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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.”

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.

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

Christian Wolff’s For Trumpet Player was the first piece Nate Wooley received after undertaking the commissioning series. Wooley describes the impetus of commissioning these works as coming from a desire to add music to the solo trumpet repertoire that met a certain aesthetic that felt lacking in the contemporary literature: music with an attention to non-linear forms, an attention to sound and timbre over technical flash, and music that was personal not only within the language of the composer but the player as well.

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).

Ashley Fure’s Shiver Lung 2, performed by percussionist Ross Karre, features Fure’s signature use of complex timbres drawn from extended instrumental techniques and acoustic “wildness.” Her work is known for how virtuosity and crudeness “face-off,” circling an aesthetic region between embellishment and fact, between sound as a carrier of aesthetic intent and sound as a subsidiary effect of action.

For his second project as 2017 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow, DeForrest Brown Jr. presents the premiere of Elevator to Mezzanine, a new commissioned project between Brown and Berlin-based artist, musician and writer Steven Warwick taking place at Secret Project Robot.

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).”

Jonas Mekas speaks on his film Reminiszenzen aus Deutschland, 1971/1993 (edited 2012), never before screened in the U.S. (running time: 25 minutes). A non-chronological presentation of the filmmaker’s time in German forced labor camps and displaced person camps, the film details a story that begins in 1944 and goes on until 1949.

Saturday, September 9th, Byron Westbrook continues his ISSUE residency with “Threshold Variations,” an immersive environment expanding on the techniques of “Interval/Habitat” presented at Westbrook’s previous residency commission in April, 2017. “Threshold Variations” revisits the experimental staging of “Interval/Habitat,” but focuses more directly on the synaesthetic play between light amplitude and sound volume in relation to the audience’s thresholds of perception.

ISSUE Project Room's 2017 Fall season opens at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights with celebrated composer and process-musician William Basinski. His most recent work A Shadow In Time is a eulogy to David Bowie that explores the two artists’ shared concern with how to make time, change, and death their own.