IAC Commissions: "What the Silence Said" by Marie Howe

“Marie Howe's poetry is luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life. Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.”—Stanley Kunitz

Marie Howe, a featured artist in IAC’s 2017 PoetryFest, has published four volumes of poetry. Her work has also appeared in publications including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and the Partisan Review.

Guitar polymath Nels Cline’s recording and performing career spans jazz, rock, punk and experimental music with over 200 recordings, including 30 as a leader, to his credit. His accolades include being named as both one of “20 New Guitar Gods” and one of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” by Rolling Stone.

Born in Los Angeles in 1956, Cline and his twin brother, drummer Alex, formed a teenage rock band called Homogenized Goo, inspired by the groundbreaking psychedelic guitar work of Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, George Harrison, and Pete Townshend. Cline and his brother would eventually come under the tutelage of free jazz multi-instrumentalist Vinny Golia and bassist-pianist-composer Eric Von Essen, who played duets with Cline on the guitarist’s first recording, 1980’s Elegies. After a series of recordings with alto saxophonist Tim Berne (The Five Year Plan, 7X, Spectres) and with Berne’s mentor Julius Hemphill (1984’s live Georgia Blue), Cline released a string of recordings in the ‘90s by the Nels Cline Trio. His 1999 duet with drummer Gregg Bendian, Interstellar Space Revisited (The Music of John Coltrane), gained critical attention in the jazz world. A following set of releases through the 2000’s for the label Cryptogramophone, including with the Nels Cline Singers, would put him on the avant-garde map. Cline joined the band Wilco in 2004, appearing on their albums from 2005 on. 

His 2016 double album debut on Blue Note, Lovers, was called “quietly ravishing” by The New York Times, “stunning” by Downbeat and “wildly inventive” by Rolling Stone while his 2018 follow-up, Currents, Constellations, was called “vibrant, adventurous…a skronking, shredding, shapeshifting good time” by Stereogum.

Photo credit: Sean Ono Lennon

Yuka C. Honda (the C is for Cline) is a musician, producer, composer, and performer. Born in Tokyo, Honda spent part of her childhood in Dusseldorf, Germany, and in a small village in Denmark. She feels that having lived in different countries and learned different languages before her foundation was formed had a great influence on her music, in which her major interest is in the integration of elements that may initially seem foreign. As such, her work naturally defies the concepts of genres and borders. 

Residing in New York City since the mid-1980s, Honda is best known for the band Cibo Matto, which she co-founded in 1994 and with which she created a unique one-man-band sound by triggering samples "live." Honda released three solo albums (on the Tzadik label) and has produced recordings by Sean Lennon, Martha Wainwright, Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band, and Cibo Matto. 

Most recently, Honda has been performing and recording with CUP (a duo with Nels Cline with a recording on the Northern Spy label), with her solo entity Eucademix, and with ON/IN (a duo collaboration with Akio Mokuno). During the pandemic, Honda began creating visual works: filming, editing, and 3D animation, in addition to soundtrack composition. This work includes a music video for The Nels Cline Singers' “Beam/Spiral” (from their Blue Note album Share The Wealth), a mixed-media film that includes her 3D animations. Honda created the soundtrack to Yoriko Mizushiri’s short animation film Anxious Body, which was admitted to Cannes Director’s Fortnight and won Honda the Sound Award at the 2021 Fantoche International Animation Festival.

Honda has recorded and performed with a wide range of musicians, including Yoko Ono, Esperanza Spalding, Susie Ibarra, Cornelius, Bernie Worrell, Marc Ribot, Laurie Anderson, Sean Lennon, YoshimiO (of The Boredoms), and Nels Cline, among others.

Composer Paola Prestini is a leader in the global new music scene, collaborating with poets, filmmakers, and scientists in large-scale multimedia works that explore themes ranging from the cosmos to the environment. She created the largest communal VR opera with The Hubble Cantata, was part of the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19 initiative, and has written and produced large scale projects like the eco-documentary The Colorado (premiered and commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Houston Da Camera Series) and the opera theater work Aging Magician (premiered and commissioned by the Walker Arts Center and the Krannert Center, with performances at ASU, the New Victory Theater and San Diego Opera). Her compositions have been commissioned and performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barbican Centre, Cannes Film Festival, Carnegie Hall, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Kennedy Center, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Opera, among others. 

Prestini’s new opera theater work Old Man and the Sea, with Karmina Šilec and Royce Vavrek, will be premiered by Carolina Performing Arts and Arizona State University. Other upcoming works include the chamber opera Sensorium Ex (co-commissioned by The Atlanta Opera and Beth Morrison Projects for the Prototype Festival), the album release and immersive installation of Houses of Zodiac: Poems for Cello for Jeffrey Zeigler with film by Murat Eyuboglu and dance by Dai Matsuoka and Georgina Pazcoguin, and two new piano concertos: one for Awadagin Pratt and A Far Cry, and another for Lara Downes with the Louisville Symphony, Oregon Bach Festival, and The Ravinia Festival.

Prestini is the co-founder and artistic director of the Brooklyn-based arts institution and incubator National Sawdust. Her podcast about artistic leadership and social change, Active Hope, is a collaboration with the Kennedy Center and the Apollo Theater, co-hosted with Kamilah Forbes and Marc Bamuthi Joseph. As part of her commitment to equity for the next generation of artists, she started the Hildegard Competition for emerging female, trans, and non-binary composers, and the Blueprint Fellowship for emerging composers and female mentors with The Juilliard School. She was a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Sundance Institute Film Music Program Fellow, has been in residence at the Park Avenue Armory and MASS MoCA, and is a graduate of the Juilliard School.

Photo credit: Marco Valentin

Jeffrey Zeigler (cellist) has been described as “fiery,” and a player who performs “with unforced simplicity and beauty of tone” by the New York Times. The recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize, the Polar Music Prize, the President’s Merit Award from the National Academy of Recorded Arts (Grammy’s), the Chamber Music America National Service Award, and The Asia Society's Cultural Achievement Award, Zeigler is admired as a potent collaborator and unique improviser.

Zeigler’s career has led to collaborations and tours with such artists as Yo-Yo Ma, Tanya Tagaq, Philip Glass, Hauschka, John Zorn, John Corigliano, Laurie Anderson and Siddhartha Mukherjee. He has performed as a soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Royal Danish Radio Symphony, and the Ulster Orchestra. He was the cellist of the Kronos Quartet for eight seasons, during which time his collaborators included Henryk Gorecki, Steve Reich, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Tom Waits.

In addition to his own recordings, Zeigler has appeared with Norah Jones on her album Not Too Late on Blue Note Records. Zeigler can also be heard on the soundtracks for award-winning films La Grande Bellezza and The Fountain, as well as on-screen performing the music of Paola Prestini in the Golden Globe Award-winning series Mozart in the Jungle. Zeigler is featured in Prestini’s new cello opera, Old Man and the Sea.

The pandemic has forced humanity into an involuntary state of uncertainty that may last a long time. This is troubling, of course, but, as with any of life’s terribly sad moments, is not without redemptive possibility. We are challenged to find a new comfort level with uncertainty as a more constant companion. 

Like everyone, we at Irish Arts Center are entering a new phase of grappling with all of this. We still don’t know when it will be safe or allowable to gather in groups for live performing arts experiences. We continue to innovate our digital programming and prepare for our magnificent new building that awaits us, soon enough we hope. We develop scenarios and contingency plans. 

And we challenge ourselves to lean into the moment. For this, as ever, we rely on the artists. 

To that end, we have commissioned more than two dozen artists reflecting a range of perspectives across our artistic community, to create short works that respond to the idea of finding grace in uncertainty, to find meaning in the chaos, and perhaps even some redemption, as we recognize the fear and sadness we feel. 

In his work On the Transmigration of Souls, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic just weeks after 9/11, John Adams sought to create a “memory space” for those who suffered loss of life, of loved ones, of innocence, and to evoke the feeling “that we are all united by a common bond of humanity.” 

In a similar spirit, we wish to inspire a volume of artistic responses that might form a kind of tapestry of emotion, a chronicle of the moment, work that can be appreciated now and for the long-term.

The common bond of humanity unites these artists—and will carry us all through this moment.