The second public performance and NYC premiere of Pauline Oliveros’ 1998 work Primordial/Lift, featuring many performers from the original studio recording: Pauline Oliveros - accordion & electronics, voice; Andrew Deutsch - electronics & toy piano; Anne Bourne - cello & voice; David Grubbs - electric guitar. The work is “based on information concerning the shift in the resonant frequency of the earth.”
Jason Huang - violin
Anne Bourne - cello/voice
David Grubbs - harmonium
Pauline Oliveros - V accordion
Miguel Frasconi - glass harmonica
Suzanne Thorpe - oscillator
Andrew Deutsch - sampler
A native Texan, Pauline Oliveros has influenced American music extensively in her career spanning more than 60 years as a composer, performer, author and philosopher. She pioneered the concept of Deep Listening, her practice based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation, designed to inspire both trained and untrained musicians to practice the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions in solo and ensemble situations.
During the mid-'60s she served as the first director of the Tape Music Center at Mills College, aka the Center for Contemporary Music, followed by 14 years as Professor of Music and 3 years as Director of the Center for Music Experiment at the University of California at San Diego. Since 2001 she has served as Distinguished Research Professor of Music in the Arts department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where she is engaged in research on a National Science Foundation CreativeIT project. Her research interests include improvisation, special needs interfaces and telepresence teaching and performing. She also serves as Darius Milhaud Composer in Residence at Mills College doing telepresence teaching and she is executive director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd. where she leads projects in Deep Listening and Adaptive Use Interfaces. She is the recipient of the 2009 William Schuman Award from Columbia University for lifetime achievement. A retrospective from 1960 to 2010 was performed at Miller Theater, Columbia University in New York March 27, 2010 in conjunction with the Schuman award. She received a third honorary degree from DeMontort University, Leicester, UK July 23, 2010. Recent recordings include collaborations with Miya Masoka and Chris Brown on Deep Listening.
David Grubbs has released eleven solo albums, the most recent of which is Hybrid Song Box.4 (Blue Chopsticks). He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with writers such as Susan Howe and Rick Moody, and with visual artists such as Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, Cosima von Bonin, and Stephen Prina. He is an assistant professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College and director of the graduate programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA). Grubbs was a 2005-6 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and has been called one of two “Best Teachers for an Indie-Rocker to Admire” in the Village Voice and “le plus Français des Américains” in Libération.
With improvised streams of extended cello and voice, Anne Bourne integrates the experience of listening and composing for dance, film, experimental context, digital image media, chamber music, and words. She has created with Andrea Nann, Michael Ondaatje, Susie Ibarra, Eve Egoyan, Alvin Lucier, Nicolas Collins, John Oswald, Tom Kuo, Peter Mettler, Fred Frith, and Pauline Oliveros. Anne is interested in each musical expression being an offering of sonic activism, in the sense of resolution between tones, peoples, landscapes, and individual paradoxes through listening.
Jason Kao Hwang (violin) leads his quartet, EDGE, quintet, Local Lingo, octet, Burning Bridge, and improvising string orchestra, Spontaneous River. He has performed with William Parker, the Rova Sax Quartet, Henry Threadgill and received grants from Chamber Music America, the NEA, NJSCA, and Meet the Composer.
Miguel Frasconi is a composer and improvisor who uses electronics and a menagerie of glass objects to create his sound world. He has worked closely with many esteemed composers and choreographers. He presently teaches electronic music at Bard College and is director of the new music ensemble Ne(x)tworks.
Suzanne Thorpe is an electro-acoustic flautist, composer and sound artist. Her fixed compositions tend to be site-specific multichannel works that employ psycho-acoustic phenomena and tuned filtering techniques, and in performance she extends her instrument with an ever-evolving set-up of analogue and real-time software components. As an improviser she has performed with Chris Brown, Annette Krebs, Maggie Nicols, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Gino Robair, Zeena Parkins, and Ulrich Krieger, among others. Thorpe is a founding member of the alternative rock group Mercury Rev, with whom she worked from 1989 – 2001, earning numerous critical accolades, and from time to time she can be heard mucking it up with J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. Her discography comprises over 20 recordings released on Sony, V2, Beggars Banquet, Geffen, Specific Recordings, including a recent release with feedback artist Philip White as duo thenumber46. Lately she can be heard with newly formed quartet Volume (Shelley Burgon, Maria Chavez and Stephan Moore).
Andrew Deutsch received his BFA in Video Art and Printmaking from Alfred University in 1990. He obtained his MFA in Integrated Electronic Art from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1994. Since 1998 Deutsch has released over 14 CDRs of solo electronic music on his own Magic If Recordings imprint.
Carol Robinson's Billows:
Billows is a twelve-section piece for basset horn or birbyne and a reactive electronic environment. Drawn from a series of recent pieces for solo instruments with live electronics, Billows explores the shifting components of timbre and time.
Franco-American composer and clarinetist Carol Robinson has a multifaceted musical life, equally at ease in the classical and experimental realms.
Robinson often works closely with composers, but she also pursues new and alternative contexts for her work through collaborations with video artists, photographers, and musicians from diverse backgrounds. The freely converging musical world of her group Sleeping in Vilna is typical of what interests her. Improvisation is her passion. She began composing by writing for her own music theater productions, subsequently receiving commissions for concert pieces, installations, radio, dance and film productions. Her works often combine acoustic sounds with electronics, and her musical aesthetic is strongly influenced by a fascination with aleatoric systems. Particularly interested in dance, she has collaborated with choreographers Susan Buirge, Nadège MacLeay, Thierry Niang, François Verret, and Young Ho Nam.
In 2008, she was awarded a composition fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Her works have been recorded by the Hessischer Rundfunk, Saarlandischer Rundfunk, Lithuanian National Radio, and Radio France. Billows, for clarinets and live electronics, was released by Plush in 2009. Other recent releases include solo monograph recordings of music by Giacinto Scelsi, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono, and Luciano Berio for Mode Records, Phill Niblock for Touch, as well as classical music and jazz for Syrius, BTL and Nato.
