Percussionist Owen Weaver presents a concert of works for found objects, intensified and complemented by electronics and non-musical artistic disciplines. With new works from Ian Dicke (NY Premiere), Lisa Coons, Steven Snowden, and Christopher Cerrone, the performance features collaborations with Tigue Percussion Trio, choreographer Rosalyn Nasky, and photographer Lucas Foglia. Part of MATA's Interval Concert Series.
Program:
Missa Materialis (2010, NY Premiere) by Ian Dicke
A theatrical percussion quartet scored for vibraphone, musical saw, boomboxes, and a host of discarded objects, Missa Materialis was inspired largely by Vince Hanneman’s 21-year old ongoing (and sadly, recently condemned) construction known as the Cathedral of Junk. The piece is modeled as a requiem mass for modern consumer culture highlighting the vast amount of waste created by the planned obsolescence of the things we buy. In five movements, Ian requires the percussionists play, sing, whistle, and act their way through the life cycle of material goods turned trash, from the factory to a literal onstage garbage heap. A collaboration with Tigue Percussion Trio.
Sculpture Piece No. 1 (2007) by Lisa Coons
This structured improvisation features a sculpture welded by the composer from scrap rebar and electric fence wire as the percussive object and sole instrument of the piece. A contact microphone and volume pedal amplify and manipulate a myriad of sounds as the spiky sculpture is alternately caressed, bashed, and flossed with steel guitar strings. Premiered in 2007, Weaver is the 2nd to perform the piece, working closely with the composer to develop a new musical form and graphic score.
A Watched Pot (2009) by Steven Snowden
Commissioned for Austin’s Big Range dance festival, A Watched Pot came about as a collaboration between Owen Weaver, composer Steven Snowden, and dancer/choreographer Rosalyn Nasky. The piece is scored for a teakettle, six metal mixing bowls, and electronics. For the first time since it's premiere, this performance features Rosalyn's original work for dance "Dwellers" which depicts simmering domestic tensions set in a dream within the mundane.
Memory Palace (2012) by Christopher Cerrone
Memory Palace explores ancient memorization techniques that involve elaborate visualization. Written for solo percussion and electronics, the work spans five movements and over twenty minutes to explore this concept as the well as the uncanny power of music to both create and stir up memories within us. Lucas Foglia will curate an exhibition of five photos—one for each movement—which will be presented as self-contained listening stations specially for this concert.
The music of American-born composer Ian Dicke (b. 1982, Trenton, NJ) includes works for orchestra, wind ensemble, chamber ensembles, and electronic media. Heralded by the San Francisco Classical Voice as “colorful, well-designed, and deftly scored,” Dicke’s works often explore contemporary social-political culture through a mixture of pungent and triadic harmonies, dance-like rhythms, and intricately layered textures. In 2010, Dicke co-founded and directed Fast Forward Austin, an all day new music festival in Austin, TX. The festival pairs local and international cutting-edge artists in a “welcomingly relaxed venue…[that] taps into what is so great about the Austin vibe: a community of people who are artistically curious, non-doctrinaire, and unpretentious” (NewMusicBox).
Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984, Huntington, NY) is a Brooklyn-based composer of dramatic, orchestral, chamber, and electronic music. Hailed as “a rising star” (The New Yorker) and “dangerously talented” (The New Haven Advocate), Cerrone's intricate and evocative work has been described as “skillful and economical,” and “the program’s highlight” by the New York Times. Cerrone is a founding member and co-artistic director of Red Light New Music and one-sixth of the Sleeping Giant composers collective.
Growing up around equipment and metalworking on a farm in northeast Missouri, Lisa Renée Coons acquired a special affinity to noise composition and found sounds. Presently a Jackie McLean Fellow and Visiting Professor of Composition at the Hartt School in the University of Hartford, she received her PhD in Composition from Princeton University, her Master’s from SUNY Stony Brook, and studied at the University of Missouri-Kansas City during her undergraduate degree. Lisa Renée's portfolio includes music for acoustic and electronic instruments, turntables, traditional ensembles and welded percussion sculptures. She was awarded a 2011 Composer Fellowship from the Other Minds Festival, an ICElab Fellowship from the International Contemporary Ensemble, and received an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award for the string quartet Awkward Music. Recent commissions include works for The California E.A.R. Unit, The Machine Project for the Hammer Museum of Los Angeles, the Violin Futura Project, and Dither Electric Guitar Quartet. Lisa Renée lives in New York and is a member of the composers collective called, simply, The Collected.
Steven Snowden creates music for a diverse array of settings including theater, dance, film, multimedia installations, and the concert stage. He has focused much of his recent work on interdisciplinary collaboration and is quite active as a performer in both acoustic and electronic mediums. Raised in rural Southwest Missouri, Snowden began composition studies in 2002, received his Masters degree in composition at the University of Colorado, his DMA at the University of Texas at Austin, and was awarded a Fullbright Fellowship for 2012-2013. He is a co-founder/director of the Fast Forward Austin new music organization and his works have been performed by many outstanding ensembles at numerous festivals and concert series across five continents.
Choreographer and performer Rosalyn Nasky has been fascinating Austin, Houston, and Fort Worth audiences since her return from New York in 2008. She has created and peformed numerous solo and collaborative works for local festivals including Big Range, PILOT, and Nmass, as well as shows at Co-lab space and site-specific venues. Her collaborative work, Poet’s Love, recently won for “Outstanding Short Work” in dance inthe Austin Critics’ Table Awards.
Lucas Foglia (b. 1983) was raised on a small family farm in New York and is currently based in San Francisco. A graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Art, Lucas exhibits and publishes his photographs internationally. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Pilara Foundation and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Fine Art. His photographs have been published in Aperture Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, British Journal of Photography, Contact Sheet, Wired and PDN’s 30. His first
book, A Natural Order, was just released by Nazraeli Press.
