MANHATTAN IN CHARCOAL
A Chamber Opera
JACOB MILLER
The poet Jacob Miller was a student of the Nobel Prize Laureate, Joseph Brodsky, and also worked with the American Poet Laureate, Robert Hayden. Jacob’s work has received a Hopwood Poetry Award and he has also been the recipient of support from the New York Foundation for the Arts for his collection, Selected Poems. Jacob has long collaborated with composers, including Gene Pritsker, Peter Jarvis and Dan Barrett, to name a few, on numerous projects that have been performed across the United States, bridging poetry and music. Jacob’s free-verse libretto, Manhattan In Charcoal, was written with composer Gene Pritsker in mind, to offer a new approach to opera.
Also a fiction author, Jacob was awarded a series of Artist's Grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts for his novel The Last Word. As an essayist, his work, Sublimity vs. Circulation, urging librarians nationally to more aggressively seek out new writers, was awarded in the Best of Lit. Series and published first in Library Journal and later by The Scarecrow Press.
As an editor, Jacob worked for the University of Michigan Press, Times-Mirror Publications, The Empyrea Literary Journal, and The Yorkville Anthology of New Writers, before opening Jacob’s Studio ( jacobs-studio.org ) in New York City and making his editorial services available privately. Over the past twenty years, Jacob has also been teaching Creative Writing at Hunter College, the Gotham Writers' Workshop, and the Scuola Internazionale in Italy.
GENE PRITSKER
Composer/guitarist/rapper/Di.J. Gene Pritsker has written over five hundred compositions, including chamber operas, orchestral and chamber works, electro-acoustic music and songs for hip-hop and rock ensembles. All of his compositions employ an eclectic spectrum of styles and are influenced by his studies of various musical cultures.
photo by Martin Vandory
He is the founder and leader of Sound Liberation; an eclectic hip hop-chamber-jazz-rock-etc. ensemble and co-director of Composers' Concordance. Gene's music has been performed all over the world at various festivals and by many ensembles and performers, including the Adelaide Symphony, MDR Symphony, The Athens Camerata, China Philharmonic Orchestra, Brooklyn, Shanghai and Berlin Philharmonic, Sinfonietta Riga, Orchester des Pfalztheaters, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, Anhaltische Philharmonie as well as by soloists such as Anne Akiko Meyers, Lara St. John, Sarah Chang, Kathleen Supové, Martin Kuuskmann and Simone Dinnerstein. He has worked closely with Joe Zawinul and has orchestrated major Hollywood movies, Including 'Cloud Atlas', for which he wrote additional music and composed his ''Cloud Atlas Symphony', to be released in 2015 .
The New York Times described him as "...audacious ...multitalented." Joseph Pehrson, writing in The Music Connoisseur, described Pritsker as "dissolving the artificial boundaries between high brow, low brow, classical, popular musics and elevates the idea that if it's done well it is great music, regardless of the style or genre".
Classical Music Sentinel wrote: "His expressive reach is so wide as to encompass everything from ethno/techno, rock/jazz fusion, classical opera and more, and it all seems to be effortlessly integrated within his anima and comes out through different facets of his persona. You could almost see him as a modern day renaissance man. “
He is the co-founder/guitarist of Absolute Ensemble and artist-in residence at the Austrian Outreach Festival. www.genepritsker.com