The popular idea of a “Liederabend” – an evening of song – goes back to Schubertiads and the flowering of German Romantic poetry and song in the 1800s. These musical salons provided the artists and ruling-class intelligentsia of their day opportunity to co-mingle ideas, music, and personal passions. Beginning in 2009, Beth Morrison Projects Creative Producer and PROTOTYPE Festival co-producer Beth Morrison and composer and National Sawdust co-founder and Artistic Director Paola Prestini took up the mantle of the Liederabend tradition, determined to capitalize not only on the form’s strengths of creative collaborative osmosis and community building but also imbue them with an egalitarian, forward-thinking spirit. These renewed twenty-first century Liederabends would marry composition, instrumentation, and thrilling feats of vocal talent while also adding performative visual and video art into the mix. Over the past decade, Prestini and Morrison have honed the 21c Liederabend concept with a series of “opuses,” each conceived to expand their aesthetic beyond sound with an emphasis on lighting, projection and video design as a crucial part of the work’s vision. Now, in response to the challenges of COVID and with the aim of reaching an even larger audience, Beth Morrison Projects and National Sawdust present 21c Liederabend, op. WORLDWIDE (digital), the fifth full realization of the project and the first to take place exclusively as a broadcast event.

21c Liederabend will be streamed via The WNET Group’s ALL ARTS television channel and streaming app as a digital concert beginning on June 27, 2021. This is the first program in a six-episode retrospective series titled Contemplations from National Sawdust, celebrating National Sawdust’s fifth anniversary, airing this summer on ALL ARTS TV throughout the tri-state area and streaming nationally. Contemplations offers six newly commissioned visions of the reinvention of the song form.

Learn More >