Darmstadt Institute and ISSUE Project Room are proud to present an evening of contemporary keyboard music by four specialists in the experimental tradition: Michael Century, Stephen Gosling, Emily Manzo, and Kathleen Supové. Solo repertoire by Terry Riley, Alvin Curran, Yan Maresz, and more will culminate in a rare performance of Pauline Oliveros's "Gathering Together" for eight hands, one piano.
Kathleen Supové is one of America's most acclaimed and versatile contemporary pianists, known for continually redefining what it means to be a pianist/keyboardist/performance artist in today's world. In addition to her compelling virtuosity, she is also known for her ways of breaking the wall between performer and audience. After winning top prizes in the Gaudeamus International Competition for Interpretation of Contemporary Music, she began her career as a guest artist at the prestigious Darmstadt Festival in Germany. Since then, Ms. Supové has presented solo concerts entitled The Exploding Piano, in which she has championed the music of countless contemporary composers—minimalists, postminimalists, and experimentalists. Some of the most notable are Frederic Rzewski, Louis Andriessen, Terry Riley, Chinary Ung, Giacinto Scelsi, Iannis Xenakis, John Adams, and Alvin Curran, as well as younger composers including Randall Woolf, David Lang, Nick Didkovsky, Eve Beglarian, John Zorn, Phil Kline, and many others.
She has appeared with The Lincoln Center Festival, The Philip Glass Ensemble, Bang On a Can Marathon, Music at the Anthology, Composers' Collaborative, Inc., and at many other venues, ranging from concert halls such as Carnegie to theatrical spaces such as The Kitchen to clubs such as The Knitting Factory and The Cutting Room. She is currently an artist-in-residence at The Flea Theater in NYC, where she regularly presents her newest Exploding Piano concerts each season. Recently, she was a featured performer in two prestigious festivals: The Ussachevsky Memorial Festival (Pomona College, Claremont, CA) and the NIME Festival (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) in New York City.
Kyle Gann of the Village Voice has called Emily Manzo a “dynamite young pianist,” and the New York Times has called her "exceptional." Emily has performed throughout the U.S. and Europe at festivals including the Sosterberg Music Festival in Holland and the Acanthes Festival in France. She has premiered the works of John Luther Adams, Susie Ibarra and Rodney Sharman and has played in ensembles conducted by Tim Weiss and Tania Leon. Her degrees were earned at the New England Conservatory (pre-college), the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (BM) and Columbia University Teachers College (MA) where her teachers included Jean Stackhouse, Stephen Drury, Lydia Frumkin, and Jeanne Golan. She has played in masterclasses for Seymour Lipkin, Loren Hollander, Roger Muraro and Florent Boffard, among others.
She currently resides in New York where she performs regularly as a classical solo and chamber musician, as well as with her group, Christy & Emily, which has a new release on The Social Registry. She has a long-term collaboration with video artists Paul Rowley and David Phillips based around John Cage's piano music from the '40s. Emily is a founding member of Till by Turning, an ensemble dedicated to developing educational resources for new music. She is also a mentor, piano instructor and band member for the viBe SongMakers, one of several workshops run by viBe, a local nonprofit and performing-arts education program for teenage girls.
Pianist Stephen Gosling’s “extraordinary virtuosity” (Houston Chronicle) has also been hailed as “electric” and “luminous and poised” by The New York Times and as possessing “utter clarity and conviction” by The Washington Post. Mr. Gosling earned his Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees at the Juilliard School. During his tenure he was awarded the Mennin Prize for Outstanding Excellence and Leadership in Music and the Sony Elevated Standards Fellowship. He was also featured as concerto soloist an unprecedented four times.
Mr. Gosling is a member of New York New Music Ensemble, Ensemble Sospeso, Ne(x)tworks and Columbia Sinfonietta. He has also performed with Orpheus, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, American Composers Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Riverside Symphony, Speculum Musicae, Ensemble 21, DaCapo Chamber Players, Continuum, SEM Ensemble, the League of Composers/ISCM Chamber Players, and Da Camera of Houston. Mr. Gosling has recorded for Albany, Bridge, Centaur, CRI, Innova, Koch, Mode, Morrison Music Trust, Naxos, New World Records, and Rattle Records.
Michael Century, M.A. (music history and theory), Berkeley, was educated in musicology, piano performance at the Universities of Toronto, and California at Berkeley, and science/technology policy at Sussex University (U.K.). In his scholarly work, he studies the history and sociology of art-technology interactions in the twentieth century, highlighting the dynamics of innovation in creative software cultures. Long associated with The Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, Century founded the Centre's Media Arts Division in 1988, and headed the Inter-arts program and Jazz workshop there from 1981-87. From 1993-2002 he was a program manager, consultant, and policy advisor for art and technology, serving public institutions, foundations, and research laboratories in Canada. Pioneering work in the field of new media art, included The Art and Virtual Environments project (1991-94), one of the first large-scale and sustained investigations of virtual reality technologies as a new medium for artists, also one of the organizers of the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Montreal, 1995. Century wrote Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture for the Rockefeller Foundation, which was published by Leonardo Journal as an Electronic Monograph. He was panelist and co-author for the U.S. National Academy of Science 2003 report on information technologies and creative practices, Beyond Productivity. Century is also a pianist and composer with a broad interest in solo and chamber classical repertoire, and he composed a series of works for piano and computer-processed voice that have been performed at music festivals in Canada and the U.S., and broadcast nationally on the CBC.
