30-second excerpt from LIFE Music: Concepts and Images by Frans Lanting; Music by Philip Glass; Choreography by Alexander V. Nichols; Produced by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.
For information about booking a performance of LIFE Music, please contact info@lanting.com
LIFE Music Calendar
Frans Lanting’s ORIGINS, a new multimedia production based on LIFE: A Journey Through Time, will be performed on October 21, 2008, at the official ceremony to inaugurate CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. To read the press release, please click www.LifeThroughTime.com/news.html.
Specially commissioned by CERN for this occasion, ORIGINS features the imagery of Frans Lanting and the music of Philip Glass in a multimedia show that celebrates the wonders of the cosmos and the glory of life on earth. Choreographed by visual designer Alexander V. Nichols, ORIGINS will be performed by Geneva's Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, led by conductor Carolyn Kuan of the Seattle Symphony. The show is a 20-minute adaptation of the original, one-hour multimedia production LIFE: A Journey Through Time, featuring Frans Lanting's photographs and Philip Glass's music. LIFE interprets the history of life on Earth in seven movements, from its earliest beginnings to its present diversity. The music for ORIGINS is comprised of the first and last movements from LIFE, paired with a visual score newly created for this event that includes images from CERN and from NASA's Hubble Telescope, in addition to the photographs by Frans Lanting.
About LIFE Music and ORIGINS
LIFE Music is an original multimedia orchestral performance that chronicles the story of life on Earth through the imagery of Frans Lanting and the music of Philip Glass.
The World Premiere performances of LIFE were presented by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in July 2006, with Maestra Marin Alsop conducting the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra. The East Coast premieres of LIFE were performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Marin Alsop, in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland in February 2007. The European premiere of LIFE was performed in Genoa, Italy in November 2007, as part of Genoa’s annual Festival della Scienza, with Carlo Boccadoro leading the Torino Symphony Orchestra. In June 2008 Carolyn Kuan led the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in a performance of LIFE for the avant-garde music festival “8 Days in June,” and in July 2008 she conducted the Napa Valley Symphony Orchestra when LIFE was presented during Napa, California’s annual arts gala, the Festival del Sole.
The original multimedia version of LIFE was produced by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in collaboration with Frans Lanting and his partner Christine Eckstrom, composer Philip Glass, arranger Michael Riesman, music director Marin Alsop, and choreographer Alexander V. Nichols. The Festival commissioned a score from Philip Glass which consists of seven sections adapted from works originally composed for smaller ensembles or solo instruments, and presented for the first time for full orchestra in arrangements by Michael Riesman.
ORIGINS features the first and seventh movements from LIFE: “Elements,” and “Planet of Life.” Philip Glass’s score for “Elements” was originally composed for chamber orchestra and featured in Christopher Hampton’s film The Secret Agent (1996). The music for “Planet of Life” first appeared in a short film by Peter Greenaway entitled Man in a Bath, one in a series of silent films for which Philip Glass composed scores that were performed live with the films by the Philip Glass Ensemble.
Frans Lanting has been hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time. His influential work appears in books, magazines, and exhibitions around the world. For more than two decades he has documented wildlife from the Amazon to Antarctica to promote understanding about the Earth and its natural history through images that convey a passion for nature and a sense of wonder about our living planet. Lanting's work has been commissioned frequently by National Geographic, where he served as a Photographer-in-Residence. In 2006, Lanting launched The LIFE Project, a lyrical interpretation of the history of life on Earth, as a book, an exhibition, an interactive website, and a multimedia orchestral performance with music by Philip Glass. The multimedia production of LIFE premiered in Santa Cruz, California, in 2006 and is currently touring North America and Europe. Lanting’s books have received awards and acclaim: “No one turns animals into art more completely than Frans Lanting,” writes The New Yorker. His books include LIFE: A Journey Through Time (2006), Jungles (2000), Penguin (1999), Living Planet (1999), Eye to Eye (1997), Bonobo (1997), Okavango: Africa’s Last Eden (1993), Forgotten Edens (1993), and Madagascar, A World Out of Time (1990). Lanting serves on the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund and on the Chairman’s Council of Conservation International, and he is a Trustee of the Foundation Board of the University of California Santa Cruz. Lanting has received top honors from World Press Photo, the title of BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award. He has been honored as a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in London and is a recipient of Sweden’s Lennart Nilsson Award. In 2001 H.R.H. Prince Bernhard inducted him as a Knight in the Royal Order of the Golden Ark, the Netherlands’ highest conservation honor.
Philip Glass, composer
Through his operas, symphonies, compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times. The operas—Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten, and The Voyage, among many others—play throughout the world’s leading houses. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as The Hours and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, while Koyaanisqatsi, his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may have been the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since Fantasia. Glass was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School, and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. He moved to Europe and studied with the legendary Nadia Boulanger, who also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones, and he also worked closely with sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble—seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer. In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than twenty operas, large and small; eight symphonies; two piano concertos; concertos for violin, piano, timpani, saxophone quartet, and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; string quartets; and works for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. Glass presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble.
Michael Riesman, arranger
Michael Riesman is a noted composer, conductor, keyboardist, and producer, and is best known as the Music Director of the Philip Glass Ensemble. As Glass’s long-time collaborator, Riesman has conducted live performances and recordings of many of his works, including the film scores The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time, Kundun (Golden Globe Winner), the Academy-Award-nominated The Truman Show, The Fog Of War, The Illusionist, and the Godfrey Reggio trilogy of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi. He was the producer and solo pianist of the Academy Award-nominated soundtrack for the film The Hours, and has released an album of solo piano arrangements of music from that film. Riesman has received two Grammy nominations as a conductor, for The Photographer and Kundun. He has also conducted and performed on albums by Paul Simon (Hearts and Bones), Scott Johnson (Patty Hearst), Mike Oldfield (Platinum), Ray Manzarek (Carmina Burana), David Bowie (BlackTie/White Noise), and Gavin Bryars (Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet). Riesman released his own album, Formal Abandon, which originated from a commission by choreographer Lucinda Childs. Riesman’s own compositions include the film scores for Enormous Changes At The Last Minute, Pleasantville (1976), and Christian Blackwood’s Signed: Lino Brocka. Riesman studied at the Mannes College of Music and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D., and has taught at Harvard and SUNY-Purchase. He has served as composer in residence at the Marlboro Music Festival and at the Tanglewood Festival.
Alexander V. Nichols, visual choreographer
Alexander Nichols is a Berkeley, California, native whose theater credits include designs for American Conservatory Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, Houston’s Alley Theater, Baltimore’s Center Stage, Boston’s Huntington Theater Company, the California Shakespeare Festival, the National Theater of Taiwan and New York City’s Culture Project. In the dance world, Nichols’ credits are equally impressive. In 1986 he joined the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company as technical director and has since designed scenery and lighting for fourteen pieces. He has served as resident designer for the Pennsylvania, Hartford, and American Repertory ballets, and as lighting director for American Ballet Theatre. His dance credits include work with numerous ballet companies from San Francisco to Singapore and collaborations with many celebrated choreographers. His design experience extends to live music, where he began by assisting lighting designer Harri Kouvenen in the garage-band days of the heavy metal bands Metallica, Exodus and Laaz Rockit. He has since collaborated with Kronos Quartet, The Paul Dresher Ensemble, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, and performance artist Rinde Eckert. Nichols created the exterior lighting design for the Sentinel Building, Francis Ford Coppola’s historic headquarters in San Francisco, as well as the courtyard fountain lighting at the Niebaum Coppola Winery in Napa, California. He was the structural lighting designer for “Circle of Memory,” an installation project created with Eleanor Coppola, Richard Beggs, Jean McMann, Elizabeth Macdonald and Robilee Frederick. His awards include four Isadora Duncan Awards, a Bay Area Critics Circle Award, and four Dean Goodman Awards.
Christine Eckstrom, project editor
Christine Eckstrom is a writer, videographer, and producer. She is the author of Forgotten Edens, and is a contributing author of numerous books published by National Geographic, where she worked as a staff writer for 15 years. Assignments have taken her to wild places on all seven continents, and for the past two decades she has worked with her husband and partner, Frans Lanting, on fieldwork from the Amazon to Mongolia. She collaborated with Lanting, to write and edit LIFE: A Journey Through Time (2006), and to realize LIFE as an interactive website, a traveling exhibition, and a multimedia orchestral performance with music by Philip Glass. She has also teamed up with Lanting to write and edit natural history and photography books, including Jungles (2001), Penguin (1999), Eye to Eye (1997) and Okavango: Africa’s Last Eden (1993). Her National Geographic Traveler story, “The Last Real Africa,” won a 2007 Lowell Thomas Award for Best Magazine Article on Foreign Travel. As a videographer Eckstrom documents the field assignments she produces with Frans Lanting. She has filmed and produced pieces for the National Geographic Channel and NGM.com on cloud goats in India, elephants of the Western Ghats, Hawaii’s volcanoes, wildlife in Zambia, albatrosses in the Southern Ocean, and chimpanzees in West Africa. Her coverage of chimpanzees was also featured in the 2008 NOVA-National Geographic television special “Ape Genius.”
The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music
The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music is America’s preeminent new music festival dedicated to orchestral music, and is the winner of the national A.S.C.A.P. Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music for twenty-five consecutive years, from 1982 to 2007. Led by Music Director and Conductor Maestra Marin Alsop and Executive Director Ellen Primack, the Festival has presented numerous world premieres by composers including John Adams, Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Lou Harrison, Keith Jarrett, and Arvo Part, and it has become the epicenter of modern symphonic music in the United States. Alsop also serves as the Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and is the first woman to lead a major American orchestra.
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the orchestra of French-speaking Switzerland, was founded in 1918 by Ernest Ansermet. The orchestra tours widely and has premiered many works of the Swiss composers Arthur Honegger and Frank Martin. With 112 musicians, the orchestra performs an annual concert in support of the United Nations as well as lyrical performances in the Grand Theatre in Geneva. It is supported by the Township and the City of Geneva, the Radio-Television Suisse Romande, as well as associations of friends and many sponsors and patrons.
Carolyn Kuan, conductor
Carolyn Kuan is Associate Conductor of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and has served as Assistant Conductor for the North Carolina Symphony and Baltimore Opera Company, and was an Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Ballet. As a guest conductor, Kuan has performed with the Baltimore Symphony, England’s Bournemouth Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, the Eastern Music Festival, the Festival del Sole, the Milwaukee Symphony the National Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony. Upcoming concerts include performances with the Mexico Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan, the Toledo Symphony, a return to the San Francisco Symphony and more than 35 concerts with Seattle Symphony in the 2008–2009 season.
Ms. Kuan is a keen advocate of new music, having served as Assistant Conductor for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music under Music Director Marin Alsop since 2003. She has also held the post of conductor of the Smith College Composers Ensemble and has led the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in readings and recordings of new compositions. Recently, Kuan led four world premieres at Merkin Hall in New York City for Music from Japan. The recipient of numerous awards, she was the first woman to receive the Herbert von Karajan Conducting Fellowship, an honor that resulted in her residency at the 2004 Salzburg Festival. Winner of the first Taki Concordia Fellowship, she has also received awards from the Women’s Philharmonic, the Conductors Guild, the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship, and the Susan W. Rose Fund for Music. Kuan has studied with Marin Alsop, Kurt Masur, Gustav Meier and Leonard Slatkin.
More about the story behind the making of LIFE Music, from the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music 2006 Program Guide:
Marin Alsop and Orchestra
“In the winter of 2004, photographer Frans Lanting approached the Cabrillo Festival’s Music Director and Conductor Marin Alsop with an idea. Already four years into a monumental project about the evolution of life on the planet, Lanting could envision his new body of work somehow merged with music. An admirer of Alsop at the Festival and of her previous theatrical and multimedia undertakings, he could foresee the power and emotional potential of such a collaboration. Alsop viewed his extraordinary photographs and immediately agreed, and the Festival undertook to create an original work that would merge art and science, photography and music, for Santa Cruz audiences and other orchestras around the world. Conversations quickly turned to composer Philip Glass’s music as an artistic complement, and Alsop extended an invitation. In early 2005, Alsop and Lanting met with Glass in New York to discuss his participation in the project and the commission was confirmed. Designer Alexander Nichols’s breadth of experience in lighting and scenic design in music, dance, and theatre, coupled with his resume of artistic archievements and his familiarity with Lanting’s photography, made him the uniquely qualified lynchpin of the artistic team—the person who would take still photographs and a musical score, convey an epic story, and bring them to life with the theatricality and sense of majesty they commanded.”
From the LIFE Music Program Guide, July 2006:
The WORLD PREMIERE performances of
Frans Lanting’s LIFE: A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME
Saturday, July 29, 8:00 pm Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
Sunday, July 30, 2:30 pm and 8:00 pm Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
Concept and images by Frans Lanting
Music by Philip Glass
Arranged for orchestra by Michael Riesman
Visual choreography and editing by Alexander V. Nichols
Featuring Maestra Marin Alsop,
conducting the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra
Introduction narrated by Peter Coyote
LIFE: A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME (2006)
Philip Glass (b. 1937)/arr. Michael Riesman (b. 1943)
l. Elements
ll. Beginnings
lll. Out of the Sea
lV. On Land
V. Into the Air
Vl. Out of the Dark
Vll. Planet of Life
The performance is presented without intermission, and is followed by a question and answer session with the artistic team.
Opening Night begins with an outdoor Pre-Concert Talk by Marin Alsop and a special dinner (ticketed event) served alfresco at the Civic Auditorium.
The Cabrillo Festival Orchestra under Maestra Marin Alsop will present the world premiere performances of a groundbreaking new multimedia work that merges art and science, photography and music. LIFE: A Journey Through Time, is the culmination of National Geographic photographer Frans Lanting’s six-year journey of photographic discovery that parallels new scientific insights about the evolution of life on Earth. The result is a lyrical interpretation of life on our planet, from its earliest beginnings to its present diversity. From prehistoric trilobites to giant tortoises, delicate jellies to spiny octopus trees, and from erupting volcanoes to shimmering coral reefs, LIFE: A Journey Through Time is a testament to the magical beauty and enduring miracle of life on Earth. Lanting’s breathtaking images will be exquisitely choreographed by visual designer and editor Alexander Nichols, to orchestral music by composer Philip Glass, who joins us for Opening Night. A Cabrillo Festival commission, the Glass score is comprised of seven sections adapted from works originally composed for smaller ensembles or solo instruments, and now presented for the first time in arrangements for full orchestra. Maestra Alsop will conduct the Festival Orchestra in front of a 48-foot projection screen filled with Lanting’s imagery, as Glass’ music creates the emotional underpinnings of this celebration of LIFE: A Journey Through Time.
Each performance will be followed by a Question & Answer Session with the artistic team, including Frans Lanting, Philip Glass (Saturday, July 29 only), Marin Alsop, and Alexander V. Nichols.
The World Premiere performances of LIFE were presented by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in July 2006, with Maestra Marin Alsop conducting the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra. The East Coast premieres of LIFE were performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Marin Alsop, in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland in February 2007. The European premiere of LIFE was performed in Genoa, Italy in November 2007, as part of Genoa’s annual Festival della Scienza, with Carlo Boccadoro leading the Torino Symphony Orchestra. In June 2008 Carolyn Kuan led the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in a performance of LIFE for the avant-garde music festival “8 Days in June,” and in July 2008 she conducted the Napa Valley Symphony Orchestra when LIFE was presented during Napa, California’s annual arts gala, the Festival del Sole.
Opening Night begins with an outdoor Pre-Concert Talk by Marin Alsop and a special dinner (ticketed event) served alfresco at the Civic Auditorium.