Festival Opening – Friday February 10th, 2012 – 8PM
- 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 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

Below, a clip from the World Premiere performance November 18th at the Music At First series

and the composer’s program notes:

on Circular Trance…

When I began studying rāga with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in 2005, my life was immediately changed forever.

Circular Trance… is a section, a facet, of Apparitions Of The Four Pillars, my ever-evolving work based on pure stacked harmonic relationships, and a series of related prime-number intervals that form the building blocks for an infinite number of compositions. In this case, The Second Pillar, the music is built around a stack of pure seventh harmonic relationships over an eternal 72hz fundamental.

As indebted as this work is to La Monte’s pioneering sine wave compositions, Circular Trance… is also indelibly linked to my rāga studies with Young and Zazeela, and the profound respect they have for the rich traditions of classical Indian music.

For a number of years now I’ve been working to find ways to create a raga from the ground up, developing rules, scales, the whole package. This is the most complete realization of this work to date, and represents a strong step towards a fully realized raga performance that is also rooted in the 21st century. Circular Trance is structured in the same way as a traditional raga performance with an extended opening Alap section introducing each new pitch, followed by a bandish (composition) consisting of the traditional sections, augmented by selective harmony, an innovation of Young’s to the classical Indian vernacular.

The text of the composition, in Sanskrit, is taken from a section of the Rig Veda that discusses creation, and highlights both music and the number seven.

सहस्तोमाः सहछन्दस आव्र्तः सहप्रमा रषयः सप्तदैव्याः |
पूर्वेषां पन्थामनुद्र्श्य धीरा अन्वालेभिरेरथ्यो न रश्मीन ||

– Randy Gibson XI-xvii-2011

More about Apparitions of The Four Pillars can be found here

2012 Avant Music Festival Tickets On Sale Now

http://avantmedia.org/tickets/

Presale tickets are $12 general, $8 for students, with no fees for buying online. Tickets at the door will be $15/$10 so buy early and save!

The Third Annual Avant Music Festival celebrates John Cage’s 100th birthday, and the 100th anniversary of Pierrot Lunaire in addition to new evenings of work by Eve Beglarian, Randy Gibson, and Jenny Olivia Johnson.

Friday 2/10/2012 – 8pm
Randy Gibson: 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 performed by Ekmeles

Saturday 2/11/2012
Celebrating John Cage at 100:
· Sonatas & Interludes performed by Vicky Chow – 4pm
· Composer Roundtable – 5.30pm
· Cage, Unlocked – 8pm – featuring Living Room Music, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Nocturne, Ryoanji, and Four3
- with performances from Vicky Chow, loadbang, Randy Gibson, and more..

Wednesday 2/15/2012 – 8pm
Arnold Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire
Jenny Olivia Johnson: An After School Vespers, 4 Songs on Youth/Sex/Death
both performed by The Pierrot Project with special guests

Friday 2/17/2012 – 8pm
Eve Beglarian: Songs from The River and Elsewhere performed by Eve Beglarian, Ana Milosavljevic, Vicky Chow, and Ekmeles

Saturday 2/18/2012 – 8pm
Randy Gibson: 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 performed by Will Lang

Get your tickets today http://avantmedia.org/tickets/

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.

Please consider pledging any amount today to help the Avant Music Festival continue to present high quality art in a beautiful intimate setting.

A very special limited edition CD by Randy Gibson of the music from
Aqua Madora
the seminal Avant Media production with Gibson, Ana Baer-Carrillo, and Dani Beauchamp

Limited to an edition of 100, with 30 copies being hand-numbered, signed, wrapped in hand-made paper from Japan, scented with roses, and sealed with wax.

Limited edition CDs sell for $15, Hand-Embellished version for $25.

Get your copy today here.
Listen to a sample of the “Table” track here.

This release was made possible by funding through Kickstarter
Hand-Embellished discs begin shipping March 22nd.

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.

I hope to see you there – Randy

Visit our Facebook Event for this evening here

Special Thanks to John Cage.Info for piece and date information

The full list of performances is as follows:

• Friday 2/11/2011 – The World Premiere of a new version of Randy Gibson’s Apparitions of The Four Pillars
• Saturday 2/12/2011 – An evening of works by John Cage featuring Vicky Chow, Ekmeles, and William Lang
• Thursday 2/17/2011 – Duets by Reiko Füting and Nils Vigeland
• Friday 2/18/2011 – The New York Premiere of Georges Aperghis’ opera Sextuor: L’origine des Espèces
• Saturday 2/19/2011 – Randy Gibson’s Apparitions of The Four Pillars

Advance tickets to individual concerts for $12, $8 for students, and multi-night festival passes are available starting today. There are no fees to buy online, and tickets at the door will be $15/$10, purchase advance tickets and save.

The second annual Avant Music Festival focuses on evolution as its guiding theme, from the evolution of a single work (the world premiere of a new version of Gibson’s Apparitions of The Four Pillars), evolution through an artist’s career on the John Cage night, to the literal exploration found in the New York premiere of Georges Aperghis’ opera Sextuor: L’origine des Espèces, based on Darwin’s “Origin of Species.” A roundpanel discussion moderated by Schubert between Gibson, Reiko Füting, and Nils Vigeland will take place at 5:30 PM on the evening of the 12th, in advance of the Cage performances. The discussion, free to the public, will discuss the concepts of artistic and personal evolution through composition. On the theme of this year’s festival, Randy Gibson says, “Standing on line for a packed concert downtown, Megan and I were talking about the festival, and where we wanted it to go. The idea of Evolution came to mind as it relates to all of the work we’re programming. It’s something I’m extremely interested in within my own work, and the theme of personal evolution is really strong throughout all the works and programs we’re presenting.”

Opening and closing the festival, on Friday the 11th and Saturday the 19th of February, will be the avant-premiere of Randy Gibson’s ongoing meditative evening-length immersive performance, Apparitions of The Four Pillars. This year’s full title is Apparitions of The Four Pillars with Their Lowest Additive Primes as limited to the 3rd, 7th, 9th, and 11th New Primes chosen Cyclically, The Toll of Premonition, The Memorial Connector over the Outlying Primal Abyss, and The Mid-Winter Ending. This work, for just intonation toy organs, strings, and sine waves, with video projection created by London-based graphic designer Oscar Henriquez, presents an immersive sound world of pure primal harmonic relationships and visceral, improvised melodies. The London premiere of a section of this work was described by Liminal’s Scott McMillan as “a moment of relative calm, of stillness, and of pleasingly soporific and mind-emptying purity.”

On Saturday, February 12th, Avant Media will once again present an evening of works by John Cage. Organized to show his evolution as a composer, the Cage night features early piano works, Dream and In A Landscape, performed by noted pianist, Vicky Chow, the musicircus-esque Song Books as interpreted by the visionary new vocal ensemble Ekmeles, and the late Two5 performed by Gibson and microtonal trombonist William Lang.

The second weekend of the festival features, on Thursday Feb. 17th, an evening of duets by Reiko Füting and his mentor Nils Vigeland. This varied evening of works explores the duet both as a music form and through the long-term evolving partership of a student and teacher. The collaborative pianist Yegor Shevtsov will be anchoring the duets.

On Friday February 18th, the Avant Music Festival is extremely proud to present the New York Premiere of Georges Aperghis’ idiosyncratic opera based on Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” – Sextuor: L’origine des Espèces. This new realization of the opera for voices and cello features an exquisite all-female cast, headed by Fabienne Séveillac, deeply dedicated to this unusual operatic experience.

Advance tickets to individual concerts are $12, $8 for students and Avant Media members. Festival Passes, as well as multi-night subscription discounts, are also available. Tickets are on sale now. Tickets at the door are $15/$10. All performances will start at 8PM at Wild Project – 195 East 3rd Street, NYC.

The Avant Music Festival is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with The City Council.

The release is scheduled for February 2011, and you can help make it a reality. The performance was recorded live and has already been edited and mixed. The funds from the kickstarter campaign will go to making a truly beautiful CD package in collaboration with our longtime designer, Oscar Henriquez.

The edition will be limited to 100 copies, 30 of which will be further embellished with vellum and a wax seal, scented with roses (as all of the performances were) and signed. Combined with the exquisite recording by Mike Rugnetta and mastering by Terminator Smile, this will be a fantastic representation of the ritualistic experience of this piece.

Aqua Madora on Kickstarter

The second annual festival will take place from February 11-19 and features the meditative immersive Apparitions of The Four Pillars by Randy Gibson, a night of music by John Cage, a musical dialog between Reiko Füting and Nils Vigeland, and the New York Premiere of Georges Aperghis’ opera Sextuor: L’origine des Espèces.

This special one-night-only event on October 12th will raise money for the 2011 Avant Music Festival and help support the work of the amazing composers and performers who are a part of the festival.

Our goal is to raise $1,000 to be able to have a piano for the festival, a central instrument to the work of John Cage and of Füting and Vigeland.

In addition to free beer, wine, and food, the evening will also play host to a preview of some of the exciting performances in store for the 2011 Festival including a World Premiere performance of Randy Gibson’s The Third Pillar with its Lowest Primes and Memories of The Second Pillar from Apparitions of The Four Pillars and an excerpt of Georges Aperghis’ Sextuor.

Visit the event page to reserve your place today
and RSVP to the Facebook event page here

This year, curators Randy Gibson and Megan Schubert are focusing on Evolution as a guiding theme. The evolution of contemporary music, evolution in the literal sense, how we learn from our mentors, and how a work evolves once it’s in the hands of the performers.

A full listing of dates and performances is below. Please join us for a special preview on October 12th for the Avant Music Festival Fall Fundraiser

Friday, February 11, 2011

The World Premiere of Apparitions of The Four Pillars with Their Lowest Additive Primes as limited to the 3^rd, 7^th, 9^th, and 11^th New Primes chosen Cyclically, The Toll of Premonition, The Memorial Connector over the Outlying Primal Abyss, and The Mid-Winter Ending by Randy Gibson. Performed by Randy Gibson, William Lang, and The Apparitions String Ensemble, with Video by Oscar Henriquez

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Works by John Cage: Songbooks Performed by Ekmeles and Two⁵ Performed by Randy Gibson and  William Lang

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

Duets by Reiko Füting and Nils Vigeland performed by Yegor Shevtsov, Olivia de Prato, Victor Lowrie, John Popham, Erin Lesser, Carol MacGonnell, and Megan Schubert

Friday, February 18th, 2011

The New York Premiere of the Opera Sextuor: L’origine des Espèces by Georges Aperghis performed by vocalists Fabienne Séveillac, Gelsey Bell, Christie Finn, Amirtha Kidambi, Megan Schubert, and cellist Émilie Girard-Charest

Saturday, February 19th, 2011

The Avant-Premiere of Apparitions of The Four Pillars with Their Lowest Additive Primes as limited to the 3^rd, 7^th, 9^th, and 11^th New Primes chosen Cyclically, The Toll of Premonition, The Memorial Connector over the Outlying Primal Abyss, and The Mid-Winter Ending by Randy Gibson. Performed by Randy Gibson, William Lang, and The Apparitions String Ensemble, with Video by Oscar Henriquez