Media 2017

ISSUE commemorates the close of the 2017 season with a special year-end event with acclaimed composer and electronic musician Tyondai Braxton and extended technique vocalist, composer, and performer Like A Villain (Holland Andrews), co-presented with BOMB Magazine.

Saturday, December 2nd, Byron Westbrook premieres Interval/Forum, his third and final piece as a 2017 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence. The work completes a series of conceptual environments that collaborate with audience perception and participation, making use of the theatrical setting of Irondale Arts Center to focus and expand the perception of audience presence as a dynamic performance element.

Alvin Lucier stages his paradigmatic 1970 work I am sitting in a room. The piece consists of several sentences of recorded speech simultaneously played back into a room where they are re-recorded sequentially. As the repetitive sequence continues, those sounds and resonances common to the original spoken statement and those implied by the structural dimensions of the room are reinforced. The others are gradually eliminated.

Alvin Lucier stages his seminal 1976 work Bird and Person Dyning, reprising a performance done at ISSUE in 2013 on a program that included the premiere of December 12th, performed by the Ensemble Pamplemousse. Bird and Person Dyning stands as an essential work demonstrating the composer turning inward to the fundamental sparks of aural phenomena.

In tribute and commemoration of the artistic contributions of Ana-Maria Avram, ISSUE presents a “tombeau” program celebrating late Romanian composer. Bassist and Hyperion Ensemble member Zach Rowden performs a stunning rendition of "Axe VII."

OCCAM IX, the ninth composition in the OCCAM OCEAN composition cycle, was created with Laetitia Sonami on electronics with her new instrument, the Spring Spyre. The work mode is based on an individual “image” illustrated and evoked within each solo -- where each musician is guided by his or her personal “image.”

ISSUE presents a performance of Christian Wolff’s Edges or Exercises featuring Nate Wooley (trumpet), Christian Wolff (small percussion and melodica), Michael Pisaro (electric guitar) and Kristin Nordeval (voice). In the liner notes for Wolff’s 10 Exercises, the American composer Frederic Rzewski describes the work as “not reproducing familiar forms, but revealing, behind these, life’s unpredictability. You could say it is political; improvisatory; concerned with collaborative, non-hierarchical forms of social organization; but you can’t really say what it is like (although John Cage came close when he said, after a performance of the Exercises in New York, that it was like the classical music of an unknown civilization).”

Annea Lockwood’s 1995 composition I Give You Back, performed by Kristin Norderval, is a lament for unaccompanied mezzo-soprano and is set to a text by celebrated Mvskoke poet Joy Harjo. The score notes evoke the piece as “the simple image of one woman onstage, barefoot, letting loose great octave leaps and glissandos peaking in sharp cries, projecting a beautifully unfettered freedom.”

Stem-Flower-Root, the title of Michael Pisaro’s commissioned work for trumpet and sine waves, provides an apt metaphor for the FOR/WITH series at-large. Wooley describes how each of the composers featured have something in common with the structure outlined in Stem-Flower-Root; they demonstrate a power and creativity that can remain hidden, yet essential, in the structure of their works.

FOR concludes with a performance of Annea Lockwood’s Bayou-Borne, for Pauline. The piece is dedicated to the late Pauline Oliveros (1932 - 2016) and follows a score based on a map of the six bayous converging near Houston, Texas. The work is performed by Christian Wolff (percussion), Ross Karre (percussion), Nate Wooley (trumpet), Michael Pisaro (electric guitar), Megan Schubert (soprano voice) and Jessica Pavone (viola).

Issue presents the debut duo performance between Christian Wolff (small percussion) and Michael Pisaro (electric guitar).