Dear friends and listeners,

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.

Tickets to this special premiere are available now.

In harmony,

Randy

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.

From William Lang, on the experience of preparing this piece:

I have worked closely with Randy over the last three years – and this is the culmination of many long hours of playing, talking, and working together. It’s been a great trip so far, and I feel that through this collaboration, I have learned more about myself and how my instrument works then I have anywhere else.

It’s going to be a huge show for me, and an amazing piece! 3 straight hours of playing over beautiful drone harmonies. If you’ve listened to La Monte Young in the past, it’s in a similar vein. It’s been a great process getting ready physically and mentally for this show, and I really think it’s going to be a special night.

From Randy Gibson on the work itself:

When I first began to think about writing a solo piece for Will Lang, I knew I wanted to keep the elements of density we had been working with in the 2010 and 2011 ensemble versions of Apparitions of The Four Pillars. With the cassette releases I did for The Tapeworm, I had experimented with how moments can emerge from density, synchronizing a melody across 19 cassettes, layered together, so it emerged from the rich drone around it.

For 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 I have built a series of variable delay lines that at once allow the soloist to become an orchestra with himself, but also to quickly allow melody to emerge from the texture when it’s required.

Since I first stepped into the dense wall of sound that is La Monte Young’s Base 9:7:4 Symmetry…, installed at the Church Street Dream House, I’ve been transfixed with the lushness of close primal relationships inspired by those pioneered by Young in the Sixties and today. Following the example of Young’s The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys and The Four Dreams of China and live experiences like those of Jung Hee Choi’s recent Tonecycle Base 65 Hz, 2:3:7 performances, and, of course, La Monte’s uncompromising ethos I’ve become devoted to stricter and stricter rules governing my compositions. I didn’t set out to write my longest piece to date, it just what the rules dictated. La Monte has famously said, “tuning is a function of time” and I’ve taken that practice to heart. By sustaining the tones for long periods of time, we are better able to experience the complex feeling created through even the most simple of intervallic relationships.

A portion of the title of tonight’s performance refers to the palindrome, a form I’ve been interested in since I first encountered it in the works of Messiaen, and the macro/microcosmic relationships of Cage. The overall form of this piece is a palindrome, offset by melodic movement. This desire to work as a palindrome also influences the duration of the work.

There are two incenses being burned this evening. They relate to my early spiritual development at the Shambala center in Boulder, my hometown. The evening begins and ends with a Japanese incense called Viva from Nippon Kodo. The bulk of the performance is accompanied by a special Tibetan incense created by the great sage scholar, Mipham, for the consecration of the Great Stupa at Dharmakaya in the Colorado mountains.

We journey together into the ritualistic presentation of The Drone, sustained before and after the performance. The bright primal video projection by Oscar Henriquez and lighting by Kryssy Wright heighten our awareness and concentration. The passage of time becomes fluid. Tonight we experience the multiple facets of The Third Pillar and the pure 9:8 interval that defines it.

- Randy Gibson I-xxviii-2012

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.

From Eve:

I am delighted to be presenting Songs from the River and Elsewhere with the wonderful musicians of Ekmeles and Vicky Chow and Ana Milosavljevic. All of the pieces on tonight’s concert, while intensely varied in technique, mood, and texts, have in common a preoccupation with paradox: the joy that lives at the heart of the most painful loss; the doubt that animates the deepest faith; the anguish and anxiety that accompany the most passionate love. The music reflects these paradoxes as it questions and challenges distinctions between simplicity and complexity.

All of the pieces on this evening’s program are part of A Book of Days, my ongoing project in which I compose a piece of music for each day of the year. Several of these pieces were inspired by my four-month journey down the length of Mississippi River by kayak and bicycle in 2009. Almost all of the vocal music on tonight’s program was originally written for me to sing, and I’m thrilled to hear the musicians of Ekmeles take these songs to unexplored, pristine places.

From Jenny:

An After School Vespers: 4 Songs on Youth/Sex/Death is an evening-length presentation of four of my recent chamber and electronic pieces, each of which explore intense and emotional teenage experiences. The first two works are deeply mired in 1980s-era sensibilities and cultures: we open with Cutter, a raw portrayal of an adolescent girl who, while watching The Never-Ending Story and listening to Metallica’s One, secretly self-injures. We then move to the dreamy, synthesizer-ridden drunken haze of Dollar Beers, which tells a fragmentary story of a young girl whose best friend almost drowns in the steely green waters of Redondo Beach following an epic night of teenage drinking. For the second half of the set, our purview then turns to teenagers from slightly different eras and cultures: Oh, Ancient Fragrance is an emotive depiction of a former altar boy coming to terms with memories of clergy abuse; and the closing work, Starling, is an ambivalent meditation on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, specifically what I imagine to be the teenaged Lolita’s memories of driving across the country with her abusive step-father, and—in the midst of his quiet manipulation and violence—witnessing the sublime and sun-drenched beauty of the American landscape.

While their subject matters are undeniably dark, all four of these works seek to explore the emotional ambivalence that often accompanies overwhelming and traumatic experiences: their terror, their life-altering impact, and—most interestingly—their strange beauty.

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.

—

He changed the course of 20th century music. I remember those first dull clicks and rumbling trombone tones I ever heard, and knowing that my art would forever be changed. We have all been profoundly changed by the music and thinking of John Cage. Forever. I can’t imagine a world where Concert for Piano and Orchestra hadn’t been interrupted at town hall because the “extreme disparities… as for instance in a forest, or on a city street” hadn’t proved too much. Where the chance meeting between he and Feldman had never happened. Where his commitment to selflessness hadn’t freed thousands to pursue beauty, however they heard it.

“I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.” “I was never psychoanalyzed. I’ll tell you how it happened.” “The most, the best, we can do, we believe (wanting to give evidence of love), is to get out of the way, leave space around whomever or whatever it is.”

One hundred years after his birth, his music is just as revolutionary. Performing it for the first time is an education unlike any other, and devoting yourself to the spirit of it is pure bliss. A safe place – the forest. I return to the number pieces for their simple, sparse, haunting beauty; to those early piano works for their endearing sense of melody and pacing; to works like Atlas… and Concert… for their commitment to the concept. Cage paved the way, made it all possible. We live in a world of liberated sound, where the power is in our choices, or our decision to remove ourselves from them. “not a composer, but an inventor of genius.”

- Randy Gibson I-xxxi-2012

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.