02/24 @ 8:00pm - Stephen Drury plays John Cage’s Etudes australes + Collide-O-Scope Music plays Riley, Glass, Stockhausen

Stephen Drury performs John Cage’s Etudes australes. Composed in 1974-1975, the piece (a total of 32 Etudes, organized into 4 books, each book having 8 Etudes) consists of single tones and combinations derived from star charts of the Atlas Australis. Though notated on conventional staves, there are no dynamic markings nor pedal instructions, and the player is free to interpret the notes given.

In a Landscape (1948), John Cage (1912-1992)

Etudes Australes , Book III (1974-75), John Cage

Etude No. 17
Etude No. 18
Etude No. 19
Etude No. 20
Etude No. 21
Etude No. 22
Etude No. 23
Etude No. 24

Pianist and conductor Stephen Drury has performed throughout the world with a repertoire that stretches from Bach to Liszt to the music of today. He has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Barbican Centre and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and from Arkansas to Seoul. A champion of contemporary music, he has taken the sound of dissonance into remote corners of Pakistan, Greenland and Montana.

“Three From The Revolution Years: 1965-1969”

Collide-O-Scope Music presents music by Terry Riley, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Phillip Glass in a program dedicated to one of the most volatile and exciting periods in our recent musical past, the late ‘60’s. Against the backdrop of cataclysmic transformations and conflicts of global impact in virtually every sphere of political, social, and cultural engagement, composers in musical centers around the world initiated an unprecedented period of experimentation, shattered boundaries, and a reinvention of the performative experience. This program presents a sampling of watershed works that epitomize the ferment and grounbreaking forays into the unknown which broadly characterize music of the period. Terry Riley’s Tread On The Trail(1965) is one of two modular ensemble works composed in the wake of his wildy successful In C. Tread On The Trail, for unspecified performers, further explores spontaneous formal configurations and reconfigurations of a static collection of materials, but in a more chromatic setting that borrows heavily from the jazz idiom. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Spiral(1968), is a work for soloist on any instrument or combination of instruments in combination with a shortwave receiver. Abstract, concrete, and musical sounds picked up from the receiver are imitated by the soloist and subsequently transformed according to rigorously conceived parametric considerations. Perhaps no other work so overtly embodies the aesthetic viewpoint inherent in Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message,” as the particular content employed in a realization of the work is left open and in a non-deterministic role while the impact of the actual composition rests entirely in the relation and differentiation imposed by the compositional medium. Finally, Phillip Glass’s Music In Fifths(1969) is one of the culminative works composed by Glass during a particularly prolific period of activity between the years 1967-69, just after the composer had first heard music of Steve Reich. A sprawling diatonic work of repeating figures for any number of performers, Music In Fifths is an important early opus that represents the fully-formed aesthetic Glass would explore throughout his career.

About Collide-O-Scope Music

Now in its third season, Collide-O-Scope Music is a contemporary music collective with a focus on presenting a diverse spectrum of music and visual media, emphasizing the integral connection between emerging technologies and the formation of new aesthetic environments. Led by pianist Augustus Arnone and composers Chris Bailey and Louis Bunk the group has offered an eclectic mix of newly composed works and essential classics from the modern repertory. In keeping with the group’s mission of integrating a maximally diverse range of  musical materials and approaches, programming has featured a blend of both acoustic and electronic compositions as well as juxtaposing fixed compositional forms with improvisational, indeterminate, and interactive music. A particular focus is given to musical works that explore innovative or extended media, pertaining to physical/practical innovations, including extended instrumental techniques, microtonal composition, electronic sound and signal processing, and non-traditional notation, as well as conceptual extensions including the application of innovative theoretical/mathematical models, indeterminacy and the use of chance operations, and analogues and models drawn from other fields.  Composers represented include seminal pioneers John Cage, Milton Babbitt, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez, Phillip Glass, and Alvin Lucier as well as emerging Americans Jason Eckardt, Edmund Campion, Stephen Gorbos, Christopher Bailey, David Smooke, and Michael Gordon. Collide-O-Scope Music instrumentalists have included performers from a number of New York’s premiere contemporary music groups including Bang On A Can, ICE, Talea Ensemble, and the Da Capo Chamber Players.

Chamber Music Month is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.