Placed Notes Opus 2, 3 & 4
2021-10-03 14:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | Staten Island Museum at Snug Harbor, 1000 Richmond Terrace, Building A, Staten Island, NY, 10301, United States
A spaced composition for 31 Performing Artists
Performance will take place on the grounds surrounding the Staten Island Museum
Join artist, composer, and trumpeter Volker Goetze and 31 other performers for an interactive musical experience. The audience moves through the compositions and forms to experience changing sounds from darker to lighter, major to minor, and descending to ascending sounds. The compositions are placed notes organized in space creating a musical tunnel or spiral with specific soundscape concepts – one parameter being the cardinal points: lighter keys in the south, darker keys and modes in the north, ascending sounds in the east and descending sounds in the West. The musicians will walk freely in space and improvise. The second composition creates a tunnel which the audience can walk through hearing a melody at the speed they choose to move. A third composition will position the musician in a spiral which the audience can walk inside or leave to experience other cords and sounds preorganized by imaginary diagonals.
The first Opus of “Place Notes” was performed at the “Supergau” festival in Germany, which brought contemporary art to the German countryside.

About Volker Goetze:
Artist, composer and trumpeter Volker Goetze arrived in New York 20 years ago. His contributions to the art world and city are multifaceted. He recently produced New York City’s first Sound Sculpture Walk (Sonic Gates), toured the globe for over 12 years with his transcultural African-Harp and trumpet duo, released multiple jazz albums including large ensembles and orchestral while also creating feature documentaries – uplifting and inspiring communities and fans. His recordings received highest honors as best World Music Release by Public Radio International and reached #1 on iTunes. Past performances include the Jazz Gallery New York, LA Festival of Sacred Music, Paris Jazz Festival, Jazz A Vienne, New Philharmonie Paris, Munich Opera Festival, and Panama World Music Festival. In 2017 Volker Goetze received the EtM Con Edison Composers’ Residency and composed a VR work about New York City’s mass grave on Hart Island titled ‘Unique Places of Death NYC.’ Currently he is working on a Community VR Performance about indigenous homelessness and genocide celebrating culture overcoming historic trauma funded by the McKnight Visiting Composer with the American Composers Forum.

Josephine's Cotton: The Revue by Skin Dance Company
2022-04-02 14:00 - 15:30
$20 per person
Travel back in time through song and dance to join Josephine Baker, the first Black American superstar, as she dives deeper into the experiences of her childhood and adult life. Through a series of reflections, she reimagines a world that could have existed during the Harlem Renaissance featuring icons such as Billie Holiday, Sam Cooke, Eartha Kitt, Carmen Miranda, Paul Robeson, Little Richard, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and more. This fictional portrayal captures the timeless stories of potent pioneers through dance and song.
Produced, directed, choreographed, and conceptualized by Tina Thompson
Performed by SKIN Dance Company

Yes, And Closing Event | Perfect Moment Review
2023-04-01 14:00 - 16:00
Collect, Share, Process
Free with Museum admission
Join Yes, And artists Day de Dada as they process the Perfect Moments that have been written on tags and collected through their installation over the past 8 months. It’s time to share, read out loud, and add the Perfect Moments Tags to the Day de Dada archives. Readings will take place throughout the first floor and sweet treats will be distributed as a thank-you to all the participants and Museum staff.

National Poetry Month: Readings by Ukrainian poet Vasyl Makhno with translator Olena Jennings
2023-04-29 13:00 - 14:00
Free with Museum Admission
Introduced and moderated by Prof Susan Smith-Peter, College of Staten Island/CUNY
Paper Bridge is the first bilingual collection by Ukrainian poet Vasyl Makhno. Translated by Olena Jennings, this collection of personal poems communicates the present day Ukrainian experience.
In Paper Bridge, Makhno is able to preserve an “enviable spiritual equilibrium…one that grinds out the music even in the toughest of days, a music that survived the twentieth century and keeps alive in the new horrors of the twenty-first,” in the words of Los Angeles Book Prize winner Ilya Kaminsky.
About the Author
Vasyl Makhno is a poet, essayist, and translator. He was born in Chortkiv, western Ukraine, in 1964. Makhno left Ukraine in the late 1990s, and, after a short time teaching and writing in Poland, ended up in New York, where he still lives. His early work drew on the rich seams of Ukrainian modernism, in particular on the ecstatic and eclectic genius of the interwar poet Bohdan-Ihor Antonych. His trajectory westwards was accompanied by a move away from modernist forms towards a simpler, more outward-looking sensibility. The poet’s eye turned to the strange, new landscapes around him. In New York, he caught the tail end of the activities of the New York Group of post-war Ukrainian émigré poets. His poetry contains fond nods in their direction, but as an immigrant of a different wave, he is more enchanted by New York than his predecessors, and more attuned to its paradoxical mix of local specificity and global reach. Makhno is today surely one of that city’s most dedicated poetic chroniclers, flitting between Chinatown markets and Brooklyn bars – watching, listening and recording. (Read more here)
Makhno is the author of fourteen collections of poetry and most recently the book of poems One Sail House (2021). He has also published a book of short stories, The House in Baiting Hollow (2015), a novel, The Eternal Calendar (2019), and four books of essays, The Gertrude Stein Memorial Cultural and Recreation Park (2006), Horn of Plenty (2011), Suburbs and Borderland (2019), and Biking along the Ocean (2020). Vasyl Makhno’s works have been widely translated into many languages; his books have been published in Germany, Israel, Poland, Romania, Serbia and the US. Two poetry collections, Thread and Other New York Poems (2009) and Winter Letters (2011), were published in English translation. He is the recipient of Kovaliv Fund Prize (2008), Serbia’s International Povele Morave Prize in Poetry (2013), the BBC Book of the Year Award (2015), and Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize “Encounter” (2020). Makhno currently lives with his family in New York City. (Read more here)

Musical Crossroads: Where Worlds Meet Volker Goetze Quartet Featuring Uthpala Eroshan
2024-03-02 14:00 - 16:00
Free with Museum admission
Join us for the long-awaited debut performance and new music by the Volker Goetze Quartet featuring world renowned Sri Lankan drummer Uthpala Eroshan. This experiment in cross-cultural collaboration brings together the traditions of jazz improvisation and Kandyan percussion to create a new musical vision born on Staten Island, and now ready to be shared with the world.
Volker Goetze Quartet is a recipient of a 2023 grant from Chamber Music
America’s Artistic Projects program, funded through the generosity of The
Howard Gilman Foundation.
