ISSUE Project Room » string quartet

Either/Or

andrew — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:57:34 +0000

Either/Or is a cutting-edge contemporary music ensemble based in New York City. Founded in 2004 by pianist/composer Richard Carrick and percussionist David Shively, Either/Or focuses on compelling new and recent works for unconventional ensemble formations rarely heard elsewhere. The group draws upon its roster, featuring some of New York’s leading interpreters, to present intense chamber music alongside larger ensemble works. E/O has performed to critical acclaim at Miller Theatre, Merkin Concert Hall, The Kitchen, MATA Festival, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and ICA:Boston, in addition to frequent appearances at experimental music venues such as The Stone, Roulette, and Issue Project Room.

Programs have included numerous world, U.S., and New York premieres; these range from major works of American experimental music to rarely heard classics from the dynamic margins of the European avant-garde. In addition to its ongoing collaborations with emerging artists, Either/Or has brought distinguished composers such as Helmut Lachenmann (2008), Paolo Aralla (2009), and Chaya Czernowin (2010, 2011) to New York for portrait concerts and lectures through E/O’s Composer’s Atelier series.

Either/Or will be releasing its first two CDs in 2011, on Starkland and on New World Records. Additionally, Either/Or and its directors have been Artists in Residence at Eugene Lang College of the New School for Social Research (2010) and New York University Faculty of Arts & Sciences (2008-9). Educational activities have included lectures, workshops, open rehearsals, and premieres of student works.

Richard Carrick – Shadow Flow, John Pickford Richards, viola
Hans Thomalla – Piano Counterpart, Richard Carrick, piano
Keeril Makan – Zones d’accord, Esther Noh, violin
Keeril Makan – Mu, Alex Waterman, cello
Keeril Makan – Voice within voice, Geoff Landman, baritone saxophone

ETHEL’s HomeBaked: A Work in Progress Performance

andrew — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:04:17 +0000

ETHEL, “extraordinarily skilled, passionate musicians (New York Times),” presents a sneak-peek into four new commissioned works by composers Andy Akiho, Anna Clyne, Judd Greenstein and Matt Marks. (Premieres are scheduled for May 23rd as part of NYC’s Tribeca New Music Festival.) ETHEL’s HomeBaked commissioned works are from innovative, emerging composers who live and work in our hometown of New York City. Come see what’s cookin’ in ETHEL’s kitchen!

Acclaimed as America’s premier postclassical string quartet, ETHEL boldly infuses contemporary concert music with fierce intensity, questioning the boundaries between performer and audience, tradition and technology. Formed in 1998, New York’s ebullient ETHEL is comprised of Juilliard-trained performers: Cornelius Dufallo (violin), Ralph Farris (viola), Dorothy Lawson (cello) and Mary Rowell (violin). ETHEL performs adventurous music of the past four decades including repertoire by Julia Wolfe, Phil Kline, David Lang, John Zorn, Steve Reich, JacobTV, Scott Johnson, Don Byron, Marcelo Zarvos, Evan Ziporyn, and Mary Ellen Childs. ETHEL currently serves as Park Avenue Armory’s 2011 Artists-in-Residence.

ETHEL’s HomeBaked commissions are funded in part by the Jerome and Greenwall Foundations.

Mivos String Quartet and the CNS Symphony Orchestra play works by Tony Conrad, Huang Ruo and Luke Dubois + Dave Soldier and Brad Garton

Zach Layton — Fri, 08 May 2009 23:29:26 +0000

MIVOS quartet is devoted to performing contemporary music. It was founded in 2008 by violinists Olivia DePrato and Joshua Modney, violist Victor Lowrie, and cellist Isabel Castellvi. They met while pursuing a master’s degree at Manhattan School of Music in the Contemporary Performance Program. Since their inception they have performed and premiered works by both young and established composers including Anna Clyne, Juan Calderon, and Kirsten Broberg. They have performed at venues such as The Stone, Issue Project Room, the Bretch Forum and for the American Music Center at the Chelsea Museum. Recently they have collaborated with clarinetist Ned Rothenberg for a performance of his quintet for clarinet and string quartet, which they will be recording on Tzadik records in the fall of 2009.

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, video artist, and programmer living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia’s Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He is best known as a co-author of Jitter, a software suite developed by Cycling’74 for real-time manipulation of matrix data. His music is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling’74, and Cantaloupe music.

Hard Data (for String Quartet) is a data-mining, sonification, and visualization project that uses statistics from the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as source material for an interactive audiovisual composition based around an open-source “score” of events. Using Xenakis’ understanding of formalized music as a starting point, DuBois draws upon a variety of statistical data ranging from the visceral (civilian deaths, geospatial renderings of military actions) to the mundane (fiscal year budgets for the war) to generate a dataset that can be used for any number of audiovisual compositions.The intention of the project is to recontextualize the formal stochastic music in the context of real-world statistics, and to provide a compositional and metaphoric framework for creating an electroacoustic music relevant and significant to our time.

David Soldier & Brad Garton:

String Quartet #3: “The Essential”

for string quartet and brain waves

composed by Dave Soldier & Brad Garton

and performed by the CNS Symphony Orchestra

String Quartet #3 “The Essential“

Dave Soldier and Brad Garton, June 2009

For my third string quartet, we choose to return to the essential quartet, that which is pure. To attain this ideal, one would bring to existence a string quartet untouched by human hands.

The piece is constructed as follows:

1. We selected a favorite string quartet, Schoenberg’s Second, scherzo movement.

2. We retained the original pitches and extirpated all of his rhythms and phrasing marks, rewriting them completely at our whim

3. The string players record our “enhanced” score

4. In performance, they place the instruments on chairs, and sit behind on other chairs. They trigger sections of their own playing using electroencephalograms: the brain waves are projected for the audience to see. The amplitude threshold of the brain signals trigger the entry of their various parts, while frequency and slope are derived to trigger transformations, including changes in tempo and pitch.

There are two movements

1. Fourier Transformations

This is the original Schoenberg second movement in amplitudes of frequency distributions without a time dimension: all frequencies (pitches) used in the piece are played simultaneously, in amplitudes (volume) which are the product of the number of times the pitch is played and the volume used. It is thus quite short in duration, and could be listened to music lovers in a hurry, as it is identical to the original version of the piece, containing all of the same information.

2. Exobiology: I breathe the air on other planets

Expanding time to a variable fractal dimension in our second movement, the recorded phrases are triggered by the performer’s minds. Performers may use motor actions, such as eye closure or isometric muscle presses, to trigger variable brain waves from the cortex and transform their prerecorded performance.

An epigram and further analysis for The Essential Quartet is a western blot (Figure 1) prepared by acquiring two violins, a viola, and a cello, boiling them (or boiling followed by varnish extraction with benzene), and displaying their entire constituent proteins on the basis of molecular weight on a polyacrylamide gel. This provides all essential information on the string quartet and is completely identical to the original.

The CNS Symphony Orchestra

Mari Kimura, Curtis Steward, violins & brainwaves
Herve Bronnimann, viola & brainwaves
David Eggar, cello & brainwaves
Brad Garton, Dave Soldier, conductors

Emily Manzo & Daisy Press perform Erik Satie’s SOCRATE + VEXATIONS for Toy Pianos

Zach Layton — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:20:30 +0000

Emily Manzo & Daisy Press perform Erik Satie’s SOCRATE + Flux Quartet

ISSUE Project Room is pleased to host a special performance of Erik Satie’s masterpiece, “Socrate” based on the life and death of Socrates, featuring a libretto by Jean Cocteau, performed by soprano Daisy Press and pianist Emily Manzo.
A specialist in the field of contemporary music, Daisy Press, vocalist, was born into a performing family as the daughter of two musicians. In addition to her solo and ensemble vocal work, she also plays the violin and guitar and has appeared as an actor in an upcoming Adam Goldberg independent film. Most recently, she was praised by the New York Times for her “winning subtlety and understatement” in her rendition of George Crumb’s new folk-based song cycle “Unto the Hills” at Miller Theater with the acclaimed group So Percussion. Previously, she has sung with them the works of Steve Reich, including “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Drumming,” which she has also performed as a guest artist at Juilliard.

Additional credits include being the featured soloist for the New York premiere of Phillipe Leroux’s “Voi(rex)” at Miller Theater alongside IRCAM; “Apparition” by George Crumb at the Bang on a Can Marathon, where Ms. Press was for two years singer-in-residence; “Attila-Joszef Fragments” by Kurtag at Symphony Space; and excerpts, with the composer in attendance, for Elliot Carter’s “Of Challenge and of Love.” She has also appeared in Ireland with the Argento Ensemble in Earl Kim’s “Exercises en Route” and was hailed for her “calm naturalness” by The New York Times for her performance of early and late Webern song cycles.

Ms. Press has performed Morton Feldman’s “Three Voices” (the studio recording of which is soon to be released) and has appeared with the renowned VOX vocal ensemble. She is currently on faculty at Manhattan School of Music, where she received her Masters degree. She also holds academic degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and Oxford University, and she has studied voice in the studios of Trish McCaffrey and Hilda Harris, and North Indian ragas with Michael Harrison.

VEXATIONS for toy pianos

with

Andrea LaRose (antisocial music)
Barry London (from Oneida)
Nick Hallett
Tom Chiu
Katie Young
Emily Manzo