Gather Hear Tour with Pianist Miki Sawada
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Visit Gather Hear Tour with Pianist Miki Sawada on the web!
About Gather Hear Tour:
Gather Hear Tour was launched in 2017 when pianist Miki Sawada drove around Alaska for three weeks with a piano in a van, performing 25 concerts in settings such as cafes, bars, lodges, galleries, schools, and parks.
Gather Hear Tour explores the idea of the piano as a central object of a gathering place – how we can’t help but be drawn to sing, play, and listen when there’s a piano in a room. It explores the social possibilities of classical music when taken out of a concert hall and into community gathering spaces. The goal is to perform free concerts in all 50 states in a quest to understand, document, and contribute to American life coast-to-coast through an artistic communal experience.
For Gather Hear West Virginia, Miki performs a new work titled “A Kind of Mirror” that combines classical music with participatory theater, reflecting her desires to make classical music more immersive, personal, and democratic. The music for solo piano and electronics, newly written by WV-native composer Brendon Randall-Myers, combined with standard classical pieces, will act as the pillars of the performance while audience members are invited to the stage to follow a theatrical prompt that inspire spontaneous poetic storytelling. Theater direction by Daniel Pettrow; the creation of this work is supported by a New Music USA grant.
About Miki:
NYC-based classical pianist Miki Sawada is dedicated to creating meaningful relationships through a communal listening experience in spaces small and large, music old and new. Miki has performed in North America, Europe, and Asia at venues and occasions such as: Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Museum of Natural History, Helsinki Music Centre, Oneppo Chamber Music Series at Yale, Toronto Summer Music Festival, Music on Main (Vancouver), Chicago Symphony Center’s Macy’s Day of Music, the Banff Centre, and radio stations WQXR (NYC), WFMT (Chicago), and KUAC (Fairbanks). In the summers, she serves as a faculty member of Heifetz Institute, Point CounterPoint Camp, and Berkshire High Peaks Festival. Miki holds degrees from Yale School of Music, Eastman School of Music, and Northwestern University.