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Playing It UNsafe
April 5, 2013
Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall
Orchestra Underground
coLABOratory: Playing it UNsafe
Composers pursuing no-holds-barred explorations that challenge their creative capacities and stretch the limits of what is possible with an orchestra. Come hear new pieces workshopped in this free public reading and open laboratory workshop session. New experimental works by Du Yun, Troy Herion, Raymond J. Lustig, Judith Sainte Croix, and Dan Visconti.
A Groundbreaking ‘R & D’ Lab
for New Music
video preview: CoLABoratory 2012-13
Announcing coLABoratory: Playing It UNsafe, the first and only professional research and development lab to support the creation of cutting-edge new American orchestral music through no-holds-barred experimentation, encouraging composers to do anything but play it safe. The composers participating in coLABoratory this season are selected from a national search for their willingness to experiment and stretch their own musical sensibilities, and their ability to test the limits of the orchestra.
This season, coLABoratory will include a unique incubation process of workshops, public readings, collaborative feedback, and laboratory performances of music, open to the public, taking place from November 2012 through April 2013. Each composer’s work is developed with the orchestra over the course of the season in a process that includes ACO’s Music Director George Manahan, ACO’s artistic leadership Robert Beaser and Derek Bermel, mentor composer Morton Subotnick, plus ACO advisors and members of the orchestra..
Born and raised in Shanghai, China, currently based in New York, Du Yun is an internationally-performed composer and musician. Hailed by The New York Timesas “cutting-edge” to whom the term young composer could hardly do justice”, and “an indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge;” “re-invents herself daily” so does her music,” (Time Out New York), her music exists at an artistic crossroads of chamber music, theater, pop music, opera, orchestral, cabaret, storytelling, visual arts and noise. Du Yun has received commissions include from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Carnegie Hall Weill Institution Commission, the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, the Whitney Museum Live, the Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, violinist Hillary Hahn, cellist Matt Haimovitz, flutist Claire Chase and many more. An alumna of Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Oberlin College (BM), Harvard University (MA, PHD), she has served on the faculty of SUNY-Purchase since 2006.
Slow Portraits will investigate a fixed point in orchestral sound, a gradient palette underneath a hyper-slow movement. Du Yun’s starting point will be a sound design she created for visual artist David Michalek’s “Portraits in Dramatic Time.” She explains, “While the music, mostly as sound design at the time, was broadcast over WiFi to the public, I was hoping I could write for an acoustic chamber orchestra to truly investigate the detailed nuance relationship between the acoustic world and the visual processing image, that both are not digitally altered a bit. For the music, I wonder what I could do to showcase a frozen phrase, elongated gestures elongated, without any digital aid. Like a glacier, things are never quite frozen.”
Du Yun: Portraits (excerpt)
Troy Herion:
New York City Symphony
Troy Herion is a composer and filmmaker whose work unites contemporary music with visual arts through chamber and orchestral music, opera, theater, and film. He explores the concept of “visual music:” the idea that musical qualities are found in visual as well as aural experience. His visual-music film Baroque Suite was called “marvelous” by New Yorker critic Alex Ross and has been screened at the Brooklyn Film Festival, The Wassaic Project, and during ACO’s SONiC festival in October 2011. His music video directing debut – The Bright Motion for pianist Michael Mizrahi on New Amsterdam Records – was released to critical acclaim on the music blogs NPR Classical and The Rest is Noise. Herion’s concert works have been performed by leading ensembles including So Percussion, Nash Ensemble of London, and the Brentano Quartet. As a composer for theater, he has worked with Pig Iron Theatre, The Wilma Theater, The Arden Theatre, Azuka Theater, Swarthmore College, and Columbia University. He was nominated for three Barrymore Awards, including the prestigious F. Otto Haas Emerging Artist Award, and his sound design was featured in the 2011 Prague Quadrennial. Herion holds an MFA from Princeton University, where he is pursuing a joint PhD in Composition and Interdisciplinary Humanities.
Click here to view some of Troy’s latest video work.
Troy Herion: Sextet (Prelude)
New York: A City Symphony by Troy Herion from Troy Herion on Vimeo.
Raymond J. Lustig: Latency Canons
Raymond J. Lustig has won ASCAP’s Rudolf Nissim Prize, the Aaron Copland Award from Copland House, the Juilliard Orchestra competition, the New Juilliard Ensemble competition, and several ASCAP Plus Awards. His music has been presented in venues ranging from New York City clubs and galleries to major concert halls and festivals around the world – from Le Poisson Rouge and the Stone to Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and the Ecole Normale in Paris. His UNSTUCK for orchestra was recently released on Albany Records with Emily Freeman Brown and the Bowling Green Philharmonia. Lustig’s teachers have included John Corigliano, Robert Beaser, and Samuel Adler. Also a published researcher in molecular biology, Lustig is deeply inspired by science, nature, and the mind. He lives in New York and teaches at The Juilliard School.
Latency Canons will make intentional use of the indefinite time interval and incremental canons that can arise from latency – the slight delay that occurs in signal transmissions – through a performance via videoconferencing. Lustig says, “The cycle of lateness will be ever-increasing, as each musician tries to play along with the delayed version of what their remote counterpart has played, in an unstable feedback loop. This will work with parts of the orchestra onstage while other parts are offstage on camera, possibly even in another city or country and possibly with a sister ensemble or players in a faraway place. The piece will require two or more laptops (depending on the number of “voices” in the canons) equipped with Google+ Hangouts videoconferencing application, microphones, amplification, and AV projection to an overhead screen that will allow the players and the audience members to view the voices of the canon.”
Raymond J. Lustig: Medley (excerpt)
coLABoratory: Ray Lustig Part 1 – Establishing Latency
coLABoratory: Ray Lustig Part 2 – Finding Guidance
Judith Sainte Croix was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and received her early musical training from her mother, a piano teacher, her father, a tenor soloist and Marion Hutchinson and Gerald Bales who taught her organ. Her teachers and mentors include the composers John Eaton, Iannis Xenakis, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss and the poet Mary Ellen Solt. Sainte Croix’s transformative music blends social issues and aesthetic expression, primitive sounds and new technologies, ancient structures and modern techniques to create a unique, evocative style. Her awards and commissions include the Gaudeamus Competition; a Creative Associate Fellowship in Buffalo, NY; the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation Award; Chamber Music America; The Orchestra of St. Lukes; The Long Island Composer’s Alliance; The Kitchen; Meet the Composer; The American Composer’s Forum; New York Foundation for the Arts; The Jerome Foundation; The Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust; the National Endowment of the Arts; a Con Edison Composer Residency; and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Sainte Croix’s Vision V will integrate three non-orchestral instruments into the orchestra by the Sonora Trio: the populist electric guitar played by Oren Fader, ancient pre-Columbian flutes played by Andrew Bolotowsky, and the non-ordinary sound palette of the synthesizer played by the composer. Abstract digital imaging suggesting the auras of the musicians photographed during rehearsal, will play along with the music in the concert. Vision V is the fifth in a series of compositions by Sainte Croix, the first for full orchestra, which combines traditional classical instruments with indigenous instruments of the Americas. The digital images used in the piece will be derived from photography by Claudia Miranda with design support from Marcelo Mella.
Judith Sainte Croix: Trio Dance
Sonora Trio: Andrew Bolotowsky, flutes; Oren Feder guitars; Judith Sainte Croix, keyboards
Composer Portrait of Judith Sainte Croix
Composer Portrait 2 of Judith Sainte Croix
Dan Visconti’s music has been commissioned by ensembles including the Kronos Quartet, the Da Capo Chamber Players, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Albany Symphony, and the Berlin Philharmonic Scharoun Ensemble, at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and LA’s Disney Hall. His compositions have been honored with the Berlin Prize, the Bearns Prize from Columbia University, and the Cleveland Arts Prize; awards from BMI and ASCAP, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Society of Composers, and the National Association of Composers USA; and grants from the Naumburg Foundation, the American Music Center, the Barlow Endowment, the Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bascom Little Fund, the Annenberg Foundation, and Chamber Music America. He has also been the recipient of artist fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Copland House, the Lucas Artists Program at Villa Montalvo, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Visconti studied composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Yale School of Music, primarily with Margaret Brouwer, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, and Zhou Long. He is a member of BMI and currently resides in Washington, DC, where he serves as artistic director of DC’s VERGE Ensemble.
Visconti’s Glitchscape will be created in collaboration with experimental filmmaker Simon Tarr, and will blend instruments of the orchestra with sounds from obsolete analog technology. The piece will explore the interaction of live acoustic instruments with sounds created on modified vintage Speak & Spell and Speak & Read toys, and an old “noisebox” from the 1950s. Visconti says, “This new work will create a unique texture through reimaging familiar, nearly-forgotten sounds: an exploration of the expressive power of obsolescence.”
Dan Visconti: Black Bend (excerpt)
Lab workshops are your opportunity to be a part of the experiment. Explore the creative process as composers and their collaborators, the conductor and orchestra, develop cutting-edge new music over the course of the season. Lab workshops are free; reservations recommended.
LAB Workshop II (Dec 13, 2012)
Mannes, The New School (150 W. 85th St., NYC)
LAB Workshop III (Jan 22, 2013)
LAB Workshop IV (Mar 5, 2013)
Flushing Town Hall (137-35 Northern Blvd., Flushing, NY)
LAB Workshop V (Apr 2, 2013)
The DiMenna Center (450 W 37th St., NYC)
ACO’s coLABoratory: Playing It UNsafe is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation and the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, and with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts.