[silence] S.E.M. Ensemble at Tonic: Sunday, July 2

[PK SEM]

For Immediate Release
June 26, 2006
Contact: Donel Young
Phone: 732/295-2406

S.E.M. ENSEMBLE AT TONIC NYC
WORKS BY CAGE, KOTIK, TARDOS, AND MAC LOW
 

When: Sunday, July 2, 2006, 8pm
Where: Tonic NYC; 107 Norfolk Street, New York City
Who:      
S.E.M. Ensemble
Petr Kotik, Director, Flutist
Anne Tardos, Voice
Allison Lyman, Mezzo-soprano
Thomas Buckner, Baritone
Anne Guthrie, French horn
Chris Nappi, Percussion
        
Program:    
Anne Tardos  Compositions #1- #4  (2001)
John Cage  Ryoanji  (1983/85)
Jackson Mac Low  Milarepa Gatha  (1976)
Petr Kotik  There is Singularly Nothing  (1971/1995)



Tickets: $10
Info & Reservations: Call Tonic at 212-358-7501

The S.E.M. Ensemble is dedicated to the performance and advancement of new
music, with a focus on works that can best be described as post-Cagean.
Since its inception in 1970, SEM has collaborated with composers who also
often perform with the group. They have included, among others, Earle Brown,
John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Morton Feldman, Alvin Singleton, Leroy Jenkins,
Pauline Oliveros, Elliott Sharp, Jackson Mac Low, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill
Niblock, David Tudor, and Christian Wolff. Since 1972, The S.E.M. Ensemble
has also performed extensively overseas, touring Europe once or twice every
season. In 1997, SEM performed at the Takemitsu Memorial Concert at Oji Hall
in Tokyo.

Anne Tardos (b. 1944) is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of the
multilingual performance work Among Men, which was produced by the (WDR)
West German Radio, in Cologne. She has lectured and performed her works
widely in the United States and Europe. Examples of her visual texts were
exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993; the Venice Biennale
(Fluxus Pavillion), 1990; Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bolzano, 1991; the New
Museum, New York, 1992; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, New York, 1999.
Examples of her recordings can be heard on the CDs A Chance Operation: The
John Cage Tribute, collaboratively composed and performed with Jackson Mac
Low (New York: Koch International, 1992), and Open Secrets (New York:
Experimental Intermedia XI 110, 1993) and on the cassettes Songs and
Simultaneities, with Mac Low (New York: Tarmac-1, 1981), and Gatherings (New
York: New Wilderness Audiographics 8137A, 1981). She met Mac Low in 1975;
the two lived and worked together from 1978 until his death in 2004.

John Cage (1912-1992) studied liberal arts at Pomona College.  His
composition teachers included Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg.  Cage has
received numerous commissions and awards from musical organizations around
the world and has been elected to the National Institute of Arts & Letters.
It would be impossible to calculate the catalytic effect and ramifications
that Cage's work has had on 20th Century music and art, for it is clear that
the musical developments of our time cannot be understood without taking
into account his music and ideas.  His invention of the prepared piano and
his work with percussion instruments led him to imagine and explore many
unique and fascinating ways of structuring the temporal dimension of music.
He is universally recognized as the generative and leading figure in the
field of indeterminate composition by means of chance operations.

³SEM's history with Ryoanji began in February of 1987, when the S.E.M.
Ensemble performed at the "24 Hours with John Cage" festival in Cologne -- a
large scale, 24-hour broadcast celebration of Cage's 75th birthday with
Cage's participation, including concerts, talks, theater, and other events
including a macrobiotic feast. Ryoanji (1983-85) is a series of instrumental
solos, each performed with a percussion part. As it was written, each solo
consisted of a live performance with three prerecorded layers of similar
material, however S.E.M. Ensemble's realization (created in collaboration
with Cage himself) does not use the recorded material. The material in
Ryoanji is described by the composer as a "garden" of sounds, to be played
gently as much as possible, like sounds in nature rather than sounds in
music.² 

    - Petr Kotik on Ryoanji

Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004) was a poet, composer, painter, and multimedia
performance artist. He studied at Chicago Musical College (1927-32),
Northwestern Univ. Music School (1932-36), Univ. of Chicago (1939-43; A.A.,
1941), Brooklyn College (B.A. cum laude, 1958). He also studied with Shirley
Rhodes Perle (1943-44), Grete Sultan (1953-55), Franz Kamin (1976-79), Erich
Katz (1948-49), John Cage (The New School for Social Research, 1957-60), and
Pandit Pran Nath (1975-76). Mac Low taught at N.Y.U.; Mannes College of
Music; State Univ. of N.Y. at Albany, Binghamton, and Buffalo; Temple Univ.;
Schule für Dichtung in Wien; Naropa Inst.; Bard College; and Brown Univ. He
was also Regents' Lecturer at Univ. of Calif., San Diego in 1990. His
writings and music have been published in 31 books, more than 90
anthologies, and many periodicals.

Mac Low wrote, directed and performed in several verbal-musical Hörspiele
(radio works) for Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne. Both as composer and
writer he adopted nonintentional procedures, including chance operations,
indeterminacy, and related methods in 1954, but he also wrote and composed
extensively by intentional and "quasi-intentional" methods. His many
"simultaneities" (among them his Vocabularies and Gathas) include musical,
verbal, and/or visual elements. They and his other compositions are for live
voices, instruments (usually variable), and/or tape multitracking. Many are
realized by instruction- and score-guided performers' choices. He performed
extensively throughout North America, Europe, and New Zealand, often with
his wife, the painter, composer, poet, and performance artist Anne Tardos.
The S.E.M. Ensemble has performed his works, often in collaboration with Mac
Low himself, since the early 1980s.

Petr Kotik (born 1942, Prague) has lived in the United States since 1969. He
is a composer, conductor, and flutist and the founder and Director of S.E.M.
Ensemble and The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble. Kotik has received
numerous composition grants and commissions including from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the West German Radio in Cologne. In 1998 he was
given the prestigious composition award from the Foundation for Contemporary
Performance Arts. In 2004 Kotik was a resident composer in Berlin under the
sponsorship of Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). His most
recent major composition, the 40 minute Variations for 3 Orchestras
(totaling 86 musicians) was premiered, to critical acclaim, at the Ostrava
Days 2005 festival last August by the Janacek Philharmonic.

There is Singularly Nothing (1971-73, additions made 1995 and 2000) is an
open form composition with no distinct beginning or ending. It consists of
22 solos totaling several hours in length, which with rare exceptions, is
not performed in its entirety.  Any number of solos can be performed in any
combination, thus creating various solos or ensemble configurations. Though
the concept is not new, Kotik's application is unique because of his use of
a steady pulse as the unifying element-no bar lines, downbeats, or upbeats,
only durations for each note measured in the number of pulses. The text is
taken from Gertrude Stein's lecture ³Composition as Explanation² given at
Oxford University in 1926. Kotik created a series of open-ended compositions
in the 1970s (the best-known is the 6-hour long Many Many Women also based
on a text by Stein). They usually require a large-scale performance, lasting
one to several hours in duration.


For more information
About S.E.M. Ensemble: www.semEnsemble.org
About Tonic: www.tonicnyc.com


###

S.E.M. Ensemble is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, the
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable
Trust, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Phaedrus Foundation, and
individual contributions from Yoko Ono, Noni Pratt, Stephanie Bernheim,
Alvin Friedman-Kien, Molly Davies, Christian Wolff, Ulla Dydo, Rosumund
Bernier & John Russell, Rackstraw Downes, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Levinson,
Peter Layton, Susan Sollins-Brown, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Kuhns, and John and
Linda Wadsworth. Special thanks to the Brooklyn Borough President, Marty
Markowitz, for his support.





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://list.mail.virginia.edu/pipermail/silence/attachments/20060627/9831b4b2/attachment.html