Thursday, November 1st, ISSUE is pleased to present WITH, the second evening of FOR/WITH, a mini-festival featuring new commissions and works by iconoclast composers Annea Lockwood, Ashlely Fure, Felipe Lara, and Wadada Leo Smith. Now in its second year, the FOR/WITH series celebrates the collaborative process between performer and composer, the spirit of spontaneity in contemporary music, and the ever-present search for the new.
Organized by performer, composer, and 2011 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. The festival continues to subtly revolve around Wooley’s project to commission artists outside the sphere of “capital T” trumpet repertoire to write solo pieces that feature the trumpet player as a whole, rather than the capabilities of the trumpet as a machine.
The second evening of the series opens with the world premiere of Becoming Air by Annea Lockwood, followed by the U.S. premiere of Library on Lightning by Ashley Fure performed by Rebekah Heller, current ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Brandon Lopez, and Wooley. The evening also features Felipe Lara’s recent composition Metafagote performed by Rebekah Heller, and, lastly, the world premiere of the duo rendition of Wadada Leo Smith’s Red Autumn Gold, performed by Nate Wooley and Leo Smith himself.
Her first-ever piece for trumpet, Annea Lockwood’s Becoming Air completely inhabits the concept of the FOR/WITH festival. It was composed through intimate collaboration with Wooley, using much of his improvising electro-acoustic vocabulary. And, yet, is absolutely an Annea Lockwood composition: performative, shamanic, and with an attention to the naturalness of sound that makes the audience rethink their aural surroundings.
Ashley Fure’s Library of Lightning, performed by double bassist Brandon Lopez, bassoonist Rebekah Heller, and Wooley, showcases Fure’s enduring aesthetic interest in ritual abstraction, chaotic matter, and haptic sound. Mirroring Wooley’s mission to chart new paths for the trumpet -- specifically non-linear forms with attention paid to sound and timbre over technical flash -- Fure’s work focuses on estrangement, abstraction, and a visceral materiality that doesn’t rely on narrative, representation, or text.
Rebekah Heller then performs Brazilian-born composer Felipe Lara’s Metafagote for solo bassoon. Written expressly for Heller, the piece explores and inverts the raw sound of the solo bassoon, using electronics, spatialization and powerful melodic writing. In the piece, Lara explores how layering bassoon upon bassoon - seven bassoons total - can create a new instrument entirely, or, a “Metafagote” (fagote being the word for bassoon in Felipe's native Portuguese). With similar aim to Wooley’s commissioning for trumpet, the work is a major and exciting addition to the solo bassoon repertoire, written for and with Rebekah Heller through a deep and meaningful collaborative process.
The series closes with Iconic composer, trumpeter and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Wadada Leo Smith staging a duo version of Red Autumn Gold alongside Nate Wooley, premiering the piece as a duo iteration that expands the composition into a discretely new work. The piece utilizes Leo Smith’s unique Ankhrasmation graphic score language alongside a scalable ‘traditional’ score for one or more musicians. The piece seamlessly veers between the composed, the inspired suggestion, and the improvised.
PROGRAM:
Annea Lockwood: Becoming Air (2017) – Nate Wooley (trumpet)
Ashley Fure: Library on Lightning (2018) –
Rebekah Heller (bassoon)
Brandon Lopez (double bass)
Nate Wooley (trumpet)Intermission
Felipe Lara: Metafagote (2015) – Rebekah Heller (bassoon)
Wadada Leo Smith: Red Autumn Gold (2018) – Wadada Leo Smith and Nate Wooley (trumpets)
Wadada Leo Smith, trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser is one of the most acclaimed creative artists of his times, both for his music and his writings. For the last five decades, Mr. Smith has been a member of the historical and legendary AACM collective. He distinctly defines his music as “Creative Music.” Mr. Smith’s diverse discography reveals a recorded history centered around important issues that have impacted his world. Mr. Smith started his research and designs in search of Ankhrasmation in 1965. His first realization of this language was in 1967, which was illustrated in the recording of The Bell (Anthony Braxton: ‘Three Compositions of New Jazz’), and has played a significant role in his development as an artist, ensemble leader, and educator. He has been on the faculty of the following institutions: The University of New Haven (1975-’76), The Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY (1975-’78), and Bard College (1987-’93). From 1994 he was on the faculty at The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts. There he was the director of the African-American Improvisational Music program. Mr. Smith retired from CalArts in 2013. Wadada Leo Smith’s Ankhrasmation language scores have recently been exhibited in major American museums. In October 2015, The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago presented the first comprehensive exhibition of these language scores. In 2016, the scores were also featured in the Hammer Museum’s ‘Made in L.A.’ exhibition; he also received the Hammer Museum’s 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement honoring brilliance and resilience.
His scores have also been shown at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Michigan, and Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, California.
Born in New Zealand in 1939, Annea Lockwood moved to England in 1961, studying composition at the Royal College of Music, London, attending summer courses at Darmstadt and completing her studies in Cologne and Holland, taking courses in electronic music with Gottfried Michael Koenig. In 1973 feeling a strong connection to such American composers as Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, the Sonic Arts Union (Ashley, Behrman, Mumma, Lucier), and invited by composer Ruth Anderson to teach at Hunter College, CUNY, she moved again to the US and settled in Crompond, NY. She is an Emerita Professor at Vassar College. During the 1960s she collaborated with sound poets, choreographers and visual artists, and also created a number of works such as the Glass Concerts which initiated her lifelong fascination with timbre and new sound sources. In synchronous homage to Christian Barnard’s pioneering heart transplants, Lockwood began a series of Piano Transplants (1969-82) in which defunct pianos were burned, drowned, beached, and planted in an English garden. During the 1970s and ’80s she turned her attention to performance works focused on environmental sounds and life-narratives, often using low-tech devices such as her Sound Ball, containing six small speakers and a receiver, designed by Robert Bielecki for Three Short Stories and an Apotheosis, in which the ball is rolled, swung on a long cord and passed around the audience. World Rhythms, A Sound Map of the Hudson River, Delta Run, built around a conversation she recorded with the sculptor, Walter Wincha, who was close to death, and other works were widely presented in the US, Europe and in New Zealand. Since the early 1990s, she has written for a number of ensembles and solo performers, often incorporating electronics and visual elements. Thousand Year Dreaming is scored for four didgeridoos, conch shell trumpets and other instruments and incorporates slides of the cave paintings at Lascaux. Duende, a collaboration with baritone Thomas Buckner, carries the singer into a heightened state, similar to a shamanic journey, through the medium of his own voice. Ceci n’est pas un piano for piano, video and electronics merges images from the Piano Transplants with Jennifer Hymer’s musings on her hands and pianos she has owned, her voice being sent through, and colored by the piano strings. Much of her music has been recorded, on the Lovely, XI, Mutable, Pogus, EM Records (Japan), Rattle Records, Soundz Fine (NZ), Harmonia Mundi and Ambitus labels. She is a recipient of the 2007 Henry Cowell Award.
Ashley Fure (b.1982) is an American composer and sound artist. 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 joined the Dartmouth College Music Department as Assistant Professor in 2015. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Fure also won a 2018 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a 2017 Rome Prize in Music Composition, a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a 2015 Siemens Foundation Commission Grant, the 2014 Kranichsteiner Composition Prize from Darmstadt, the 2014 Busoni Prize from the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, a 2014 Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship from Columbia University, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship to France, a 2013 Impuls International Composition Prize, a 2012 Darmstadt Stipendienpreis, a 2012 Staubach Honorarium, a 2011 Jezek Prize, and a 2011 10-month residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude. Her work has been commissioned by major ensembles throughout Europe and the United States including The New York Philharmonic, The Los Angeles Philharmonic, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, the Diotima Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and Dal Niente. Notable recent projects include The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects, an immersive intermedia opera called “staggeringly original” and “the most purely visceral music-theatre outing of the year” by Alex Ross in the New Yorker; and Bound to the Bow, for Orchestra and Electronics, named “boldly individual” by the New York Times and “the most arresting of the world premieres” at the 2016 New York Phil Biennial in the New Yorker.
Praised by the New York Times as "a gifted Brazilian-American modernist" whose works are “brilliantly realized”, “technically formidable, wildly varied”, and possess “voluptuous, elemental lyricism," Felipe Lara’s work — which includes orchestral, chamber, vocal, film, electroacoustic, and popular music—engages in producing new musical contexts by means of (re)interpreting and translating acoustical and extra-musical properties of familiar source sonorities into project-specific forces. He often aspires to create self-similar relationships between the macro and micro-articulation of the musical experience and highlights the interdependence of acoustic music composition and technology, including the application of electroacoustic paradigms as catalysts for both entire structures and local textures. His music has been recently commissioned by leading soloists, ensembles, and institutions such as the Arditti Quartet (with ExperimentalStudio Freiburg SWR), Brentano Quartet (with Hsin-Yung Huang), Claire Chase, Conrad Tao, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Duo Diorama, Ensemble InterContemporain, Ensemble Modern, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Ogni Suono, Rebekah Heller, and São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (Osesp), and also performed by the Amazonas Philharmonic, Asasello Quartet, Ensemble Recherche, David Fulmer, Ex Novo Ensemble, Ilan Volkov, JACK Quartet, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, Mivos Quartet, Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic Hilversum, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Peter Eötvös, Steven Schick, and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra.
Nate Wooley was born in 1974 in Clatskanie, Oregon, a town of 2,000 people in the timber country of the Pacific Northwestern corner of the U.S. He began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of 13. His time in Oregon, a place of relative quiet and slow time reference, instilled in Nate a musical aesthetic that has informed all of his music making for the past 20 years, but in no situation more than his solo trumpet performance. He has since become one of the most in-demand trumpet players in the burgeoning Brooklyn jazz, improv, noise, and new music scenes. He has performed regularly with such iconic figures and ensembles as John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Eliane Radigue, Ken Vandermark, Annea Lockwood, Evan Parker, Christian Wolff, Yoshi Wada, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), as well as being a collaborator with some of the brightest lights of his generation such as Ashley Fure, Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Peter Evans and Mary Halvorson. Wooley has a long-standing history of working with ISSUE Project Room including being a 2011 Artist-In-Residence, developing and performing multiple projects, and also presenting the first iteration of FOR/WITH in collaboration with Annea Lockwood, Michael Pisaro and Christian Wolff, at ISSUE in September 2017
Improviser/Composer Brandon A. Lopez, deemed the "Ubiquitous Free Improv Bass Ace" by the Village Voice and said to play with a "Bruising Physicality" by the Chicago reader.
He was born and raised in the splendors of Northwestern New Jersey, in the shadow of the (New York) city. It was there that he cultivated a taste for the left of center musics and subsequently, dug graves. He attended New England Conservatory and has had the pleasures of working with many of the world's luminary left of center musicians (He's currently a member of Nate Wooley's 4tet). Is a frequent collaborator (With Weasel Walter, Mette Rasmussen, Gerald Cleaver, Peter Evans, Ingrid Laubrock, Dave Rempis and many others). And has toured and played prestigious halls, DIY basements, festivals all across North America and the European Continent. He currently leads a piano trio dubbed "Mess" with Sam Yulsman and Chris Corsano. He frequently plays solo and is a 2018 Artist in Residence at ISSUE Project Room.
Praised for her “flair” and “deftly illuminated” performances by The New York Times, bassoonist Rebekah Heller is a uniquely dynamic solo and collaborative artist. Called "an impressive solo bassoonist" by The New Yorker, she is fiercely committed to expanding the modern repertoire for the bassoon. Her debut solo album of world premiere recordings (featuring five new pieces written with and for her), 100 names, was called "pensive and potent" by The New York Times and her newly-released second album, METAFAGOTE (also entirely made up of pieces created with and for her), is receiving wide acclaim. As Artistic Director and bassoonist of the renowned International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Rebekah performs all over the world. Not only is she committed to advancing the music of our time, she is deeply engaged in working with younger musicians to continue the ICE-y legacy of fearless exploration and deep collaboration. She is also a committed advocate, through platforms like ICEcommons (a free, crowdsourced index of newly composed music), for underrepresented voices and outrageous experimentation.
