Darmstadt Institute in collaboration with David Grubbs Presents:
Luc Ferrari, Two Works for Ensemble with Memorized Sounds
Tautologos III (1969; Chicago version, 2001)
Et tournent les sons dans la garrigue (1977)
PLUS A RARE SCREENING OF: "Luc Ferrari facing his tautology – 2 days before the end", a film by Guy Marc Hinant and Dominique Lohlé"
NEW YORK PREMIERES
Performed by Ensemble Pamplemousse with David Grubbs
French composer Luc Ferrari (1929-2005) was one of the progenitors of musique concrète and a pioneer of and resonantly idiosyncratic voice within electroacoustic music. Following upon studies with Alfred Cortot, Olivier Messiaen, and Arthur Honegger, Ferrari was an early participant in the Groupe de Musique Concrète and, with Pierre Schaeffer and François-Bernard Mâche, co-founded the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1958. In the early 1960s, largely unaltered environmental recordings began to work their way into his compositions. This process culminated in the tremendously influential Presque rien No. 1 (Le Lever du Jour au bord de la mer) (1970), a work whose source material was comprised exclusively of recordings made from a point overlooking a beach on the Dalmation coast. Throughout his career, Ferrari worked in multiple forms: instrumental works, vocal music, text scores, electronic and electroacoustic music, and Hoerspiele. Together with Gérard Patris he realized a series of documentary films about musicians in rehearsal, entitled Les Grands Répétitions, which will be released on DVD later in 2010.
Tautologos III is a text score for unspecified types of performers; it could as easily be realized by actors or dancers as by musicians. In this performance, Ensemble Pamplemousse and David Grubbs will be joined by the “memorized sounds” that Luc Ferrari created for a revised version of Tautologos III that was first performed in Chicago in 2001. Et tournent les sons dans la garrigue also presents live performers in combination with electroacoustic sonds prepared by Ferrari, but to altogether different ends.
Somewhat astonishingly, these are New York premieres of these two works. Shame on you, New York!
ABOUT THE PERFORMERS
Founded in 2002 as a vehicle for musical exploration, Ensemble Pamplemousse (Natacha Diels, Andrew Greenwald, Kiku Enomoto, Rama Gottfried, David Broome, and Jessie Marino) presents concerts of extraordinary focus and clarity. Comprised of virtuosic musicians trained in classical, electronic, and improvisational realms, the group consistently delivers fresh, exhilarating new concepts in sound. The members’ eagerness for aural discovery has allowed for ample experimentation processes, where boundaries are non-existent, and from which a strong dialogue has emerged. Among the group’s vernacular resides formerly unfathomable sound landscapes formed by the acute relationships the performers have forged with each other, and with the composers who are an intrinsic part of the ensemble.
David Grubbs is assistant professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College and director of the graduate programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA). He has released eleven solo albums, the most recent of which is Hybrid Song Box.4 (Blue Chopsticks), and 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, and Stephen Prina.
