Photo by Reuben Radding

Bassist and composer James Ilgenfritz kicks off his first Artist-in-Residence performance with the music of Anthony Braxton for solo bass. Ilgenfritz will also bring a chamber ensemble to premiere a new work for septet, featuring Leah Paul (flute), Kirk Knuffke (trumpet), Julianne Carney (violin), Chris Dingman (vibraphone), Taylor Levine (guitar), and Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon), with Ilgenfritz on contrabass. The evening will conclude with Billy Fox’s Blackbirds and Bullets celebration of their CD release Dulces, which includes Ilgenfritz on bass.

I: James Ilgenfritz: The music of Anthony Braxton for Solo Bass

Various works from Anthony Braxton’s Duo, Quartet, Ghost Trance Music, Pulse Track, and works for brass ensemble or orchestra are collaged together using Language Music -based improvisation structures.

II: New music for chamber ensemble

A new chamber work for septet, featuring Leah Paul (flute), Kirk Knuffke (trumpet), Julianne Carney (violin), Chris Dingman (vibraphone), Taylor Levine (guitar), and Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon), and Ilgenfritz on contrabass, followed by a game piece for the septet, augmented with percussionists and woodwinds.

II: Billy Fox’s Blackbirds and Bullets: CD Release Party Composer Billy Fox’s second record for Clean Feed, Dulces, features jazz improvisation influenced by west african and north indian music. The band, Blackbirds and Bullets, features James Ilgenfritz (bass), John O’Brien(drums), Evan Mazunik (keyboards), Miki Hirose (trumpet), Gary Pickard (saxophone), Matt Parker (saxohpone), and the composer playing maracas and conducting.

Established in 2006, ISSUE’s AIR program provides emerging artists with a 3-month residency including rehearsal space, production, curatorial, and pr/marketing support to create new works, to reach the next stage in their artistic development, and gain exposure to a broad public audience. ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation, the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

Admission to the Flexagons rehearsal and Q&A with ISSUE Board Member and longtime collaborator Luke DuBois is free and open to the public. Admission to the performances beginning at 7:30 will be ticketed ($35 / FREE for Members).

This is the second night of a celebration of Elliott Sharp, E#@60, which begins March 4 at 110 Livingston with the premiere of Elliott’s new work for double string quartet, Occam’s Razor. Join us to celebrate our friend and supporter at this special event.

ELLIOTT SHARP is a central figure in the avant-garde music scene in New York City of over thirty years and a long-time supporter of ISSUE Project Room. Composer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer, he leads the projects Carbon, Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics and Terraplane, and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His collaborators have included Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Radio-Symphony of Frankfurt; Debbie Harry, Perry Hoberman; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; jazz greats Jack Dejohnette, Sonny Sharrock, Oliver Lake, and Billy Hart; turntable innovator Christian Marclay; and Bachir Attar of the Master Musicians Of Jahjouka, Morocco. Sharp’s work was featured in the New Music Stockholm festival (2008), at the Hessischer Rundfunk Klangbiennale (2007) and the Venice Biennale (2003, 2007).

The evening begins at 5 pm and continues until 12:30 am:

Photo by Andreas Sterzing

5-7 pm: Flexagons, a new composition by Elliott Sharp performed by his Orchestra Carbon and conducted by Butch Morris: Open rehearsal and Q&A with ISSUE Board Members Luke DuBois.

7:30-8:30 pm: screening of Bert Shapiro’s documentary on Sharp’s work “Doing The Don’t.”

8:30-8:50 pm: Elliott Sharp solo: excerpts from Octal for 8-string guitarbass  (20′)

9:00-9:50 pm: Flexagons performance (45′)
with Curtis Fowlkes-trombone, Chris McIntire-trombone, Jenny Lin-piano, Danny Tunick-percussion, vibraphone, Kevin Ray-bass, Reuben Radding-bass,  Judith Insell-viola, Rachel Golub – violin, Ha-Yang Kim-cello, Briggan Krauss – alto sax, Oscar Noriega – reeds, E#-guitar, reeds

10:00-10:30 pm: Oligosono by Sharp:  piano solo performed by Jenny Lin (20′)

10:40-11:20 pm: Bootstrappers: JG Thirwell-electronics, Carl Stone-electronics, Anthony Coleman-piano, Melvin Gibbs-bass, Don McKenzie-drums, E#-guitar (30′)

11:30-11:45 pm: Amygdala by Sharp: guitar solo performed by Marco Cappelli (15′)

12:00-12:30 am: All-Guitar SyndaKit (30′) with Ben Tyree, Marco Cappelli, Angela Babin,  Marc Sloan, Ron Anderson, Zach Layton, Dave Scanlon, Debra  DeSalvo,  James Ilgenfritz, Anders Nilsson

The 5 pm open Flexagons rehearsal and Q&A with Elliott Sharp and Luke DuBois is supported by Meet the Composer’s Creative Connections program.

Zach Layton

Zach Layton is a composer, curator, improviser, teacher, and new media artist based in Brooklyn with an interest in biofeedback, generative algorithms, experimental music, buddhism and indeterminacy. His work investigates complex relationships and topologies created through the interaction of simple core elements like sine waves, minimal surfaces and kinetic visual patterns.

Zach’s work has been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and he has performed and exhibited at the Kitchen, ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, Diapason, PS1/MoMa, Anthology Film Archives, Joe’s Pub, Exit Art, SCOPE Art Fair, Art Forum Berlin, New York Electronic Art Festival, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Eyebeam, Sculpture Center, Millenium Film Workshop, St. Mark’s Ontological Theater, Dumbo Arts Festival, New York Digital Salon, Miguel Abreu Gallery, Participant Gallery, Monkeytown and many other venues in New York, South America and Europe. He has collaborated with Luke Dubois, Vito Acconci, Joshua White, Jonas Mekas, Tony Conrad, Bradley Eros, Alex Waterman, Nick Hallett, Andrew Lampert, Matthew Ostrowski, Michael Evans, MV Carbon, Seth Kirby, Matthew Welch, Christine Bard, Andy Graydon, Ryan Sawyer, Matt Mottel, Bradford Reed, Anthony Huberman, Sarina Basta, Gareth James, Emily Manzo, Patrick Hambrecht, Marissa Olsen, Angie Eng, Adam Kendall, Chika Ijima, Peter Gordon, Peter Zummo, Tristan Perich and Ray Sweeten among many other artists, filmmakers, curators, musicians and friends.

Zach is also founder of Brooklyn’s monthly experimental music series, “Darmstadt: Classics of the Avant Garde” co-curated with Nick Hallett featuring leading local and international composers and improvisers, was the co-curator of the PS1 summer Warm Up music series from 2007 -2009 and curator at Issue Project Room. Zach has received grants from the Netherlands America Foundation, Free103.9′s AIRtime fellowship, Turbulence, Jerome Foundation, Experimental Television Center, NYFA, the Danish Council for Visual Art, the City of Copenhagen Artist in Residence Program, and is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Alex Waterman

Alex Waterman is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. In New York he performs with the Either/Or Ensemble. Alex has worked with musicians such as Robert Ashley, Richard Barrett, Helmut Lachenmann, Keith Rowe, Marina Rosenfeld, Anthony Coleman, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Gerry Hemingway, David Watson, Chris Mann, Alison Knowles, Thomas Meadowcroft, and Michael Finnissy. He has performed as guest musician with numerous ensembles, including Trio Event (Berlin), Champs d’Action-Antwerp, Q-O2-Brussels, and Magpie Music and Dance Company. Waterman has made music for numerous European ballet and modern dance companies including Freiburg Ballett/Pretty Ugly, Scapino Ballet, Nederland Dans Theater III, and others. As a curator he has organized events at Les Bains:Connective in Brussels, OT301 in Amsterdam, Miguel Abreu Gallery and The Kitchen. His duo projects with the dancer Michael Schumacher have toured in Switzerland, Italy, Holland, the Opera of Monaco and most recently in all 5 boroughs of New York in a Joyce Theater production in association with the City Parks Foundation in July of 2008.

In 2007, Alex curated two exhibitions in New York, one on experimental music and poetics: Agapê (June 2-July 28th, 2007) at Miguel Abreu Gallery; and the other on graphic notation, Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music (September 7-October 20, 2007) at The Kitchen in Chelsea. Alex is presently working on his PhD in musicology at NYU, as well as writing a book about the composer Robert Ashley with the designer and writer Will Holder. Alex participated in Dexter Sinister’s residency at the Armory for the 2008 Whitney Biennial writing a new work based upon Herman Melville’s Bartleby The Scrivener. Alex Waterman and Beatrice Gibson’s film, A Necessary Music, narrated by Robert Ashley and with original music by Waterman, premiered at the Whitney Museum ISP show and won the Tiger Prize for Best Short Film at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2008. Alex lectured and performed as part of the exhibition, The Possibility of Action at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 2008, and was in residence at the ICA in May 2009 with his ensemble, in addition to performing solo works. He installed a permanent 12 speaker sound installation out in Napa Valley in July of 2009, at the residence of Norah and Norman Stone, is presently working on a new film project in Vieques, and starting up his record label (D.S. al coda). He also plays the music of Arthur Russell with Arthur’s Landing whenever he can. His writings have been published by Dot Dot Dot, Paregon, FoArm, and Artforum.

Ryan Sawyer

Ryan Sawyer aka Lone Wolf (b. 1976) grew up in San Antonio, Texas, where he played drums in various punk rock bands, most notably, At The Drive-In. After 21 years in Texas, he decided to move to New York to pursue a formal education of music  and broaden his understanding of music making on the drum set.  While in New York, he studied under Bobby Previte, Susie Ibarra, Hamid Drake, and Thurman Barker, and was a regular fixture in the New York free jazz and noise scene, frequenting legendary venues such as  Tonic, The Cooler, and The Knitting Factory.  Interested in combining elements of improvisation, jazz, and aesthetics of the musical avant garde, Sawyer performed his music in underground parties and rock clubs in hopes of making his music widely accessible to the public.

Ryan has played and recorded with hundreds of improvisors and bands while maintaining his own groups (Tall Firs, Glass Rock, Stars Like Fleas) throughout the years.  Some of his collaborations include, Charles Gayle, Thurston Moore, Jandek, TV on the Radio, Celebration, Scarlett Johansson, and Rhys Chatham. Ryan also led and co-wrote the New York Chapter of The Boredoms’ 88 Boadrum, a piece that incorporated 88 drummers playing an 88 minute piece of music co-written by Ryan Sawyer and Gang Gang Dance.

Michael Evans’ Swirling Lotus Blossom Bandits Band (a South-African tinged jazz-blues-improvisational band) celebrates the expatriates of South Africa (Chris McGregor, Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza, Louis Moholo and Johnny Dyani) that relocated to Great Britain in the early 1960’s. Tunes by Gwi Gwi’s band, Blue Notes members…Chris Mcgregor, Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza, Johnny Dyani and Llouis Moholo as well as Sun Ra, Howlin’ Wolf  and Stan Kenton.

Featuring: Michael Attias : alto saxophone, Michael Evans: drums, Evan Gallagher: keyboard, Jeff Hudgins: alto saxophone and Adam Lane: upright bass, Peter Zummo: Trombone

Michael Evans is an improvising drummer/percussionist/thereminist/composer whose work investigates and embraces the collision of sound and theatrics. As well as being a drumset player, his work with unusual sound sources includes found objects, homemade instruments, the theremin and various digital and homemade analog electronics. His work with the theremin varies the quality of its sound through set-up and technique. On the theremin he has performed with dancers and in group settings playing experimental, jazz, rock, ersatz lounge and chamber music. In 2000, he was photographed playing a Moog ether wave theremin for the front of Bob Moog’s Big Briar catalog. He has performed in multiple performances of the NYC Theremin Society’s Issue Project Room concerts during 2005, 2006 and 2007. He has studied movement/sparring/drumming with Professor Milford Graves, drum technique with Joe Morello, tabla with Misha Masud, kanjira with Ganesh Kumar and Haitian/Afro-Cuban hand drumming with John Amira. He has studied musicianship with Helen Hobbs Jordan, composition with Richard Cameron Wolf, Blue Gene Tyranny and the theremin with Pamelia Kurstin.

He has worked with a wide variety of artists of all sorts including Ron Anderson, Jeff Arnal, Audio Artists, Claire Barratt, Samm Bennett, Jac Berrocal, Carla Bley, Naval Cassidy, James Chance, Martha Colburn, Combustible Edison, Lol Coxhill, EasSide Percussion(ESP), Roger Ely(the Devil’s Chaueffeur), Nicolas Dumit Estevez, Ken Filiano, Fast Forward(Gobo), Chris Ferris, Michael Gira (Angels of Light, Swans), Gisburg, Gilbert Godfried, God Is My Co-Pilot, David Grubbs, Alexander Hacke(Einsturzende Neubauten), Susan Hefner, Steve Horowitz’s Code Ensemble, Jarboe (Swans), Pamelia Kurstin, Skip LaPlante’s Music for Homemade Instruments, Zach Layton, Gen Ken Montgomery, Neil Leonard, Aimee Mann, Karen Mantler, Sean G. Meehan, Donald Miller, Eric Mingus, Gordon Monahan, Joe Morris, Anders Nilsson, Evan Parker, Andrea Parkins, Maxime De La Rochefoucauld, William Parker, Yvette Perez’s Birdbrain, Gino Robair, Lary Seven, Elliot Sharp, Moe! Staiano, LaDonna Smith, David Simons, Jesse Stewart, Toronto Dance Theatre, Stephen Vitiello, Christopher Walken, Jason Willet, Peter Zummo’s Noisy Meditation Band and John Zorn.

He continues his ongoing collaborations with: Jeff Arnal(MEJA duo), Anders Nilsson & Ken Filiano(Fulminate Trio), Peter Zummo’s Noisy Meditation Band, Lary Seven and composes music for and performs with Susan Hefner and Dancers. Recorded examples of his work can be found on EasSide Percussion’s ESP release on Avant records, MESuperstar on A.T.M.O.T.W. records, Karen Mantler’s Farewell and Pet Project releases on XtraWatt records, Just Drums 2 – The Project(a compilation of 35 drummers) on Fever Pitch records, MEJA(Michael Evans/Jeff Arnal) on C3R records, Fulminate Trio: s/t on Generate records and Deviant Shakti: Ladonna Smith and Michael Evans on Trans Museq records.

C. Spencer Yeh was born in Taipei, Taiwan (1975), moved to the US in 1980, studied radio/television/film at Northwestern University, lived in  Cincinnati, Ohio for over a decade, and is now based in Brooklyn, New York.  Yeh works as a solo artist and improviser, most notably with his project, Burning Star Core. He has collaborated with a variety of artists and groups, including Tony Conrad, New Humans with Vito Acconci, Evan Parker, Thurston Moore, Amy Granat with Jutta Koether, Okkyung Lee, Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano, John Wiese, Nate Wooley, Wally Shoup, Don Dietrich and Ben Hall (as The New Monuments), Clare Cooper, Prurient, and Jandek. He has performed at festivals and venues such as Sonar, FIMAV at Victoriaville, Frieze Arts Fair, Issue Project Room, No Fun Fest, High Zero, the 24 Hour Drone People at Fylkingen, The Kitchen, and ZKM Karlsruhe.  His video and sound works have been showcased internationally.

Brian Chase is a drummer and composer living in Brooklyn, NY. Growing up on Long Island, he started taking private drum lessons at an early age which lead to earning a Bachelors of Music from the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. Brian is probably best known as a member of the rock group Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a band that has toured extensively throughout the world and has been nominated for three Grammys. Other recorded projects include a minimalist punk rock band called the Seconds, a duo ensemble with saxophonist Seth Misterka, and Jeremiah Lockwood’s Sway Machinery. Performance collaborations have also included Alan Licht, Okkyung Lee, Matt Welch, Stefan Tcherepnin, and Kid Millions’s Man Forever. Brian is also interested in the Just Intonation tuning theory and, heavily influenced by the work of La Monte Young introduced to him by guitarist Jon Catler, has begun an ongoing recording and performance project in which the principles of Just Intonation are applied to drums and percussion. Influential drum and percussion teachers are and have been Susie Ibarra, Greg Bandy, and Michael Rosen. Away from the drums, Brian is a regular practitioner of Ashtanga yoga.

Columbus Ohio’s Ryan Jewell lends his percussive skills to a vast and wide variety of settings, from holding down the drum chairs in the Siltbreeze bands Psychedelic Horseshit and Pink Reason to improvised explorations with C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core), Nate Wooley (Melee), and Jack Wright, not to mention his much regarded electro-acoustic solo sets. He has played throughout the United States, Canada and Europe and has recorded for Chocolate Monk, Teen Action, and Dreamship Records.

http://www.myspace.com/ryanxing
http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/ryan+jewell.html

Trumpeter Greg Kelley has performed experimental music, free jazz and noise w/ musicians throughout the globe {Keiji Haino, Kevin Drumm, Jandek}, releasing a number of recordings in the process {RRR, Twisted Village, Freedom From, No Fun, Erstwhile}. He constantly seeks to push the boundaries of the trumpet and of ‘music’.

http://ordinaryfanfares.blogspot.com/
http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/greg+kelley.html

Vic Rawlings (prepared amplified cello, surface electronics) is active in the Boston improvised music community. His performances focus on the metamusical potential of unstable sounds and silences. He is an instrument builder specializing in modifications of existing instruments. In addition to his extensive cello preparations, he continually develops an electronic instrument from extant analog circuitry, producing, in effect, an analog synthesizer with a highly unstable interface.

He performs regularly as a soloist and as a member of undr quartet, The BSC, and in duo and trio ensembles with Michael Bullock, Greg Kelley, Bhob Rainey, Sean Meehan, Jason Lescalleet, James Coleman, Tatsuya Nakatani, and Howard Stelzer. Collaborators have included Eddie Prevost (AMM), Donald Miller (Borbetomagus), Daniel Carter (Other Dimensions in Music), Laurence Cook, Jaap Blonk, Masashi Harada, and Stephen Drury.

Rawlings appears on the record labels Audio Dispatch, Grob, Sedimental, Emanem, Boxmedia, Chloe, Absurd, and Rykodisc. He has performed as a soloist/ composer with Nicola Hawkins Dance Company and has composed scores for films by Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva. He has toured throughout the US and in France.

http://www.vicrawlings.com/vicrawlings.com/Improvised_Music.html
http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/vic+rawlings.html

ISSUE Project Room and Gisburg present a rare performance of John Cage’s extraordinary masterpiece for many voices, Song Books (1970), preceded by Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” (1949, published in 1959 in Silence).

A treasury of superimposed vocal solos in a wide variety of styles ranging from Indian ragas to Italian Bel Canto, Cage’s score envisions a kaleidoscopic performance layering the songs of Erik Satie, with 19th century opera excerpts and electronic theater works. Primarily utilizing texts drawn from Henry David Thoreau’s Journal, Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Buckminster Fuller and Marcel Duchamp, Cage created an anthology of 90 solos for voice (and sometimes electronics) specified and arranged using chance procedures drawn from the I Ching, producing a “happening” that revels in Zen visions of anarchy, ecology and time.

Song Books (1970)
70 min.

Performers: 
Gelsey Bell, 
Shelly Burgon,
Michael Evans,
Jessica Feldman,
Fast Forward, 
Gisburg,
Nick Hallett,
Travis Just,
John King,
Dafna Naphtali,
Robert Osborne,
Eva Jane Peck,
Loui Terrier,
Michael  V. Waller

Barry Chabala (b.1961) – NJ guitarist taking cues from wide ranging influences like John Cage, Morton Feldman and Taku Sugimoto, Barry’s music has continued to evolve, reduce, and focus, reaching ever closer to the essence of his intention. His recent work with composer Michael Pisaro has yielded two critically acclaimed recordings: ‘an unrhymed chord(for 25 acoustic guitars) for Confront Recordings, and ‘black, white, red, green, blue (voyelles)’ for Winds Measure.

Travis Just is co-director of Object Collection. His work as a composer comes from a background in improvised music and experimental composition and often uses texts, gesture, and unconventional technologies in addition to instruments and electronics. His opera Problem Radical(s) premiered at PS122 in 2009 and will be followed by another opera Innova in 2011. In addition to his compositional work, Travis has curated at the Ontological Theater, The Stone, an auto repair yard in Berlin and is the Music Curator at Incubator Arts Project.

Tucker Dulin has lived in brooklyn for 3 years. current projects: jango.com, a set of pieces for live musicians and subwoofer, bicycle riding.

Michael Pisaro

Michael Pisaro (born 1961 in Buffalo, New York) is a guitarist and composer. A member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble, he has composed over 80 works for a great variety of instrumental combinations. A large majority of his oeuvre consists of solo works, notably a series of 36 pieces (grouped into 6 longer works) for the three-year, 156-concert series organized by Carlo Inderhees at the Zionskirche in Berlin-Mitte from 1997-1999. Another solo piece, pi (1-2594), was performed in installments by the composer on 15 selected days in February 1999, in Evanston, Illinois and in Düsseldorf in 2000-2001.

Pisaro’s work is frequently performed in the U.S. and Europe in both music festivals and smaller venues. He has been selected twice by the ISCM jury for performance at World Music Days festivals (Copenhagen,1996; Manchester, 1998) and has been included in festivals in Hong Kong (ICMC, 1998), Vienna (Wien Modern,1997), Aspen (1991) and Chicago (New Music Chicago, 1990, 1991). He has had extended composer residencies in Germany (Künstlerhof Schreyahn), Switzerland (Forumclaque/Baden), Israel (Miskenot Sha’ananmim), Greece (EarTalk) and in the U.S. (Birch Creek Music Festival/Wisconsin). Concert length portraits of his music have been given in Munich, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Vienna, Brussels, Curitiba (Brazil), Berlin, Chicago, Düsseldorf, Zürich, Cologne, and Aarau. Most of his recents works are published by Edition Wandelweiser (Germany) and two of his CDs have been released by Edition Wandelweiser Records. In addition to performing his own pieces, Michael Pisaro has showcased the work of his close associates Antoine Beuger, Kunsu Shim, Jürg Frey and Manfred Werder, and those from the experimental tradition, namely John Cage, Christian Wolff, Robert Ashley and George Brecht.

Before joining the composition faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, he taught music composition and theory at Northwestern University from 1986 to 2000. In 2006 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

Milarepa is a great saint and poet of Tibet who lived in the 11th Century. Through years dedicated to meditation and related practices in the solitude of the mountains, Milarepa achieved the highest attainable enlightenment and the mental power that enabled him to guide innumerable disciples. His ability to present complex teachings in a simple, lucid style is astonishing. He had a fine voice and loved to sing. When his patrons and disciples made a request or asked him a question, he answered in spontaneously composed free-flowing poems or lyric songs. It is said that he composed 100,000 songs to communicate his ideas in his teachings and conversations.

Eliane Radigue -  Born in Paris, France Radigue studied electroacoustic music techniques at the Studio d’essai at the RTF, under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1957-58). She was married to the artist, Arman, and devoted ten years to the education of three children, deepening classical music studies and instrumental practice on the harp and piano at the same time. In 1967-68 she worked again with Pierre Henry, as his assistant at the Studio Apsome.

Radigue worked for a year at the New York University School of the Arts in 1970-71. Her music, its source an Arp synthesizer and medium recording tape, attracted considerable attention for its sensitive, dappled purity. She was in residence at the electronic music studios of the University of Iowa and California Institute of the Arts in 1973. Becoming a Tibetan Buddhist in 1975, Radigue went into retreat, and stopped composing for a time. When she took up her career again in 1979, she continued to work with the Arp synthesizer which has become her signature. She composed Triptych for the Ballet Théâtre de Nancy (choreography by Douglas Dunn), Adnos II & Adnos III, and began the large-scale cycle of works based on the life of the Tibetan master, Milarepa.

In 1984 Radigue received a “bourse à la creation” from the French Government to compose Songs of Milarepa, and a “commande de l’état” in 1986 for the continuation of the Milarepa cycle with Jetsun Mila. Notoriously slow and painstaking in her work, Radigue has produced in the last decade or so on average one major work every three years. Very recently, in response to the demands of musicians worldwide, she has begun creating works for specific performers and instruments together with electronics. The first of these was for bass player Kaspar Toeplitz, and more recently the American cellist Charles Curtis.

Performances of her music have taken place at galleries and museums such as the Salon des Artistes Decorateurs (Paris), Foundation Maeght (St. Paul de Vence), Albany Museum of the Arts (New York), Galerie Rive Droite (Paris), Gallery Sonnabend (New York), Galerie Yvon Lambert (Paris), and Galerie Shandar (Paris); at festivals including the Festival de Como (Italy), the Festival d’Automne a Paris, Festival Estival (Paris), International Festival of Music (Bourges, France); and at the New York Cultural Center, Experimental Intermedia Foundation (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Columbia University (New York), Vanguard Theatre (Los Angeles), LACE (Los Angeles), Mills College (Oakland), University of Iowa, Bennington School of Music, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the NEMO Festival (Chicago 1996). She has appeared on many broadcast programs including France Culture, France Musique, distribution via satellite covering over 50 stations in the U.S. including special programs on KPFK (Los Angeles) and KPFA (San Francisco).

The Propensity of Sound festival is presented, in part, through generous support from The Barbara Lee Family Foundation and from CHORA, a project of the Metabolic Studio, a direct charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation led by Artist and Foundation Director Lauren Bon. CHORA aims to support the intangibles that precede creativity.

Special thanks to the Electronic Music Foundation for their technical support for this concert.

Co-presented by Crossing the Line, the fall festival of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) Crossing the Line is the fall festival of the French Institute Alliance Franyaise (FIAF), conceived as a platform to present vibrant new works by a diverse range of transdisciplinary attists working in France and New York City. Crossing the Line 2010 takes place September 10-27.

Eliane Radigue will introduce the New York premiere of her 2009 acoustic composition Naldjorlak, a two and a half hour work in three movements. The concert will mark only the 3rd performance in ISSUE Project Room’s future home at 110 Livingston: a McKim Mead & White-designed jewel box theater, featuring marble floors and 40-ft high vaulted ceilings.

Naldjorlak - After more than 30 years of infinitely discrete electronic music, Eliane Radigue abandoned her cherished Arp 2500 synthesizer to devote herself entirely to acoustic composition. Monumental in length but delicate due to the acoustic treatment of the pulsing and murmuring sounds, Naldjorlak was conceived as a trilogy with incredibly subtle harmonics, sub-tones and partials interacting continuously. The piece was elaborated in close collaboration with three virtuoso musicians who will be performing the piece: cellist Charles Curtis and basset horn players Carol Robinson and Bruno Martinez.

The suspension of time, the dialog with eternity, the proximity to silence, an appeal to contemplation, and exceptional concentration… all that has characterized Eliane Radigue’s music since 1970, is now more relevant than ever. But, Naldjorlak takes her even further on her musical journey, because with these three performers, she has found the ideal means of coming ever closer to the “impalpable chimerical” music of her dreams.

Eliane Radigue -  Born in Paris, France Radigue studied electroacoustic music techniques at the Studio d’essai at the RTF, under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1957-58). She was married to the artist, Arman, and devoted ten years to the education of three children, deepening classical music studies and instrumental practice on the harp and piano at the same time. In 1967-68 she worked again with Pierre Henry, as his assistant at the Studio Apsome.

Radigue worked for a year at the New York University School of the Arts in 1970-71. Her music, its source an Arp synthesizer and medium recording tape, attracted considerable attention for its sensitive, dappled purity. She was in residence at the electronic music studios of the University of Iowa and California Institute of the Arts in 1973. Becoming a Tibetan Buddhist in 1975, Radigue went into retreat, and stopped composing for a time. When she took up her career again in 1979, she continued to work with the Arp synthesizer which has become her signature. She composed Triptych for the Ballet Théâtre de Nancy (choreography by Douglas Dunn), Adnos II & Adnos III, and began the large-scale cycle of works based on the life of the Tibetan master, Milarepa.

In 1984 Radigue received a “bourse à la creation” from the French Government to compose Songs of Milarepa, and a “commande de l’état” in 1986 for the continuation of the Milarepa cycle with Jetsun Mila. Notoriously slow and painstaking in her work, Radigue has produced in the last decade or so on average one major work every three years. Very recently, in response to the demands of musicians worldwide, she has begun creating works for specific performers and instruments together with electronics. The first of these was for bass player Kaspar Toeplitz, and more recently the American cellist Charles Curtis.

Performances of her music have taken place at galleries and museums such as the Salon des Artistes Decorateurs (Paris), Foundation Maeght (St. Paul de Vence), Albany Museum of the Arts (New York), Galerie Rive Droite (Paris), Gallery Sonnabend (New York), Galerie Yvon Lambert (Paris), and Galerie Shandar (Paris); at festivals including the Festival de Como (Italy), the Festival d’Automne a Paris, Festival Estival (Paris), International Festival of Music (Bourges, France); and at the New York Cultural Center, Experimental Intermedia Foundation (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Columbia University (New York), Vanguard Theatre (Los Angeles), LACE (Los Angeles), Mills College (Oakland), University of Iowa, Bennington School of Music, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the NEMO Festival (Chicago 1996). She has appeared on many broadcast programs including France Culture, France Musique, distribution via satellite covering over 50 stations in the U.S. including special programs on KPFK (Los Angeles) and KPFA (San Francisco).

Charles Curtis

The cellist Charles Curtis performs a unique repertoire of major solo works created expressly for him by La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue and Alison Knowles, rarely-heard compositions by Terry Jennings and Richard Maxfield, and works by Cardew, Wolff, Feldman and Cage. La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s four-hour long solo composition, Just Charles and Cello in the Romantic Chord, has been heard in Paris, Berlin, Lyon, New York, Dijon, Polling and Bologna. Éliane Radigue’s recent Naldjorlak for solo cello has received over thirty performances worldwide and, as part of a new trilogy, was premiered in the Auditorium of the Musée du Louvre last October. Lucier’s compositions for Curtis include music for cello and piano, cello and sine waves, and solo cello with large orchestra. A former faculty member at Princeton University, and for eleven years the first solo cellist of the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, Curtis is now professor for contemporary music performance at the University of California, San Diego, and tours and records internationally. In the Bavarian village of Polling Curtis performs and teaches every summer in the Regenbogenstadl, a space devoted to the work of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. His performances in recent seasons have taken him to the Guggenheim in New York, the CAPC in Bordeaux, the Galerie Renos Xippas in Paris, the MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin, Dundee Contemporary Arts, the Kampnagelfabrik in Hamburg, the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York, as well as Chicago, Ferrara, Austin, Los Angeles and Harvard University. He continues to perform and record the traditional repertoire for cello, both as soloist and as artistic director of the chamber music project Camera Lucida.

Carol Robinson

Composer and clarinetist, Carol Robinson has a multifaceted musical life. Equally at ease in the classical and experimental realms, she performs in major concert halls and international festivals (Wien Modern, RomaEuropa, MaerzMusik, Huddersfield, Archipel, Musica, Musica Contemporanea, etc.). In addition to working closely with composers, she pursues the new in more alternative contexts, collaborating with video artists, photographers, and musicians from divers horizons. Improvisation is her passion. Carol Robinson plays all types and sizes of clarinets, including more exotic instruments such as the Lithuanian birbyne.

She began composing by writing for her own music theater productions, subsequently receiving commissions for concert pieces, installations, radio, dance and film productions. Her works often combine acoustic sounds with electronics, and her musical aesthetic is strongly influenced by a fascination for aleatoric systems. Particularly interested in dance, she has collaborated with choreographers Susan Buirge, Nadège MacLeay, Thierry Niang, François Verret, and Young Ho Nam. In 2008, she was awarded a composition fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy.

Her works have been recorded by the Hessischer Rundfunk, Saarlandischer Rundfunk, Lithuanian National Radio, and Radio France. A CD of her composition Billows, for clarinets and live electronics, was released by PLUSH in 2009. Other recent releases include solo monograph recordings of music by Giacinto Scelsi, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono, and Luciano Berio for MODE, Phil Niblock for TOUCH as well as classical music and jazz for SYRIUS, BTL and NATO. A DVD of the aleatoric musical system Cross-Currents is currently in production for the label Shiiin, with support from IRCAM,

Carol Robinson was born in the United States and graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory. After receiving a H.H. Wooley grant to study in Paris, she settled in France.

Bruno Martinez

Bruno Martinez was born on September 13, 1963 in Maubeuge France. Principal Bass Clarinetist at the Paris Opera since 1992, he has performed with conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Seiji Ozawa, Charles Dutoit, Kurt Sanderling, Myung Wung Chung, Armin Jordan, Georges Prêtre, James Conlon, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Witold Lutoslawski, Yehudi Menuhin, Valery Gergiev, Esa Pekka Salonen, Bernhard Haitink, Semyon Byshkov, Christoph von Dohnanyi, and others.

Bruno Martinez appears as soloist and chamber musician in France and worldwide. Between 1996 and 1998, Bruno Martinez was the Principal Bass Clarinetist with the Lucerne (Switzerland) and d’Aix en Provence International Festival Orchestras. He has premiered several contemporary works. He is also active in feature film recordings among which as clarinet and basset horn soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra for “Alice et Martin” de A.Téchiné. Education: – In 1984, awarded 1st Prize from the Paris Conservatory (CNSM), studying with Guy Deplus – In 1986, awarded “Virtuosity” Prize from the Geneva Conservatory (Switzerland), studying with Thomas Friedli – In 1987, accepted in the “Masters” chamber music seminar at the CNSM, Paris studying with Maurice Bourgue -In 1988, received a French and Canadian government scholarship to study at the Banff Center School of Fine Arts (Canada).

The Propensity of Sound festival is presented, in part, through generous support from The Barbara Lee Family Foundation and from CHORA, a project of the Metabolic Studio, a direct charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation led by Artist and Foundation Director Lauren Bon. CHORA aims to support the intangibles that precede creativity.

Laurie Spiegel is one of those rare composers in whom head and heart, left brain and right brain, logic and intuition, merge and even exchange roles. Though she is one of the highest-tech computer composers in America, Spiegel is also a lutenist and banjo player, and sees the computer as a new kind of folk instrument. She makes her most intuitive-sounding and melodic music from mathematical algorithms, and her most complex computerized textures by ear and in search of a desired mood. Form and emotion are as difficult to separate in her music as they are in that of her idol, J.S. Bach.

Spiegel was born in Chicago where in her teens she played guitar, banjo, and mandolin, and through them cultivated a devout philosophy of amateur music making. After receiving a degree in the social sciences, she returned to music. Having taught herself notation, she studied classic guitar and composition privately in London, then baroque and renaissance lute at Julliard, and composition with Jacob Druckman and Vincent Persichetti.

Having worked with analog synthesizers since 1969, she sought out the greater compositional control which digital computers could provide and wrote interactive compositional software at Bell Labs from 1973-79. She later founded New York University’s Computer Music Studio, and became famous in rock music circles for her music software for personal computers, notably MusicMouse.

Despite her innovative involvement with technology, Spiegel the composer has never been dominated by Spiegel the computer technician. Her music from the 70s used compositional algorithms (in one case a realization of Kepler’s “Harmony of the Planets”, included in the Voyager spacecraft’s record Sounds of Earth) to generate music in an accessible, minimalist vein. Some of that music was captured on her record on the Philo label, The Expanding Universe, containing works from 1974-6.

But in the early 80s, Spiegel distanced herself from the downtown New York scene that she had helped create, saying that the new music scene’s general direction was toward an “expansion of the collection of tools and techniques available to make music (useful, but not as the central content of a work)”. “For me,” she more recently explained, “music is a way to deal with the extreme intensity of moment to moment conscious existence.” Since breaking away, Spiegel has lived as one of New York’s most independent musicians, supporting herself by her software and circulating her music privately.

Those who fell in love with the folk like melodies and early algorithms of The Expanding Universe may be surprised to hear how much darker and more complex Spiegel’s recent music has become. “Minimalism” may still aptly describe the slow movement of pitch in these pieces (Unseen Worlds), but it gives no hint of their complex timbres, glacial momentum,and cathartic climaxes. Such vibrant, expressive music could only have come from a composer who put her intuition and imagination first, yet who had the immense technical know-how needed to meet the challenges they posed.

Pianist Joseph Kubera has been a leading interpreter of contemporary music for the past three decades. He recently performed at Monday Evening Concerts in L.A. and The Stone in New York, and has been soloist at such festivals as the Warsaw Autumn, Berlin Inventionen and Prague Spring. He has worked closely with legendary composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, Robert Ashley and others. Among the composers who have written works for him are Michael Byron, Anthony Coleman, David First, Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, and “Blue” Gene Tyranny. A longtime Cage advocate, he has recorded the Music of Changes and Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and toured with the Cunningham Dance Company at Cage’s invitation. Mr. Kubera has been awarded grants through the National Endowment for the Arts and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts.

Mr. Kubera is a core member of S.E.M. Ensemble, the DownTown Ensemble and Ostravska Banda, and he has performed with a wide range of New York ensembles and orchestras ranging from Steve Reich and Musicians to the Brooklyn Philharmonic. He tours with new-music baritone Thomas Buckner, and luminaries such as Terry Riley and Ingram Marshall have written for his duo-piano team with Sarah Cahill. Mr. Kubera’s playing may be heard on the Wergo, Albany, New Albion, New World, Lovely Music, O.O. Discs, Mutable Music, Cold Blue, and Opus One labels.

The Propensity of Sound festival is presented, in part, through generous support from The Barbara Lee Family Foundation and from CHORA, a project of the Metabolic Studio, a direct charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation led by Artist and Foundation Director Lauren Bon. CHORA aims to support the intangibles that precede creativity.

Oval, also known as Markus Popp, is an electronic musician from Berlin, Germany. He is a pioneer of “glitch,” a genre of music that embraces the purposeful mutilation of audio equipment to produce fragmented sounds in a rhythmic electronic style. Originally a trio, Oval also included members Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzer until Popp decided to pursue solo projects in 1995. Since then, he has released various CDs, most notably Ovalprocess (Thrill Jockey, 2000), Ovalcommers (Thrill Jockey, 2001), and his most recent debut, Oh (Thrill Jockey, 2010). Oval’s music has been featured alongside Björk, Gastr Del Sol, and Japanese singer Eriko Toyada, with whom he performed in a trio entitled So.

Oval – Ah! from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.