PUTNEY — On Tuesday, Oct. 6, The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Ferdinand are among the guests on Yellow Barn Patio Noise, moderated by Artistic Director Seth Knopp.
Taking a look back at Yellow Barn's July 25 concert stream, which included performances on Yellow Barn Music Haul at the Grammar School's playground in Putney, musicians will talk with audience members and one another about the program inspired by children's books, and the child in all of us.
“Researchers hypothesize that 'musicality may have preceded language in evolution, and language may build on the natural disposition for musicality.' I am comforted to know that music is an inextricable part of me, of all people who were ever babies; it existed in my body and brain before I had a choice,” wrote Yellow Barn alumna Annie Jacobs-Perkins in an introduction to this program.
Music, she continued, “was my sole form of communication for close to three years,” calling it “just one more communication tool in this inexplicable world which leaves so much to the imagination.”
Bookending the program are two works for narrator and instrumentalists: Stephen Coxe's The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Alan Ridout's Ferdinand.
Also included are works for two percussionists: Mark Applebaum's Gone, Dog. Gone! (a reference to P.D. Eastman's Go, Dog. Go!) and Fredrik Andersson's The Lonelyness of Santa Claus, and John Cage's Solo for Voice no. 57, interpreted through several well-known children's songs.
Joining Knopp will be musicians from the performance, including narrators Elaine Daiber and Lucy Fitz Gibbon, violinists Alice Ivy-Pemberton and Curtis Macomber, percussionists Ayano Kataoka and Eduardo Leandro, and soprano Lucy Shelton.
In addition, Yellow Barn Music Haul architect John Rossi will be present to speak about the genesis of Music Haul, which is celebrating its fifth birthday this month after hundreds of performances on playgrounds, street corners, city lots, and open fields, all the way from the Putney Community Garden to Baltimore, Dallas, Boston, Midcoast Maine, and New York City.