SERIES PASS: $40 General / $35 Members
Tectonics Festival NY concludes with a diverse program highlighting works by Eric Richards, a little-known but tremendously influential American avant-garde composer who came of age in the pervasively interdisciplinary counterculture of the 1960s. Two of Richard’s works are performed by percussionist Alan Zimmerman. Alvin Lucier returns for this final event of the festival, performing two works with pianist Jenny Lin. Baritone Jeffrey Gavett, a premiere vocalist of contemporary music, performs works by Lucier, Scelsi and two experimentalists of a younger generation— Aaron Cassidy and Evan Johnson.
Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir closes the festival with a solo set, an acclaimed Icelandic cellist at the forefront of experimental rock, best known for her collaborations with múm and Pan Sonic. With cello, voice and software manipulation, Guðnadóttir draws a broad spectrum of sounds from her instrument, ranging from intimate simplicity to huge soundscapes.
Program:
Eric Richards: Times Racing (with tape)
Eric Richards: Finalbells
Performed by Alan Zimmerman.
Alvin Lucier: Still Lives
Alvin Lucier: Nothing Is Real
Performed by Jenny Lin & Alvin Lucier.
Aaron Cassidy: I, Purples, Spat Blood, Laugh of Beautiful Lips
Evan Johnson: A General Interrupter to Ongoing Activity
Giacinto Scelsi: Three Latin Prayers
Alvin Lucier: Music for Baritone and Slow Sweep Pure Wave Oscillators
Performed by Jeffrey Gavett, Baritone.
Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir: Solo Performance
Hildur Guðnadóttir (b. 1982) is an Icelandic cello player, composer and singer who has been emerged at the forefront of experimental pop and contemporary music. In her solo works she draws a broad spectrum of sounds from her instrument, ranging from intimate simplicity to huge soundscapes. She has released three critically acclaimed solo albums (all on Touch), and performed and recorded with Skúli Sverrisson, Jóhann Jóhannsson, múm, Schneider TM, Angel, Pan Sonic, Hauschka, Wildbirds & Peacedrums, Jamie Lidell, The Knife, Fever Ray and Throbbing Gristle, among many others. Guðnadóttir has composed music for theatre, dance pieces and films, including commissions from The Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, Icelandic National Theatre, Tate Modern, The British Film Institute, The Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, Gothenburg National Theatre and other institutions. She won Gríman (The Icelandic Theatre Award) in 2011, for her music for King Lear, and in 2012 was nominated for Denmark’s Robert Prize film award for her original score for A Hijacking.
Eric Richards was born in New York City in 1935 and attended— and later taught at— the Mannes College of Music. Many of his pieces use unusual instruments or standard instruments played (or tuned) in idiosyncratic ways. His music has been performed in New York at the Kitchen, Lotus Music and Dance, the Cocteau Repertory Theatre— where he was musical advisor, and the Composers Forum. His music is recorded on New World Records (two of the pieces on these Tectonic Festival concerts), Turnabout Records (Gregg Smith Singers) and Koch International Classics (Jenny Lin). He has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and the recipient of a Ford Foundation Recording Grant. He divides his time between New York City and Albuquerque, New Mexico; his printed music is available from Frog Peak Music.
Alvin Lucier was born in 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire. He was educated in Nashua public and parochial schools, the Portsmouth Abbey School, Yale, and Brandeis and spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship. From 1962 to 1970 he taught at Brandeis, where he conducted the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus which devoted much of its time to the performance of new music. Since 1970 he has taught at Wesleyan University where he is John Spencer Camp Professor of Music. Lucier is a composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. Lucier has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. His recent works include a series of sound installations and works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra in which, by means of close tunings with pure tones, sound waves are caused to spin through space.
Taiwanese-American pianist Jenny Lin is among the most sought-after players of the music of our time, with numerous premieres and dedications to her credit. She has worked alongside many composers, and collaborated with Chris Wiesendanger, Marc Ribot, George Lewis, and Wilco members Nels Cline and Glenn Kotche. Her ability to combine classical and contemporary literature has brought her to the attention of international critics and audiences, she has been acclaimed for her "remarkable technical command" and "a gift for melodic flow" by The New York Times. Her concerts have taken her to Carnegie Hall, Miller Theatre, MoMA, Whitney Museum, Morgan Library, Le Poisson Rouge, Salle Cortot in Paris; Victoria Hall in Geneva.
Jeffrey Gavett, baritone, is dedicated to the creation and presentation of new music as composer, performer and improviser. He has performed with a broad range of collaborators, from the Rolling Stones and indie rock group to new music groups. His own mixed ensemble loadbang has premiered more than 70 new works in the past five years, writing their own music, improvising, and working closely with composers to create a repertoire for their unique instrumentation (trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, baritone voice). In 2010 he founded the Ekmeles vocal ensemble, which is dedicated to performing new works for a cappella voices and classics of the avant garde.
Aaron Cassidy is an American composer and conductor based in England since 2007. His work has been programmed by leading international contemporary music specialists, ensembles and soloists. Recordings of his work are available on NEOS, NMC, HCR, and New Focus Records. Also active as a conductor, Cassidy has led performances by student and professional ensembles in a diverse range of contemporary and traditional repertoire. He has conducted at the June in Buffalo festival, ICMC, and in a variety of university settings, most recently serving as conductor of the Symphony Orchestra and the New Music Ensemble at the University of Huddersfield. In 2009, he participated in the Herrenhaus Edenkoben Mastercourse with Peter Eötvös and Zsolt Nagy, conducting the International Ensemble Modern Academy (IEMA) in a radio broadcast for SWR-2. Cassidy joined currently serves as Reader in Composition, Research Coordinator for Music and Music Technology, Coordinator of the MA by Research, and part of the Directorate of the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM) at the University of Huddersfield.
Evan Johnson (b. 1980) is an American composer whose music focuses on the physical underpinnings of instrumental performance, extreme notational situations, and the structural potential of conflicting repetitive and canonic structures. His music has been performed throughout North America and Europe, and programmed at American and international festivals of contemporary music at Darmstadt, Witten, Huddersfield, Leuven (TRANSIT), Berlin (Klangwerkstatt), Bludenz, Los Angeles (the Monday Evening Concerts series), Buffalo, San Diego, and others. Recordings are available or forthcoming on the HCR, Metier, Mode, and New Focus labels. The recipient of a Fellowship Prize at the 2012 Darmstadt Summer Courses and a 2011 Meet the Composer commission, Johnson has received commissions and awards from BMI/Concert Artists Guild, ASCAP, Columbia University (Bearns Prize), the Rhode Island Foundation, the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, the Society for New Music, and Yale University, among others. He has held residencies at Copland House and the Millay Colony.
Giacinto Scelsi (1905 – 1988) was an Italian composer who also wrote surrealist poetry in French. He is best known for writing music based around only one pitch, altered in all manners through microtonal oscillations, harmonic allusions, and changes in timbre and dynamics, as paradigmatically exemplified in his revolutionary Quattro Pezzi su una nota sola ("Four Pieces on a single note", 1959). His musical output, which encompassed all Western classical genres except scenic music, remained largely undiscovered even within contemporary musical circles during most of his life. A series of concerts in the mid to late 1980s finally premiered many of his pieces to great acclaim, notably his orchestral masterpieces in October 1987 in Cologne, about a quarter of a century after those works had been composed and less than a year before the composer's death. The impact caused by the late discovery of Scelsi's works was described by Belgian musicologist Harry Halbreich: “A whole chapter of recent musical history must be rewritten: the second half of this century is now unthinkable without Scelsi... He has inaugurated a completely new way of making music, hitherto unknown in the West. In the early fifties, there were few alternatives to serialism's strait jacket that did not lead back to the past.”
