WILLIAMS PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE TO PERFORM AT CLARK ART INSTITUTE

For Immediate Release
April 23, 2015

Williamstown, Massachusetts—The Williams Percussion Ensemble presents Alaskan composer John Luther Adams’s expansive and elemental Strange and Sacred Noise, a seventy-minute immersion in the deep resonance of drums, gongs, marimbas, and sirens, on Saturday, May 9 at 4 pm at the Clark Art Institute. The performance will be held outdoors around the reflecting pool. In the event of rain, the event will take place Sunday, May 10 at 3 pm.

Called “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker), Adams was the 2014 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. His contemporary masterpiece Strange and Sacred Noise is described by director Matthew Gold as “a celebration of noise as a metaphor for the turbulent phenomena in the world around us, and as a gateway to ecstatic experience.”

Grounded in the elemental violence of nature and the self-similar forms of linear fractals, the music is a convergence of sonic geography and sonic geometry. Each piece in the cycle is conceived as its own distinct and separate sound world, evoking the immediacy and presence of a place.

ABOUT THE CLARK

The Clark Art Institute, located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is one of a small number of institutions globally that is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. Opened in 1955, the Clark houses exceptional European and American paintings and sculpture, extensive collections of master prints and drawings, English silver, and early photography. Acting as convener through its Research and Academic Program, the Clark gathers an international community of scholars to participate in a lively program of conferences, colloquia, and workshops on topics of vital importance to the visual arts. The Clark library, open to the public with more than 240,000 volumes, is one of the nation’s premier art history libraries. The Clark also houses and co-sponsors the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.

The Clark is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Galleries are open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is $20; free year-round for Clark members, children 18 and younger, and students with valid ID. For more information, visit clarkart.edu or call 413 458 2303.

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