"Sharp, distinct,and vibrant."
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Rebecca Bryant Novak
Conductor
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Rebecca Bryant Novak | Conductor
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About
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“The music sounded sharp, distinct, and vibrant.”“The joy of the music shaped her conducting.”Südkurier
Rebecca Bryant Novak
is an assistant conductor of the Eastman Philharmonia and Eastman Symphony Orchestra and doctoral student at the Eastman School of Music. She is also the founder and artistic director of Ad Hoc, a flexible chamber orchestra based in Rochester, New York and named as a “Maverick Classical Music Ensemble” on ArtsJournal’s Sandow.Her recent guest conducting engagements include the Loudoun Symphony Orchestra, the Washington Metropolitan Philharmonic Association, the Sheboygan Symphony Orchestra, the New Conductors Orchestra, the Massachusetts All-State Orchestra, and the Penfield Symphony Orchestra.
She previously served as the Associate Conductor of National Philharmonic, where she conducted Summer String Institute, Montgomery County Public Schools 2nd Graders Concerts, and the Johansen International Competition Showcase Concert, and served as the assistant conductor for the National Philharmonic Chorale.She has studied at master classes with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Southwest German Philharmonic, Hradec Králové Philharmonic, the Romanian Chamber Orchestra, and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, among others, with teachers including Gerard Schwarz, Atso Almila, Johannes Schlaefli, Markand Thakar, Ken Lam, Matthias Bamert, Martin Sieghart, and Cristian Măcelaru. She has completed graduate studies in orchestral conducting at the University of Cincinati College-Conservatory of Music and the Peabody Institute. She currently studies with Tito Muñoz.Her innovative musical programs have won significant awards and support, including SoundWebs – a concert series and commissioning project exploring wordless music in surprising sonic spaces, supported by People’s Liberty, philanthropic lab of the Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile, Jr. U.S. Bank Foundation – and The Listening Lab – an educational concert program that teaches students intentional listening skills, which was selected for the Peabody Institute Dean’s Incentive Award and the Johns Hopkins Social Innovation Lab, with further support from the John J. Leidy Foundation and Eddie C. & C Sylvia Brown Foundation.A first-generation college graduate, she is committed to access in education and has served as a teaching artist for underserved students with Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s OrchKids, MyCincinnati, and the Peaslee Neighborhood Center.Her wife, Jessica Smithorn, is principal oboist of the Chattanooga Symphony, and her family is from Festus, Missouri. Bryant and Novak are her grandmothers’ maiden names.
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Rebecca Bryant Novak | Conductor
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@notorious.r.b.n
I hope you'll join me in transitioning away from Meta onto alternative platforms.
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Rebecca Bryant Novak | Conductor
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Do Not Look Away
Yoko Ono - Cut PiecePauline Oliveros - The Tuning Meditation
January 20th, 2025
Martin Luther King, Jr.,Day
Inauguration Day
Rebecca Bryant Novak, performer
Part of Twin Devotionshosted by Christ Church Rochester
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RSVP requested but not requiredDonations accepted for NOIRE HouseTea and talkback session to follow
Do Not Look Away
Be in touch, simply do not look away. Grasp nothing, hold nothing. There is just now, here, fresh, new, alive.
- Harada Tangen Roshi
Do Not Look Away is a performance of Yoko Ono’s iconic Cut Piece, which invites the audience to cut small pieces of the performer’s clothing to take with them, followed by Pauline Oliveros’ The Tuning Meditation, a participatory vocal work.Donations will be accepted for NOIRE House, a housing co-op in the city of Rochester, providing below-market-rate rents for women, families and LGBTQIAA+ folks, plus a transitional housing unit.Do Not Look Away is a participatory performance, and all audience members are invited to participate to whatever degree they are comfortable. Instructions will be provided, or you will find them linked here.
January 20th, 20256 pm, doors open 5:30Christ Church
141 East Ave.
Rochester, NYRSVP requested but not required
Yoko Ono - Cut PieceRebecca Bryant Novak, performerPauline Oliveros - The Tuning MeditationAll are welcome to participate in the performance of The Tuning Meditation regardless of training.Tea and talkback session will follow the performance.
Do Not Look Away is part of Twin Devotions, hosted by Christ Church Rochester. Christ Church hosts a community vigil the following evening, January 21st, at 6 pm, with doors opening at 5:30 pm. Rochester Philharmonic harpist Grace Browning plays contemplative music, and all are welcome to use the sacred time and space for prayer and meditation.
Do Not Look Away
Be in touch, simply do not look away. Grasp nothing, hold nothing. There is just now, here, fresh, new, alive.
- Harada Tangen Roshi
January 20th, 2025 | 6 pm, doors open 5:30
Christ Church | 141 East Ave., Rochester, NY
RSVP requested but not required.
Instructions
All audience members are invited to participate in the performance, to the degree they are comfortable, using the following instructions.Please enter the space silently. You are encouraged to sit on pews or on the carpeted area of the floor in front of the chapel altar.
You may take limited photos or video, but please do so respectfully and unobtrusively.❊At the sound of the first bell, Cut Piece will begin.At that time, you are invited to come forward and cut a piece of the performer’s clothing to take with you or to offer someone as a gift.The piece ends when all have participated or at the performer’s discretion.❊At the sound of the second bell, The Tuning Meditation will begin.Oliveros’ instructions are as follows:Begin by taking a deep breath and letting it all the way out with air sound.
Listen with your mind’s ear for a tone.
On the next breath using any vowel sound, sing the tone that you have silently perceived on one comfortable breath.
Listen to the whole field of sound the group is making.
Select a voice distant from you and tune as exactly as possible to the tone you are hearing from that voice.
Listen again to the whole field of sound the group is making.
Contribute by singing a new tone that no one else is singing.
Continue by listening then singing a tone of your own or tuning to the tone of another voice alternately.Commentary:
Always keep the same tone for any single breath. Change to a new tone on another breath.
Listen for distant partners for tuning.
Sound your new tone so that it may be heard distantly.
Communicate with as many different voices as possible.
End when everyone else does. It happens.
Sing warmly!❊At the end of The Tuning Meditation, a third bell will ring. This signals the end of the event.Please exit silently.
Please join us in the Guild Room for a tea and talkback session following the performance.
Do Not Look Away
Be in touch, simply do not look away. Grasp nothing, hold nothing. There is just now, here, fresh, new, alive.
- Harada Tangen Roshi
January 20th, 2025 | 6 pm, doors open 5:30
Christ Church | 141 East Ave., Rochester, NY
RSVP requested but not required.
Artist's Statement
When I do the Cut Piece, I get into a trance, and so I don't feel too frightened. There's several layers of meanings. So of course I was saying, hey, you're doing this to women, you know? We're all in it. But also, at the time, it's much better to just go with it. And that thought of letting women know that, you know, we're all going through this, but don't fight, let it happen. By not fighting, we show them that there's a whole world, which could exist by being peaceful.We usually give something with a purpose of ours. But I wanted to see what they would take. Also, I realized that when somebody's cutting you – geometrically, it's a line. But our body is a curve. And they're trying to cut the curve with a line, which is very strange. And that's what they do in life.There was a long silence between one person coming up and the next person coming up. And I said it's a fantastic, beautiful music, you know? Ba-ba-ba, cut! Ba-ba-ba, cut! Beautiful poetry, actually.-- Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono’s works can seem absurd or even silly from the outside looking in. Their radical simplicity, their mind-blowing questioning of assumptions, only show up when you actually experience them, and it can leave you with a sense of profound - you might even say sacred - surprise.After all, John Lennon first fell for Yoko, not on meeting her, but on experiencing her work. At the Indica Gallery in London, Lennon climbed a white ladder, as Ono’s Ceiling Painting invited the viewer to do. When he reached the top, he found the simple word, “yes,” printed on the ceiling in tiny letters.A few years ago, I organized a performance of Ono’s works, and it was one of the most memorable and powerful performances I’ve ever participated in. During Ono’s Touch Piece, my fellow performers and I - many of whom barely knew each other - followed her simple instructions to, “Touch each other.” During her Audience Piece for LaMonte, a few members of the sold-out crowd spontaneously made their way down to the stage and took over the performance. For a few fantastically tense minutes, no one had any idea what do do next. But what I remember most is what I can only describe as a “Christmas Eve glow” - that flush feeling of peace and goodwill - that seemed to permeate the room after the performance.
I’ve thought about performing Cut Piece for a long time. It’s one of Ono’s most iconic works, but it’s not for the faint of heart. I wanted to do it now for a few reasons. First, it felt like a powerful and timely work to perform on this Inauguration Day. With an incoming administration that has embraced violence against women, trans people, immigrants, people of color, and others, Cut Piece felt like the right kind of peaceful protest for the day.The second is more personal. Shortly after starting my doctorate at the Eastman School of Music last fall, I had to file a complaint against a faculty member for gender-based harassment. I was never in physical danger, and I was in the privileged position of insisting that issues of dignity, well-being, and equality be adequately addressed.It launched me into an exhausting, isolating, and often dehumanizing Title IX reporting process. It’s a system that harms more than it helps and does more to preserve destructive power dynamics than to dismantle them.To get the concerns addressed, I had to go increasingly “off-road,” making my story more and more public - and accepting the unpredictable fallout, whether I liked it or not. Even then, I got mixed results, and the matter remains unresolved.I've been struck by the fact that our culture and institutions still force those who experience harm - often marginalized by gender or race - to make the impossible trade of privacy for sympathy, exposure for recourse. Cut Piece - or one of it’s many layers, anyway - speaks to that phenomenon in a powerful way.
But Cut Piece needn’t be a one-dimensional work. Among other things, Ono describes it as a kind of offering, even a lighthearted one. In 2003, she said "When I first performed this work, in 1964, I did it with some anger and turbulence in my heart. This time, I do it with love for you, for me and for the world." In that performance, she invited the audience to cut a piece of her clothing - less than the size of a postcard - to send to someone they love.I'd also invite you to think of this performance as a gift. There's no denying Cut Piece‘s darker elements, particularly in the context of this day. Participating in the piece will be uncomfortable. It’s supposed to be. But while it’s natural to focus on what you are doing to the performer, it’s also worth considering what the performer is offering to you - with full agency, even if some of that agency is willingly, consciously surrendered.And if Cut Piece seems like a work for “solo performer,” The Tuning Meditation makes it obvious that there is no such thing. Everyone present is a participant.If you participate in Cut Piece by taking, you participate in The Tuning Meditation by giving - giving your unique voice to this space at this moment, and giving your deepest listening to each unique voice around you.These works are infinitely simple, infinitely complex, and experiencing them can provoke an infinite number of reflections, reactions, and insights. My hope is that you find in them whatever is most meaningful to you,
right here, right now.-- Rebecca Bryant Novak
Do Not Look Away
Be in touch, simply do not look away. Grasp nothing, hold nothing. There is just now, here, fresh, new, alive.
- Harada Tangen Roshi
January 20th, 2025 | 6 pm, doors open 5:30
Christ Church | 141 East Ave., Rochester, NY
RSVP requested but not required.
rsvp and donate
Do Not Look Away is a performance of Yoko Ono’s iconic Cut Piece, which invites the audience to cut small pieces of the performer’s clothing to take with them, followed by Pauline Oliveros’ The Tuning Meditation, a participatory vocal work which requires no special training.Do Not Look Away is a participatory performance, and all audience members are invited to participate to whatever degree they are comfortable. Participation instructions will be provided, or you will find them linked here to read in advance.
If you are attending this performance - or if you can't be there but want to show your support - please consider making a donation to NOIRE House.
You can add a note to your donation indicating it's from this performance
An initiative of Noire Collective, NOIRE (Neighbors Organized with Imagination for Resilient Emergence) House is a housing co-op in the city of Rochester, providing below-market-rate rents for women, families and LGBTQIAA+ folks, plus a transitional housing unit. NOIRE House provides supportive services in the form of life skills, mentorship and community resources that empower folks, increasing stability and quality of life.Flower City Noire Collective was founded in Rochester in 2016 by Tonya Noel Stevens and Kristen Walker. They founded FCNC specifically as a corrective to the transphobia, classism, and elitism they witnessed in existing mainstream activist movements, and to cultivate practices of self-care, accountability, and radical honesty. Their interventions include a free Black feminist mentoring program for local youth called “Petals,” cultivation of green space for and with Black urban growers (B.U.G.S.), regular reading groups and other consciousness-raising efforts including a reading and discussion group, and most recently the founding of Noire House at the corner of Flower City and Dewey Avenue on the city’s predominantly Black west side in 2019.