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Wednesday, 29 February 2012 @ 7:30pm
The Lab
2948 16th Street, San Francisco 94103
Composers: D. Edward Davis; John P. Hastings; Peter V. Swendsen; Jen Wang
Performers: Rootstock Percussion
A reception will follow the concert.
Tickets: $20 general / $12 students
800-838-3006/
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/218306
N.B. Limited availability; must be purchased separately from Festival tickets.
For more information: www.otherminds.org/fellowship
Other Minds Festival 17
All concerts take place at
Kanbar Hall @ Jewish Community Center of San Francisco
3200 California St., San Francisco 94118
Pre-concert panels @ 7pm / Concerts @ 8pm
Tickets: Single tickets (from $25-$45) and festival passes for all 3 concerts (from $64-$115) available @ JCCSF box office (415-292-1233) or online at www.jccsf.org/arts-ideas/performances/music/other-minds-17
Concert #1
Thursday, 1 March 2012
Øyvind Torvund: Neon Forest Space (2009)
Øyvind Torvund: Willibald Motor Landscape (2011) World Premiere Simon Steen-Andersen: Study for String Instrument #2 (2009)
Simon Steen-Andersen: Half a Bit of Nothing Integrated (2007)
Simon Steen-Andersen: On and Off and To and Fro (2008)
Simon Steen-Andersen: Study for String Instrument #3 (2011)
Performers: asamisimasa
Concert #2
Friday, 2 March 2012
Gloria Coates: String Quartet No.5 (1988)
Harold Budd: It's Only a Daydream (2011)
Tyshawn Sorey, Ikue Mori, Ken Ueno: Improv Set (2012)
Performers: Del Sol String Quartet; Harold Budd, Keith Lowe
Concert #3
Saturday, 3 March 2012
Lotta Wennaköski: Nosztalgiaim (2006-7)
John Kennedy: First Deconstruction (In Plastic) (2005)
John Kennedy: Island in Time (2012) World Premiere, OM commission
Tyshawn Sorey: Solo Improv Set
Ken Ueno: Peradam (2012) Video by Johnny Dekam; World Premiere, OM commission
Performers: Del Sol String Quartet; Magik*Magik Orchestra; John Kennedy
Composer Biographies
Harold Budd, a modern poet of the piano, has been playing music since his teens, yet it was not until his late 30s that he found his true voice as a composer. And it was only in 1978, with the release of his first record, The Pavilion of Dreams, that the work of this genial Californian began to find an international audience. In the early 60s, under the spell of John Cage and Morton Feldman, he produced an indeterminate, improvisatory music, moving on, as the decade progressed, to a much more spare and minimalistic style: pieces consisted of quiet drones or simple instructions to the performers. As the 70s began, Budd ground to an 18-month halt: "I really minimalized myself out of a career," he says now. The turning point came with Madrigals of the Rose Angel in 1972, a gently hypnotic work for harp, electric piano, celeste, percussion and lulling, angelic chorus—"my favorite instruments"—which he wrote for a university festival. Brian Eno heard a tape of Madrigals and offered Budd the chance to record this and other pieces from the hour-long Pavilion of Dreams cycle. In 1980, the two collaborated on The Plateaux of Mirror, the second record in Eno's Ambient series: Budd provided the electric and acoustic piano parts, and Eno the crystalline studio treatments. In 1986, Budd attracted well-deserved attention for his collaboration with The Cocteau Twins on The Moon and the Melodies. With By the Dawn's Early Light in 1991, Budd introduced spoken poetry into his music. While 1992's Music for 3 Pianos (with Ruben Garcia and Daniel Lentz) is again only instrumental, 1994's She Is a Phantom continues the music and poetry direction of Dawn's Early Light and marks a return to composing for ensemble.
Born in Wisconsin, Gloria Coates began composing and experimenting with overtones and clusters at the age of nine. She considers both Alexander Tcherepnin, who encouraged her composing from the time she was 16, and Otto Luening, to have been her gurus. Her studies took her from Chicago and Louisiana (with a Masters Degree in composition), to New York's Cooper Union Art School and Columbia University for postgraduate studies in music composition. While maintaining a residence in the United States, Gloria Coates has lived in Munich, Germany since 1969 where she has promoted American music by organizing a German-American Music Series (1971-1984), writing musicological articles, and producing broadcasts for the radio stations of Munich, Cologne, and Bremen. From 1975 to 1983 she taught for the University of Wisconsin's International Programs, initiating the first music programs in London and Munich. She has been invited to lecture on her music with performances in India, Poland, Germany, Ireland, and England, and in the United States at Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and Boston Universities. A paramount figure in modern symphonic form, Coates' symphonic works have been hailed by Ludwig Finscher as "the spirit of an expressionistic-apocalyptic-mystical world view." Coates' breakthrough came with the 1978 premiere of a work composed in 1973, lain Music on Open Strings, at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, a work for string orchestra in which the strings retune. It proved to be the most discussed work at the festival and throughout the European press. In 1986 it was a finalist for the KIRA Koussevitzsky International Award as one of the most important works to appear on record that year. She has written 15 symphonies and other orchestral pieces, nine string quartets, chamber music, numerous songs, solo pieces, electronic music, and music for the theater.
John Kennedy has forged a diverse musical career centered on new music performance and advocacy, through work as a composer, conductor, performer, and educator. Regarded as one of America's foremost proponents of new music, he has worked closely with some of the leading composers of our time, including Robert Ashley, John Cage, Philip Glass, Lou Harrison, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Steve Reich. Kennedy has developed a unique compositional voice which draws upon experimental traditions but which has proven extremely appealing to audiences and musicians. His works include opera, cantata, orchestral, and chamber music, with numerous vocal works and songs. His compositions have received performances throughout the world, at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Santa Fe Stages, and San Francisco's Other Minds Festival. In recent years he has pursued a parallel career as a conductor of music ranging from Mozart to Stravinsky to the present, serving as guest conductor at the Lincoln Center Festival, New York City Ballet, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, Arena Stage (Washington DC), the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and others. In 1987, when Kennedy lived in New York, he founded the ensemble Essential Music, which presented over 100 premieres of new work and toured throughout Europe and Japan. He founded SFNM (Santa Fe New Music) when he moved to Santa Fe in 1999, providing deep community immersion in new music via wide collaboration with museums and other performing organizations. SFNM has an annual concert series, a biannual festival, has launched the nation's first New Music Youth Ensemble, and conducts the New Mexico Young Composers' Project, a program offering awards to child composers age 11-18.
Drummer and composer Ikue Mori moved from Tokyo to New York in 1977 and shortly thereafter formed the seminal No Wave band DNA with Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright. When the group disbanded in 1982, she began performing improvisations and collaborating with artists such as Fred Frith, Kato Kideki, Marc Ribot, Tom Cora, and John Zorn. In 1990, she received an NEA grant to work with filmmaker Abigail Child, marking the beginning of several soundtrack projects for Mori. After winning the Prix Ars Electronics award in Digital Music in 1999, Mori began using laptop computers to create not only sounds but visual materials as well. This fascination with mixed media has more recently led Mori to incorporate animated cutouts from Japanese woodblock prints into her presentations. Mori has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the NY Electronic Art Festival/NYSCA. In 2007, she was commissioned to create a live sound track for the silent films of Maya Deren, and she has also received commissions from Montalvo Arts Center and WSR German radio program. In 2009, Mori served as curator for Unlimited 23, a three-day music festival in Wels, Austria. Her current groups include The Kibyoshi Project with Mark Nauseef and Koichi Makigami, MEPHISTA with Sylvie Courvoisier and Susie Ibarra, projects with Kim Gordon, PHANTOM ORCHARD with Zeena Parkins, and multiple projects with John Zorn.
Tyshawn Sorey is an active composer, performer, educator, and scholar who works across an extensive range of musical idioms. A percussionist, trombonist, and pianist, Sorey has performed and/or recorded with his own ensembles and with those led by Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Coleman, Anthony Braxton, and Wadada Leo Smith, among many others. His recordings as a leader - That/Not (2007), Koan (2009), and Oblique-I (2011) - have received critical acclaim from The New York Times, The Wire, NPR's Fresh Air, and Down Beat. After completing his undergraduate studies at William Paterson University, Sorey received a Master of Arts in composition from Wesleyan University and is currently pursuing doctoral work in composition at Columbia University. He has been commissioned by the Van Lier Fellowship, Roulette Intermedium, and John Zorn's New York performance space The Stone, where Sorey also served as curator-in-residence in August 2009. In addition to performing, he has also participated in lectures and master classes on improvisation, contemporary drumming, ensemble playing, and critical theory at the International Realtime Music Symposium in Norway, Hochschule für Musik Köln, School of Improvisational Music, Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg, Berklee College of Music, Birmingham Conservatory of Music, and Cité de la Musique in Paris.
Born 1976 in Odder, Denmark, Simon Steen-Andersen has lived and studied in Aarhus, Paris, Freiburg, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen and Rome. Simon Steen-Anderson attempts to "approach the human behind the instrument, because then music can be about everything that is most important: communication, being, fragility, and intimacy." In his most recent works, this takes the form of amplifying barely audible sounds at extreme levels, opening up a rich micro-world of new sounds. He was granted a year-long residency in 2010 under the DAAD program in Berlin, and the following year served as Composer in Focus during the Ultraschall Festival für Neue Musik. He has received grants and awards from the Danish Art Foundation, the Léonie Sonning Music Foundation, and the International Summer Courses for New Music Darmstadt, among others. In addition to compositions for soloists, ensembles and orchestra - some of which are scored for additional unorthodox instruments, devices and electroacoustic setups - Simon Steen-Andersen also creates audiovisual installations. His music often extends into the theatrical dimension through the performers' actions. He has taught composition since 2008 at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark, published articles in kunstMusik, Dansk Musik Tidsskrift, and Parergon, and serves as co-editor of AUTOGRAF, a Danish magazine for new music.
Øyvind Torvund (b. 1976) studied at Oslo's Norwegian Academy of Music and Berlin's Universität der Künste, while working for years as a guitarist in rock and improvising groups. Jazz is a point of reference in his Giants of Jazz (1999-2000), a composition in which he pays tribute to old masters like Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. In contrast, Power Art (2002) is reminiscent of the musical feel of hardcore power trios like Black Flag, while using a song by Henry Purcell as the piece's foundation. Torvund calls on his players to improvise, with instructions like game rules, leaving open the exact path the works will take. Improvisation also plays a role in a through-composed orchestral work like How Sound Travels (2005-06). The score is based on a guitar improvisation: the feedback, flowing waves, and fluctuating pitch are transferred to the symphonic apparatus. How Sound Travels is said to be of a piece with the sound color compositions of Giacinto Scelsi and György Ligeti. For Torvund, the avant-garde is an aesthetic surface onto which he projects materials from musical peripheries like ornament, the everyday, nature and popular culture.
Winner of the 2006-2007 Rome Prize and the 2010-2011 Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno is a composer, vocalist, improviser, and cross-disciplinary artist. His music coalesces diverse influences into a democratic sonic landscape. In addition to Heavy Metal sub-tone singing and Tuvan throat singing, he is also informed by European avant-garde instrumental techniques, American experimentalism, and sawari or beautiful noise, an aesthetic in traditional Japanese music. Ueno's artistic mission is to champion sounds that have been overlooked or denied so that audiences reevaluate their musical potential. In an effort to feature inherent qualities of sound such as beats, overtones, and artifacts of production noise, his music is often amplified. Ueno's music has been performed at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, the Muziekgebouw, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, and Steim. Ensembles and performers who have played his music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Frances-Marie Uitti, Alarm Will Sound, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. As a vocalist, Ueno specializes in extended techniques (overtones, throat-singing, multiphonics, extreme registers, circular singing), and has collaborated in improvisations with Joey Baron, Joan Jeanrenaud, Pascal Contet, and many others. His ongoing performance projects include collaborations with Tim Feeney, Matt Ingalls, Du Yun, and Lou Bunk. In recent years, Ueno has collaborated with visual artists, architects, and video artists to create unique cross-disciplinary art works. With artist Angela Bulloch, he has created tlineseveral audio installations (driven with custom software), which provide audio input that affect the way her mechanical drawing machine sculptures draw. Working with the landscape architect Jose Parral, Ueno has collaborated on videos, interactive video installations, and a multi-room intervention at the art space Rialto, in Rome, Italy. Ken is currently an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
"I've always been fascinated by the scarcely audible," says Lotta Wennäkoski. "I've never had any desire to compose very loud music...in trying to establish a sound of my very own, I've had the feeling I'll find it on the borders of silence." Born in Helsinki, Wennäkoski began her musical career as a violinist, and started composing while a student of Eero Hämeenniemi at the Sibelius Academy. Other influential teachers include Kaija Saariaho, Paavo Heininen, and Louis Andriessen. The first public performance of one of her compositions took place at the Musica Nova Helsinki Festival in 1999, and in 2003 she received a commission by Esa-Pekka Salonen, who conducted her piece's premiere with the Helsinki Philharmonia. Wennäkoski's stage work N! (Woman's love and life) was premiered at the Helsinki Festival that same year. Influenced by lyric poetry, Wennäkoski has set the poems of Eeva-Liisa Manner for mezzosoprano and chamber ensemble. Wennäkoski served as artistic coordinator for the Tampere Biennale Festival from 2008-10, and in 2008 released a recording, Culla d'aria, on Alba Records.
Fellow Biographies
D. Edward Davis writes electronic and acoustic music, usually both in the same piece. His work explores patterns and systems inspired by nature and mathematics, and he has a longstanding interest in slowly-developing nuances of timbre and tuning. In 2011, his compositions were released on two recordings: Phantasm (Music for Saxophone and Computer) by Eric Honour and Music for Violin by Erik Carlson. Davis has studied with Amnon Wolman, David Grubbs, and John Supko. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University and lives in Durham, NC.
John P. Hastings is a composer, sound artist and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. His current focus is on the creation of unique sonic environments utilizing novel methods to engage the audience. Many compositions and installations include the use of the harmonic series, field recordings, digital sound generation, microtones and aleatoric performance practice. Minimalist art theories and artists, especially Barnett Newman, Donald Judd and Michael Heizer, also heavily inform his music and practice. The formalist tendencies of these artists are projected into a musical landscape creating a logical and rationally satisfying whole. He is a founder of the web-based music journal The Experimental Music Yearbook, a co-head of the experimental music performance group, Ensemble 303, and a music curator for the Sound Series at Presents Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Born and raised in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, John is a graduate of the University of Virginia and has a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with Ulrich Krieger , Michael Pisaro, Mark Trayle and Wolfgang von Schweinitz.
Peter V. Swendsen explores the capacity of electroacoustic sound and digital media to challenge and extend our sense of place and engagement with performance. His music has been called “highly skillful” by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, “the sonic equivalent of ether” and “marvelous” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and “ethereal and arresting” by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is Assistant Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Swendsen spent a year in residence as a Fulbright Fellow at the NoTAM computer music studios in Oslo, Norway, where he worked on a large project based in soundscape composition and ecoacoustics. His subsequent compositions combine live instruments with electronics to shape an experience of place for the listener. He works extensively in collaboration with choreographers and has composed over three dozen scores for dance, including recent collaborations with Amy Miller (NYC/Cleveland) of GroundWorks DanceTheater and Mary Carbonara (San Francisco). Swendsen received his BM from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, his MFA from Mills College, and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. His research on soundscape composition and the relationship between electroacoustic music and dance has been presented and published in the US and Europe. Performances of his compositions in the past year have taken place in New York City, Boston, Montreal, London, Amsterdam, and Oslo.
Jen Wang's work has been featured at the Wellesley Composers Conference, the International Computer Music Conference, the Bang On A Can Summer Institute, the California EAR Unit Residency at Arcosanti, the Music ’03 and ’04 festivals, and the SPARK Festival. She has been performed by Lucy Shelton, SoundGEAR, the Del Sol String Quartet, the California EAR Unit, Onix Ensamble, Eco Ensemble, the New Spectrum Ensemble, and the percussion ensembles of Mannes College, SUNY Purchase, and the University of California, Davis. Jen has been commissioned to write a chamber work for Talea for the 2012 Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, as one of the recipients of the Staubach Honoraria. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony of the Arts. She is a graduate of Carleton College (B.A.). and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (M.M.). Currently, Jen is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has been awarded the Eisner Award in Music and the Nicola de Lorenzo Prize in Music Composition. She is founder and co-director of Wild Rumpus, a San Francisco music collective dedicated to the collaborative development of new work by emerging composers.
About the Festival
Now in its 17th year, the annual Other Minds Festival of New Music invites nine of the most innovative artists from around the world to the San Francisco Bay Area for a four-day residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California, and three days of concerts, panel discussions, and symposia in San Francisco. Known for featuring illustrious guest performers, a significant number of world premieres, and productions that incorporate new technologies and multidisciplinary collaborations, the Festival brings together composers who represent all points of the musical spectrum and push the creative possibilities of their respective disciplines. The Festival has also recently added a Fellowship program and concert for emerging composers, helping to nurture the most promising "other minds" of the future. The Los Angeles Times has called the OM Festival “the premier new music festival on the West Coast.”
About Other Minds
Other Minds, a not-for-profit organization devoted to supporting new music, was founded in 1992 by Charles Amirkhanian and art curator/film producer Jim Newman. In addition to presenting concerts, mounting its annual festival, recording at least one CD per year and expanding the radiOM.org database, Other Minds also sponsors film screenings each season, the most recent being the presentation in September 2011 of an entire evening of rare films by and interviews with George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Ben Vautier, Nam June Paik and more as part of a three-event celebration of the historic influence of Fluxus on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. In 2012, Other Minds will release a new chamber music recording, Scenes from a Séance, an album of compositions, including three world premieres, by Henry Cowell, George Antheil, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Alan Hovhaness and eleven others, performed by violinist Kate Stenberg and pianist Eva Maria Zimmermann. Other Minds will also issue the complete works of Carl Ruggles for the first time on CD. The recordings, featuring the Buffalo Philharmonic under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, were originally released on Columbia Masterworks in 1980, have never been issued on CD, and have been out of print for decades.