ISSUE’S FIRST PUBLIC CONCERT @ 110 LIVINGSTON, TO BE BROADCAST LIVE ON Q2 – Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2
ISSUE’S FIRST PUBLIC CONCERT @ 110 LIVINGSTON
Pre-Renovation Candlelit Performance of Morton Feldman’s Second String Quartet by Ne(x)tworks
Q2 to Webcast Entire Performance LIVE:
Q2, Classical 105.9 WQXR’s contemporary music stream – in partnership with WNYC Culture – will present a live audio webcast of this rare event.
The public will have a chance to attend a rare performance of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 in its entirety when ISSUE Project Room opens its doors at 110 Livingston St. for a pre-renovation, inaugural Open House event. Performed by Ne(x)tworks, the six hour-long contemporary masterpiece will be free to the public, commemorating ISSUE’s first concert in their future Downtown Brooklyn home.
String Quartet No. 2 has been performed in its entirety only a few times, the first being in 1999 by the FLUX Quartet at Greenwich Village’s Cooper Union. The Ne(x)tworks quartet (which includes Cornelius Dufallo and Kenji Bunch, formerly of FLUX) will play the entire piece by candlelight in the cloistered hall while audience members are invited to stay for as long as little as they like. The beauty of candlelight is also a necessity as the space is still raw, in need of renovation and lighting.
“Ne(x)tworks is thrilled to present Feldman’s masterful Second String Quartet at ISSUE Project Room as our artistic endorsement of their fabulous new concert venue [at 110 Livingston],” says Ne(x)tworks’ Director, Cornelius Dufallo. “The musical community of New York City has been eagerly awaiting the opening of this performance space.”
Called his “most extreme” composition, Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 (1983) is a collective paragon encompassing Feldman’s signature free rhythms, muted pitches, quiet and slowly unfolding music, and his experiments with duration.
“The focus at the time [of the premiere in 1999] seemed to be on how we were going to play for six hours without stopping,” Dufallo reflects. “As we immersed ourselves in the music, however, this began to change: we found that duration is by no means the most interesting aspect of this work. The ‘athleticism’ became more of a secondary concern to us. In this work, duration acts as a canvas, on which Feldman paints a stunningly beautiful encomium to the eternal marriage of sound and time. The piece must exist on a large scale in order to portray this relationship.”
In 2008 ISSUE Project Room won the bid for a 20-year, rent-free lease to occupy the landmark theatre at 110 Livingston St., an architecturally significant (McKim, Mead & White, 1926) and stunningly beautiful 4800 square foot performance space located in the former New York City Dept. of Education headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn. Once renovated, this space will offer opportunities to increase ISSUE’s audience, implement new programs and advance Brooklyn’s place as a cultural epicenter.
While this is an extraordinary opportunity, it is also an enormous challenge. ISSUE must still raise well over half a million dollars towards the $2.5 M needed for basic renovations. We hope that the community will join ISSUE on this amazing journey toward building a world-class center for experimental culture.
ISSUE Project Room’s Inaugural Concert @ 110 Livingston
Ne(x)tworks Performs Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2
April 11, 2010
FREE
Reception: 11 am
Performance: 11:30 am – 5:30 pm
110 Livingston St. (Entrance on Boerum Place)
Brooklyn, NY 11201
NY Times features ISSUE’s new home at 110 Livingston
An Avant-Garde Arts Group Bites Off a Lot to Chew
When it comes to the avant-garde side of the arts, the numbers tend to be pretty small. Record sales of a thousand or two, if you’re lucky; theater audiences in the dozens, not hundreds.
But last year Issue Project Room, a nonprofit arts space that was founded in the East Village and for the last four years has been in Brooklyn, was dealt a dauntingly large number. As part of a city deal, a developer that was converting the former Board of Education building in downtown Brooklyn into condominiums was required to offer 5,000 square feet on its ground floor to a cultural group on a 20-year, rent-free lease.
Issue Project Room won the bid. (Yes!) But then found that the space needed $2.5 million in renovations. (No!)
The organization’s leaders managed to raise about $350,000 but finally were able to exhale when Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, called late last month with the news that he was allocating $1.1 million for Issue Project Room’s renovations, as part of the $37.7 million in capital funds that he has the authority to distribute for the current fiscal year.
The building, at 110 Livingston Street, was designed by McKim, Mead & White and opened in 1926 as a home for the Elks club. By 1940 the Board of Education had taken it over, and the city sold it six years ago to the Brooklyn developer Two Trees Management for more than $45 million.
With Issue Project Room, whose proposal to Two Trees won over those from more than 100 other organizations, the building will become a home for all kinds of experimental music, theater, dance, literary readings and film. “A Carnegie Hall for the avant-garde,” Suzanne Fiol, the group’s founder and creative director, said.
“I truly believe that this is the work that keeps our culture going forward,” Ms. Fiol said. “We want to be an important space for music and film and literature and poetry and video and sound art. And a little bit of dance.”
Most of the space is a wide, marble-lined room somewhere between a courtroom and a dance hall, said Sarah Garvey, an Issue Project Room spokeswoman. In addition, there is room for offices and an additional space that could be used for a library.
Ms. Fiol opened the first Issue Project Room in 2003 in a former garage on Sixth Street in the East Village and two years later moved to a former oil silo on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, where she put on shows like an extremely rare visit by the reclusive Texas musician Jandek.
In 2007 Issue Project Room had to move again, to the former Old American Can Factory, nearby in Carroll Gardens. This month that space has its Floating Points Festival, with experimental musicians like Alan Licht and Tony Conrad (who is an Issue Project Room board member) making use of a custom-built hemispherical speaker system that hangs from the ceiling.
Whether the idea of a big, official institution like Carnegie Hall is antithetical to the spirit of the avant-garde is an open question. But with Manhattan rapidly losing performance spaces devoted to experimental arts — like Tonic on the Lower East Side, which closed in 2007 — some kind of home is necessary, and Mr. Markowitz believes that Brooklyn is the perfect place for it.
“Issue Project Room is well respected, avant-garde, cutting-edge, in-your-face — you know what? That’s Brooklyn too,” Mr. Markowitz said. “I don’t understand half the things they do, and when they tell me about them, they lose me. But that’s not the point.” The point, he added, was that “the arts create jobs.”
His contribution brings the renovation budget to within about $300,000 of what it needs for the nuts-and-bolts first phase.
Ms. Fiol said she was at first reluctant to apply for the new space because at the time her organization had no money. But having three homes in six years taught her to keep an open mind.
“Everybody gets kicked out of their space, or they end up shutting down,” Ms. Fiol said. “But instead of getting all flipped out about that, I took the road of just finding a new space. And I’ve been really lucky.”
