive Content Manager: Matt Evans
Assistant Store Manager: Cassie Wieland
Publicity: Jensen Artists
If you have any questions to me, or want to purchase a copy of the score, send me an email at [email protected] (my website’s contact is down right now). Thanks, all! Good night!
bravo everyone — gorgeous performances and thank you for sharing so much about your piece, armando!!
Thanks. I figured it was better than sending everyone out to read a doc or leave you asea on what’s going on. LOL
Thank you, everyone! That’s Memorias Vagabundas. I may have written the music, but the pianists are the stars. Thank you, Vicky, for shepherding the project, and to Mikael, Vicki, Blair, Tim, Winston, J.P., Geoffrey, Michael, Erika and Meg.
And thanks, BoaC!
And the Hostetler Fund.
And all of you for listening.
Thank you & BRAVO Armando!
An amazing work and group of musicians. Such a diverse collection of forms, structures and musical dialects. Thanks you to all involved!
Bravo everyone. I am so touched and moved. *in tears!*
Beautiful performance Vicky – so great to see/hear you!
Thank you Ken! Thx for tuning in’
Wow – just wow! Incredibly moving & emotional journey, beautiful music and community! Thank you all!
Incredible!!!
SO thankful for BOAC online!
So cool Armando! And a huge bravo/brava to the A Team piano coalition!
Loved it!!
BRAVO ALL
Tutti bravi!! Such brilliant, vivid, and devastating performances from everyone. Armando, I’m indescribably moved by finally hearing the set as a whole. So powerful, personal, multi-layered and ingenious. Bravissimo.
I love getting to know every one of you through hearing your beautiful playing with us. Thank you .
We really need to figure out how to have all 11 pianists in one room for this live. It’s really special.
Truly breath taking performances and amazing music
Thank you
What a journey i’ve been taken through. Thank you Armando. <3
Thank YOU, Vicky. You’ve been at the heart of this the whole time. 🙂
Wow Vicky! Loved your powerful and heart wrenching performance of Personal Apocalypses ….
thanks meg! i loooooved your performance of Dédalo y San Felipe too! <3
I’ll write about the final two pieces here, so as to avoid distracting you al further. Coquis are little tree frogs native to Puerto Rico. They have a distinct song that becomes really prominent after rain fall. I love that sound. In 33 years in the US I’ve yet to get over missing it.
My Children’s Country is a bit of nostalgia for the future. It’s about legacy, and about my two daughters and their generation. A benediction for when I’m gone.
I hadn’t seen the title of the movement but I knew it was the coquis and a storm. The night I heard it has stuck with me and always will. ❤️
Vicky, I love the purple lighting in your piano room!
me too!
gotta have the right vibez
So the bottom half of this cycle is really serious. Oof! Personal Apocalypses is about the really tough parts of life. Yes, it’s about a specific, formative trauma, this time in my adulthood, but I’m not going to say much about it because it’s meant to be taken more generally.
(But let’s just say that there’s a cypher that starts the final, peaceful section that refers to someone who has been a rock in these traumatic experiences. She knows who she is.)
Cameo 4 is also about my father. He had an abiding, life long love of baseball. So, in his portrait, I take “Take me Out to the Ball Game” and rework it into…this. 😉
(Also, I’ve known Winston a really long time. I wrote a big piano piece for him when I was a student. I’ve always been impressed by how effortless his technique seems. He can play Fernyhough and Carter and make it sound easy!)
I’ve been absolutely loving these thrilling performances of such gripping and stellar music! Armando, you’ve knocked it out of the park with this!
Thanks, Winston. 🙂
My father died when I was 14. He was only 39. This was the most formative traumatic experience of my early life.
the music is blowing my mind!
🙂
everyone is so inspiring. <3
Right? I am a lucky, lucky composer.
this piece!!!!!! WOW
I also think each piece really matches each of your personalities!
The seis has been called the backbone of Puerto Rican folk music (seriously. It’s how EVERY write up starts!). There are a handful of melodic patterns around which vocalizing and drumming is performed. Here, I imagine one Johann Sebastian Bach encountering the seis Andino (the basic pattern, in the minor mode) and the Seis Jibaro (a variant associated with Christmas carols).
phew!
Yeah, that’s a toughie!
Cameo 3 is a multi-generational picture of a house full of kids. It’s dedicated to my brother, sister, their kids and mine. Oh, and it’s based both on a Schumann piece and one of mine, for two pianos, arranged for one.
I’m in the room with these people — the loud, chaotic and wonderful Bayolo family. Trust me when I say it really is a great likeness.
Lovely!
The biggest piece in the cycle, Memories of Places Never Seen (Palimpset) is about ancestral memory. My paternal grandfather, whom I never met, was borh in the Spanish province of Galicia, not far from the pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela. This piece is a kind of variation set on three tunes related to Santiago or associated with Spain: the first, from the earliest notated polyphony, the second from Les folies d’espagne, and finally the Muneiras do Santo Amauro, which is a rowdy tune sung by pilgrims on the route to Santiago in the Middle Ages. Each tune gradually replaces the previous one, like on a palimpset.
so dreamy and gorgeous vicky!!!
(Erika barely touches the pedal in that performance. That just blows my mind!)
Cameo 2 is a little sentimental song for my grandparents, who are all gone now.
it was very touching <3
That was beautiful
The Self Portraiit with Adams and Andriessen (and Ginastera is Also there) is a cheeky reference to two of the most formative composers to my own work, especially early on. But it also references Alberto Ginastera, who is a composer I like, but I’m not particularly passionate about, but the second half of this movement reminds me of his piano writing. (The title, IYKYK, is itself a reference to Ligeti’s Three Pieces for Two Pianos.)
Love the dialogs among all the composers in that “room”!
First Snow is all about the first time I saw snow, at the age of 16, in Michigan. I’d also just left home to study at Interlochen. So this piece is both a nature picture, like the opening Cordillera, and a bit of nostalgic memory of leaving home.
I really liked that one very upbeat
First cameo: my mother was a pianist back in Cuba and her big piece was the Chopin Revolutionary Etude. Here, I rework the left hand pattern in that piece for a little portrait of my mother as a young girl wowing her juries with this fiendishly difficult piece.
The cameos, BTW, divide the piece into five sections or “books.” They’re each about a family story or a portrait of a family member and are very brief, in contrast with the main movements.
and all the different piano room vibezz
Isn’t that fun??
Yes!
i’m loving hearing all the movements! i dont know what to expect. !!
🙂
Beautiful piece Armando, and performance, Meg – a lovely contrast between the first two movements…
Thanks. I love how Meg plays that movement.
sad to have just missed Meg…
Thanks for joining us Gene!
Thank you Armando! I’m loving hearing all the movements and everyone!
Thank you Ken for listening! Such beautiful music!
So groovy!
Amazing
Thank you
I loved it!
Thanks, baby
The Fania All Stars were the house band for Fania Records, which set the gold standard for salsa music in the 1960s and 70s. Here they meet another big musical influence of mine, Igor Stravinsky.
Cordillera Oceanica= a picture of the archipelago of Puerto Rico rising from the ocean. Dedalo y San Felipe (Daedalus and St. Phillip) is about one of my earliest memories: flying kites as a young child with my father and brother, in the field in front of the Spanish fortifications in San Juan.
was wonderful
Thank you
So looking forward to hearing Memorias Vagabundas!
Score will be available AFTER the show. Any inquiries should be directed to [email protected]. Enjoy the music!!
Thank you, Daniel. I hope you enjoy it
Hello Armando: Thank you for composing Memorias Vagabundas
Thanks, Michael! Thanks for coming!!!!!!!
Hi! Excited for tonight! Thank you Tim and bang on a can , armando, and all the pianists performing tonight! ❤️
Starting now, if you press the play button you should see a Welcome page! That means you’re rolling and won’t miss a beat…
Looking forward to this amazing concert!
Hello, Tim. Thank you for presenting Memorias Vagabundas this evening.
Hello and welcome to the show!!
Always love listening to Vicky…
hi Tim – Megumi is trying to post but it says it’s awaiting approval….