Part of Ultima Festival New York, Berlin-based Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard presents Faust as well as other works by the pioneering electronic musician Else Marie Pade (not present). The acclaimed piano/percussion quartet Yarn/WIre perform works by composers Øyvind Torvund, Simon Steen-Andersen and a collaborative pice by Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Sigurdur Gudjonsson. Born in 1924, after serving time in a WWII prison camp, Else Marie Pade cultivated a diverse body of works and became the first composer in Denmark to compose with electronics. Over the past few years Pade has developed a collaboration with Jacob Kirkegaard— bridging an age difference of over 50 years, the duo released a collaborative record in 2013 (Important).
Program
* Yarn/Wire
Øyvind Torvund: The Stacks
Simon Steen-Andersen: Rerendered
Anna Thorvaldsdottir/Sigurdur Gudjonsson: Trajectories
* Jacob Kirkegaard
Else Marie Pade: Faust & other electronic pieces
Else Marie Pade (b. 1924) is one of the pioneers of electronic music in Denmark. From the beginning of the 1950s, she, in close co-operation with technicians and assistants on Radio Denmark, produced a substantial amount of concrete and electronic music, partly in the shape of independent works for radio broadcasts, partly in the shape of accompaniments to various radio dramas. She started taking private lessons in composition from both Vagn Holmboe, Jan Maegaard and Leif Kayser. It was in 1952 that Pade discovered the means by which she could bring into being her universe of sound. The impulse came from a broadcast on Radio Denmark about Pierre Schaeffer, the originator of the new movement within the French field of electronic music: musique concrète. After visiting Schaeffer in 1952, Pade began to study the concrete aesthetics of music and the technique behind it. In the latter half of the 1950s, Pade, together with Lauridsen, organised an interimistic electronic sound studio at Radio Denmark, where one could work with both concrete and synthetically produced sound material - a synthesis which was also a prominent issue in the new Italian sound studio, Studio de Fonologia Musicale, where people like Luciano Berio, Henri Posseur and John Cage were working. From 1957 until the middle of 1960s, Pade experienced a productive period in which she created a long series of electronic works and thereby made a name for herself, both in Denmark and to a certain extent in international electronic circles.
Danish artist Jacob Kirkegard's works are focused on scientific and aesthetic aspects of sonic perception. He explores acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible to the immediate ear. Kirkegaard's installations, compositions & photographs are created from within a variety of environments such as subterranean geyser vibrations, empty rooms in Chernobyl, a rotating TV tower, and also sounds from the human inner ear itself. Based in Berlin, Germany, Kirkegaard is a graduate of the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne. Since 1995, Kirkegaard has presented his works at galleries, museums, venues & conferences throughout the world. His sound works are primarily released by the British record label Touch and he is a member of the sound art collective freq_out.
Yarn/Wire is a chamber quartet specializing in the performance of 21st century music. A unique instrumental combination of two percussionists (Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg) and two pianists (Laura Barger and Ning Yu) allows Yarn/Wire to interface with both traditional performance practice and emergent stylistic trends with ease. Founded in 2005 at Stony Brook University, the members of Yarn/Wire have extensive performance and pedagogic experience encompassing international and domestic music festivals, college and university residences, and substantive work in the avant-garde theater and DIY/punk worlds. Frequent collaborations with composers on new work form a significant portion of the ensemble’s activities. In addition to presenting multiple US premieres, Yarn/Wire has given the world premieres of over two dozen new works written specifically for the ensemble.
Alongside regular musical studies in Oslo and Berlin, the Norwegian composer Øyvind Torvund (b.1976) played guitar in rock and improvising groups, and his music assembles disparate materials, inconsistent attitude: sounds from rock or from everyday life (or nature) occurring in chamber music, simplicity in a complex context, improvisation coexisting with exact notation, music combined with film or projections, seriousness in counterpoint with humor. Raw melodic schemes may come from Purcell, the infill from the detritus of electronic distortion or street noise. Categories are split open or blurred, habits unbent.
Simon Steen-Andersen (b.1976) is a Berlin-based composer, performer and installation artist, working in the field between instrumental music, electronics, video and performance within settings ranging from symphony orchestra and chamber music (with and without multimedia) to stagings, solo performances and installations. Recent works concentrate on integrating concrete elements in music and emphasizing the physical and choreographic aspects of instrumental performance. The works often include amplified acoustic instruments in combination with sampler, video, simple everyday objects or homemade constructions.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir (b. 1977) is an Icelandic composer who frequently works with large sonic structures that tend to reveal the presence of a vast variety of sustained sound materials, reflecting her sense of imaginative listening to landscapes and nature. Her music tends to portray a flowing world of sounds with an enigmatic lyrical atmosphere. Icelandic artist Sigurdur Gudjonsson (b. 1975) makes videos where image, sound, and space form a seamless whole. He finds his ideas in his immediate environment often in abandoned places. These become settings for movement and sound that have laws of their own and generate a strong and nostalgic atmosphere. The distant world of these works draws the viewer toward its core, through a near-bodily experience of the interplay of image and sound with the setting.
