Friday, November 15th, ISSUE is pleased to present FOR, the first evening of FOR/WITH, a mini-festival featuring new commissions and works by iconoclast composers Sarah Hennies, Eva-Maria Houben, Katherine Young, and Ryoko Akama. Now in its third 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 series opens with the world premiere of chanting ballads by Eva-Maria Houben, followed by Katherine Young’s 2015 piece Puddles and Crumbs performed by Weston Olencki. The evening ends with a very special work by London/Tokyo based composer Ryoko Akama commissioned in honor of ISSUE Project Room founder Suzanne Fiol. It will be performed by a group of former ISSUE Artists-in-Residence: Nate Wooley, Lea Bertucci, and Russell Greenberg.
Eva-Maria Houben’s wonderfully minimal chanting ballads, gives agency to the performer. Her first work for trumpet, the score is made up of rigorously spaced pitches with no meter, tempo or duration noted. Her inscription in the beginning of the work encapsulates the mystical spirit of the work:
"Listening to the trumpets of Jericho I found out that the trumpet is a voice— caressing, alluring, promising, questioning; and hopeful, joyful, full of wonder, full of grace. The voice whispers: 'I don’t know exactly.' Moreover, our memories carry us through the millennia." -- Eva-Maria Houben
Katherine Young’s work for trombone and electronics, Puddles and Crumbs, is a perfect match for the festival. It is here performed by Weston Olencki, who collaborated closely with Young in the composition and electro-acoustic setting of the work.
The first evening of FOR/WITH concludes with the world premiere of a new work by Ryoko Akama. One of the younger generation of composers influenced by the wandelweiser group (of which Houben is a major figure), Akama’s work deals with the relationships between performer and space, sound and time, and how the visual becomes the aural.
The 2019 FOR/WITH Festival performances are the closing events of Suzanne Fiol: Ten Years Alive, an exhibition of mixed media work from ISSUE’s late founder Suzanne Fiol. Organized in collaboration with Suzanne’s daughter, Sarah Fiol, the exhibition runs from October 4th until mid November, marking ten years since Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz issued a proclamation officially declaring November 15th “Suzanne Fiol Day in Brooklyn, USA." Suzanne brought artists from a wide array of disciplines together forming new trajectories and models for presenting experimental work, particularly through her commitment to emerging practices highlighted by ISSUE's Artists-in-Residence Program, of which Nate Wooley -- and many of the FOR/WITH 2019 artists -- have participated.
"Suzanne Fiol once told me that I should only make music that scared me. I tried to make that the parameter surrounding my time in residence at ISSUE in 2011; and, since then, I have found the greatest satisfaction in whatever I'm doing when it comes closest to that standard. Suzanne lives in my heart as a great hero and a caring friend; caring not only about me as a human, but about what, why, and how I presented my thoughts and ideas to the world. I know I'm only one person that had this experience with her. There are many others. And, for all of them I celebrate her." — Nate Wooley
PROGRAM:
Eva-Maria Houben: chanting ballads (World Premiere) - Nate Wooley (Trumpet)
Katherine Young: Puddles and Crumbs (2015) - Weston Olencki (Trombone)
Intermission
Ryoko Akama: (World Premiere)
Lea Bertucci (Bass Clarinet)
Russell Greenberg (Percussion)
Nate Wooley (Trumpet)
Nate Wooley grew up in Clatskanie, Oregon. He works in contemporary classical, jazz, noise, and electronic music as an interpreter, improviser, and composer. While a large part of his work has consisted of solo improvisation and composition, he has collaborated with Anthony Braxton, Éliane Radigue, Annea Lockwood, Yoshi Wada, Christian Wolff, Wadada Leo Smith, and others. Mr. Wooley has performed as a soloist or commissioned composer at SWR Donaueschinger Musiktage, Musica Polonica Nova, Jazztopad Festival, Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, A L’ARME! Festival, music unlimited, and international jazz festivals. He has been an artist-in-residence at London’s Cafe OTO and Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room. He was a 2016 recipient of a Grants to Artists award in Music / Sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Nate Wooley is the editor of Sound American, an online journal intended to demystify contemporary experimental music with the intention of expanding and perpetuating a base audience for the radical and avant-garde. He is currently the curator of the Database of Recorded American Music (DRAM) and teaches at The New School for Social Research.
Eva-Maria Houben studied Music Education at Folkwang-Musikhochschule Essen (Germany) and the organ with Gisbert Schneider. Since 1993 Professor Houben has been lecturing at Dortmund University`s “Institut für Musik und Musikwissenschaft”, with both music theory and contemporary music as her focus (see for example Adriana Hölszky, Violeta Dinescu, Hans-Joachim Hespos, wandelweiser composers [MusikDenken, Antoine Beuger, Jürg Frey]). As she is related to the wandelweiser group of composers, her compositions are published by edition wandelweiser, Haan (Germany). Her list of compositions includes works for solo instruments, ensembles, orchestra, voice solo or accompanied by instruments, voice and orchestra, and choir. She has presented her work in the US, in Europe, and in Asia.
Katherine Young makes electroacoustic music using expressive noises, curious timbres, and kinetic structures to explore the dramatic physicality of sound, shifting interpersonal dynamics, and tensions between the familiar and the strange. As an improviser, Katherine amplifies her bassoon and employs a flexible electronics set up for solo and collaborative performances. The LAPhil’s Green Umbrella series, Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW, Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Coast Percussion, Spektral Quartet, Weston Olencki, Nico Couck / Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Fonema Consort, Callithumpian Ensemble, and others have commissioned her music. This fall, she will install an 8-channel outdoor sound installation on the University of Chicago's campus. She’s also excited about recent and coming-soon projects with NIKEL Ensemble for Bludenz Festival, vocalist Lucy Dehgrae, WasteLAnd and RAGE Thormbones, Distractfold Ensemble’s Linda Jankowska, and Yarn/Wire. She’s recently released recordings with Wet Ink and Michael Foster & Michael Zerang, and she's working on new albums with violist Amy Cimini (as Architeuthis Walks on Land) and percussionist Sam Scranton (as Beautifulish).
Ryoko Akama works with installations and sounds who approaches listening situations that magnify silence, time and space. Her sculptural work engages with mundane objects and invisible energies such as magnetism and gravity, employing small and fragile objects such as paper balloons and glass bottles in order to create tiny aural and visual occurrences that embody ‘almost nothing’ aesthetics. She also composes text scores and performs a diversity of alternative scores in collaboration with other artists and musicians. She runs melange edition, co-curates ame and independent publisher mumei publishing. Selected installations include: the way they are (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2019, UK), composition of happiness (Spanien19C, 2019, Denmark), kosetsu (Stedelijk Museum, 2019, Amsterdam), ploughs and harrows (Konfrontation Festival, 2018, Austria), listening with the city (Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, 2018, Germany), odds and ends (Bunkier Sztuki Gallery, 2018, Poland), loiner or (Industrial Museum of Leeds, 2018, UK), Object Migration (Avant Art Festival + Sanatorium Dź wię ku, 2017, Poland) and 1→ 5 (Uppsala Art Museum, 2016, Sweden).
