Soft Series
l'Artiste ordinaire
[ Melissa Grey & David Morneau ]
Soft Series presents soft premieres of new works. Created and directed by Melissa Grey & David Morneau.
Soft Series is a concert series dedicated to presenting soft premieres of new music in an intimate environment with lively pre- and post-concert conversation. The first season featured performances by cellist Craig Hultgren performing in-progress works he has commissioned, violin duo Miolina (Lynn Bechtold and Mioi Takeda) performing new acoustic and electroacoustic duets, and Varispeed with thingNY performing an excerpt of Kenneth Gaburo’s six-hour opera Maledetto. All of the concerts take place in Grey’s loft apartment in the NoMad neighborhood of New York, creating an accessible setting for the audience to interact with the musicians.
\\//\\//
Concert no.11 — Waku Waku
l’Artiste ordinaire welcomes Thomas Piercy
Friday, October 26, 2018
8:00pm (doors open @ 7:30)
@ Flower Cat HQ – by invitation only
Program
Trappist-1
music by l’Artiste ordinaire
performed by l’Artiste ordinaire & Thomas Piercy
Voices, for hichiriki and electronics
music by Bin Li
performed by Thomas Piercy
Voices
(Constantine P. Cavafy, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn)
Imagined voices, and beloved, too,
of those who died, or of those who are
lost unto us like the dead.
Sometimes in our dreams they speak to us;
sometimes in its thought the mind will hear them.
And with their sound for a moment there return
sounds from the first poetry of our life–
like music, in the night, far off, that fades away.
This piece, in Fuzhounese (the language of my childhood in Fuzhou, China), is dedicated to Thomas Piercy and to all those who fly on planes. – Bin Li
To read more about the artists:
http://artisteordinaire.org/soft-series-concert-no-11-waku-waku/
\\//\\//
Concert no.10 – Lost by Streams
l’Artiste ordinaire welcomes Eve Beglarian & Will Lang
Friday, October 20, 2017
8:00pm (doors open @ 7:30)
by invitation only
Program
I know who you are now
music by l’Ao & Eve Beglarian
performed by l’Artiste ordinaire
I am lost by streams
music by Eve Beglarian
video & photography by Caleb Kenna
video editing by Rohan Sen
performed by Will Lang
The title, I am lost by streams, is the complete text of an email I received one evening from a friend, Loris Bradley, who had taken a wrong turn on my land in Vermont.
In the music I have made, Will Lang very slowly performs the Gregorian chant version of Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down, yea, we wept”), while the pre-recorded trombones, recorded by Will, extend each note to create a gradually intensifying network of traces. Melody becomes harmony, and over the course of thirty-five minutes, perhaps time becomes space.
The photographer Caleb Kenna and I have begun audio and video documenting the stream that runs through my land, Sugar Hollow Brook, from its source in the Brandon Town Forest about five miles north of my land, to where it joins Otter Creek five miles south in Pittsford, and then turns north again and flows about fifty miles past Brandon and Middlebury and Vergennes to Lake Champlain.
We imagine spending a year making portraits of the stream and the people we meet there, working our way downstream along its length. The video Rohan Sen has edited for you this evening is a work-in-progress. Each time Will performs the piece for the next year, Rohan will make a new edit incorporating the latest footage Caleb has made, until sometime in the fall of 2018 we will be able to share the finished piece.
Anne Midgette of the Washington Post describes Eve Beglarian’s work this way: “An experimental composer and performer, Beglarian writes genre-defying, intimate music that resists categorization: a collage of sound and effect, voice and electronics, written for everything from a rock band to a found recording, and sometimes responding to collaborators such as Maya Beiser or a concept like kayaking down the Mississippi River, which resulted in “BRIM: the river project.” Her ongoing “Book of Days” is creating a kind of musical devotional book-cum-diary in excerpts and musical vignettes with texts by creators including Rilke and the I Ching, expressed in an equally diverse musical vocabulary.”
\\//\\//
Concert no.9 – EIOinD
l’Artiste ordinaire welcomes Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes
Friday, September 15, 2017
8:00pm (doors open @ 7:30)
by invitation only
Program
Photon Ecstasy (Trappist–1)
music by l’Artiste ordinaire
performed by l’Artiste ordinaire & Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes
…city flexure…
music by Brian Padavic
performed by Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes
Photon Ecstasy is a growing catalog of compositions that engages music, sound, science fiction, and interactive light. It is an expansion of the mythology created by Dan Rose in his artist book, The DNA-Photon Project, which tells the story of a top-secret government project that converted the DNA of a young woman into photons and beamed them out to the stars in order to mate with intelligent life and expand humanity into the far future universe.
Photon Ecstasy allows l’Ao to collaborate and connect with musicians, artists, engineers, and designers. Tonight’s installment, Photon Ecstasy (Trappist–1), is composed for an upcoming performance with Tom Piercy at Barge Music.
•••
Brian Padavic’s …city flexure… is an extended work for EIO (with electronics realized by David D. McIntire). Composed in 2016 during a residency with the Charlotte Street Foundation, this piece is an exploration of melody. Here, a drone comprised of hundreds of sine waves and processed bass provides a shimmering backdrop over which the musicians search for the melody.
Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes is David McIntire, Ryan Oldham, and Brian Padavic
David D. McIntire (b. 1958) was born in upstate New York and has had some training on the clarinet. He has maintained his livelihood through playing, teaching, composing, and writing about music for over thirty years. Also played clarinet and saxophone with a number of groups, including the Colorblind James Experience and the Whitman/McIntire Duo. He holds music degrees from Nazareth College, Ithaca College and Missouri-Kansas City and currently teaches at Missouri Western State University. He also operates Irritable Hedgehog, a label specializing in minimal and electroacoustic repertoire, whose releases have been widely praised for their excellence and historical importance.
Composer Ryan Oldham (b. 1977) is an adjunct instructor for the University of Missouri – Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance. He holds a B.A. from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (1999), a M.M. from the University of Louisville (2002) for music composition and theory, and a D.M.A. from the University of Missouri – Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance (2008). Oldham’s music ranges from piano miniatures to operas and everything in between. Currently, Oldham performs as trumpeter/composer in E.I.O. (the Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes) and in the choral group Te Deum.
Brian Padavic composes music covering a wide range of genres and ensemble configurations, from jazz to contemporary concert, American/European folk to avant garde, and rock to musical theater. In 2014, he received grants from the Lighton International Artist Exchange Program and ArtsKC to compose solo bass repertoire while studying with legendary double bassist François Rabbath in Paris, France. Padavic holds composition degrees from UMKC (’12) and Berkley College of Music (’07) and was recently a 2015/2016 Charlotte Street Studio Resident. He currently performs with Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes, Chestnut Fine Arts Theater, Anna Lee and the Lucky So and Sos, and KC Baroque Consortium.
\\//\\//
Concert no.8 – Folk Geometry
l’Artiste ordinaire welcomes Nicole Antebi
special guest violinist Lynn Bechtold
Friday, April 28, 2017
8:00pm (doors open @ 7:30)
by invitation only
Prelude
Nicole Antebi & Melissa Grey: Collaborations
Gesture 1 on 2 Strings (2015)
from Fifteen Minutes of Fame: Eva Ingolf, produced by Melissa Grey
Nicole Antebi, animation
Melissa Grey, music
Magic Square (2016)
Nicole Antebi, animation
Melissa Grey, music
featuring Vince Clarke, music
CaCO3 (2015)
from Fifteen Minutes of Fame: Eva Ingolf, produced by Melissa Grey
Nicole Antebi, animation
David Morneau, music
The Telling of Bees Telling (2015)
Nicole Antebi, animation
Melissa Grey, music
Program
Procrustean Bed (2016)
Nicole Antebi, animation
Melissa Grey, music
featuring Lynn Bechtold, violin
Photon Ecstasy (Kepler–37) (2017)
Nicole Antebi, salt, sculptures, microscope, light
l’Artiste ordinaire, benjolin synthesizer, blindfolds
\\//\\//
Nicole Antebi works in non-fiction animation, motion graphics, installation while simultaneously connecting and creating opportunities for other artists through larger curatorial and editorial projects such as Water, CA (a six year collaboration with Enid Ryce) and Winter Shack (a three year collaboration with Alex Branch). She has also collaborated on numerous visual music projects with experimental composer, Melissa Grey and musicians Laura Ortman, David Eng and most recently with electronic music pioneer, Vince Clarke. Her work has been shown in several continents and in fiercely alternative spaces such as Anthology Film Archives, High Desert Test Sites, The Manhattan Bridge Anchorage, Teeny Cine’s converted trailer, Portable Forest, a Texas Grain Silo and in the cabin of a capsized ship at Machine Project in Los Angeles. And more traditional art spaces such as Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University, LACE Contemporary Exhibitions, Orange County Museum of Art, Torrance Art Museum, The Crocker Museum, Dallas Contemporary, and the Armory Center for the Arts. She was the 2015 animator-in-residence at Circuit Bridges, New York and was recently awarded a Jerome Foundation Grant in Film/Video for a forthcoming animated film about El Paso and Ciudad Juàrez in the early 90’s.
nicoleantebi.com
[photo credit: John Michael Kilbane]
//\\//\\
Concert no.7–Duo marié
l’Artiste ordinaire welcomes The Bowers–Fader Duo
[ Jessica Bowers, mezzo-soprano; Oren Fader, guitar ]
Friday, March 24, 2017
Listen online: http://clocktower.org/series/soft-series-concert
Program
Photon Ecstasy (Kepler-19) [preview]
music: l’Ao (after Vincenzo Bellini’s La Sonnambula)
The Maldive Shark
words: Herman Melville
music: David Claman
Ganga Yamuna
words: Ved Vatuk
music: David Claman
The Lone Tenement
words & music: Erin Rogers
My Love
words & music: Ana Milosavljevic
Volvelle
music: Melissa Grey
Light Arriving on the Infinite Ocean
music: Judith Sainte Croix
Places Among the Stars
words: Stephen Crane
music: Hilary Purrington
Three Little Birds
words: Stephen Crane
music: Hilary Purrington
Finding One Self
• A Charm
• A Young Woman
• Who is I?
• Roman Elegy
words: David Ferry
music: Paul Salerni
Beyond Words
words: Kevin Young
music: Paul Salerni
Created in 2009, The Bowers-Fader Voice and Guitar Duo (Jessica Bowers, mezzo-soprano, Oren Fader, guitar) performs in New York City and across the US. Recent concerts have taken them to Washington State, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, as hosted by the Classical Guitar Society of Northeastern Pennsylvania. The Duo performs classical works of Mozart, De Falla, Brahms, Weill, as well as contemporary works. Composers writing for the Duo this season include Judith Sainte Croix, Martin Rokeach, Frank Brickle, Melissa Grey, David Claman, and Paul Salerni.
Outreach activities for the Duo include free concerts each year for the Lighthouse Guild for the Blind, and Beginnings, a social program for seniors supported by Renewal Care. This year the Duo has performed in New York City, Honesdale, PA, and Manchester, VT as part of the Manchester Music Festival. This fall, the Duo presented a concert of new American art songs at Tenri Cultural Institute, featuring 5 world premieres, 3 of which were based on poetry by living authors. In the coming months, the Duo will be performing and recording works by Paul Salerni, performing works by l’Artiste ordinarie (Melissa Grey & David Morneau), performing with Composers Concordance, and working on a new song cycle by Frank Brickle. For more information please visit www.bowersfaderduo.com
//\\//\\
Concert no.6 – Piano jouet
l’Ao welcomes New Renaissance Artist Elizabeth A Baker and her toy pianos.
Friday, October 28, 2016
8:00pm (doors open @ 7:30)
by invitation only
Listen online: http://clocktower.org/series/soft-series-concert
Celebrated for her “terrifying dynamic range,” cleanliness of sound, as well as unique sensitivity and ability to sculpt her performance for the acoustics of a space, Elizabeth A. Baker is a dramatic performer with an honest, near psychic connection to music, which resounds with audiences of all ages and musical backgrounds. As a creator, her understanding of sonic space from organic intuition and studies in music production, pair with a unique eclectic voice, making for a spatial and auditory experience of music. Eschewing the collection of traditional titles that describe single elements of her body of work, Elizabeth refers to herself as a “New Renaissance Artist” that embraces a constant stream of change and rebirth in practice, which expands into a variety of media, chiefly an exploration of how the sonic world can be manipulated to personify a variety of philosophies and principles both tangible as well as intangible.
An active performer highly sought after for her unique concert presentation methods, which break the fourth wall and draw the audience further into the music by asking them to listen beyond the surface through interactive dialogue, reminding them that there is no such thing as an incorrect interpretation of a work. Elizabeth firmly believes that every person will encounter music in a unique manner because each person comes from a different set of cultural norms, life experiences, and even the way they physically hear can be a factor to consider when seeking to relate with a work. Her solo concert tours have featured engagements at Lamar University (Beaumont, TX), Flying Monkey Arts Collective (Huntsville, AL), Eyedrum (Atlanta, GA), Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX), and the Good Shepherd Chapel (Seattle, WA).
Emmy-award winning composer Larry Groupé has referred to her works as “Perfect.” and compared one of her early works to Debussy’s Engulfed Cathedral. Elizabeth’s works have been featured by Composers Circle, FIVE by FIVE, TEDxYouthTampaBay, Tampa Mini Makers Faire, Orlando Mini Makers Faire, as well as at the 2014 Electronic Music Midwest Festival and the 19th International Festival of Women Composers. Her compositions have been studied in academic institutions throughout the United States including USC-Thornton and the University of Georgia – Athens.
In 2015 she received an Individual Artist Grant from the Saint Petersburg Arts Alliance and the City of Saint Petersburg, Florida to create and present an original sound installation In Our Own Words: A Sonic Memory Quilt, which told the stories of various African-Americans in a fresh avant-garde manner, framed by evolving drones and a four-hour live performance by Elizabeth.
In addition to her work on the concert stage and on the page writing for other performing artists, Elizabeth has extensive training in recording arts, live sound reinforcement, and consistently received praise as well as high marks for the artistic sensibility and technical excellence of her mixes at St. Petersburg College, where she studied closely under mastering engineer Dave Greenberg. Today, friends and colleagues across the globe, frequently look to her as a consultant on projects for her skills as both a recording and mix engineer.
Combining her love of electronics and keyboard instruments, Elizabeth embarked on a mission in 2015 to promote works for toy piano and electronics, using a setup that combines handmade microphones and hydrophones. Her original works have been hailed by the Orlando Weekly as “a sterling testimonial to her artistry that proves she’s not just an expert in the toy piano field but a pioneer.” In Fall 2015, Schoenhut Piano Company added Elizabeth A. Baker to their official artist roster.
In Summer 2016, Elizabeth embarked on creating the score for a film project headed by the brilliant dancer-choreographer Helen Hansen French, which explores the experience of being an artist-mother. The Motherhood Project workshop, presented in relation to the film featured a live dance performance with Elizabeth accompanying Helen’s choreography with toy piano, electronics, and Indian harmonium, a keyboard instrument that rarely appears on the Western musical concert stage. A sensitive improviser, with experience in a wide array of genres, Elizabeth is a frequent collaborator for Jim Ivy’s Tangled Bell Ensemble and other improvisational projects throughout Florida.
Elizabeth is author of Toyager: A Toy Piano Method, the first comprehensive instructional book for toy piano, featuring principles of technique, practice strategies, music notation, as well as improvisational tactics.
Elizabeth is Founder and Executive Director of The New Music Conflagration, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation founded in the State of Florida to promote the work of contemporary composers and musicians. She is also, Co-Founder and Festival Director of the Florida International Toy Piano Festival.
//\\//\\
Concert no.5 – Photon Ecstasy
Friday, October 14, 2016
8:00pm (doors open @ 7:30)
by invitation only
l’Artiste ordinaire is performing the soft premiere of Photon Ecstasy.
Listen online: http://clocktower.org/series/soft-series-concert
//\\//\\
Photon Ecstasy is a performance project that engages music, sound, light, and science fiction to address the hubris of certainty. Created by l’Artiste ordinaire (Melissa Grey & David Morneau), it is a concert-length performance for spoken word, trombone, interactive light and electronics—including the beeps of subverted video game systems, samples from the NASA Audio Collection, and the randomness of the benjolin modular synthesizer. It is based on Dan Rose’s The DNA-Photon Project, an artist book and twenty-five machine-sculptures, which explores the certitude of industrialized capitalist countries, national security secrecy, and corporate overreach.
The performance is an adaptation of the original story about the quest to beam one woman’s DNA into the many worlds of the universe. Further inspiration is drawn from Message From Earth, the record created by NASA for Voyager, which transmits human culture deep into space. Grey & Morneau blur the lines between presentation and performance, fact and fiction, and art and commentary.
Photon Ecstasy was commissioned by the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania for “Arbitrary Pleasures: Plaisirs Arbitraires,” an exhibition of some never-before-seen artist books from Penn emeritus professor, Dan Rose. Drawing from the tradition of formal constraints Rose’s visual narratives of such topics as the underarm, anthropology, philosophy, sex, motherhood, large corporations, and gender identity take the viewer-reader on journeys into elegant absurdity.
l’Artiste ordinaire will premiere Photon Ecstasy at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania on October 20, 2016.
\\//\\//
Melissa Grey & David Morneau
Composers – Performers
Robert Kirkbride
Trombone Mute Designer (“culoboccalogist”)
Ezgi Ucar
Creative Technologist
Gregory Beson
Trombone Mute Fabricator
Dan Rose
Artist. Author: The DNA-Photon Project
//\\//\\
Established in January 2016, l’Artiste ordinaire (l’Ao) is a collaborative partnership between composer-performers Melissa Grey and David Morneau that has launched electronic performances and Soft Series, a concert series dedicated to presenting soft premieres. Live electronic performances include 7^3 [M] (Benjolin synthesizer, Game Boy), Gadget Berry Dimple: A Glossary of False Translation (Benjolin, Merlin, Spoken Word) for Hans Tammen’s Rakete bee bee? Rakete bee zee! 100th Anniversary of Dada at Spectrum NYC, and Hyperlocal 2.0 for Thomas Piercy (Bass Clarinet, Sine Waves, Beats). l’Ao is developing Photon Ecstasy, a concert-length performance project that engages music, sound, and science fiction to address the hubris of certainty, which will premiere at the University of Pennsylvania Special Collections Library in conjunction with the exhibition of artist Dan Rose’s DNA-Photon Project (October 2016).
Composer Melissa Grey’s projects include concert works, electroacoustic performances, installations, food and sound events, and frequent collaborations with artists, architectural designers, musicians and composers. Her works have been described as “elegantly diabolical…strikingly eerie and captivating” (furtherfield.org). Recent projects include kinetic scores based on combinatorial memory wheels: blur (after blue hour) for Payton MacDonald’s Sonic Divide project and Volvelle for the Bowers-Fader Duo. She created an electronic soundscape with the modular synth Benjolin to broadcast in the gallery space for the exhibition curated by artist Angela Grauerholz, Michèle Lemieux | The Whole and Its Parts, From drawing to animated films, exhibited at the Centre de design, Université du Québec à Montréal September-November 2016.
With artist and animator Nicole Antebi, she has ongoing animation-sound projects that include live performance and processing with Grey performing a vintage Merlin music machine: Procrustean Bed, composed for violinist Lynn Bechtold, premiered at the New West Electronic Arts and Music Organization Festival in San Diego; and Magic Square, a triple collaborative effort, features new music by synthpop pioneer, Vince Clarke, and premiered at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, New York.
Grey teaches Sound Studies at the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. She is an Associate Director of Composers Concordance, and a Board Member of Miolina, the violin duo of Lynn Bechtold and Mioi Takeda.
David Morneau is a composer of an entirely undecided genre. Described by Molly Sheridan as a “shining beacon” of inspiration, his diverse work illuminates ideas about our culture, issues concerning creativity, and even the very nature of music itself. His eclectic output has been described variously as “elegantly rendered”, “happily prissy”, “impressive”, “unusual, esoteric, and offbeat”. His chiptune album, Broken Memory, “absolutely wrecks shop.… For that, David Morneau wins.” His current projects include Not Less Than the Good, a secularized morning prayer service based on Henry Thoreau’s Walden, which is being composed for New Thread Quartet (a New York based saxophone ensemble) and will include field recordings made at Walden Pond and read excerpts from Thoreau’s book performed by J.D. McClatchy; and Vintage Machines, a series of pieces utilizing vintage video game systems to make music. Morneau is composer-in-residence with Immigrant Breast Nest, a New York City netlabel.
Robert Kirkbride is Dean of Parsons School of Constructed Environments and Associate Professor of Architecture and Product Design. Dr. Kirkbride has been director of studio ‘patafisico for 25 years, and is also Spokesperson and a founding Trustee for PreservationWorks, a non-profit organization for the adaptive reuse of Kirkbride Plan Hospitals. Robert designed the Morbid Anatomy Museum, in Brooklyn, NY, with collaborator Anthony Cohn, and authored the award-winning multimedia online book, Architecture and Memory, which focuses on two Renaissance memory chambers. Kirkbride has been a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and architect-in-residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, Italy. At Parsons/The New School, where he recently received the University Distinguished Teaching Award, Dr. Kirkbride established the Giuseppe Zambonini Archive at the Kellen Design Archives, and is an ongoing contributor to Memory Studies. Robert received his Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University, and a Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Arts in Design of the Environment from the University of Pennsylvania.
Ezgi Ucar is a New York based sound artist, creative technologist and multimedia designer. She earned her MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design, soon after her undergraduate studies in Industrial Engineering at Middle East Technical University. Her works revolve around sound experiments, multisensory explorations, physical computing, wearable technology and material research. She exhibited and performed her work at Metropolitan Museum of Art, Circuit Bridges Concert Series, SXSW Interactive, Parsons School of Design, Eyebeam, NYC Media Lab, Numa Paris, and New York Hall of Science. She gave talks about her projects at SXSW Interactive 2016 , Immersive Worlds Conference at Baruch College and Dreamyard Project. She is currently working as a creative technologist at Loomia, where she is also a resident artist.
Gregory M Beson is a designer and craftsman living in New York City. He continues to practice professionally and hone his hand skill while also expanding his perception and knowledge through studies in art, design & philosophy.
Currently Gregory is enrolled in Parsons School of Design Industrial Design MFA Program for which he has received the Presidential Scholarship.
He earned a Bachelor of Sciences degree from The New School University as a member of the Cohort 21 experimental experiential self directed learning program, for which he was awarded an accompanying full scholarship & fellowship.
Dan Rose is a leading theoretical artist working back and forth across two dimensional images and the way they are transformed by various techniques into three dimensions. Trained as an anthropologist, Rose wrote Black American Street Life about living on the streets of Philadelphia the year after Martin Luther King was murdered. His artistic production began by making a hundred one-of-a-kind artist books and covers many of which have been distributed by the Serpentine Gallery and the London ICA in the UK and by Printed Matter and other venues in the U.S.
His artist book, The DNA-Photon Project included 25 actual machines and thus became a three dimensional novel. A collaborator, Melissa Grey, composed music based on the book and wrote and performed a radio play that aired in New York City and London. With Rachel Cheetham-Richard he formed the Steamroller Laboratories devoted to visual experimentation; and the results of their collaboration has been shown in Philadelphia galleries. They have also founded an artist circle called the OuDiPo, translated from the French as, the sewing circle of potential images.
Dan Rose is a Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania from which he also received an honorary Master of Arts degree.
\\//\\//
l'Artiste ordinaire presents:
Soft Series Concert No.4
Friday, June 17, 2016
8:45pm (doors open @ 7:45)
by invitation only
Featuring Miolina with special guest Ken Butler
A special Miolina chocolate created by Kee’s Chocolates will be shared with our guests.
Prelude
7^3 [M]
Melissa Grey (Benjolin synthesizer)
David Morneau (Nintendo Gameboy)
:::::
Program
Angélica Negrón
Tres insultos para dos violines
I) Burlesco
II) Secco
III) Insistente
Mari Kimura
Sarahal for Two Violins & Interactive Computer
Melissa Grey (music) & Nicole Antebi (animation)
Procrustean Bed
featuring performance by Melissa Grey (Merlin Music Machine & laptop)
Lynn Bechtold
FunShallBeHad
featuring Ken Butler, multi instrumentalist & artist
Monroe Golden
Winona’s Lesson
Karen Tanaka
Shibuya Tokyo
Miolina was formed in 2012 when artistic director/violinist Mioi Takeda decided to form a violin duo with longtime collaborator, violinist/composer Lynn Bechtold. To date, the duo has had successful performances in NYC at The Church of the Transfiguration, City Lore, Gallery MC, Greenwich House Music School, (le) Poisson Rouge, The Morbid Anatomy Museum, Parsons School of Design, Queens Library, Spectrum, St. Mark’s Church, and Turtle Bay Music School, as well as at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, at Monk Space in Los Angeles, and at the Cité Internationale des Arts and l’Institut Finlandais in Paris, France. In addition, they have performed on series and festivals such as Circuit Bridges, Composers Concordance, and Electronic Music Midwest. Miolina specializes in violin duo music that employs the natural beauty and sound of the instruments, with or without electronics and video. They enjoy collaborating on new compositions with composers, as well as discovering hidden gems of the past. In the last three years, they’ve premiered eleven new works. Some of their recent collaborators include cellist Jennifer DeVore and percussionists Ian Ding and Eric Millstein. Miolina’s future productions include creating music for silent Japanese films of the 1920s, and an educational program about immigration and its influence on composers. Both violinists are longtime advocates of new music, and have performed with various new music groups, including the American Symphony Orchestra, Composers Concordance, Glass Farm Ensemble, North/South Consonance, SEM Ensemble, & VIA. They are recipients of a 2015 grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and a 2014 grant from New York Women Composers, and were recently granted 501(c)3 non-profit status. They will be recording their first album in late summer 2016.
//\\//\\
Since she settled in NYC, Japanese violinist Mioi Takeda earned her reputation as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestral player, and as a seasoned new music specialist in town. As Miolina’s artistic director, her mission is clear: encourage composers to write music for violin duo employing the natural beauty and sound of the instruments, without limitations. She also hopes to expand the violin-duo repertory for future generations. Mioi wants to help rediscover neglected violin-duo compositions by old masters, and to share the joy of current violin-duo music with her audiences.
In addition, Ms. Takeda has performed with new music groups, including North/South Consonance as concertmaster, SEM Ensemble, and Composers Concordance, giving countless premieres. She has also performed with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, American Symphony Orchestra, Washington Square Festival, Scandia Symphony, Stamford Symphony, Strathmere Orchestra, The Japan Philharmonic, and The New Japan Philharmonic. Ms. Takeda’s performances can be heard on North/South and Naxos Recordings.
Mioi was a scholarship student of Dorothy DeLay and Masao Kawasaki at The Juilliard School, and she earned a Doctorate of Musical Arts from The City University of New York under the guidance of Itzhak Perlman. She also enjoys doing yoga and watching The Big Bang Theory when she is not playing the violin.
//\\//\\
Violinist Lynn Bechtold has appeared in recital throughout the U.S., Canada, France, Holland, and Switzerland. An advocate of contemporary music, she has worked with composers such as Carter Burwell, Gloria Coates, George Crumb, John Harbison, and Morton Subotnick, and has premiered works on the NWEAMO Festival, Princeton Composers’ Series, and the TriBeCa New Music Festival. In 2001, she gave the premiere of “Violynn,” a work for violin and electronics written for her by Alvin Lucier. Called ‘up-and-coming’ by TimeOut and noted in All About Jazz for her ‘virtuosity and technical expertise,’ she performs with Miolina, Zentripetal, Bleecker StQ, CompCord Ensemble, North/South Consonance, SEM Ensemble, and the disco band Escort, and has been a member of groups that have included the Grammy-nominated East Village Opera Company (rock/opera band). San Diego Story recently called her “unapologetically dominating.”
She has been heard on CBC Radio, CBS-TV, NBC-TV, NHK-TV, and WNYC, and on TV shows such as 30 Rock & Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Recent programs have been with Catalyst Dance, DJ Spooky, VisionIntoArt, and Pablo Ziegler. In addition, she’s performed with entertainers such as Boyz II Men, Willie Colon, Sheryl Crow, Dead Can Dance, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society Band, Roberta Flack, Left Banke, Smokey Robinson, J-Pop band SMAP, Donna Summer, and Stevie Wonder. An active performer, she has performed at diverse venues from Carnegie Hall & Lincoln Center to Joe’s Pub & Madison Square Garden.
She received her M.M.from Mannes-The New School for Music, where she was a student of noted violinist Felix Galimir. Prior to that, she received a double-degree in Violin and English from the New England Conservatory and Tufts University in Boston. In addition, she likes to compose electroacoustic works, and to write articles about food/music/life. Her compositions have been performed on festivals such as Circuit Bridges, Composers Concordance, and Music With a View. She is on the faculty of The Dwight School and Greenwich House Music School in NYC, and the Norwalk Youth Symphony in CT.
//\\//\\
Ken Butler is an artist and musician whose Hybrid musical instruments, performances, installations, and other works explore the interaction and transformation of common and uncommon objects, altered images, sounds and silence.
He has been featured in exhibitions and performances worldwide including The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Prada Foundation in Venice, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Mass MoCA, The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, as well as in South America, Thailand, and Japan.
Ken recently won first prize in the Guthman Musical Instrument Design Competition at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, in addition to the People’s Choice awards for Best Performance and Most Unusual Instrument.
His works have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, Smithsonian, and Sculpture Magazine and have been featured on PBS, CNN, MTV, and NBC, including a live appearance on The Tonight Show. Awards include fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pollack/Krasner Foundation.
Ken Butler studied viola as a child and maintained an interest in music while studying visual arts in France, at Colorado College, and Portland State University, where he completed his MFA in painting in 1977.
He has performed with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, David Van Tieghem, Butch Morris, The Soldier String Quartet, Matt Darriau’s Paradox Trio, The Tonight Show Band, and The Master Gnawa musicians of Morocco. His CD, Voices of Anxious Objects, is on Tzadik records.
Works by Ken Butler are represented in public and private collections in Portland, Seattle, Vail, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, Washington, Paris, Tel Aviv, and New York City, including the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
l'Artiste ordinaire presents:
Friday, April 1, 2016
8:00pm (doors open @ 7:30)
by invitation only
Program
an arrangement of
Kenneth Gaburo's MALEDETTO
by thingNY & Varispeed
NOTE ON THE ARRANGEMENT
As with Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives and John Cage's Empty Words, Varispeed likes to shake things up a bit with our arrangements by taking a single authoritative voice and splitting it up among a collective. Kenneth Gaburo's Maledetto was written for Speaker A, indicated as male who at times may "appear to be a historian, a mere 'reader,' a pontiff, a circus barker, a teacher, an auctioneer"; Speaker B, indicated as male who is "always cursing"; Speaker D, indicated as female who is "transformational" and "comes to realizations and acts on them positively"; and an SATB chorus. The experiment that Varispeed is trying in this reading is to break-up each of these roles amongst the collective, so that who is reading which part shifts throughout the piece. Why would we do this? The quickest answer might be: to undo the drive toward mansplaining, to look beyond a mode where each gender is confined to particular kinds of vocalization, and, by extension, where certain sexual innuendos – which this piece is replete with – are primarily implied toward male-female couples. We wanted to do more than simply switch the genders of who did what. So this arrangement is infused with a Star-Trek-esque idealism about collective experience and power relations, in hopes that it furthers the spirit of the piece but updates it for a twenty-first-century world. - GB
featuring performances by:
Gelsey Bell is a singer, songwriter, and scholar. She is a core member of Varispeed and thingNY, and her work has been presented internationally. Upcoming performances include the final night of her Roulette residency on April 24th. She has a PhD in performance studies and a keen interest in compositional linguistics. www.gelseybell.com
Brian McCorkle is a composer and performer working with Panoply Performance Laboratory (as co-Director with Esther Neff) and Varispeed Collective. Upcoming projects include "Boleros" as part of this year's Make Music NY festival and PPL's new opera "Embarrassed of the Whole" panoplylab.org/brianmccorkle
Esther Neff is the founder of Panoply Performance Laboratory, an entity situating live acts of collective ideation and performing operas-of-operations. PPL is currently making a new opera entitled "Embarrassed of the Whole" panoplylab.org/estherneff
Paul Pinto is a composer, writer and performer. He's a founder of experimental music ensembles thingNY and Varispeed. An album of his poetic compositions, minis/Trajectories is set to be released in September, and he's writing a psychedelic new electronic opera called Thomas Paine in Violence for the HERE Art Center. pfpinto.com
Dave Ruder is a Brooklyn-based vocalist, clarinetist, guitarist, electronicist, composer, songwriter, writer/librettist, interdisciplinary collaborator, etc. Dave is a key member of the groups Varispeed, thingNY, and Reps. Since 2013, Dave has been the driving force behind Gold Bolus Recordings, which documents the work of NYC's greatest musical weirdos. daveruder.com
Aliza Simons is a founding member of Varispeed. She has released several albums as Why Lie? with Dave Ruder and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Also, today is her birthday.
Jeffrey Young is a composer, violinist, and electronic musician from Brooklyn, NY specializing in experimental, rock, and classical music. Recent performance highlights include tours in the US and Europe as a solo artist and with The World/Inferno Friendship Society, Valerie Kuehne and the Wasps Nests, and Paul Pinto. jeffrey-young.com
Varispeed is a collective of composer-performers that creates site-specific, sometimes-participatory, oftentimes-durational, forevermore-experimental events. Founded by Aliza Simons, Dave Ruder, Paul Pinto, Brian McCorkle, and Gelsey Bell, Varispeed came together in June 2011 to perform Perfect Lives Brooklyn, a 12-hour celebration of Robert Ashley's landmark opera. varispeedcollective.com
thingNY is a 501c3 not-for-profit collective of composer-performers who create and perform theatrically charged experimental music, champion the work of avant-garde and contemporary classical composers, and collaborate across disciplines, media and genres. thingNY.com
//\\//\\
Concert No.2 – Farmer Cellist
Friday, March 4, 2016
8:00pm (doors open @ 7:30)
by invitation only
Program
Listening
[] Melissa Grey [Merlin Music Machine, spoken word]
[] David Morneau [spoken word]
Cello Club [excerpt, in progress] by David Morneau
[] Craig Hultgren [cello]
New Work for unaccompanied cello by James Romig
[] Craig Hultgran [cello]
Aurora Inscrutabile by Tim Johnson
[] Craig Hultgren [cello]
~improvisation~
[] Craig Hultgren [cello]
About the Artists
For several decades, cellist Craig Hultgren has been a fixture on the scenes for new music, the newly creative arts, and the avant-garde. Recently leaving Birmingham after more than 30 years as a member of the Alabama Symphony, he now resides outside of Decorah, Iowa as the farmer-cellist. A recipient of two Artist Fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, he was a member for many years of Thámyris, a contemporary chamber music ensemble in Atlanta. He is a founding member of Luna Nova, a new music ensemble with a large repertoire of performances available as podcast downloads on iTunes. Hultgren is featured in three solo CD recordings including The Electro-Acoustic Cello Book on Living Artist Recordings. For ten years, he produced the Hultgren Solo Cello Works Biennial, an international competition that highlighted the best new compositions for the instrument. He taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the Alabama School of Fine Arts and Birmingham-Southern College where he directed the BSC New Music Ensemble. He is a founding member and former President of the Birmingham Art Music Alliance and was on the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Youth Orchestras of Birmingham and their Scrollworks program. In 2013, Hultgren performed a 15 Minutes of Fame concert titled Occupy Cello in New York for the Composer's Voice Concert Series. That program featured 15 one-minute solo compositions that challenge the traditional boundaries of the instrument. Last fall, he was the featured performer for the La Crosse New Music Festival in Wisconsin.
James Romig (b. 1971) endeavors to create music that reflects the intricate complexity of the natural world, where fundamental structures exert influence on both small-scale iteration and large-scale design, obscuring boundaries between form and content. His music has been performed in 49 states and 30 countries. Notable ensemble performers include the JACK Quartet, Talujon, Ensemble Chronophonie, Duo Contour, Helix, the Khasma Duo, New Muse Duo, the Zodiac Trio, Suono Mobile, and the Quad City Symphony Orchestra. Solo performances include recitals by pianists Ashlee Mack and Taka Kigawa, flutists John McMurtery and Harvey Sollberger, violinist Erik Carlson, and numerous others. Recordings of his music have been released on the Blue Griffin, First Step, and Navona record labels, and also by Perspectives of New Music/Open Space. His percussion works are especially well-known and have received hundreds of performances around the world. Guest-composer visits include Eastman, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Bowling Green, Northwestern, Illinois, and the American Academy in Rome. Residencies include Petrified Forest National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Copland House. He holds degrees from Rutgers University (PhD, studying with Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt) and the University of Iowa (MM, BM). He has been on faculty at Western Illinois University since 2002.
Composer Timothy Ernest Johnson is known for music that integrates disparate materials into a multiplicity of expressive dimensions, most recently in a series of works partially based on historical chess games. His large ensemble work Kasparov vs Deep Blue was a finalist in the 2008 Alea III competition and Morphy vs Brunswick and Isouard won the 2004 University of Illinois Symphony Orchestra prize. His co-commissioned electronic work Tensile Strength received a prize in the 2008 International Electroacoustic Music Competition "Musica Nova" in the Czech Republic, and has been featured on two recordings. Johnson has had numerous other works performed in his native Chicago and abroad, and remains active as a classical guitarist, with recent recitals in South Korea and Chicago. As a theorist, Dr. Johnson's most recent presentation was a 2013 guest lecture at the University of Illinois entitled "Ben Johnston's Compositional World: 13-limit Extended Just Intonation."
Composer Melissa Grey’s projects include concert works, electroacoustic performances, installations, food and sound events, and collaborations with artists, architectural designers, and musicians. Upcoming projects include Photon Ecstasy, a collaborative concert-length spatial performance with composer David Morneau to premiere at the University of Pennsylvania Special Collections Library and held in conjunction with the exhibition of artist Dan Rose’s DNA-Photon Project. With frequent collaborator artist and animator Nicole Antebi, Grey has ongoing projects that include a wide range of shared interests, including honeybees and an ancient magic square. Grey is an Associate Director of Composers Concordance and a Board Member of Miolina, the violin duo of Lynn Bechtold and Mioi Takeda. She teaches Sound Studies at the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York City and co-produces Soft Series with David Morneau.
Grey’s recent works have been published by The MIT Press and featured at Spectrum NYC, National Gallery of Canada, Whitney Museum of American Art (with Antenna International), Electronic Music Midwest, Goethe-Institut Montréal, The Stone, Corridor at BolteLang, Dorsky Gallery, Gallery MC, Alphabet City Festivals 2010 AIR and 2009 WATER, Cinesonika: First International Film and Video Festival of Sound Design, Parsons The New School for Design, Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio, and others.
David Morneau is a composer of an entirely undecided genre. Described by Molly Sheridan as a "shining beacon" of inspiration, his diverse work illuminates ideas about our culture, issues concerning creativity, and even the very nature of music itself. His eclectic output has been described variously as "elegantly rendered", "happily prissy", "impressive", "unusual, esoteric, and offbeat". His recent album, Broken Memory, "absolutely wrecks shop." For that, David Morneau wins." Morneau is Composer-In-Residence at Immigrant Breast Nest and co-produces Soft Series with Melissa Grey.
//\\//\\
Concert no.1- Another Dimension
David Morneau performed Another Dimension, his new work for Nintendo Gameboy and Nanoloop.
Soft Series No.1
Saturday, January 23, 2016 - 8:00pm
by invitation
