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ASHTON APPOINTED TO ORCHESTRA OF OUR TIME
Graham Ashton has accepted the position as Executive Director of New York's prestigious Orchestra of Our Time beginning June 1st, 2006. He will also be Principal Trumpet with the ensemble and begin the fall 2006 season as soloist in a new work by Alan Seidler called 'The Mystic Trumpeter'. The performance is schedulled for October 10th, in New York City's Merkin Hall.
About: The Orchestra of Our Time.
The Orchestra of Our Time is a 501c-3 organization founded by Joel Thome originally in 1954 as the Philadelphia Composers Forum, Inc. It was renamed Orchestra of Our Time (OOT) in 1963 and incorporated in New York State in 1978.
In 1978, OOT settled in the South Bronx forming a consortium with the South Bronx Community Action Theater and Bronx Museum of the Arts. The ensemble has since performed for communities throughout the US - often choosing alternative spaces in schools, colleges, universities, community centers, prisons, and even street corners. They have also given acclaimed performances in Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center Avery Fisher Hall, Beacon Theater, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Merkin Hall, National Gallery Of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, IBM Auditorium and the Guggenheim Museum.
Orchestra of Our Time began the first Community-in-Residence projects for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1974-88, which helped establish their reputation for reaching out to communities through imaginative programming and exemplary performances of contemporary music. The ensemble has commissioned over 250 new works from high visibility and little-known composers. Some well-known composers include: Virgil Thomson, Henry Brant, Manuel Enriquez, Lucia Dlugoszewski and George Crumb. In 1993, OOT collaborated with rock icon Frank Zappa on his recording ‘Zappa’s Universe’, for which they received a Grammy Award and sold over 125,000 copies worldwide.
In addition to the Grammy-Award winning ‘Zappa’s Universe’, the Orchestra of Our Time has received awards such as the Koussevitsky International Recording Prize from the International Music Critics Association, and Musical America’s Recording of The Month and Recording of the Year - for which they received an Honorable Mention.
From the outset, Orchestra of Our Time has collaborated with visual artists, and performing artists from other genres. Probably their most famous modern dance collaborations were with the Erik Hawkins Dance Company where they frquently performed the music of Lucia Dlugoszewski. Most recent collaborative visual arts projects include the works of Alexander Calder and Francois Gilot.
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