Michael Pisaro’s “Stem-Flower-Root” Performed by Nate Wooley

Saturday, September 30th, ISSUE is pleased to present WITH, the second evening of FOR/WITH, a mini-festival featuring new commissions with some of America’s most iconoclastic composers and performers. A celebration of individual languages and the spirit of collaboration, the series continues with the premiere of Stem-Flower-Root by Michael Pisaro, a performance of Annea Lockwood’s 1995 work I Give You Back performed by Kristin Norderval, and a performance of Christian Wolff’s open score Edges or Exercises. The evening and series will close with a roundtable discussion and Q&A with Nate Wooley and all four of the series’ composers: Annea Lockwood, Ashley Fure, Christian Wolff and Michael Pisaro.

Organized by performer, composer and former 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.

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 (stem) of their works. Pisaro, Lockwood, Fure and Wolff all work with sound, but with a sense that the sound is coming from a deep and settled, human place (root). And, as will be heard, the music and ideas from these four composers bloom in incandescent ways.

New York-based American trumpeter Nate Wooley (b. 1974) has performed on over 100 recordings. Increasingly acknowledged internationally, Wooley’s specific style is part of a burgeoning revolution in experimental trumpet technique. His own compositions expand conceptions of linguistic based embouchure manipulation and utilize the trumpet to control amplified feedback. He has performed regularly with such icons as John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Eliane Radigue, Ken Vandermark, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, and Yoshi Wada, as well as being a collaborator with some of the brightest lights of his generation like Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Peter Evans, and Mary Halvorson.

Michael Pisaro (born 1961 in Buffalo, New York) is a guitarist and composer. A member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble, he has composed works for a great variety of instrumental combinations. Since 2010 portrait concerts of his music have been given in London, Paris, New York, Santiago, Tel Aviv, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, Oxford, Glasgow, Moscow, Chicago, Munich, Huddersfield, Madrid, Brussels, Montpelier, Boston, Berlin, Houston, Düsseldorf, Trondheim, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Nantes, Mexico City, Seattle, Linz, San Diego and elsewhere. Recordings of his work (solo and collaborative) have been released by Edition Wandelweiser Records, erstwhile records, New World Records, another timbre, slubmusic, Cathnor, Senufo Editions, winds measure, HEM Berlin and on Pisaro's own imprint, Gravity Wave. Before joining the composition faculty at the California Institute of the Arts (where he is located presently), he taught music composition and theory at Northwestern University from 1986 to 2000. In 2005/6 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He was Fromm Foundation Visiting Professor of Music Composition in the Department of Music at Harvard in the fall of 2014.