Table of the Elements – The Copernicium Festival:
May 12-14 at ISSUE Project Room
Image from Robert Longo's Pictures for Music (1979), to be shown alongside Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio
Jonathan Kane’s February, Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, Stephen O’Malley, Zeena Parkins, Films by Robert Longo, Tyler Hubby, & Tony Conrad
May 12 – 14, 2011
Since 1993 the record label Table of the Elements has staked its claim on a massive enterprise, intending nothing less than to rewrite the history of American music in the second half of the 20th century, and beyond. Its projects have focused on musicians whose light shimmers outside the frames of convention, and comprise a vital contemporary archive of experimental, minimalist, improvised and outsider musics.
ISSUE Project Room and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn Commissions (Duane Pitre, Tony Conrad, Katherine Young, Alex Mincek) at St. Anne’s Church in Brooklyn Heights
ISSUE Project Room is proud to premiere four newly commissioned works in partnership with the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, conducted by Eli Spindel. Former ISSUE Project Room Artist-in-Residence Duane Pitre premieres his new work Suspended in Dreams along with a new work ISSUE board member and pioneer Tony Conrad, virtuoso bassoonist Katherine Young’s Inhabitation of Time, and Wet Ink Ensemble Artistic Director Alex Mincek’s Ebb and Flow.
The String Orchestra of Brooklyn (SOB) is a close-knit group of amateur and professional musicians coming together to explore the breadth of the string repertoire, from the concertos of Bach to the latest experimental works by emerging composers. The orchestra also seeks out unique collaborative projects with other like-minded performance organizations, including ISSUE Project Room, American Opera Projects, and Hellgate Harmonie.
Founded in 2007 by violinist and conductor Eli Spindel, the SOB has quickly become an integral part of Brooklyn’s growing musical community. Based at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn Heights, the ensemble also presents an annual summer concert in Fort Greene Park, and holds regular chamber recitals around the Borough. For more information, please visit www.thesob.org
PROPENSITY OF SOUND: Pauline Oliveros’ Primordial/Lift + Carol Robinson’s Billows
The second public performance and NYC premiere of Pauline Oliveros’ 1998 work Primordial/Lift, featuring many performers from the original studio recording: Pauline Oliveros – accordion & electronics, voice; Andrew Deutsch – electronics & toy piano; Anne Bourne – cello & voice; David Grubbs – electric guitar. The work is “based on information concerning the shift in the resonant frequency of the earth”.
Jason Huang – violin
Anne Bourne – cello/voice
David Grubbs – harmonium
Pauline Oliveros – V accordion
Miguel Frasconi – glass harmonica
Suzanne Thorpe – oscillator
Andrew Deutsch – sampler
Pauline Oliveros – A native Texan, Oliveros has influenced American music extensively in her career spanning more than 60 years as a composer, performer, author and philosopher. She pioneered the concept of Deep Listening, her practice based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation, designed to inspire both trained and untrained musicians to practice the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions in solo and ensemble situations.
During the mid-’60s she served as the first director of the Tape Music Center at Mills College, aka Center for Contemporary Music followed by 14-years as Professor of Music and 3 years as Director of the Center for Music Experiment at the University of California at San Diego. Since 2001 she has served as Distinguished Research Professor of Music in the Arts department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where she is engaged in research on a National Science Foundation CreativeIT project. Her research interests include improvisation, special needs interfaces and telepresence teaching and performing. She also serves as Darius Milhaud Composer in Residence at Mills College doing telepresence teaching and she is executive director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd. where she leads projects in Deep Listening, Adaptive Use Interface. She is the recipient of the 2009 William Schuman Award from Columbia University for lifetime achievement. A retrospective from 1960 to 2010 was performed at Miller Theater, Columbia University in New York March 27, 2010 in conjunction with the Schuman award. She received a third honorary degree from DeMontort University, Leicester, UK July 23, 2010. Recent recordings include Pauline Oliveros & Miya Masoka and Pauine Oliveros & Chris Brown on Deep Listening, http://paulineoliveros.us, and http://www.deeplistening.org/
David Grubbs - Grubbs has released eleven solo albums, the most recent of which is Hybrid Song Box.4 (Blue Chopsticks). He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with writers such as Susan Howe and Rick Moody, and with visual artists such as Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, Cosima von Bonin, and Stephen Prina. He is an assistant professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College and director of the graduate programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA). Grubbs was a 2005-6 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and has been called one of two “Best Teachers for an Indie-Rocker to Admire” in the Village Voice and “le plus Français des Américains” in Libération.
Anne Bourne – With improvised streams of extended cello and voice, Anne integrates the experience of listening and composing for dance, film, experimental context, digital image media, chamber music, and words. She has created with Andrea Nann, Michael Ondaatje, Susie Ibarra, Eve Egoyan, Alvin Lucier, Nicolas Collins, John Oswald, Tom Kuo, Peter Mettler, Fred Frith, and Pauline Oliveros. Anne is interested in each musical expression being an offering of sonic activism, in the sense of resolution between tones, peoples, landscapes, and individual paradoxes through listening.
Jason Kao Hwang (violin) leads his quartet, EDGE, quintet, Local Lingo, octet, Burning Bridge, and improvising string orchestra, Spontaneous River. He has performed with William Parker, the Rova Sax Quartet, Henry Threadgill and received grants from Chamber Music America, the NEA, NJSCA, and Meet the Composer.
Miguel Frasconi is a composer and improvisor who uses electronics and a menagerie of glass objects to create his sound world. He has worked closely with many esteemed composers and choreographers. He presently teaches electronic music at Bard College and is director of the new music ensemble Ne(x)tworks.
Suzanne Thorpe is an electro-acoustic flautist, composer and sound artist. Her fixed compositions tend to be site-specific multichannel works that employ psycho-acoustic phenomena and tuned filtering techniques, and in performance she extends her instrument with an ever-evolving set-up of analogue and real-time software components. As an improviser she has performed with Chris Brown, Annette Krebs, Maggie Nicols, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Gino Robair, Zeena Parkins, and Ulrich Krieger among others. Thorpe is a founding member of the alternative rock group Mercury Rev, with whom she worked from 1989 – 2001, earning numerous critical accolades, and from time to time she can be heard mucking it up with J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. She has a discography of over 20 recordings released on Sony, V2, Beggars Banquet, Geffen, Specific Recordings, with a most recent release with feedback artist Philip White as the duo thenumber46. Coming up she can be heard with a newly formed quartet, Volume, with Shelley Burgon, Maria Chavez and Stephan Moore, among other configurations.
Deutsch received his BFA in Video Art and Printmaking from Alfred University in 1990. He obtained his MFA in Integrated Electronic Art from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1994. Since 1998 Deutsch has released over 14 CDRs of solo electronic music on his Magic If Recordings.
Carol Robinson’s Billows:
Billows is a twelve-section piece for basset horn or birbyne and a reactive electronic environment. Drawn from a series of recent pieces for solo instruments with live electronics Billows explores the shifting components of timbre and time.
Franco-American composer and clarinetist Carol Robinson has a multifaceted musical life, equally at ease in the classical and experimental realms.
Robinson often works closely with composers, but she also pursues new and alternative contexts for her work through collaborations with video artists, photographers, and musicians from diverse backgrounds. The freely converging musical world of her group Sleeping in Vilna is typical of what interests her. Improvisation is her passion. 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 with 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. Her works have been recorded by the Hessischer Rundfunk, Saarlandischer Rundfunk, Lithuanian National Radio, and Radio France. 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 Records, Phil Niblock for Touch, as well as classical music and jazz for Syrius, BTL and Nato.
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.
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.
Tony Conrad and Branden W Joseph: a reading, discussion and performance
ISSUE Project Room is pleased to present:
Tony Conrad and Brandon W Joseph in a reading and discussion followed by a performance by Tony Conrad.
Branden W. Joseph is Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He is the author of Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (MIT Press 2003), Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works (ed. Christopher Eamon; Northwestern University Press/Steidl, 2005) and, most recently, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone Books, 2008). His writings have also appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Art Journal, Critical Inquiry, October, Texte zur Kunst, Parkett, and Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, as well as in such catalogues as CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (2002), X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s (2003), andRobert Rauschenberg: Combines (2005). He is also a founding editor of Grey Room, a journal of architecture, art, media, and politics, published quarterly by MIT Press since 2000.
Grey Room with Ulrike Müller and Emma Hedditch, Petit Mal and XXX Macarena
GREY ROOM PRESENTS:
XXX Macarena started to form at 4:30 pm on June 3, 2006 when Karin Schneider invited Jutta Koether and John Miller to take part in her performance Sabotage at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City. Schneider had been included in group show called Grey Flags. She set smoke machines and instructed Koether and Miller to start playing when the entire space filled with smoke. Since then the two have performed at art venues such as NBK in Berlin, Forde Galerie in Geneva and Artists’ Space in New York. MFC-Michèle Didier & Les Presses du Réel have recently published the CD Selling Short, a recording their NBK performance. Last February Mike Kelley and Tony Conrad joined Koether and Miller for a performance at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery. This will be their third performance with Conrad.
John Miller was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1954 and currently lives and works in New York and Berlin. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977 and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1979. He is currently an Associate Professor Barnard College’s Art History Department. While at RISD, he played bass in a band that included J.D. King who went on to form the proto-Sonic Youth band, the Coachmen. At CalArts, he played in Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler’s band, the Poetics. The Kunsthalle Zurich will have a retrospective of Miller’s work that will open August 29.
Petit Mal (Benedict Seymour & Melanie Gilligan)
Petit Mal are Melanie Gilligan and Benedict Seymour, an artist and writer respectively, who first started to publicly release music as part of the Antifamily collective in London. The duo have been described as practicing a kind of electro-pop fusion of Chris and Cosey and Alain Robbe-Grillet, with Gilligan’s icily melancholic vocals and Seymour’s synths and piano staking out an unironic reinvention of post-punk and electro sounds. Their single “Crisis in the Credit System” failed to penetrate the charts, but is, as far as they know, the only song to predict the current collapse of capitalism as we have unfortunately known it. (Dusted Magazine)
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, A Naked Woman Riding a Spiral Graphic of Some Kind, 2009
Emma Hedditch & Ulrike Müller with Nancy Brooks Brody, Zoe Leonard, and Megan Palaima
Emma Hedditch and Ulrike Müller will use the inventory list of the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ expansive T-shirt collection as the material for a collaborative reading performance (names of participants to be announced).
To wear a T-shirt for others to read. To get the message, or ask for it’s meaning. A communication, to communicate with strangers. A signal, sent out, a call, with or without intention. To embrace the confessional. To make and be made by it. To embody and intend ones desires, politics, and alliances. Declarative. Encounters in your face, so many bodies, women, lesbians. A move towards tensions? An attraction and a question. An archive, a collection, a list. Dense absence. To reintroduce the body, our bodies, and feel both difference and affinity. To voice a relationship. How to talk about contentious feminist histories without leveling them into all-one, all-the-same? To talk about a movement, and be a movement. Be moved. What are you trying to tell me, what do I think you are trying to tell me?
Emma Hedditch
Emma Hedditch is an artist living in New York whilst participating in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Recent performances include When I Do This, Can You Feel Something? as part of If I Can’t Dance… Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, March 2009 and We Are The Signs And The Signal atWorking Documents, La Virreina, Barcelona November 2008.
Ulrike Müller
Ulrike Müller is an artist living and working in New York and Vienna, Austria. She has worked with the queer feminist collective LTTR, is the editor of Work the Room. A Handbook on Performance Strategies (OE/b_books, 2006) and currently serves as visiting faculty at VCFA (Vermont College of Fine Arts).
GREY ROOM
Grey Room brings together scholarly and theoretical articles from the fields of architecture, art, media, and politics to forge a cross-disciplinary discourse uniquely relevant to contemporary concerns.
Publishing some of the most interesting and original work within these disciplines, Grey Room has positioned itself at the forefront of the most current asthetic and critical debates. Featuring articles, translations, interviews, dossiers, and academic exchanges, Grey Room’s emphasis on aesthic practice and historical and theoretical discourse appeals to a wide range of readers, including architects, artists, scholars, students, and critics.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/grey
Duane Pitre with special guest Tony Conrad
ISSUE Project Room’s Artist In Residence: Duane Pitre *
Admission: $10
Duane Pitre (originally from New Orleans) is a Brooklyn-based, avant-garde composer and performer. His current works explore both chaos and discipline—and the relationship that exists between the two. Pitre primarily works with long-tones and utilizes alternate tuning schemes that focus on microtonally, enabling him to explore unaccustomed harmonic intervallic relationships.
Composing primarily for acoustic and electro-acoustic instrumentation, Pitre has scored works for large String/Wind Ensembles, String Quintet, his own Bowed Harmonic-Guitar Ensemble, solo performers, among other instrument configurations. In 2008 Pitre started exploring simple electronic sounds and their role in a dualistic relationship with acoustic instruments, as well as utilizing them in his recent “tape” pieces.
Pitre has releases on Important Records, Trome Records, NNA, and Quiet Design, among others. He has appeared on compilations with artists such as Keith Rowe (AMM), Sir Richard Bishop, Tetuzi Akiyama, Jandek, Sebastien Roux, and Thierry Muller/Ilitch. He recently curated and contributed a track to an upcoming Just Intonation compilation (Important Records), alongside Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman, Michael Harrison, Greg Davis, Charles Curtis, and others.
Pitre has presented his works in NYC at such spaces as Roulette, The Stone, Phillips de Pury & Co., St. Marks Church, The Knitting Factory, and ISSUE Project Room (where he will be Artist in Resident for spring 2009). He has also performed in other cities across the U.S., as well as in Europe at Les Voûtes (Paris), St. Giles-in-the-Fields Church (London), and in Bristol, U.K.
In 2009, Pitre is planning more performances (national and abroad), a variety of releases, recording sessions, new works, and further exploration of electronic sound material.
Tony Conrad (b. 1940) teaches on the media study faculty of SUNY at Buffalo. Over the last twenty years he has been especially active in video. His work with music composition and performance started while he was a mathematics student, after which he was associated with the founding of “minimal” music and “underground” film. His movie The Flicker is one of the key early works of the “structural” film movement. His art videotapes are widely seen, and he has produced more than 250 programs for public access cable in Buffalo. Conrad performs his recent music regularly at festivals, clubs and new music venues in the US and Europe.
“Tony Conrad is a pioneer, as seminal in his way to American music as Johnny Cash or Captain Beefheart or Ornette Coleman, one of those really savvy Old Guys whom all the kids want to emulate because their ideas, their style are electric and new and somehow indivisible.” - Steve Dollar
*ISSUE Project Room’s Artist In Residence is made possible through the generous support of the Jerome Foundation
tony conrad + m.v. carbon
January 03, 2008
If Tony Conrad’s powerful sound has its roots in “minimalism”, M.V. Carbon’s music introduces a more contemporary but equally aggressive practice. Meeting as they do with violin and cello above a unifying drone, Conrad and Carbon explode the space we normally think of in connection with string quartets, waltz music, and country fiddlin’. Chaotic parameters are bent and rigorously sculpted using techniques that have been revealed through enduring experimentation. Their tangles of sounds incite a tumbling clash of traditions. The interplay of their approaches reflects the split personality of today’s listeners, who want to discover the thrill of music in a rich sonic imbroglio.
mv carbon
8 pm $10
On January 25, ISSUE Project Room will inaugurate its new space at 110 Livingston with Gaudeamus Muziekweek, a four-day festival celebrating groundbreaking and challenging new music by emerging composers from around the world. Working in partnership ...
ISSUE is starting off the New Year with a change of scenery. That's right, Issue Project Room is moving out of our space at the Old American Can Factory and into 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn. We've had a great run at the Can Factory,...