Wednesday, October 31st, ISSUE is pleased to present FOR, the first evening of FOR/WITH, a mini-festival featuring new commissions and works by iconoclast composers Wadada Leo Smith, Annea Lockwood, and Catherine Lamb. 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 series opens with the world premiere of Red Autumn Gold by Wadada Leo Smith, followed by Annea Lockwood’s 1998 piece Immersion performed by Dominic Donato and Frank Cassara, and the U.S. premiere of Catherine Lamb’s Prisma Interius VIII performed by Wet Ink Ensemble (Josh Modney, Josh Rubin, Giacomo Baldelli, Mariel Roberts, Laura Barger and Eric Wubbels).
Iconic composer, trumpeter and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Wadada Leo Smith’s Red Autumn Gold utilizes his unique Ankhrasmation graphic score language alongside a scalable ‘traditional’ score for one or more musicians. On this night’s premiere, Nate Wooley will perform the work in its solo iteration which seamlessly veers between the composed, the inspired suggestion, and the improvised.
Showcasing her unique ability to draw out the innate poetic qualities of acoustic sources in the natural world, Annea Lockwood’s percussion work Immersion, performed by Dominic Donato and Frank Cassara, features gentle beating tones emanating from a slow-moving exploration of marimba, tam tams, and gong. Previously unreleased, the piece was recently issued on Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle imprint, providing captivating proof of Lockwood's belief in the complexity that deep listening can reveal within seemingly simple sounds.
The first evening of FOR/WITH concludes with the U.S. premiere of Catherine Lamb’s Prisma Interius VIII, performed by the renowned Wet Ink Ensemble. Previously staged in London at Cafe Oto in March 2018, the piece is the most recent development of a series of pieces constructed around the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer, an instrument—in development with Bryan Eubanks—that spectrally filters a live sound input of the outer atmosphere to the listening space within which the the performance piece is situated. In this iteration, the piece is staged with violin, clarinet, guitar, cello, and the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer.
PROGRAM:
Wadada Leo Smith: Red Autumn Gold (2018) - Nate Wooley (trumpet)
Annea Lockwood: Immersion (1998) - Frank Cassara & Dominic Donato (percussion)
Intermission
Catherine Lamb: Prisma Interius VIII (2018) - Wet Ink Ensemble
Josh Modney (violin)
Josh Rubin (clarinet)
Giacomo Baldelli (electric guitar)
Mariel Roberts (cello)
Laura Barger and Eric Wubbels (synthesizers)
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.
Catherine Lamb (b. 1982, Olympia, Wa, U.S.), is a composer exploring the interaction of elemental tonal material and the variations in presence between shades and beings in a room. She has been studying and composing music since a young age. In 2003 she turned away from the conservatory in an attempt to understand the structures and intonations within Hindustani Classical Music, later finding Mani Kaul in 2006 who was directly connected to Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and whose philosophical approach to sound became important to her. She studied (experimental) composition at the California Institute of the Arts (2004-2006) under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro, who were both integral influences. It was there also that she began her work into the area of Just Intonation, which became a clear way to investigate the interaction of tones and ever-fluctuating shades, where these interactions in and of them-selves became structural elements in her work. Since then she has written various ensemble pieces (at times with liminal electronic portions) and continues to go further into elemental territories, through various kinds of research, collaboration, and practice (herself as a violist). She received her MFA from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2012 and is currently residing in Berlin, Germany.
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
Dr. Dominic Donato enjoys being a percussion soloist, chamber musician, composer, and teacher. He has performed throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia as a soloist and member of the Talujon Percussion Group, DoublePlay Percussion Duo and the Newband/Harry Partch Ensemble. In 2007, Dr. Donato was selected by Meet the Composer as one of eight “Soloist Champions” in honor of his continuing commitment to new music and the solo percussion repertoire. Dr. Donato directs the percussion program and contemporary ensembles at the Conservatory of Music, Purchase College, SUNY.
A proponent of new and classic, western and world percussion music, Frank Cassara has premiered many works with as many diverse groups. As percussionist for the Philip Glass Ensemble, he has performed around the globe as well as recording Glass' music and film scores, most recently his new work "Orion". He has also performed around the world with Steve Reich and Musicians at major international festivals. As a member of the New Music Consort/PULSE Percussion Ensemble he has appeared at major festivals in the US and abroad, as well as premiering and recording new percussion ensemble works. Frank Cassara has toured extensively with Newband/Harry Partch Ensemble, performing and recording on Partch's original microtonal instruments and Dean Drummond's Zoomoozophone. Principal percussionist of the Riverside Symphony, he has been principal of the Connecticut Grand Opera and a member of the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, and heads the percussion departments at Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music, Long Island University and Vassar College. Frank Cassara Is an Innovative Percussion Artist.
The Wet Ink Ensemble is a unique collection of composers, improvisers and interpreters committed to making adventurous music. With a 19-year history of outstanding achievement in the programming and presentation of contemporary music, Wet Ink has earned an international reputation as one of the most innovative and virtuosic ensembles working today. Wet Ink most commonly performs as a septet comprised of a core group of composer-performers that collaborate in a band-like fashion, writing, improvising, preparing, and touring pieces together over long stretches of time. This approach has led to an incomparable body of work marked by a keenly developed performance practice, played in concert with ferocity, commitment, and expressivity. A consistent advocate for young musicians, Wet Ink has commissioned, premiered and recorded numerous works by emerging composers. The group has also collaborated with a wide range of highly-renowned artists including George Lewis, Evan Parker, Christian Wolff, and the AACM composers (during a 2-night retrospective at The Kitchen in 2008), and has introduced NYC audiences to major European figures including Peter Ablinger, Mathias Spahlinger, and Beat Furrer. Wet Ink takes a multifaceted approach to the presentation and promotion of adventurous music. The group regularly functions as The Wet Ink Large Ensemble, a flexible roster of over twenty NYC-based soloists dedicated to ambitious, large-scale projects. Wet Ink’s seven co-directors are passionate educators, and the ensemble has been engaged in residencies at the Walden School, Duke University, Amherst College, Northern Illinois University, UC San Diego, Sacramento State University, UC Davis, Hannover Musik Hochschule (Germany), the Royal Academy of Music (UK), Smith College, and at the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute (Miller Theater, NYC), among others. Wet Ink also regularly performs in Europe, including recent concert highlights at the Con Voce festival (Lucerne, Switzerland), the Sinus Ton festival (Magdeburg, Germany), and Café OTO (London, UK).
