Spring does not know summer.
Children do not meet the adults they will be.
Autumn does not know winter.
Men and women cannot imagine the elders they will be.
Nor what will happen when we die.

From Liberation, The Tibetan Book of the Dead
text by Douglas Penick

PRINCIPAL BIOS 

Philip Glass, Composer

Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times. The operas – “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha,” “Akhnaten,” and “The Voyage,” among many others – play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as “The Hours” and Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun,” while “Koyaanisqatsi,” his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since “Fantasia.” His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music -- simultaneously. He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland , Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer. The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops. There has been nothing “minimalist” about his output. In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than twenty operas, large and small; eight symphonies (with others already on the way); two piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble.

(top)

Douglas Penick, Librettist, Writer

s

After Douglas Penick graduated from Princeton University, he worked for The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He has been a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche since 1971, and has taught extensively. He is the author of The Warrior Songs of Gesar, the Canadian Film Board's series on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and along with composer, Peter Lieberson, wrote the texts for King Gesar and Ashoka's Dream. His poetry and articles have appeared in Cahiers de L'Herne, Parabola, Windhorse and The Shambhala Sun. He has also written and performed many theater pieces with Nina Rolle and painter Joan Anderson among others. His second book of Gesar songs, Crossing on a Bridge of Light and his detective story, The Secrets of Calligraphy will appear next year.

Works currently available include: The Warrior Song of King Gesar (Wisdom Publications, French translation- Editions Guy Tredaniel); the English Language version of the 2 part Video Series The Tibetan Book of the Dead ( NHK/National Film Board of Canada: Leonard Cohen narrator.  With the composer, Peter Lieberson, Penick wrote the texts for Three Songs (Deutsche Grammaphon); King Gesar, a one act opera based on the above book and premiered at the Munich Biennale (Sony Classical with Yo Yo MA, Emanuel Ax, Peter Serkin, Omar Ebrahim, et al.); and Ashoka's Dream, an opera which premiered at the Santa Fe Opera (excerpts on Lorraine Hunt Lieberson¹s Wigmore Hall/BBC Radio CD). A radio play, The Vermilion Stage was aired in Denver in the fall of 2006. Shorter pieces have appeared in the Shambhala Sun, The Widener Review, Parabola, Bombay Gin, Cahiers de L¹Herne (Paris), Porte de Singes (Paris), Windhorse, Pure Vision (Australia), among others.

Grants: Graham Foundation; Witter Bynner Foundation

Employment: Musuem of Modern Art; Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies; Food Restaurant; Spruce Associates; Naropa University; National Film Board of Canada; Santa Fe Opera Company.

(top)

Kenneth Green, Producer, Designer

Kenneth Green has over 30 years experience as a producer, artistic director and designer in film, theatre, concerts and multimedia production. He has extensive experience in producing and organizing cultural festivals and events, many with Asian themes. Principal/Producer for Windhorse Productions LLC, 1989 to 1998 in Halifax, Nova Scotia; 1998 to present in Boulder, Colorado. Green produced Secrets of the World an, award-winning world wisdom storytelling audio series, currently being distributed by Sounds True. His most recent productions have been: A Night on the Silk Road with Kitaro, a multimedia concert in Boulder, Colorado; Lama Dancers from Bhutan, at the Asia Society, NYC; Dust to Gold, an evening of Himalayan music and dance in Boulder, Colorado. He is currently working on The Tibetan Book of  the Dead – LIVE, a multimedia theater production, with original music  by Philip Glass to be performed in NYC spring 2009. He produced for Windhorse Productions and the National Film Board of Canada a prototype of BARDO, an electronic interactive journey based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Green is a founding director of Golden Sun Foundation for World Culture, a not for profit foundation whose mission is to join the wisdom of the past with the culture of the future. He was founding director and president of Centre Productions (1976 - 1985), and during that time produced several award winning documentaries including The Lion's Roar and Discovering Elegance. An early pioneer of multimedia, he designed nightclubs, art installations, organized festivals starting with the first BE-IN in NYC with Peter Max in 1967, and produced multimedia light shows in the 60's for such notable music groups as The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and The Byrds. Green traveled the Silk Road in 1968, hitchhiking from Rome to Calcutta.

(see detail bio)

(top)

Dhondup Namgyal Khorko, composer and Tibetan musician. 

Dhondup Namgyal Khorko was born at Pewar, Kham Derghe, Tibet. When the Chinese Communists invaded Tibet, he along with his family, escaped to Bhutan where he continued his education in general and Tibetan sacred music in particular with Professor Lama Tsultrim and Ven. Jangpa Tsondue. Later on, he went to India to join the Tibetan refugee school in Darjeeling, India. While he was at the school, he leisurely continued his Tibetan musical studies with such illustrious teachers like Lama K. Norbu for Tibetan oboe and Master Tsultrim Drabu for the Tibetan long horns, Dungchen in Darjeeling, India. He earned a great recognition for possessing an excellent caliber of learning from his two tutors who finally bestowed upon him certificates of mastering Tibetan oboe and trumpet. He performed and gave lectures on Tibetan secular and sacred music at many places including The Lincoln Center, the Manhattan School of Music, Rutger University, Newark Museum of N.J, The Asia Society, Tibetan Museum of Staten Island, the American Museum of Natural History, and the City Corp of New York City during the celebration of Pacific heritage of Americans. He along with Mr. Philip Glass did the soundtrack for the movie, Kundun about the life story of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, directed by Martin Scorsese. He and his brother Chime Dorjee were the guest artists with Philip Glass and his ensemble at Lincoln Center of New York City in 1998.  He also made the soundtrack for a documentary film, Tibet Hope filmed and co-produced by Emmy award-winning cinematographer, William Bacon III of Anchorage, Alaska.

(top)

Carl Skelton,  Multimedia Director

Carl Skelton is a multimedia artist/designer based in New York City, and the founding director of the Integrated Digital Media Institute at Polytechnic University, NYC. His creative practice includes public and private Collections from Tokyo to Tailinn; public installation projects, such as the 70 foot polychrome steel Still Life of 2006 in Toronto, Canada, and Glist, a projection piece for the Deutsche Bank, New York, in 2005; multimedia clients have included the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Abbeville Press, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. As director of the IDMI, Professor Skelton directs research and educational programs that develop a balanced synthesis of the creative, critical and technological aspects of new media.

(top)

John Vega,  3D artist and animator

John Vega a digital artist and educator living in Boulder, Colorado. A veteran of 15 years in commercial new media, Vega earned awards as a top interactive art director and motion graphics designer. His career clients comprise such fortune 500 companies as Apple, IBM, Motorola, and Sony. In the early 1990's working as Director of Multimedia for Leopard Communications John produced multimedia for live events traveling from Beijing, China to Basil, Switzerland. In 1995, John started his own interactive design business and began creating cutting edge interactive Web pieces for technology-based clients such as Sprint and Microsoft. In 2001, John sold his design business to Barnhart Advertising and changed course. He studied Fantastic Realism with Robert Venosa and began working with the Colorado University Boulder Fine Arts Department, pioneering the award-winning interactive net art piece FILMTEXT with Mark Amerika. FILMTEXT has had several high profile exhibitions including installations at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the American Museum for the Moving Image in New York. John joined the CU Fine Arts Department as an Instructor of Digital Arts and later with CU’s ATLAS program as a Senior Instructor teaching generative art and motion design. His own generative works, Wirescapes and Hyperstills, have been widely exhibited online as well as in traditional gallery spaces. Vega has also collaborated with net artists Keith and Mendi Obadike creating the interactive libretto for the net opera “The Sour Thunder” and has produced video art for several live events including concert visuals for electronic music pioneer Steve Roach. In addition to installations at major electronic art festivals including SIGGRAPH, FILE and 404, John’s net art can be seen in several online galleries and exhibitions

(top)

Romio Shrestha, Tibetan Thangka Painter

Romio Bahadur Shrestha was born into a Newar family in Katmandu in Nepal. When he was five years old, two Tibetan Buddhist monks arrived at his door, Romio, they said, was the seventeenth reincarnation of the master Tibetan T’angka painter Arniko and they gave to him a stock of valuable art materials, explaining that he would, one day, form his own school of painting. Romio Shrestha is a modern master of Indo-Nepali-Tibetan Buddhist traditions of enlightenment art. Romio Shrestha’s T’angka’s can be found in many of the great private and museum collections of the world. Romio is preserving and innovating the ancient wisdom and traditional craftsmanship, he founded a school in Nepal in 1968 and now into the 21st century he continues to bring the world of T’angka on into the future.     

.

(top)

The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche,  dharma advisor

The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche is acknowledged as one of the foremost scholars and meditation masters of his generation in the Nyingma and Kagyu schools of Tibetan Buddhism. He is known for his sharp intellect, humor, and the lucidity of his teaching style. Fluent in the English language and well-versed in Western culture and technology, Rinpoche is also an accomplished calligrapher, visual artist and poet.

Rinpoche is a prolific teacher and author. His teachings have been widely published in Bodhi Magazine and other venues. Rinpoche's latest books include Mind Beyond Death (Snow Lion Publications, 2007), Penetrating Wisdom: The Aspiration of Samantabhadra (Snow Lion Publications, 2006) and Wild Awakening (Shambhala Publications, 2003). Rinpoche has dedicated himself to the preservation of traditional buddhist traditions in the East, and to supporting a genuine transmission of Buddhism to the West.

Rinpoche's most recent book, Mind Beyond Death was just released to rave reviews. An indispensable guidebook through the journey of life and death, Mind Beyond Death weaves a synthesis of wisdom remarkable in its scope. With warm informality and profound understanding of the Western mind, The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche makes the mysterious Tibetan teachings on the bardos--the intervals of life, death, and beyond--completely available to the modern reader

(top)