One of the world’s preeminent pedal steel musicians, Susan Alcorn performs at the historic Orange Show Monument in Houston, TX on April 23, 2022 as part of the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art's Spring 2022 Performance Series.
Video produced by Nada Brahma Media
Cameras: Rober Johns, Don White
Edited and directed by Don White
Audio recorded, mixed and mastered by Shannon Smith
"The Heart of Sultra," "And I Await The Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar," and "A Night in Gdansk" by Susan Alcorn, uma sounds (ASCAP)
"Adios Nonino" by Ástor Piazzolla
"Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus" by Olivier Messiaen
"El Cant Dells Ocells" (traditional)
Liberation Suite:
"El Arado" by Victor Jara
"Chaconne In D Minor" by Tomaso Antonio Vitali
"Por Una Cabeza" by Carlos Gardel
"El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido"
by Sergio Ortega/Quilapayún
"Hymn To Freedom" by Oscar Peterson
"Revolucionario" by Ástor Piazzolla
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About Susan Alcorn:
One of the world’s premiere exponents of her instrument, Susan Alcorn has taken the pedal steel guitar far beyond its traditional role in country music. Having first paid her dues in Texas country & western bands, she began to expand the vocabulary of her instrument through her study of 20th century classical music, visionary jazz, and world musics.
Though known as for her solo work, she has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Chris Cutler, the London Improvisors Orchestra, the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra, Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark, Nate Wooley, Ingrid Laubrock and Leila Bourdreuil, George Burtm Evan Parker, Michael Formanek, Zane Campbell, and Mary Halvorson among others.
In 2016, she was voted "Best Other Instrument" by the International Critics Poll. In 2017 she received the Baker Artist Award, and in 2018, along with saxophonist Joe McPhee, she was the recipient of the Instant Award in Improvised Music.
The UK Guardian writes, “As an improvisor and composer, Alcorn has proven to be visionary. Her pieces reveal the complexity of her instrument and her musical experience while never straying from a very direct, intense, and personal musical expression.”
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The Orange Show is a visionary art environment and a monument to community care, constructed singlehandedly over decades by a working-class, self-trained builder and artisan, Jefferson Davis McKissack Jr. (1902-1980).
A visual symphony of wagon wheels, ornamental metalwork, garden statuary, and dozens of hand-cut scrap metal birds painted in bright primary colors, the Orange Show amplified the message of good health espoused in McKissack’s mimeographed treatise “How You Can Live 100 Years and Still Be Spry” (1960).
McKissack died soon after the Orange Show’s long-awaited public opening on May 9, 1979 but in the decades since, the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art has preserved and programmed an expanding collection of visionary art environments, and now reimagines them within a contemporary art context through a program of site-specific installations and performances.
