Anthony Braxton Falling River Quartet at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia on October 10

Friday, October 10 | 8pm
Settlement Music School
416 Queen Street
Philadelphia, PA

$35 General Admission; all ticket holders will receive free admission to the October 11 brass music concert.

Anthony Braxton Falling River Quartet
Anthony Braxton, alto/soprano/ sopranino saxophone + contrabass clarinet
Erica Dicker, violin
Sally Norris, piano
Katherine Young, bassoon



This performance is part of ANW's Free/Form: Composer Portrait series.

Please join us for the North American premiere of Anthony Braxton's Falling River Quartet.

“Falling River Musics is the name of a new structural prototype class of compositions in my music system that will seek to explore image logic construct 'paintings' as the score's extract music notation." --Anthony Braxton

Composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton (b. 1945) attended the Chicago School of Music and Roosevelt University. He is a founding member of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), formed the Creative Construction Company with violinist Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and recorded the seminal For Alto, the first-ever recording for solo saxophone. Subsequent collaborations included 'Circle' with Chick Corea and Dave Holland, Italian free improvisation group Musica Elettronica Viva, guitarist Derek Bailey, drummer Max Roach, and pianist Hank Jones. Braxton's steadiest vehicle during the 80s and '90s and what is often considered his most remarkable ensemble - was his quartet with pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser, and drummer Gerry Hemingway.

He is the founder and Artistic Director of the Tri-Centric Foundation, Inc., a New York-based not-for-profit corporation including an ensemble of some 38 musicians, four to eight vocalists, and computer-graphic video artists assembled to perform his compositions. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a tenured professor at Wesleyan University. His teaching has become as much a part of his creative life as his own work, and includes training and leading performance ensembles and private tutorials in his own music, computer and electronic music, and history courses in the music of his major musical influences, from the Western Medieval composer Hildegard of Bingen to contemporary masters with whom he himself has worked (e.g. Cage, Coleman). A seasoned master, Anthony Braxton's name continues to stand for the broadest integration of such oft-conflicting poles as “creative freedom" and “responsibility," discipline and energy, and vision of the future and respect for tradition in the current cultural debates about the nature and place of the Western and African-American musical traditions in America.

Anthony Braxton is widely and critically acclaimed as a seminal figure in the music of the late 20th and early 21st century. His work, both as saxophonist and composer, has broken new conceptual and technical ground in the trans-African and trans-European (a.k.a. 'jazz' and 'American Experimental') musical traditions in North America. Braxton's extensions of instrumental technique, timbre, meter and rhythm, voicing and ensemble make-up, harmony and melody, and improvisation and notation have revolutionized modern American music. Braxton's five decades worth of recorded output is kaleidescopic and prolific, with well over 200 recordings to his credit. He has won prestigious awards and critical praise, including the MacArthur 'Genius Grant' Fellowship, and is a tenured professor at Wesleyan University, one of the world's centers of world music.

The performance of Anthony Braxton's Falling River Quartet is made possible by a grant from the Philadelphia Music Project, a program of the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by The University of the Arts.