SUMMARY
- UCSB Arts & Lectures presents the world premiere of Everything Rises
- Commissioned by UCSB Arts & Lectures
- Created by Jennifer Koh and Davóne Tines
- World-renowned violinist Jennifer Koh is a forward-thinking artist dedicated to exploring a broad and eclectic repertoire
- Bass-baritone Davóne Tines blends opera, spirituals, gospel and songs of protest to tell a deeply personal story of perseverance that connects to all of humanity
- This presentation is part of the 2021-2022 CREATING HOPE programming initiative and Justice For All series
- Tuesday, April 12th / 8:00 p.m. Pacific / Campbell Hall
- $35.00: General Public / FREE for UCSB Students (Current student ID required)
- Health & Safety:Health & Safety: Proof of full vaccination (including booster, when eligible) is required for all attendees. Visit https://artsandlectures.ucsb.edu/SeasonFAQs/ for updates and further details.
- Tickets/Info: (805) 893-3535, www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu or (805) 963-4408
- This event includes an at-home viewing option (live stream only; no replay).
▶ ▶ ▶ Editors/Reviewers: Please include the full name of UCSB Arts & Lectures in all media coverage, including reviews.
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UCSB Arts & Lectures (A&L) presents the world premiere of Everything Rises, a new work commissioned by A&L and created by Jennifer Koh and Davóne Tines, Tuesday, April 12th at 8:00 p.m. Pacific at Campbell Hall. This presentation is part of the 2021-2022 CREATING HOPE programming initiative and Justice For All series.
Everything Rises is an original staged musical work about reclaiming agency through ancestral memory. Featuring music, projections and recorded interviews, it centers the need for artists of color to be seen and heard through connection and the creation of a new artistic space. Created by an all-BIPOC creative team, the project powerfully reclaims violinist Jennifer Koh and bass-baritone Davóne Tines’ narratives about who they are and how they became the artists and the visionary forces that created this work.
“A long-standing artist with A&L, Jennifer Koh is one of today’s most skilled violinists and a creative mind who makes surprising and potent connections through her music,” says A&L’s Miller McCune Executive Director Celesta M. Billeci. “We are proud to commission Everything Rises, her new project with another visionary artist, Davóne Tines. Koh and Tines are both commanding artists in their own right, lauded not only for their immense talent but also for using their art to push their fields — and our culture — forward. Arts & Lectures is honored to be able to support this powerful, complex collaboration that sheds light on our collective heritage as individuals and as a nation, bringing together our past, our present, and perhaps most poignantly, our future.”
Recognized for her dazzling virtuosity and technical assurance, Jennifer Koh is a forward-thinking artist dedicated to exploring an eclectic repertoire while promoting diversity in classical music. Davóne Tines, lauded as a “depths-plumbing bass-baritone” by The New York Times, is building an international career commanding a broad spectrum of opera and concert performance. Everything Rises is a multimedia collaboration born from the artists’ desire to understand themselves as the descendants of refugees and slaves and reveal a universal history shared by immigrants and minority Americans.
The performance will be followed by a Q&A with the artists.
ABOUT EVERYTHING RISES
When Jennifer Koh and Davóne Tines’s paths crossed, they saw in each other an ally struggling with the same issue: being an artist of color in a culture dominated by whiteness. Everything Rises is both a record and artistic product of that mutual encounter. It is about connection, resonance, and the creation of a new space. Their collective exploration leads them to their family histories, sharing stories of Jennifer’s mother Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh’s experiences of the Korean War and immigration to the U.S., as well as Davóne’s grandmother Alma Lee Gibbs Tines’s memories of anti-Black discrimination and violence. The piece asks what it would take for all this grief, frustration, and anger to finally be heard.
In the multiple years that Everything Rises has been in development, there has been a new surge of activism against racist violence targeting Black and Asian Americans. Inspired by the recent outpouring of support and solidarity across racial identities, the piece proposes a united front through music. Standing together, Jennifer and Davóne look out at the audience shrouded in a cloud of whiteness. Who out there will meet their gaze?
Everything Rises is produced and commissioned by ARCO Collaborative with co-commissioner UCSB Arts & Lectures. Learn more at www.arcocollaborative.org.
ABOUT JENNIFER KOH
“The excellence of Ms. Koh’s playing will surprise no one who knows the quality and integrity of her work.” The New York Times
Recognized for intense, commanding performances delivered with dazzling virtuosity and technical assurance, violinist Jennifer Koh is a forward-thinking artist dedicated to exploring a broad and eclectic repertoire, while promoting equity and inclusivity in classical music. She has expanded the contemporary violin repertoire through a wide range of commissioning projects, and has premiered more than 100 works written especially for her. Her quest for the new and unusual, sense of endless curiosity, and ability to lead and inspire a host of multidisciplinary collaborators, truly sets her apart.
Koh’s critically-acclaimed series include Limitless, The New American Concerto, Shared Madness, Bach and Beyond, and Bridge to Beethoven. Her most recent project, Alone Together was developed in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the financial hardship it placed on many in the arts community. This online commissioning project brings composers together in support of the many freelancers among them with the more established composers each donating a new micro-work for solo violin, while also recommending a fellow freelance composer to write their own solo violin micro-work on paid commission from Koh’s artist-driven nonprofit ARCO Collaborative. Initiated in 2018 at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, Limitless is a commissioning project that engages leading composer-performers, including Lisa Bielawa, Vijay Iyer, Missy Mazzoli, Qasim Naqvi, Tyshawn Sorey, Wang Lu, NinaYoung, and Du Yun, to write duo compositions that explore the artistic relationship between composer and performer. Performed by Koh and the composers themselves, these works appear on recording in September 2019, released by Cedille Records. The New American Concerto is Koh’s ongoing, multi-season commissioning project that explores the form of the violin concerto and its potential for artistic engagement with contemporary societal concerns and issues through commissions from a diverse collective of composers. Koh has premiered five concertos as part of the project: Tyshawn Sorey’s For Marcos Balter, premiered with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 2020; Lisa Bielawa’s Sanctuary, premiered with the Orlando Philharmonic in 2020; Courtney Bryan’s Syzygy, premiered with the Chicago Sinfonietta in 2020; Christopher Cerrone’s Breaks and Breaks, premiered with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 2018; and Vijay Iyer’s Trouble premiered at the 2017 Ojai Music Festival.
In recital, Koh continues to perform music from her Bach and Beyond series, which traces the history of the solo violin repertoire from Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas to 20th-and 21st-century composers; and her Shared Madness commissioning project, comprising short works for solo violin that explore virtuosity in the 21st century, written for the project by more than 30 of today’s most celebrated composers.
Born in Chicago of Korean parents, Koh began playing the violin by chance, choosing the instrument in a Suzuki-method program only because spaces for cello and piano had been filled. She made her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 11. She has been honored as “A Force of nature” by the American Composers Orchestra and Musical America’s 2016 Instrumentalist of the Year. Koh was a top prize winner at Moscow’s International Tchaikovsky Competition, winner of the Concert Artists Guild Competition, and a recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature from Oberlin College and studied at the Curtis Institute, where she worked extensively with Jaime Laredo and Felix Galimir.
Learn more at www.jenniferkoh.com.
ABOUT DAVÓNE TINES
“Davóne Tines is a singer of immense power and fervor.” Los Angeles Times
Hailed as an “immensely gifted American bass-baritone who has won acclaim, and advanced the field of classical music” (The New York Times), Davóne Tines is a groundbreaking artist whose work not only encompasses a diverse repertoire but also explores the social issues of today. As a Black, gay, classically trained performer at the intersection of many histories, cultures, and aesthetics, his work blends opera, art song, contemporary classical, spirituals, gospel, and songs of protest, as a means to tell a deeply personal story of perseverance that connects to all of humanity.
Tines is Artist-in-Residence at Michigan Opera Theatre — an appointment that will culminate in his performance in the title role of Anthony Davis’X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X in the spring of 2022 — and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale’s first-ever Creative Partner. His ongoing projects include Recital No. 1: MASS, a program exploring the Mass woven through Western European, African-American, and 21st-century traditions, with performances this season at the Ravinia Festival, in Washington, D.C., presented by Washington Project for the Arts, and at the Barbican in London. He also performs Concerto No. 1: SERMON — a program he conceived for voice and orchestra that weaves arias by John Adams, Anthony Davis, Igee Dieudonné and Mr. Tines himself, with texts by James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Maya Angelou — with the Philadelphia Orchestra and BBC Symphony.
Tines is a member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) and co-creator of The Black Clown, a music theater experience commissioned and premiered by The American Repertory Theater and presented at Lincoln Center. He has premiered works by today’s leading composers, including John Adams, Terence Blanchard, and Matthew Aucoin, and his concert appearances include performances of works ranging from Beethoven’s Ninth with the San Francisco Symphony to Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire with the Orchestre national de France.
Davóne Tines is a winner of the 2020 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, recognizing extraordinary classical musicians of color. He also received the 2018 Emerging Artists Award from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and is a graduate of Harvard University and The Juilliard School.
Learn more at https://alsoanoperasinger.org/
See A&L’s full 2022 lineup here
This is a moment that calls for Optimism, Resilience, Courage and Vision.
Santa Barbara needs Hope, and Arts & Lectures is uniquely positioned to respond.
A&L’s 2021-2022 CREATING HOPE programming initiative has already inspired our community with presentations by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, chef José Andrés and author Anne Lamott. We will continue to inspire, through shared experiences with thought leaders, creative problem solvers and arts visionaries who will guide us forward. CREATING HOPE programs strengthen human connection, promote emotional well-being, joy and compassion, and envision positive change. Learn more about the CREATING HOPE: https://artsandlectures.ucsb.edu/CreatingHope.aspx
ABOUT UCSB ARTS & LECTURES
Founded in 1959, UCSB Arts & Lectures (A&L) is the largest and most influential arts and lectures organization between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A&L annually presents more than a hundred public events, from critically acclaimed concerts and dance performances by world-renowned artists to talks by groundbreaking authors and film series at UCSB and Santa Barbara-area venues. With a mission to “educate, entertain and inspire,” A&L also oversees an outreach program that brings visiting artists and speakers into local classrooms and other venues for master classes, open rehearsals, discussions and more, serving K-12 students, college students and the general public.
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Everything Rises is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures. Presented in association with UCSB MultiCultural Center.
Supporting Sponsor: Annette & Dr. Richard Caleel
Made possible by gifts to the A&L Commission of New Work Endowment Fund.
Special thanks to our media sponsor KCRW.
Tickets are $35.00 for General Public / Free for UCSB Students (Current student ID required). For tickets and more information, call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535 or visit www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu.
This presentation is part of the 2021-2022 CREATING HOPE programming initiative and Justice For All series.
Justice for All Lead Sponsors: Marcy Carsey, Connie Frank & Evan Thompson, Zegar Family Foundation, and Anonymous.
UCSB Arts & Lectures gratefully acknowledges our Community Partners the Natalie Orfalea Foundation & Lou Buglioli for their generous support of the 2021-2022 season.
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