Chance. You can give it, you can take it, and if you’re daring, you can create with it. Protean composer, performer and aural provocateur Melissa St. Pierre does all three.
As a classically trained pianist, she specializes in the works of two giants of aleatoric music and chance operations, John Cage and Christian Wolff. In concert, she tackles Cage’s “Sonatas and Interludes” (1946) and Wolff’s “For Prepared Piano” (1951) with a vigor and creative insight that belies her years (she’s only in her 20s). Peppering the strings, hammers, and dampers of the piano with a variety of objects, St, Pierre transforms the instrument’s typical timbre and gives it a chance, an opportunity to reveal its true nature. In her adroit, gifted hands, it becomes not just a percussion instrument, but 88 percussion instruments, each key a portal to a new world of sound. Sparkling gamelans chatter; harrowing voodoo drums call out in the night.
However, St. Pierre is no mere recitalist; she is an ingeniously facile free-improvisor, and between the Cage and Wolff pieces, she performs her own work, utilizing not only piano, but an array of everyday cracked (i.e., deliberately altered) electronics. The transition, from Bosendorfer to Casio and back again, is seamless, and wholly successful. In doing so, she opens a dialog: between drastic classicism and disheveled modernity; high and low technology; twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Melissa St. Pierre takes a chance, presenting her work and that of John Cage in the same breath. In succeeding, she vivifies the spirit of 60 years’ worth of experimental music-making. And that’s what taking risks is all about.
www.myspace.com/melissastpierre
Igor Cubrilovic is composer, producer, and a guitarist. Glacier Series are set of compositions which were composed over last 3 years, since he relocated from New York City to Geneva, Switzerland.
These works explore friction of constantly moving intervals. Using long sustained glissando’s in permanent state of change, this music is static and ecstatic.
Sonically between Alvin Luciers and Elaine Radique, yet neither academic or mystic, music of Glaciers is a crash in slow motion, its a confrontational and insistent.
Glaciers Series have been performed in Switzerland and France, and this is their US premiere.
Igor was member of Jonathan Kane’s February and produced both the luminous first and long awaited 2nd album. He was lead guitarist in Rhys Chatham Guitar Army, and is now active in European Improv scene with Duet/Duel Series, and composing for film and modern dance.
He studied architecture in Belgrade, sound technology in Stockholm, sound installation in London, and is now pursuing his interest in psycho-acoustics and traditional music of the Balkans. He does not like to record his work.