Beta Collide

May 9, Tibet Peace Concert

Brian — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 03:23:04 +0000

May 9, 2013
7pm, Soreng Theater
Hult Center for the Performing Arts
Eugene, Oregon
$25

Beta Collide performs a set of music by Lhasa de Sela in support of the Palmo Peace Center.

Brian McWhorter – trumpet
Molly Barth – flute
Bill Marsh – guitar
Toby Koenigsberg – keyboard
Sean Peterson – bass
Phillip Patti – percussion
Randy Rollofson – drums

A multicultural event celebrating peace, community, unity, and the arrival of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Eugene for the very first time! This benefit for the establishment of the Palmo Peace Center includes a stellar group of musicians with bluegrass legend Peter Rowan and Grammy nominated Tibetan Flutist Nawang Khechog leading a lineup joined by local artists Beta Collide, Priyo & Gypsy Moon, The Sugar Beets, In Accord, and Laura Kemp Trio. 100% of proceeds go to establish the Palmo Peace Center. Please celebrate with us.

Buy Tickets Here

Loops – Phillipe Hurel

Brian — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 05:03:13 +0000

Feb 2, 3 – Beta Collide & AnyWhen – PDX, EUG

Brian — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 20:00:38 +0000

Saturday, February 2, 2013 – with Douglas Detrick’s AnyWhen Ensemble
8pm, $10-20 suggested donation
Community Music Center
3350 Southeast Francis Street, Portland, OR 97202

Sunday, February 3, 2013 - with AnyWhen Ensemble
7:30 pm, The Jazz Station
124 W Broadway, Eugene, OR 97401

“Douglas Detrick is one of the brightest young talents to emerge in Oregon jazz lately.”
- Brett Campbell, Willamette Week

“Beta Collide is an ensemble that fans of new music should watch out for.”
-James McQuillen, The Oregonian

Dave Douglas’ Festival of New Trumpet, an annual multi-genre celebration in clubs and concert halls across New York City and the US, presents two cutting-edge, trumpeter-led ensembles in a double-bill concert at Portland’s Community Music Center that includes the Oregon premiere of Douglas Detrick’s “The Bright and Rushing World,” commissioned by Chamber Music America and the music of world music star Lhasa de Sala.

The Juilliard grad and former Meridian Arts Ensemble member Brian McWhorter, an exciting trumpeter working at the forefront of cross-genre, new music exploration, is the Professor of trumpet at the University of Oregon where he taught Douglas Detrick, a young trumpet player and composer who has since gone on to win prestigious grants from Chamber Music America that commissioned his “The Bright and Rushing World” a dynamic 10-movement work for his AnyWhen Ensemble.

Beta Collide will perform original arrangements of the music of Montreal-based world music singer Lhasa de Sala, “an early Lilith Fair star who sang lovely, haunting originals in Spanish, English and French before succumbing in 2010 to breast cancer at age 37” (Brett Campbell, 7.31.12 Eugene Weekly) with Brian McWhorter, trumpet; Steve Owen, saxophone; Toby Koenigsburg, piano; Phillip Patti, percussion; Sean Peterson, bass; and Bill Marsh, guitar. Learn more at betacollide.com.

Douglas Detrick’s AnyWhen Ensemble will give the Oregon premiere of the Chamber Music America-commissioned The Bright and Rushing World: Suite for Five Musicians, a suite of music composed on a single theme that received its world premiere in New York City in September as part of the Festival of New Trumpet Music. AnyWhen Ensemble features Douglas Detrick, trumpet; Hashem Assadullahi, saxophone; Shirley Hunt, cello; Steve Vacchi, bassoon; and Ryan Biesack, drums. Learn more at douglasdetrick.com/anywhen. Hear “The Bright and Rushing World” at douglasdetrick.com/advance.

March 1 – Music Today Festival, EUG

Brian — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 19:59:19 +0000

a Music Today Festival Event
Free admission!

turnEnsemble, featuring Beta Collide and Verbal Transcription

Fri, March 1, 8pm

Collier House at the University of Oregon

Beta Collide will perform graphic scores. Part of the biannual Music Today Festival

Click here and here for more information.

Mar 2 – Future Music Oregon

Brian — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 19:01:51 +0000

Music Today Festival – Future Music Oregon

Sat, March 2, 6:00pm and 8:30pm

Thelma Schnitzer Hall

Description: Molly Barth will premiere a work by Iris Wang.

Part of the biannual Music Today Festival http://music.uo regon.edu/musictoday/ Thelma Schnitzer Hall in the Frohnmayer Music Building $7 general admission, $5 students and seniors Tickets are available at the door or in advance from the UO Ticket Office, tickets.uoregon.edu or 541-346-4363.

http://music.uoregon.edu/events/index.htm

Mar 16 – March Music Moderne

Brian — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 19:05:09 +0000

Molly Barth, Flute and Dieter Hennings, Guitar

Sat, March 16, 12pm – 1pm

UO White Stag Building, 70 NW Couch St, Portland (map)

Description: Flute faculty member Molly Barth will perform with special guest Dieter Hennings. A concert in the March Music Moderne series. Admission free.

Thorn

Ri — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 03:25:13 +0000

The musical composition Thorn is aptly named. Its relentless spiking attacks are placed into the context of the destructive machinations of Sumpter Oregon’s historic dredge and its insatiable churning in its quest for gold.

Harmonies are foregone in favor of unrelenting phrases requiring Molly herself to act as the dispassionate cog in the endlessly turning wheels of uncertain resolution.

Molly Barth – Flute
David Lang – Composer

Bluedot Productions - Filmmaking

Filmed at Oregon State Parks dredge in Sumpter Oregon.

Here’s some production shots:

Molly Barth acknowledges the support of the Office for Research, Innovation and Graduate Education, University of Oregon.

Bruit!

matthew — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 05:37:06 +0000

Bruit - Dance. Music. Stories

November 9 and 10 – 8 pm

Gerlinger Annex, Dougherty Dance Theatre, University of Oregon

$5 students, $10 general admission.

Bruit, an evening staged by choreographer Shannon Mockli that explores memories, identities and vulnerabilty through music, dance and narrative. Filled with a stellar cast of artistic collaborators such as Brian McWhorter and Molly Barth from Beta Collide, Christian Cherry, Sarah Ebert, Ian Coronado, Mara Bateman, Melanie Meenan, and Noah Brenner the evening is made up of a variety of things such as a tango lesson, live music, luscious dancing, and story telling.

Nov. 9 & 10, 8 pm, Gerlinger Annex, Dougherty Dance Theatre, $5 students, $10 general admission.

Sarah Ebert, Mara Bateman, Melanie Meenan- dancers
Molly Barth, Christian Cherry, Brian McWhorter-musicians
Noah Brenner-tango teacher
Ian Coronado-multi media artist

solo 57 – immobility

Brian — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:47:18 +0000

http://soundamerican.org/solo-for-voice-57

A few years ago, various members of Beta Collide started to have children. As official members of the overly ambitious contemporary music and art world, this started to have a rather humbling effect. There certainly was a period of time when we fought the “limitation” of our new lives – trying to eek out those extra rehearsal periods, deal with babysitters’ canceling at the last minute, and few of us would like to admit that we sometimes had to get away from our kids to practice all that crazy music we’d become known for – but those efforts were not only unsustainable, they were also slightly disingenuous. And so, when we saw the last line in Solo 57 (“take a nap on or off stage”) we saw how we could contribute in a way that embraced our current lives. Taking a nap is deeply alluring. Getting our kids to take a nap is deeply alluring. And now that we’ve curated thousands and thousands of these naps for our kids, we’ve become experts of sorts in listening to the nuanced sounds that take place. We’re really sleep deprived and so, for this project…we took naps. What you’ll hear then is a montage of the sounds that happen while we, our kids and our pets are taking naps. Breathing, vocalizing, patting backs, rustling sheets, and, if you listen carefully enough, you’ll hear heart-beats and the subtle click of a mechanical aortic valve.

http://soundamerican.org/solo-for-voice-57
Beta Collide:

Molly Barth, Christian Cherry, Brian McWhorter, Shannon Mockli, Phillip Patti, Matthew Svoboda

with vocal performances by Rhys Cherry (1 year old), Antonio Patti (2 years old), Kyla McWhorter (2 years old) Oakley McWhorter (4 years old), Julian Svoboda (2 years old), Henry (6 month old dog) and Tenzin
(7 year old dog)

Eugene Weekly

Brian — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 19:56:03 +0000

Beta Collide gives Ed’s Coed a new spin

ARTICLE | OCTOBER 10, 2012 – 11:00PM | BY ALEXANDRA NOTMAN

Ambitious music projects are like catnip for Brian McWhorter. His latest, an assembled score with Beta Collide for the upcoming UO screening of the 1929 silent film Ed’s Coed, is no exception. “Seventy-four minutes of music. It’s wall-to-wall music because there’s no silence,” says McWhorter, the co-director of Beta Collide and UO associate professor of Trumpet. “It’s a tremendous amount of material — I like big challenges like that.”

This is not McWhorter’s first time on the silent film merry-go-round. While a student at the UO, McWhorter wrote a score for Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis and partook in the After Quartet, a student group that regularly accompanied silent films. As a musician in New York, McWhorter joined the Paradigm Ragtime Orchestra, which exclusively performed with silent movies.

The assembled score for Ed’s Coed, the first full-length film in the nation produced entirely by students, will mix century-old songs with McWhorter’s own original compositions. Before he could line up an hour and a half of music, however, he had to do some digging. “There is this great digital historic music collection at the library,” he says. “They have Oregon-centric songs there from as early as 1904.”

And McWhorter dug up some gems. In addition to the Oregon classic, “The Frozen Logger” (For no one but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb), the live music will include “When I was Young and Foolish” (for the main character, Ed’s, theme), “In the Moonlight with the Girl You Love” (There’s something in the moon-beams, dancing through the trees. Make her think of kisses, stirs her soul just like a breeze) and “She’s Sleeping ‘Neath Oregon’s Tall Pines” (The twilight’s fading fast, I am thinking of the past, of a homestead ‘mong the tall pines far away). Beta Collide may also perform “Mighty Oregon” with a new twist.

In preparation for the upcoming performance, McWhorter watched Ed’s Coed over 50 times. The film, about a naive young man — Ed — who leaves an Oregon timber mill to attend the University of Oregon, has left the composer tickled. There’s the student “traditions” (including spanking), the songs everyone on campus knew and, McWhorter points outs, there are some sneaky cameos by former UO track coach Bill Hayward and former Dean John Straub. “You would think the first feature film done by students would be a hack job,” he says. “This does not seem like a student film. I’ve seen a lot of silent films and this is remarkable in its quality.”

McWhorter, on cornet, will be joined by Beta Collide’s Lisa McWhorter on violin, Michael Ward-Bergeman on accordion, Kyle Sanna on guitar, Tyler Abbott on bass and Aaron Trant on drums.

Beta Collide play 7 pm Friday, Oct. 12, and Saturday, Oct. 13, at 180 Prince Lucien Campbell Hall, UO; free.