Calendar

BEYOND CAGE Festival — a major event running in multiple NYC venues, Oct. 22-Nov. 7 — will open on Monday, October 22 at Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall with the 86-piece Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble performing Atlas Eclipticalis and Winter Music. It will be the first time these works are presented together in their complete version. This historical event will also mark the 20th anniversary of the complete version of Atlas Eclipticalis, performed by The Orchestra of the S.E.M. at Carnegie Hall, a performance Cage helped prepare but sadly did not live to hear.

“Static sonorities shifted, intangible events solidified; collective images began to appear amid shapeless sound. I was reminded of orthodox Easter service: across expanses of tedium, an epiphany rises in the back of the mind.” —Alex Ross, New York Times in 1992

Monday, October 22, 8 P.M.

THE ORCHESTRA OF THE S.E.M. ENSEMBLE
Petr Kotik, conductor / Joseph Kubera & Ursula Oppens, pianists

JOHN CAGE: ATLAS ECLIPTICALIS & WINTER MUSIC
Premiere of complete works performed together

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY: SHUFFLE
Orchestral premiere

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall
Tickets: $25 / $15 Students (at Box Office)
www.carnegiehall.org / CarnegieCharge 212-247-7800

BEYOND CAGE Festival (New York City, Oct. 22-Nov. 7) will present Cage’s most significant (and rarely performed) works as well as his legacy in today’s composition. The program, featuring 8 performances and 2 talks, will span three generations, from Cage’s closest associates to young emerging composers in order to display Cage’s broad and lasting influence on the music of our times. Works featured in the festival will include music by Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Luigi Nono, Salvatore Sciarrino, Roscoe Mitchell, Petr Kotik, Lucie Vitkova, Alex Mincek, Kate Soper, and many others.

For a complete schedule of events: http://www.semensemble.org

Seattle Chamber Players Presents

AMERICAN CHAMBER DANCE

SCP presents rarely performed ballets conceived for chamber ensemble and dancers by maverick American composers Charles T. Griffes, Henry Cowell, John Cage, George McKay and Lou Harrison. The performances will showcase rarely heard works that these diverse American composers created especially for dance. The project exhibits the uncommon genre of chamber ballet, with intimate-scale music composed specifically for choreographic staging. The project includes a significant amount of research spent locating, studying and reconstructing the music scores as well as in the development of new choreographic interpretations. Project is supported by a substantial grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Program One: Marriage at the Eiffel Tower

Wednesday, November 2, 2011, at 8pm
Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center
4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., Seattle

http://www.seattlechamberplayers.org/

Paige Barnes, choreographic direction and dance
Mônica Mata Gilliam, dance
Vanessa DeWolf, dramaturg
Bellamy Pailthorp and Matthew Kocmieroski, narrators
Ivan Sokolov, piano
Dave Proscia, lighting design

Henry Cowell/John Cage/George McKay: Marriage at the Eiffel Tower
Staged by Bonnie Bird at Cornish College in Seattle on March 24-25, 1939
For piano and auxiliary instruments

Lou Harrison: Marriage at the Eiffel Tower
Choreographed by Bonnie Bird at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in 1949
For flute, clarinet, trumpet, violin, cello, double bass, piano and percussion

Marriage at the Eiffel Tower by Jean Cocteau serves as the basis for two works on the program. One of them, a collective work by Henry Cowell, John Cage and George McKay, was horeographed and produced by Bonnie Bird at the Cornish School in Seattle in 1939. Only several movements of the score (and only the works by Cowell) have been published and performed in subsequent years. Ten years after the premiere of the Cowell/Cage/McKay piece, Bonnie Bird commissioned another work with the same title from composer Lou Harrison.

Get elevated at the Thalia Cafe for a free show on July 21st with some of New York’s newest frontier chamber music, featuring the septet Elevator Rose, the BACK voice and percussion duo, and the avant-prog outfit Kites of Saturn. Repertoire will include: the world-premieres of pieces written for Elevator Rose by up-and-coming composers Daniel Liot Fine, Laurence Goldman, and Patrick Kelley; a delightfully bizarre rearrangement of John Dowland by articulated-noise wizard Eric Lyon for the BACK Duo; a collection of genre-defying original tunes by the guitar/bass/drums/violin quartet Kites of Saturn; and a teaming-up of Elevator Rose and BACK members for a rollicking rendition of John Cage’s percussion + piano classic “Credo in US”. Don’t miss out on this great opportunity to hear fresh new music for free!

Five Nights of Performances February 19-27th in New York City

Avant Media, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to collaborative performance, announced today the first ever Avant Music Festival. The Festival presents five nights of live performances – February 19th-27th at Wild Project in New York City. The Avant Music Festival features some of the most talented young interpreters in New York, highlighting the influence of the performer on experimental music from the 20th century and today.

The Avant Music Festival is Avant Media’s first festival of music exploring the nature of collaboration. The performer is a critical and powerful influence on both the composition and realization of some of the most influential music of the last 70 years. The performers appearing are dedicated to the vibrant history and the exciting future of modern classical music. The festival is curated by Avant Media artistic director, Randy Gibson, and experimental vocalist Megan Schubert to reflect the intense and multi-faceted relationship between composer and performer and features works by Luciano Berio, Caleb Burhans, John Cage, Brian Ferneyhough, Randy Gibson, Alexander Knaifel, Harold Meltzer, Stuart Saunders Smith, John Steimetz, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

“I prefer to write music not for instruments, but for performers,” said Gibson, the brooklyn-based minimalist composer, student of La Monte Young, and artistic director of Avant Media whose work bookends the show. “For me, the relationship I have with my performers is the most valuable I have. It is this collaboration of ideas and process that leads me to a higher plane of understanding of my work, and allows me to push the performers and audience to that same plane.”

The full list of performances is as follows:

Tickets to individual concerts for $15, $5 for students, and Festival Passes, as well as multi-night subscriptions, are now available exclusively from www.avantmedia.org . All performances will start at 8PM at Wild Project – 195 East 3rd Street.

ABOUT AVANT MEDIA
Avant Media supports the production and performance of collaborative artistic projects. Focusing on live performance, film, and installation, Avant Media promotes a method of parallel collaboration that engages all members of the creative team from concept through realization. For more information please visit http://www.avantmedia.org/ or follow Avant Media on Twitter @avantmedia.