Thursday, May 16th at 8pm, ISSUE presents pioneering French composer of electroacoustic music, Michèle Bokanowski, for her East Coast debut. ISSUE is thrilled to be welcoming this critically important composer for a rare performance in NYC where she will share a series of selected works for concert and film at Brooklyn Music School in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The evening will also feature two new works by composer Paula Matthusen that includes improvisations with Elliott Sharp, Matthew Evan Taylor, and video by Tom Snelgrove.
One of the few female composers of her generation to build electroacoustic music for concert, theatre, and cinema–notably for director, animator, and husband Patrick Bokanowski’s work–the artist uses raw sounds to discover music led by the material itself and not by idea or thought. For the first time at ISSUE, she will present three live electroacoustic works spanning the length of her career including Tabou (1984), Battements Solaires (2008), and Rhapsodia (2018). The performance of Battements Solaires will be presented alongside Patrick Bokanowski’s film of the same name.
Throughout ISSUE’s history, the organization has continued to support the work of many pioneering female French composers often overlooked in the canon of musique concrète, including Beatriz Ferreyra, Christine Groult, and Éliane Radigue (who was honored at the organization’s 2017 annual Gala), among others such as Pascale Criton and Laetitia Sonami. ISSUE invites another composer and educator, Paula Matthusen–who has inherited Alvin Lucier’s Music 109 course at Wesleyan University–to join in conversation with the work of Bokanowski and so many others. Though they differ in generation, both composers employ kindred methods for orienting sonic surfaces with signature intensity and precision across electroacoustic and computer music. Alongside a new solo live-electronics performance, Matthusen will present an audio-structural improvisation related to the Old Croton Aqueduct co-conducted by Elliott Sharp and Matthew Evan Taylor in Van Cortlandt Park. Utilizing feedback to excite the edges of the aqueduct structure, pulsations between interior/exterior and new/old infrastructures create generative fissures for the improvisation.
Michèle Bokanowski was born in Cannes, France, and lives and works in Paris. Passionate about music from childhood, it wasn’t until later, at the age of 22, after reading À la recherche d’une musique concrète by Pierre Schaeffer, that she decided to study composition. After classical training in harmony, she met Michel Puig, a pupil of René Leibowitz, who taught her writing and analysis upon Schönberg’s Theory. In 1970, she began a two-year internship at the Research Department of the French National Office of Broadcasting (ORTF) under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer. Between 1973 and 1975, she took part in a research group on sound synthesis, studied computer music at the University of Vincennes as well as electronic music with Éliane Radigue. She mainly composed for concert (Pour un Pianiste, Trois Chambres d’Inquiétude, Tabou, Phone Variations, Cirque, L’Étoile Absinthe, Chant d’Ombre, Enfance, Rhapsodia, Cadence, Elsewhere) and for cinema (music of Patrick Bokanowski's short films and his two features L'Ange (1982) and Un Rêve solaire (2016). She has also worked for theatre (with Catherine Dasté) and for dance (with choreographers Marceline Lartigue, Bernardo Montet and Hideyuki Yano).
Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered. Awards include the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Grant, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Awards, and the 2014 - 2015 Elliott Carter Rome Prize. Matthusen has also held residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Hambidge, ACRE, create@iEar at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, STEIM, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, VCCA, CMMAS, Konstepidemin, Copland House, Composers NOW Residency at Pocantico, the Hambidge Center, and Loghaven. Matthusen completed her Ph.D. at New York University – GSAS and has taught at Columbia University, the TU-Berlin (through DAAD), University at Buffalo as the Slee Visiting Professor, and Florida International University. Matthusen is currently Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. Matthusen’s work has been released through Innova, Cantaloupe Music, New Amsterdam Records, AntiCausal Systems, Carrier Records, Quiet Design Records, and C.F. Peters.
Elliott Sharp is an American composer, performer, author and visual artist who has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction. He leads the projects SysOrk, Terraplane and Tectonics and has received Berlin Prize and Guggenheim fellowships. Sharp's collaborators have included the RadioSinfonie Frankfurt, Cecil Taylor, Nusrat Fateh-Ali Khan, Ensemble Modern, blues legend Hubert Sumlin, Christian Marclay, JACK Quartet, and violinist Hilary Hahn.
Tom Snelgrove’s experimental videos, paintings and drawings employ narratives that highlight the fallibility of a worldview of divisiveness. His work responds to the prominence of an “us vs. them” message, from many of our world leaders, which is driving dehumanizing policy. Countering these divisive messages, each piece illustrates global interconnectivity by exploring historical references, myths and existing commonalities, often overlooked, among cultures close and distant. Many of Snelgrove’s video projects were shot outside of the U.S. in locations such as the High Arctic, Vietnam, Mongolia and Namibia.
Composer and improviser Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor has been hailed as a composer whose music is “insistent and defiant…envelopingly hypnotic” (Alan Young, Lucid Culture). His music has been performed across the United States and Europe by such ensembles as the Cleveland Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony, and Metropolis Ensemble. As a performer, Matthew has collaborated with such creators as musician Elliott Sharp, visual artist Dannielle Tegeder, and dancer Sara Shelton.
