Following the truncated, partial premiere last Saturday as part of the 2012 Avant Music Festival, William Lang and I are very excited to present the Full World Premiere of The Third Pillar in Primal Imperfect Palindrome with The Souvenir of The Second Pillar, The Floating Cirrus over the Pumping Slush, and The Highest Moving Chordal Motif from Apparitions of The Four Pillars on Monday, February 27th, 2012, at 8PM at The Wild Project.
Anyone that was at the performance on the 18th, is invited back as our guests to this premiere, and I’m hoping that this last minute change in schedule will allow even more people to experience Will’s transcendent playing as it was intended.
This post is the final in a series examining each night of the 2012 Avant Music Festival through program notes, thoughts, video, sound, &c.
Saturday, February 18, 8:00 PM –Randy Gibson’s The Third Pillar in Primal Imperfect Palindrome with The Souvenir of The Second Pillar, The Floating Cirrus over the Pumping Slush, and The Highest Moving Chordal Motif from Apparitions of The Four Pillars
- The Wild Project – 195 East 3rd Street Tickets at the door will be $15($10)
Tonight marks the World Premiere of the latest installment of Randy Gibson’s drone-epic, Apparitions of The Four Pillars. The World Premiere of a Three Hour Trombone solo written for and performed by William Lang. With video created by Oscar Henriquez and lighting design by Kryssy Wright.
This post is the third in a series examining each night of the 2012 Avant Music Festival through program notes, thoughts, video, sound, &c.
Friday, February 17, 8:00 PM – Eve Beglarian’s Songs From The River and Elsewhere
- The Wild Project – 195 East 3rd Street Tickets On Sale Now – $12($8 students) discounted online presale
there are no fees for buying tickets online, tickets at the door will be $15($10)
Wednesday night saw a beautiful staging of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire paired with Jenny Olivia Johnson’s remarkable An After School Vespers: 4 Songs on Youth/Sex/Death – There will be more images and documentation coming of that evening soon, but in the mean time, here’s a great review by Brian Rosen.
On Friday night, February 17th, The Avant Music Festival presents Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, Vicky Chow, violinist Ana Milosavljevic, and singer/composer Eve Beglarian in a full evening of Beglarian’s electroacoustic music, featuring songs from the epic River Project alongside other significant songs from the composer.
These two nights share a common thread featuring vocal works, mixed with electronics and video to create a full audio-visual experience.
This post is the second in a series examining each night of the 2012 Avant Music Festival through program notes, thoughts, video, sound, &c.
Saturday, February 11, 4:00/5:30/8:00 PM – Cage, Unlocked: Celebrating John Cage at 100
- The Wild Project – 195 East 3rd Street Tickets On Sale Now – $12($8 students) discounted online presale
there are no fees for buying tickets online, tickets at the door will be $15($10)
The Avant Music Festival celebrates the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth with “Cage, Unlocked,” a marathon day of the composer’s music. Pianist Vicky Chow kicks off the marathon with Cage’s prepared piano masterpiece, Sonatas and Interludes (4PM) and the evening’s all-Cage program features Living Room Music, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Ryoanji, Nocturne, and Four3 (8PM). With Loadbang, Vicky Chow, Drew Blumberg, Megan Schubert, and Randy Gibson.
The evening closes with a very special performance of Cage’s Four3 for 12 rainsticks, piano, silence, and sine wave as live musical accompaniment to the Merce Cunningham Dance film directed by Elliot Caplan, Beach Birds for Camera.
Today at 1PM Avant Music Festival curator Randy Gibson will join Olivia Giovetti on The New Canon on Q2 to discuss Cage and his lasting influence in an episode entitled, appropriately, Cage Match.
Listen and chat live here
The third annual Avant Music Festival opens with Festival curator Randy Gibson’s immersive Circular Trance Surrounding The Second Pillar with The Highest Seventh Primal Cirrus, The Utmost Fundamental, and The Ekmeles Ending from Apparitions Of The Four Pillars. Commissioned and performed by Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, the work features sine waves, lighting design by Kryssy Wright, and video by Oscar Henriquez, and reflects Gibson’s studies with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.
Gibson will be the guest on Friday February 10th before the Avant-Premiere of this work for Olivia Giovetti’s The New Canon on WQXR at 1PM
We’ve just uploaded a little Preview video of the 2012 Avant Music Festival featuring Eve Beglarian, John Cage, Randy Gibson, and Jenny Olivia Johnson.
This video is part of the Kickstarter campaign that culminates in a live preview performance on December 19th.
This campaign will culminate in a special donor-only party on Monday December 19th at The Wild Project, host venue of the Avant Music Festival. There will also be a raffle that night with a number of interesting items, as well as performances by Eve Beglarian and Mary Rowell, The Pierrot Project, and Randy Gibson.
February 12th, 2011, starting at 8PM at The Wild Project, NYC (195 East 3rd Street @ Avenue B)
The Cage program this year is perhaps the one I’m most proud of being able to put together. Megan and I have assembled what I hope will be a really fun night.
The concert will open with the lovely Vicky Chow performing Cage’s beautiful early piano pieces Dream and In A Landscape, and will close with William Lang and myself performing one of the last pieces Cage ever wrote, and a personal favorite, 1991′s stunningly minimal and sparse Two5.
In between will be a truly monumental musicircus performance of Cage’s exhaustive vocal/theatrical compendium; 1970′s Song Books as interpreted by the avant-garde vocal ensemble Ekmeles with Vicky Chow playing Music for Piano 4-19 and me reading from Indeterminacy.
The entire performance is being chance determined. The total duration of the performance was determined using the i-ching. Festival lighting designer Kryssy Wright is creating six “looks” for the lighting that will be chance-determined by audience members at the opening of the concert. I have used the i-ching to determine how many and which of the 90 stories from Indeterminacy will be read, and the positioning on stage of every single Solo for Voice has been chance-determined, and is not being revealed to the performers as a whole, only individually. Each performer will know where they need to go, but not what may, or may not, be going on around them. The members of Ekmeles have not discussed with each other which solos they are performing, and the ephemeral nature of these sorts of performances is extremely exciting.
When I put together a night of Cage’s music, something that was so inspirational to me early on, I try to read Cage’s instructions as carefully as possible, and follow them to their letter as closely as possible. Through the use of chance operations, and particularly this year, getting the audience involved in the determinations, we are able to really capture the anarchic, playful, but incredibly specific attitude that so typified Cage’s philosophy.
