Pictures on Silence Awarded Grant for Debut CD

Pictures on Silence has received a grant from the Sparkplug Foundation for their debut CD, Voyage, which will be released in 2011. The CD will include works by composers Kathleen Bader, Charles Halka, Graham Lynch, Christopher Pierce, Andrew E. Simpson, and David Smooke.  Stay tuned for more details!

Pictures on Silence Commissioning Project 

Pictures on Silence, the harp and saxophone duo of Jacqueline Pollauf and Noah Getz, actively commission new works for harp and saxophone. This initiative allows them to bring new music to audiences, collaborate with composers, and expand the existing harp and saxophone repertoire. In the past two years, the duo has premiered more than 15 new works for harp and saxophone.

Pictures on Silence Wins Performance Grant

Pictures on Silence has been awarded an Encore Grant from the American Composers Forum. The grant will be used to promote performances of Australian composer Mark Oliveiro's Tanox for harp, saxophone, and electronics.

Orpheus and the Secret Road

Composer Andrew Earle Simpson is composing a new work for the duo entitled Orpheus and the Secret Road . In the composer's own words, this is a 45-minute theatrical multimedia piece which retells the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice through live performance, text, poetry, chant, movement, video, and electronic sound. In this fresh re-creation of an ancient story, the musicians of Pictures on Silence become the characters they portray, and as actor-performers lead the audience through their play of love, death, and danger. Orpheus, the fabled male poet with a lyre whose music could tame savage beasts, here becomes a female - and immobile - musician, her instrument the harp. Eurydice, the poet’s beloved female innocent, becomes Yuri, a young male student lost in a sudden tragedy, his instrument the soprano saxophone.

In the ancient myth, Orpheus travels to the underworld, carrying his lyre, to recover his lost Eurydice. The power of his music wins him the chance to bring Eurydice back to earth on one condition: he must not look back at her as they journey back to the light. In this modern version, Orpheus, unable to move because she is symbolically 'tied' to the harp, is totally separated from Yuri: she cannot follow him to the kingdom of shadows.

New video, still images, and texts together narrate the story from a bright beginning, through the central catastrophe, to a transformative end.

Created for Pictures on Silence, the dynamic new Baltimore-DC-based harp and saxophone duo of Jacqueline Pollauf and Noah Getz, Orpheus and the Secret Road explores the distance between life and death, ancient and modern, hope and despair.

Premieres for the 2011 - 2012 season include:
• Viridan Soliliquy by Anthony Lanman
• Weird Fires, a piece for harp, saxophone and electronics by Elizabeth Nonemaker
• 1: 1 by Washington D.C. based composer Eric Slegowski
• Endangered Dreams for harp, saxophone and electronics by Frances McKay of the Levine School of Music