Friday, September 29th, ISSUE is pleased to present FOR, the first evening of FOR/WITH, a mini-festival featuring new commissions with some of America’s most iconoclastic composers and performers. A celebration of individual languages and the spirit of collaboration, the evening opens the series with the premiere of For Trumpet Player by Christian Wolff, a performance of Ashley Fure’s Shiver Lung 2, the debut duo encounter between Michael Pisaro and Christian Wolff, and a performance of Annea Lockwood’s Bayou-Borne, for Pauline.
Organized by performer, composer and former ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Nate Wooley, FOR/WITH simultaneously premieres distinct new compositions for solo trumpet while also embarking on a celebration of the independent work of the series’ commissioned composers.
Christian Wolff’s For Trumpet Player was the first piece Nate Wooley received after undertaking the commissioning series. Wooley describes the impetus of commissioning these works as coming from a desire to add music to the solo trumpet repertoire that met a certain aesthetic that felt lacking in the contemporary literature: music with an attention to non-linear forms, an attention to sound and timbre over technical flash, and music that was personal not only within the language of the composer but the player as well. This initial premise prompted the expansion of the series into thematic celebration of the composer's’ work, methods and approaches.
Ashley Fure’s Shiver Lung 2, performed by percussionist Ross Karre, features Fure’s signature use of complex timbres drawn from extended instrumental techniques and acoustic “wildness.” Her work is known for how virtuosity and crudeness “face-off,” circling an aesthetic region between embellishment and fact, between sound as a carrier of aesthetic intent and sound as a subsidiary effect of action.
The evening also features the debut duo performance between Christian Wolff (small percussion) and Michael Pisaro (electric guitar) -- a not-to-be-missed improvisational encounter.
FOR concludes with a performance of Annea Lockwood’s Bayou-Borne, for Pauline. The piece is dedicated to the late Pauline Oliveros (1932 - 2016) and follows a score based on a map of the six bayous converging near Houston, Texas. The work is performed by Christian Wolff (percussion), Ross Karre (percussion), Nate Wooley (trumpet), Michael Pisaro (electric guitar), Megan Schubert (soprano voice) and Jessica Pavone (viola).
The evening features all four of the composers of Wooley’s commissioning project thus far (Wolff, Pisaro, Fure, Lockwood) and, without a doubt, the artists embody Wooley’s performing premise of virtuosoism, non-linearity, and deep listening. The series marks a unique opportunity to celebrate the iconoclastic, the warm, and the singular.
PROGRAM:
Christian Wolff: For Trumpet Player – Nate Wooley Trumpet (25’)
Ashley Fure: Shiver Lung 2 – Ross Karre Percussion (10’)
Intermission
Christian Wolff/Michael Pisaro Duo – Christian Wolff (Small Percussion) / Michael Pisaro (Electric Guitar) (15’)
Annea Lockwood: Bayou-Borne, for Pauline Christian Wolff (Percussion), Ross Karre (Percussion), Nate Wooley (Trumpet), Michael Pisaro (Electric Guitar), Megan Schubert (Soprano Voice), Jessica Pavone (Viola) (20’)
New York-based American trumpeter Nate Wooley (b. 1974) has performed on over 100 recordings. Increasingly acknowledged internationally, Wooley’s specific style is part of a burgeoning revolution in experimental trumpet technique. His own compositions expand conceptions of linguistic based embouchure manipulation and utilize the trumpet to control amplified feedback. He has performed regularly with such icons as John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Eliane Radigue, Ken Vandermark, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, and Yoshi Wada, as well as being a collaborator with some of the brightest lights of his generation like Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Peter Evans, and Mary Halvorson.
Christian Wolff (born 1934, Nice, France) is a composer, teacher and sometime performer. Since 1941 he has lived in the United States. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition briefly with John Cage, in whose company, along with Morton Feldman, then David Tudor and Earle Brown, his work found encouragement and support, as it did subsequently from association with Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew, and with Merce Cunningham and his dance company. As an improviser he has played with the English group AMM, Christian Marclay, Takehisa Kosugi, Keith Rowe, Steve Lacy, Larry Polansky and Kui Dong. From 1971 to 1999 he taught classics, comparative literature and music at Dartmouth College.
Ashley Fure (b. 1982) is an American composer of acoustic and electroacoustic concert music as well as intermedia installation art. Called “raw, elemental,” and “richly satisfying” by the New York Times, her work explores the kinetic source of sound, bringing focus to the muscular act of music making and the chaotic behaviors of raw acoustic matter. She holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University and further degrees from IRCAM (Cursus 1 and 2), Oberlin Conservatory and the Interlochen Arts Academy. Fure was a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow at Columbia University in 2014 and joined the Dartmouth College Department of Music as an Assistant Professor of Sonic Arts in September 2015.
Annea Lockwood (b. 1939) is a New Zealand born American composer known for her explorations of the rich world of natural acoustic sounds and environments, in works ranging from sound art and installations, through text-sound and performance art to concert music. Her music has been performed in many venues and festivals including MACBA Barcelona, De Ijsbreker, the Other Minds Festival-San Francisco, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, among many others. She was a recipient of the 2007 Henry Cowell Award. Her music has been issued on CD and online on the Lovely Music, Ambitus, EM, XI, Rattle, Lorelt, and Pogus labels.
Michael Pisaro (born 1961 in Buffalo, New York) is a guitarist and composer. A member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble, he has composed works for a great variety of instrumental combinations. Since 2010 portrait concerts of his music have been given in London, Paris, New York, Santiago, Tel Aviv, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, Oxford, Glasgow, Moscow, Chicago, Munich, Huddersfield, Madrid, Brussels, Montpelier, Boston, Berlin, Houston, Düsseldorf, Trondheim, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Nantes, Mexico City, Seattle, Linz, San Diego and elsewhere. Recordings of his work (solo and collaborative) have been released by Edition Wandelweiser Records, erstwhile records, New World Records, another timbre, slubmusic, Cathnor, Senufo Editions, winds measure, HEM Berlin and on Pisaro's own imprint, Gravity Wave. Before joining the composition faculty at the California Institute of the Arts (where he is located presently), he taught music composition and theory at Northwestern University from 1986 to 2000. In 2005/6 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He was Fromm Foundation Visiting Professor of Music Composition in the Department of Music at Harvard in the fall of 2014.
Ross Karre is a percussionist and temporal artist based in New York City. His primary focus is on combining media, including classical percussion performance, electronics, theater, moving image, visual art, and lighting design. He designs integrated, moving images that emerge from an aesthetic foundation in American experimental music as well as that of the European avant garde. Ross is a percussionist and the co-artistic director for the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).
Megan Schubert, soprano, has performed music by Stockhausen for an audience under umbrellas in a torrential downpour for Make Music New York; world premieres at Carnegie Hall; with robots while locked inside a Van de Graaff Generator at Boston’s Museum of Science; on a bike flying by the audience in an installation piece at McCarren Park Pool, Brooklyn; in a giant potato sack while video was projected onto her frontside at Webster Hall; for inmates at a maximum security prison in Ossining, NY; with puppets at E 4th Street Fab! Fest; for Elliot Carter at a celebration of his 100th birthday; shared the stage on multiple occasions with such luminaries as Meredith Monk, Bang On a Can, and with many ensembles championing art music and experimental jazz of today.
Jessica Pavone (composer, viola, violin, el.bass) has performed in countless improvisation, avant jazz, experimental, folk, soul, and chamber ensembles since moving to NYC in 2000. She currently plays with Normal Love, in a duo with guitarist Mary Halvorson, with Anthony Braxton's ensembles and as a solo violist. As a composer, The Wire magazine praised her “ability to transform a naked tonal gesture into something special,” and The New York Times described her music as "distinct and beguiling...its core is steely, and its execution clear.
