Katie Porter: Collecting Rocks From The Places We’ve Been - Music In Time & Space

Tuesday, June 18th at 8pm, ISSUE presents Collecting Rocks From The Places We’ve Been - Music In Time & Space, the second commission from 2024 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Katie Porter. Devoted to collaboration, the evening at Brooklyn Music School features experimental musicians Nomi Epstein, Jennie Gottschalk, Teodora Stepančić, and media artist Claudia Schmitz who will explore configurations of slow bass clarinet, pre-recorded clarinets, objects, dueling pianos, synthesizers, and live video performance. Realized through graphic scores and chance phenomena, Porter continues to ruminate on our ability to perceive change. 

Notes from Katie Porter on Collecting Rocks From The Places We’ve Been - Music In Time & Space:

It seems perhaps mundane, but in this residency at ISSUE, I would like to talk about the weather, and maybe motherhood, and maybe Louise Bourgeois' Spirals. My musical practice changed quite a bit since moving from Brooklyn to the mountains of Utah with young children, over a decade ago. In the move, I felt I lost my music community, and, as a performer I felt very isolated, but I gained time, and, importantly, I became comfortable with change and impermanence. I realized that my favorite music to both perform and listen to was a shared experience, ephemeral, music to exist in. Since this realization I have only wanted to perform and create my own works that focus on togetherness, community, sounds greater than our parts, sounds that are like watching the landscape, or existing in the weather. I’m now making a return to NYC, to a larger artistic community, to collaboration, but especially to making music works that require this kind of focused time. A slow process is fascinating to me, and it is important that my work continues to embrace our own change as individuals in a climate we can’t always control, creating works inside our own intimate sounds, with artists who bring their own processes and practice, working together through collaboration and artistic equality.

Recently I have been creating systems pieces, small systems that collapse and expand upon themselves, frameworks for pitches, relative rhythms and sometimes space for words and texts.  Almost always these works are about slow change. Sometimes we use the weather as  “small talk”, as a way to mark our days and predictability of the seasons, but now the weather has been so extreme lately, smoke-filled cities, flooding, that I found myself asking over and over, what is going on? Are we just sharing the small daily changes in our individual lives? Or are we waking up to the extreme change that is happening around us? In this residency I am creating new works exploring similar themes: our individual stories, our memories and things we happen to forget, our mundane lives in the weather, and the extremes we can’t always see, can’t always adjust to, can’t quite comprehend, in our current world.

Katie Porter is a Brooklyn-based clarinetist, performer/composer, writer, and artist whose work draws from decades of experimental performance practices to create structures for music perception in space and time (over lifetimes or subtle daily increments/abstractions). She is currently a 2024 Artist-In-Residence at ISSUE Project Room. Devoted to collaboration, Katie's current projects include: Phase to Phase a bass clarinet duo with Lucio Capece in Berlin, Malosma a bass clarinet and bass flute duo with Christine Tavolacci in LA, Eternities with noise artist Bob Bellerue in NYC, Red Desert Ensemble, MOONS with Judith Berkson, Laura Cetilia, and Christine Tavolacci, Quartet or Two Duos with James Ilgenfritz, Lucie Vítková, and Teerapat Parnmonkol in NYC, MUD with poet/filmmaker Anne Penders in Brussels, and Greenstone/Hennies/Porter with Sarah Hennies and Madison Greenstone. Passionate about fostering musical communities, she co-founded Listen/Space in Brooklyn, the Listen/Space Commissions in the mountains of Utah, and the biennial VU Symposium for experimental, electronic and improvised music. She has performed in many US & International ensembles, festivals, and venues, both storied and underground such as: Abrons Art Center, American Mavericks, Centre Acanthes, C4NM, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Green Umbrella Series, Ghost Ensemble, Fridman Gallery, Human Resources, Indexical, Issue Project Room, Kenyon College, The Kitchen, KLANGRAUM, KM28 Berlin, L Collective, Lincoln Center, Liquid Music Series, LOLA, NOVA Chamber Music, Ostravská Banda, Piano+, MOMA PS1, Roulette, Rhizome DC, The Stone, SOUND at the Schindler House, and SEM Ensemble.  She can be heard on the labels Another Timbre (UK), Gravity Wave / Erstwhile (US), Edition Wandelweiser (DE), FTARRI (Japan), Infrequent Seams (US), Karl Records (DE), Editions Verde (US), Harmonic Ooze Records (US), and her writings are published in the journal Sound American.  Katie is working to record a giant multi-year project for solo clarinet in Nancy Holt's land artwork, Sun Tunnels, in the remote Utah desert.  www.fromkp.com

The music of Nomi Epstein, Boston-based composer/improvisor/curator/Deep Listening® Practitioner, centers around her interest in sonic fragility. Her works have been performed throughout the US/Europe by SurPlus, ICE, Wet Ink, Mivos, Wild Rumpus, Dedalus, and Southland. Her most recent portrait album featuring Apartment House/Vibrant Matter was released under Another Timbre (February 2024). An active practitioner and advocate of experimental music, she is founder/director of a•pe•ri•od•ic, the critically acclaimed, experimental ensemble. Her curatorial work includes large scale festivals as in the Chicago area 2012 centennial John Cage Festival, the Wandelweiser and Ustvolskaya Festivals, and concerts across the US/abroad. She continues to research, write, and lecture on experimental music and serves as Associate Professor of Composition at Berklee.

Jennie Gottschalk is a composer and writer based in Boston. She is interested in simple materials and shared experiences. She holds a bachelor's degree in composition from The Boston Conservatory (2001), and a master’s degree and doctorate from Northwestern University (2008). She is the author of Experimental Music Since 1970 (Bloomsbury, 2016) and co-author of Being Time: Case Studies in Musical Temporality (Bloomsbury, 2019).

As an international media artist, Claudia Schmitz explores boundaries: Limits of perception, real and imagined barriers, liquid processes, body discourses. She uses sculpture and projection, multidimensional drawing, (live) moving image and AI – in real space, virtual and augmented reality – to explore new forms of sound, space and experience. The questioning of hegemonic perception, the exploration of identity and space, exploring identity in virtual and real space, reactivity vs. interactivity, inter- and transmediality, machine learning and artificial intelligence are main topics of her current artistic research. Thanks to the Goethe-Institut, the German Federal Cultural Foundation and many other funding institutions, her work has already been realised and exhibited in more than 20 countries. She has received numerous awards and her works are represented in public and private collections internationally.  Ztimhcs Aidualc studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, among others. 

Teodora Stepančić is a composer, pianist and curator. Born in Belgrade and based in Brooklyn, Teodora has been integral to the inception of many musical groups and scenes. She was a founding member of few experimental music ensembles in The Hague and is a pianist of Ensemble Modelo62 in the Netherlands since 2005. In 2017 she founded the Piano+ concert series in Brooklyn, now in its fifth season, and LCollective, a group dedicated to performance of challenging musical works in inclusive and unconventional environments, around which grew an engaged community of artists and friends. She is part of Teo Dora An Drea duo with singer/composer Andrea Young (Montreal), and of ambient dj/electronic/keyboard duo Stepančić.Gidron with Assaf Gidron. Teodora is currently working on two CD releases: her ensemble pieces performed by Ordinary Affects, funded by NYFA Women's Fund and debut album of Teo Dora An Drea with new pieces by Laura Cetilia, Andrea Young and Teodora, funded by Canadian Council for the Arts. She is accompanist for voice department at Third Street Music School in New York.