Coming up on NYC-Arts a profile of flutist Claire Chase, whose love for the instrument has made her champion of new music around the world.

Claire Chase: Density 2036 is the farthest thing from your grandmother's flute recital that I hope you can imagine.

A visit to the American Museum of Natural History and its revitalized Northwest Coast Hall Peter Whiteley: The great canoe is the largest surviving canoe of its size that we know of in the world.

It shows the coming together of those peoples who were in the distant past did not have a friendly relationship with each other.

In recent years, they've renewed that reconciliation.

Funding for nyc-arts is made foundation, Thea Petschek Jervolino Foundation, Jody and John Arnhold the Lewis "Sonny" possible by the Ambrose Monell Turner fund for dance, Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey brown Charles and Valerie Diker, the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Nancy Sidewater Foundation, Elroy and Terry Krumholz Foundation and Ellen and James S. Marcus.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the city council.

Additional funding provided by members of Thirteen.

Nyc-Arts is made possible in part by First Republic Bank.

First Republic Bank presents 'first things first.'

At First Republic Bank, first refers to our first priority.

The clients who walk through our doors.

The first step?

Recognize that every client is an individual with unique needs.

First decree.

Be a bank whose currency is service in the form of personal banking.

This was first Republic's mission from our very first day.

It's still the first thing on our minds.

And by Swann Auction Galleries.

Swann Auction Galleries.

We have a different way of looking at auctions, offering vintage books and fine art since 1941.

Working to combine knowledge with accessibility, whether you are a lifelong collector or a first-time buyer, or looking to sell.

Information at swanngalleries.com.

Philippe: Good evening and welcome to NYC-ARTS.

I'm Philippe de Montebello on location at the Morgan Library & Museum in mid-town Manhattan.

It is located at Madison Avenue and 36th Street, the Morgan began as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan, one of the preeminent art collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States.

Founded in 1906, the Morgan now serves as a museum, independent research library, music venue, architectural landmark and historic site.

The Morgan offers visitors close encounters with great works of human accomplishment.

Its collection of manuscripts, rare books, music, drawings and works of art comprises a unique and dynamic record of civilization, as well as an incomparable repository of ideas and the creative process from 4000 BC to the present.

Special exhibitions are also part of the Morgan's programming throughout the year.

"Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovannni Battista Piranes" highlights the Morgan's own collection of Piranesi's drawings.

It is the largest holding of the Italian artist's drawings and the exhibition is the most comprehensive look at the subject in more than a generation.

While his lasting fame is based above all on his etchings, Piranesi was also an accomplished and versatile draftsman, and most of his work was first developed in vigorous drawings.

Over 100 works on view reveal the breadth of his practice during the mid 18th century.

They include his early architectural designs, studies for prints, measured design drawings, sketches for a range of decorative objects, a variety of figural drawings and views of Rome and Pompeii.

These form the core of the exhibition, which also includes rarely seen works on loan from private collections.

In a letter to his sister near the end of his life, Piranesi told her that he had lived away from his native Venice because he could not find patrons there willing to support his "sublime ideas."

He lived instead in Rome, where he found international fame working not only as a printmaker and designer, but as an architect and archaeologist as well.

The exhibition is on view through June 4.

Claire Chase was enchanted by the flute since the age of 3.

Her love of the instrument has inspired a remarkable career in contemporary classical music.

A founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, she has been a champion of new music around the world.

She's also in great demand as a soloist.

Chase was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012 and awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 2017.

She is currently in the middle of a 23-year commissioning and performance cycle called Density 2036.

Begun in 2013, the project's goal is to create an entirely new repertoire for the flute - one that pushes both audiences' perceptions and the limits of the instrument itself.

In January, Chase launched her residency at Carnegie Hall as the Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair.

In addition to continuing commissions for her Density 2036 project, she celebrated her mentor, the late composer and performer, Pauline Oliveros, with a weekend of interactive events for families and people of all ages.

She returns to Carnegie Hall in the spring to appear as soloist with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Susanna Malkki.

The performance on May 9th will feature a flute concerto by Kaija Saariaho entitled "L'Aile du songe.".

Also on the program are two works by Sibelius.

Performances of new Density commissions will also continue through May.

A deeply committed educator, Chase is also a professor in the department of music at Harvard.

NYC-ARTS spoke with Claire Chase about four of the Density 2036 commissions completed in 2019.

Claire Chase: Density 2036 was an idea that I had in 2012, inspired by Edgard Varèse's seminal 1936 flute solo, called Density 21.5.

And my personal story with this piece is that my teacher when I was twelve or thirteen years old, a wonderful, wonderful man named John Fonville, came into my flute lesson and he put these two pages of music on the music stand and I said, "This is weird.

What is this?"

And he said, "Don't judge.

Do you want to hear it?"

I said, "Of course I want to hear it!"

So he said, "Okay kiddo, stand back."

I was like, I've never heard that before a flute performance before!

And he proceeded over the next four and a half minutes to completely blow my mind.

I had never experienced music and I'd never experienced the flute, I'd never experienced resonance that way.

Like whatever music that is, I don't know what we call that music.

But I want to do that music and I want to learn to transmit that kind of experience that John transmitted for me.

And the piece itself, I like to think of it as an anthem.

It is brash at times.

There's screeching, wailing sounds.

It's incredibly intimate and poetic and tender.

That was written in '36.

What are we going to be doing in 2036?

What will that piece be or what will that collection of pieces be that will take the flute from its previous identity and hurl it into the future?

What if I just decided to create an entirely new program of music every year between 2013 and 2036?

With the idea that we would have one and one- only one rule and that is that each year the cycle needs to be a complete departure from the last.

I've never imposed a theme.

It's very important to me that we're giving platforms to people from many different career stages, who come from many different musical backgrounds, who identify differently and most importantly who are pushing the art form forward.

It's a big team of people that that work collaboratively on this.

We really care for every sound and every action that we hope will give the audience an immersive experience that is the farthest thing from your grandmother's flute recital that I hope you can imagine.

The show opener, it's called Magic Flu-idity by Olga Neuwirth, an Austrian composer.

My duo partner is Nathan Davis who is an extraordinary percussionist, also a composer and sound artist.

So the piece is reduced from a flute concerto that Olga wrote for me last year based on Bach's Fourth Brandenburg Concerto.

And so people who are familiar with the Brandenburg Fourth will probably hear little nods and winks to the original Bach.

And so if you can imagine an orchestral force winnowing down to just one little desktop.

So Nathan has quite a complex job.

It's devilishly difficult, but playing with Nathan is just a joy.

♪ So Pamela Z is an absolutely phenomenal performer, electronic pioneer, composer, just hydra headed woman of so many trades.

I was nervous when I asked her but I was so delighted that she accepted.

I visited her over the summer in her studio in San Francisco.

We improvised a little bit.

I made some sounds, she had me record some things, and then she said, I want to put you in my little recording booth and just interview you.

And I thought OK maybe she's going to use this for a podcast or something like that.

Then I got the piece and the entire tape part is my voice but she constructed little melodies with fragments of my voice and the flute part musicalizes those naturally musical elements.

I've also coached with this wonderful theater artist, Sauri Sukara, who has helped me with the placement of the different stations - you see the different flutes onstage.

Big Bertha the contrabass flute has her own bed.

So Sauri has worked with me on telling this non narrative story.

I mean there are stories that I'm telling myself in my head but the audience isn't supposed to you know follow things from A to B and B to C. It's more like little vignettes that I think of as like dialogues with your previous selves.

And some of it's humorous and some of it is kind of demonic and dark.

♪ Phyllis Chen is another composer, performer, electronic musician, instrument inventor.

And she wrote this piece based on my heartbeat.

She strapped a stethoscope to my chest and used that sound to construct the electronic part.

♪ And then that electronic part drops out.

About halfway through the piece, a person comes up onstage and fixes a stethoscope to my live heartbeat and I play the remainder of the piece with whatever hummingbird heart is coming through.

To hear it pumped through a sound system and on subwoofers, it's quite a humbling experience.

Sarah Hennies is another absolutely incredible artist who works at the intersection of lots of different disciplines.

She's a beautiful percussionist in her own right and sound artist and composer.

And so this piece that she's written is part of a series that she's working on called the Reservoir series that deals with the idea of our unconscious as a kind of reservoir of feelings, many of which are unwanted and some of which are traumatic memories.

♪ The piece for us, it's called Reservoir II: Intrusion, involves the flutist in the middle of the space and five or more voices that move in and around.

And I'm so privileged to be working with this phenomenal young group Constellation Chor.

They are a group of philosophers, poets, movement artists, vocalists, theatre artists.

We are interconnected, whether we are conscious of it or not, so the more conscious we are of how interconnected we are, especially in a situation of heightened awareness which a performance is, the more interesting things get.

It's dangerous to be that open for the performer and for the listener.

And it's especially risky with so-called contemporary music, because we've never heard it before.

I love that high wire act.

I totally live for it.

♪ Now a visit to the American Museum of Natural History to explore the recently revitalized Northwest Coast Hall.

Located in the Museum's oldest gallery, it shows the creativity, scholarship, and history of the vibrant cultures of the Pacific Northwest.

Organized as a series of alcoves focused on the artifacts of ten Native Nations, the gallery presents more than 1,000 restored cultural treasures enlivened with new interpretation.

It features works such as 67 monumental carvings, the iconic 63-foot dugout canoe, and more.

The hall was developed with the help of co-curator, Haa'yupps, and with consulting curators from 9 Indigenous communities.

Curator Peter Whiteley is our guide.

My name is Peter Whiteley.

I'm the curator of North American Ethnology here at the American Museum of Natural History.

The Northwest Coast Hall goes back to the late 1870s when the first pieces started to come in.

At that time, there was a tremendous upheaval as a result of colonial processes, many Native people, came down under various smallpox epidemics, and the population was drastically reduced.

It was a very oppressive time for Native peoples.

So the Canadian government passed the, the Potlatch ban in 1884, which prevented people from practicing a great deal of their traditional ceremonial life.

One of the fundamental challenges of renovating the hall was of course, the fact that the collection is an historical collection.

The major part of the collection was completed by the early 20th century.

We've had First Nations people, Native people come through for many years, and they say, "Well, you, have some wonderful material, but it makes us look as if our culture has been gone for 150 years, and it's not.

We're still here."

That emphasis was certainly front and center, for our co-curator and for our nine consulting curators who definitely wanted to communicate the idea that these were living cultures.

And that while these were historical pieces, they informed a tradition that is still very much practiced in, in the present.

One of the things that we definitely wanted to bring out was this fabulous transformation mask, which is the celebration of a particular story of Siwidi, who's a Kwakwakaw'akw culture hero.

He's displeased his father and he's grabbed by this giant octopus who takes him down to the, to the bottom of the undersea world.

Siwidi spends four years there being given powers, and then eventually he comes back to shore guided by killer whales and partly transforming into a killer whale himself.

So that transformational process is represented in a variety of masks, so out as a sculpin, as the face of this, this large sea creature.

And then when it gets to a certain phase where as it's being danced, the sculpin;s jaws open like that, revealing a sea raven inside, and then it dances as a sea raven for a certain period of time.

And then finally, the sea raven's mask also opens, revealing Siwidi.

That kind of emphasis on transformation and the interrelationships with the supernatural and natural worlds is a key principle of a lot of ceremonialism all up and down the Northwest coast.

The great canoe is, is the largest surviving canoe of its size that we know of anyway, in, in the world.

It's 63 feet long and it's made out of a single, very large cedar tree.

And it's hand adzed shows influences from both Haíltzaqv and Haida on there.

The painting on the prow and the stern is definitely Haida.

The carvings there are, there are thwarts or benches on the top, which are in a distinctive Haíltzaqv design.

It shows the coming together of those peoples who in, you know, the distant past were, did not have a friendly relationship with each other.

In recent years, they've renewed that reconciliation.

Were delighted to have the Moon and Mountain Goat Chest as a focal element in the Haida alcove that comes from the village of Skedans.

This box is a chief's box, and it corresponds with the Chief Skedans.

The box represents some of the crests of Chief Skedans, so it has a moon face, a mountain goat, a grizzly bear.

The most interesting element is the mountain goat because there are no mountain goats on Haida.

And if you see the face, the background is a Chilkat pattern and design very similar to what you see in Chilkat blankets.

The tradition of Chilkat weaving comes from the Tsimshian and the Gitxsan on the mainland.

And so this represents the gift of certain privileges from a Tsimshian chief to Chief Skedans, which is represented in the Chilkat design.

So mountain goat wool, which is the major component of Chilkat blankets that was then traded to the Haida from the Tsimshian.

These are peoples who speak several different languages, which are not related to each other.

There are a lot of differences, but that process of exchange that that's represented by the Moon and Mountain Goat Chest encapsulates the Hall and Northwest Coast culture as a whole.

I hope you've enjoyed our program this evening.

I'm Philippe de Montebello on location at the Morgan Library and Museum.

Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.

Next time on NYC-Arts a profile of photographer and artist Edward Burtynsky, known for his Edward Burtynsky: The theme that underlies my work for 40 years.It really starts with a love affair for photography and large format cameras.

Coming out of the Edward Aston, Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter kind of tradition of a slow approach to subject matter and nature.

How do you take a photograph in nature and somehow transcend its kind of banality and that moves you to a sense of contemplation, mystery, wonder, all those kinds of things that I saw the early modernists doing.

And a look at the work of Winfred Rembert and his signature medium of carved, tooled and painted leather.

Produced during the last three decades of his life, the objects on view, including 7 that have never been displayed before take visitors on a journey through key chapters in the artist's personal history.

♪ Funding for nyc-arts is made possible by the Ambrose Monell foundation, Thea Petschek Jervolino Foundation, Jody and John Arnhold the Lewis "Sonny" Turner fund for dance, Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey brown Charles and Valerie Diker, the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Nancy Sidewater Foundation, Elroy and Terry Krumholz Foundation and Ellen and James S. Marcus.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the city council.

Additional funding provided by members of Thirteen.

Nyc-Arts is made possible in part by First Republic Bank.

First Republic Bank presents 'first things first.'

At First Republic Bank, first refers to our first priority.

The clients who walk through our doors.

The first step?

Recognize that every client is an individual with unique needs.

First decree.

Be a bank whose currency is service in the form of personal banking.

This was First Republic's mission from our very first day.

It's still the first thing on our minds.

And by Swann Auction Galleries.

Swann Auction Galleries.

We have a different way of looking at auctions, offering vintage books and fine art since 1941.

Working to combine knowledge with accessibility, whether you are a lifelong collector or a first-time buyer, or looking to sell.

Information at swanngalleries.com.