The use of cameras or recording equipment during the

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phones,

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Please note that late entry or reentry after 6:30 pm

is not permitted.

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, dc

Mailing address

2000b South Club Drive

Landover, md 20785

www.nga.gov

cover: Paul Stevenson Oles, 1971, National Gallery ofArt Archives

The Sixty-fourth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery of Art

2,563rd Concert

Alloy Orchestra

Ken Winokur, director,junk percussion, clarinet

Roger Miller, synthesizer, percussion

Terry Donahue, junk percussion, accordion, musical saw, banjo

Films from the Dada era with live musical accompaniment

Presented in honor of Dada

A joint presentation ofthe department of film programs;

the department ofteacher, school, and family programs;

the department of audiovisual services; and

the music department ofthe National Gallery of Art

Saturday, March 11, 2006, 4:30 pm

Sunday, March 12, 2006, 6:30 pm

East Building Auditorium

Admission free
Program

Films shown on March 11, 4:30 pm

The Thieving Hand

(Unknown director)

Dreams ofa Rarebit Fiend

Edwin S. Porter

Ghosts before Breakfast

Hans Richter

Symphonie diagonale

Viking Eggeling

Rhythmus 21

Hans Richter

Filmstudi

e

Hans Richter

One Week

Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline

Films shown on March 12, 6:30 pm

The Thieving Hand

(Unknown director)

Dreams ofa Rarebit Fiend

Edwin S. Porter

Symphonie diagonale

Viking Eggeling

Rhythmus 21

Hans Richter

Filmstudie

Hans Richter

Anemic cinema

Marcel Duchamp

Le Ballet mecanique

Fernand Leger, Dudley Murphy, and Man Ray

One Week

Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline

Ghosts before Breakfast

Hans Richter
The Musicians

Now in its fifteenth year, the Alloy Orchestra created its first original score

in 1991, for the film Metropolis. The three-person ensemble specializes in

found percussion instruments and state-of-the-art electronics. Working with

what is often an outrageous assemblage of peculiar objects, the orchestra

creates soulful music in a spectacular variety ofstyles.

Veterans of numerous film festivals in the United States and abroad, 

ensemble members Terry Donahue, Roger Miller, and Ken Winokur have

composed a new film score for each ofthe last twelve Telluride Film Festivals.

Alloy is currently touring with a score for the classic horror film Phantom of

the Opera, and next month it will premiere a new score for Rudolf Valentino’s

masterpiece The Eagle. In addition to working with silent films, Alloy has

been engaged to create soundtracks for numerous contemporary filmmakers

including Errol Morris, fane Gillooly, Ben Meade, and Shandor Garrison.

The director ofthe ensemble, Ken Winokur, has composed and performed soundtracks for Sesame Street, mtv, vh-i, and many independent

films and videos. The owner and chief engineer of C. L. Studios, he has

recorded with Birdsongs ofthe Mesozoic, the Concussion Ensemble, fellow

Alloy musician Roger Miller, Morphine, and Flal Wilner. Winokur taught

photography at Tufts University, the Boston Museum School, and Newton

North High School in Massachusetts. Fie is currently a visiting artist and

lecturer at Syracuse University, the Massachusetts College of Art, the

Boston Museum School, and the Cambridge School.

Along with Ken Winokur, multi-instrumentalist and singer Terry

Donahue shares the title of composer for the Alloy Orchestra. Donahue is

also the leader of an old-time country band, the Gillmans. He has recorded

with the Concussion Ensemble, Deception Bay, Emerald Vein, and Scanner

Darkly, and has performed with those same artists as well as with the Bad

Art Ensemble, fellow Alloy member Roger Miller’s No Man, Ottmar Liebert,

and Zero Zero.

4

Keyboardist, guitarist, and soundtrack composer Roger Miller performs

regularly with the Alloy Orchestra and with The Binary System, an avantgarde jazz/rock duo. He has recorded more than thirty albums since 1980

with such groups as Mission of Burma, Birdsongs ofthe Mesozoic, and

No Man. A number offilms for which Miller wrote the soundtrack have

won awards at the New England Film Festival. His music can be heard on 

the Comedy Central and UK Gold television networks and on Sesame Street,

as well as in Nintendo video games. Miller’s first television soundtrack,

The Wilding—composed for an antiviolence public service announcement

for MTV—won a Silver Hugo Award at the 1993 Chicago Film Festival.

He teaches guitar at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Cambridge

Center for Adult Education.

5
Dada Film and Music

In the 1920s, Parisian artists in numerous disciplines were eager to try new

media and technology. Moving pictures were still a novelty, even in sophisticated Paris, and Dada artists and musicians were fascinated with cinema as

a medium for new forms of artistic expression. “The cinema,” wrote Francis

Picabia in 1924, “must not be an imitation [of nature, or of other arts], but

an evocative invention, as rapid as the thoughts in our brains.” The silent 

films produced in the 1920s are quintessentially Dada: unpretentious, yet

mysterious and bewildering. The films were almost always presented with

live musical accompaniment, and the joining together of music and image 

gave rise to new forms of artistry.

Musicians who had made their livings in the 1920s performing with

silent films moved on in the 1930s to other venues and other specialties,

and the art died out for almost half a century. The Alloy Orchestra has

revived and enlarged upon this tradition by providing varied approaches to

accompaniment, from planned improvisation to carefully composed scores.

With these enhancements, the old silent films are no longer silent. When

heard at their best, the live accompaniments have an immediacy and

charm unmatched by even the most sophisticated recorded soundtrack.

In 1924 a composer closely associated with Dada, George Antheil

(1900-1959), composed Le Ballet mecanique, a highly rhythmic, often savage

score that combines the sounds ofthe industrial age with atonal music

and jazz. Except for two parts written for human pianists, the other parts—

including sixteen player pianos, four bass drums, three xylophones, a

tam-tam, seven electric bells, a siren, and three different-sized airplane 

propellers—are written in such a way that they are almost impossible for

humans to play and are better realized by machines. Antheil intended

the score to be played concurrently with the eponymous film by Fernand

6

Leger and cinematographer Dudley Murphy. (That film is included in

this concert with an original score by the Alloy Orchestra.) The work was

performed only twice in the composer’s lifetime and was not realized as

a soundtrack until the 1990s.

Visitors to the Dada exhibition in the Gallery’s East Building will be 

able to hear a ten-minute segment of Le Ballet mecanique, performed

entirely by digitally controlled machines, from March 12 to 29, at 1:00

and 4:00 pm on weekdays, and at 1:00 pm on weekends.