Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series is excited to present Kate Amrine’s “What we are doing to Ourselves” - a night of new music about home, identity, climate change, and more for the first concert of our 2025-2026 season. Building off last season’s theme of “Gathering Utopias,” we continue our focus on utopian visioning with performers Kate Amrine (trumpet),Ford Fourqurean (clarinet,bass clarinet), and William Lang (trombone) performing the music of Kate Amrine, Kurt Weill, David Lang and John Ling. Visual art by Bronwyn Roe.
The evening will feature Amrine's What are we doing to ourselves? Amrine describes this piece as “a call to action on environmental protection and features text from the farewell letter of LGBT rights lawyer David S. Buckel, a martyr who self-immolated in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in early 2018. The chamber work cobbles together elegant, nostalgic music on winds and strings, the sounds of a forest fire, and Amrine’s chant-like setting of Buckel’s letter; the movement abruptly ends with her distorted voice and a chilling quote, “My early death by fossil fuels reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
Small group and large group discussions inspired by the music and art will be interspersed between performances.
We invite you to join us in music, art and discussion as we work toward our utopian visions and talk about how to get there.
DECEMBER 12, 2025, 7:00 PM
SOUTH OXFORD SPACE
138 SOUTH OXFORD STREET
BROOKLYN, NY
Admission Suggested Donation
1/2 your hourly wage, pay what you think is fair, pay what you want. No one is turned away.
Kate Amrine
JULIE & ELIZABETH'S ANTI-CAPITALIST CONCERT SERIES - GATHERING UTOPIAS
Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series is excited to present the second concert of Gathering Utopias, our 2024-2025 season of concerts and reading groups designed to collectively consider and discuss our utopian imaginary.
March 9, 7pm, South Oxford Space, 138 South Oxford Street, Brooklyn. Music by Kate Amrine (trumpet), Ford Fourqurean (bass clarinet), Mara Mayer (bass clarinet), Roberta Michel (flute), Zosha Warpehan (Hardanger d’amore), Rocío Díaz de Cossío (cello), Julie Harting (composer). Visual art and text by Colleen Asper and Bronwyn Roe. Suggested donation: half your hourly wage (pay what you want, no one turned away). For three weeks before the concert we will meet to read and discuss material relevant to the theme of the concert. Everyone is invited to attend 1, 2 or all 3 reading sessions.
READING GROUP NIGHTS, 7pm, The Word is Change Bookstore, 368 Tompkins Ave, Brooklyn -
February 15: “Imaginary Cities” by David Graeber and David Wengrow
February 22: excerpts from Kristin Ross's The Emergence of Social Space and "Manifesto of the Paris Commune's Federation of Artists
March 1: TBD
We invite you to join us in reading, discussing, and listening!
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Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series
Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series is excited to present Gathering Utopias, our 2024-2025 season of concerts and reading groups designed to collectively consider and discuss our utopian imaginary.
The title of our series "Gathering Utopias" is inspired by Ursula LeGuin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” "Utopia" literally means "no place," signifying that utopia needn’t be a specific location or a singular concept where everyone lives the same way under a unified, abstract ideal. Rather than defining a single conception of utopia, we aim to gather multiple ideas and concepts, and place them in a carrier bag of utopian possibilities. As we work toward our utopian visions, our first concert will focus on defining our needs and desires in our utopias, the second concert will focus on imaging our utopias in detail, and the third concert will present musical vignettes of the utopias we created together.
We invite you to join us in reading, discussing, and listening!
First Concert of the Season
October 19th, 7pm
South Oxford Space, 138 South Oxford Street, Brooklyn
Our first concert of the series features the music of Jen Baker, Gemma Peacocke, Julie Harting, and Elizabeth Adams performed by Kate Amrine (trumpet), Jen Baker (trombone), Mara Mayer (bass clarinet), and Elizabeth Adams (voice). Also performing are Colleen Asper and Bronwyn Roe (words), with visual art by Colleen Asper. Remarks by Hagen Blix.
Admission: Suggested Donation - 1/2 your hourly way, pay what you think is fair, pay what you want. No one turned away.
READING GROUP
For several weeks before each concert we met to read and discuss material relevant to the theme of the concert at The Word is Change Bookstore in Brooklyn. The readings are attached. Our discussion questions for the concert are inspired by the conversations we had there.
Julie & Elizabeth's Anti-Capitalist Concert Series
New Music and Discussion for Political Imagining
Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series is a new music concert series founded by composers Julie Harting and Elizabeth Adams. The series started in 2015 in response to Occupy Wall Street.
We present music in a context that acknowledges our political, economic, and social realities. We are interested in programming music and conversation to stimulate thought and discussion envisioning an anti-capitalist future. The concert series is an experiment in sharing our legitimate questions about anti-capitalist struggle with our audience. Ultimately we would like our concerts to lead to collective action.
Probably the most unusual aspect of our concerts is that we ask the audience to participate in small group discussions, interspersing conversation between performances. We invite all of us to feel, think, and talk together about our future and collective action.
Previous concerts have centered around housing, wage labor, abolition, and income inequality. This year through a series of three concerts we will focus on collective envisioning of a post capitalist, egalitarian, free society.
