Sounding Limits: Pascale Criton, Silvia Tarozzi & Judith Hamann

Thursday, February 23rd at 8pm, ISSUE is pleased to present the premiere East Coast performance of French composer Pascale Criton’s Sounding Limits series of compositions, two of which were co-authored in close collaboration with renowned string players Silvia Tarozzi (violin) and Deborah Walker (cello). This special performance will mark the first time Criton will be in New York City to present her work and features the first collaborative transference of Walker’s co-authored piece, to be performed by renowned cellist Judith Hamann. The evening takes place at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Dr. S. Stevan Dweck Cultural Center at Grand Army Plaza. The program includes three compositions: Circle Process (Criton-Tarozzi, 2012) for solo violin, Chaoscaccia (Criton-Walker, 2014) for solo cello, and Bothsways (Criton, 2015) for violin and cello.

The Dweck is located on the lower level of the Central Library at 10 Grand Army Plaza. People should enter from the Eastern Parkway entrance, not the main building entrance, since that will be closed.

Circle Process and Chaoscaccia were co-authored in close collaboration between Criton with Tarozzi and Walker. Their collaborative creative process was instrumental to their composition. With Deborah Walker unable to travel to NYC, this event marks the beginning of a unique transference of Deborah Walker’s Chaoscaccia to be performed by Judith Hamann—the first time this deeply collaborative work will be interpreted by another musician. Hamann will also perform Criton’s piece Bothways alongside Tarozzi.

Since the 1980s Pascale Criton has been exploring sound variability, microtunings, multisensory reception and the spatialization of listening. Between 1974 and 1987, Criton was the music advisor of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Criton’s work focuses on the sound continuum, informed by these experiences as well as studies with microtonal pioneer Ivan Wyschnegradsky, spectralist Gérard Grisey, contemporary music composer Jean-Etienne Marie, and training in electroacoustic and musical computing. Her compositions use non-standard tunings of string instruments often referred to as a scordatura, which have become a trademark of her technique.

Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker have been actively involved in the fields of contemporary experimental music and free improvisation. Together with Pascale Criton they have been exploring microtonal extended techniques and gestural processes on a violin and a cello tuned in 1/16 of a tone. The compositions that have resulted from this process are considered as corporal scripts. They challenge the perception of form and the role of interpretation, transforming it into a creative process. Time and motion are no longer defined by pitches and metrical systems but are embodied as diagrams and moods. Pascale has described that her interest in micro-intervals “goes hand in hand with my attraction to small differences: small intervals that reveal the qualities of sound, from the complex components of timbre to those of noise. They allow the introduction of minute variations in time and movement. These slight differences stimulate awareness of sensations, variations in speed, degrees of fluidity and energy involved in dynamic transformations. The microtonal tuning renews the expressive sensitivity of the instruments and calls for attentive listening to control tiny sonic variables while experiencing the limits of perception.”

The actions and gestures of Circle Process, Criton and Tarozzi’s piece for solo violin, have no fixed duration: the process can start and stop from any point on the clock display which serves as the score of the music. The performer is tasked with the job of exploring the tiny expressive articulations of the fine-tuned scordatura. The piece makes its way through twelve different states, elaborated as Styles: from gentle rustling to chattering small talk, from fragile beats to expanding harmonics. The aim is to seek a continuity in transformation, from the emergence of a gesture to its deconstruction. Circle Process has been released on Silvia Tarozzi’s album Virgin Violin (RER Megacorp).

Chaoscaccia, Criton and Walker’s piece for solo cello, follows a script built around the idea of shifts, in an unstable but continuous manner. The purpose is to grasp musical gestures as events, to seek their motivic and processual matter. Focus is given to speeds, to continuous or unstable energies. The gesture is itself guiding both performer and listener: various states coexist, their tension is always maintained on the border of rupture or breakdown, the action is "listening.” Chaoscaccia has been released on Criton’s album Infra (Potlatch Label, 2017).

Criton’s Bothsways, for both violin and cello, explores the expressive traits of “extended microtonal techniques.” The general idea is linked to instability, to the fluid and reciprocal passage between different states or ways of playing. Taking name from a portmanteau of “Both” (a duo) and “Sways” (undulations, oscillations, swings), the piece is composed of four movements (solos and duets) of two minutes, approximately: Shift (cello); Coalescent (violin and cello); Impulse (violin); Sways (violin and cello). The piece has also been released on Criton’s album Infra.

The presentation of Pascale Criton’s Sounding Limits follows on from ISSUE's Member conversation that took place in the summer of 2021 in which Criton, Tarozzi and Walker discussed the Sounding Limits series of compositions.

Pascale Criton studied composition with Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Gérard Grisey and Jean-Etienne Marie. She also received electro-acoustic training at the CIRM (International Centre for Musical Research, Nice) from 1980 to 1982, as well as in a musical computing course for composers at the IRCAM (Paris) in 1986, and earned a PhD in musicology (1999). In the field of musical research, since 1980, Criton has explored sound variability, instrumental techniques and the spatialization of listening. A specialist of microtonality, she uses highly specific tuning systems – scordatura –particularly of stringed instruments, guitars and piano, combined with orchestral instruments and digital synthesis. She edited Gilles Deleuze, la pensée-musique, Symétrie (2015), a testimony of her encounter with the french philosopher Gilles Deleuze regarding music, and Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Libération du son, Ecrits 1916-1979 (2013).

Silvia Tarozzi is a violinist, composer and improviser. The oral transmission of music and the form created through a deep immersion into the sound are traits of her musical research and find expression in several collaborations with composers as Éliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Pascale Criton, Cassandra Miller, Martin Arnold, Pierre-Yves Macé, and Philip Corner. Her projects are released by I dischi di Angelica, Unseen Worlds, New World Records, Potlatch. Her concerts have been recorded and broadcasted by BBC Radio and France Musique. She performs regularly in festivals and venues in Europe, North America, Canada, Mexico. In duo with Deborah Walker, and as a member of Ensemble Dedalus, she has worked with Christian Wolff, Jürg Frey, Michael Pisaro, Catherine Lamb, Sébastien Roux, and many others.

Judith Hamann is a cellist and performer/composer from Narrm/Melbourne. They have “long been recognised as one of Australia’s foremost contemporary-music cellists” (RealTime Arts), and as a composer who “destroys the fiction of the musician who lives and works outside conventional parameters and puts in its place a series of compositions that are fundamentally humane” (WIRE). Their work encompasses performance, improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, site specific generative work, and micro-tonal systems in a process based creative practice. In their recent research, Hamann examines the acts of shaking and humming as formal and intimate encounters; interrogates ‘collapse’ as a generative imaginary surface; and considers the ‘de-mastering’ of bodies, both human and non-human, in settler-colonial heritage instrumental practice and pedagogy. Their process-driven and embodied practice, considers the ways sound operates as a subject, object, or actant. Trained in contemporary classical performance, they frequently challenge the boundaries of their instruments, whether the cello, voice, or body, considering how sonic thresholds offer generative sites of instability and movement. Judith likes working with and thinking-with other artists which has sometimes included people like Marja Ahti, Oren Ambarchi, Joshua Bonnetta, Dennis Cooper, Charles Curtis, Lori Goldston, the Harmonic Space Orchestra, Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, Anike Joyce Sadiq, and La Monte Young. Judith’s work has previously been published by labels including Blank Forms, Black Truffle, Another Timbre, Longform Editions and Second Editions. Judith holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from UC San Diego.