Author: Polly Moller

Polly Moller is a composer, performer, improviser, performance artist, and curator based in Oakland, California, USA. She practices a lot, writes many grant proposals, drinks a lot of mochas, and serves on the Board of Directors of Outsound Presents.
Composers, Conductors, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Festivals, Improv, Interviews, Music Events, Opera, San Francisco

Let’s ask Gino Robair

The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary this week.  On the final festival night, Saturday, September 19th, the program will include a special all-electronic performance of the opera I, Norton, by San Francisco Bay Area composer Gino Robair.

I, Norton is based on the proclamations of Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, who lived during the Gold Rush era in San Francisco. The concert begins at 8:00 p.m. at the Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online from Brown Paper Tickets.

Gino RobairGino Robair has created music for dance, theater, gamelan orchestra, radio, and television. His works have been performed throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. He was composer in residence with the California Shakespeare Festival for five years and served as music director for the CBS animated series The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. His commercial work includes themes for the MTV and Comedy Central cable networks. Robair is also one of the “25 innovative percussionists” included in the book Percussion Profiles (SoundWorld, 2001). He has recorded with Tom Waits, Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, John Butcher, Derek Bailey, Peter Kowald, Otomo Yoshihide, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Eugene Chadbourne, among many others. He is a founding member of the Splatter Trio and the heavy metal band Pink Mountain. In addition, he runs Rastascan Records, a label devoted to creative music.

S21: His Imperial Majesty Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, is an “only in San Francisco” kind of personage.  What inspired you to make him into the central character of an opera?

GR: He’s the kind of complex character one needs for an opera. And I like the fact that he’s mythologized somewhat.

Although many people see him as this incoherent, homeless vagrant, I think the reality is that he was bright man who was determined to make a difference in a world that was hostile, confusing, and often out of control. We’re talking about the Old West, here!

Remember, he was a Jewish immigrant from South Africa. Try to imagine the culture shock he experienced arriving in mid-19th-century California during the Gold Rush. It makes total sense to me that he’d conclude that the only way to solve the problems in his new environment was to roll up his shirt sleeves and do the job himself.

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by Polly Moller
Composers, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Festivals, Interviews, Performers, San Francisco

Let’s ask Donald Swearingen

SFEMF

The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF) kicks off next week, and several of its original founders will be performing in celebration of the festival’s tenth anniversary.  One of them, Donald Swearingen, will take the stage on Thursday, September 17th along with Maria Chavez, Mark Trayle, and Mason Bates.  The show starts at 8 pm in the Brava Theater, 2781 24th Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online or at the door.

It’s hard to coax Donald Swearingen away from his many projects, but I did manage to get him to share some background and a few hard-to-find details about his upcoming SFEMF performance.

S21: How has the SFEMF evolved since you helped found it in 1999?

Now in its 10th year, the child has definitely come of age. It’s grown into larger (and progressively more comfortable) venues, and from embracing primarily Bay Area artists, to an impressive roster of local, national, and international talents, both obscure and well-known. All this is a result of the dedication and ongoing efforts of the steering and curatorial committees, whose vision and energy have been the essential ingredients in the success of the festival. I should mention that I personally have not been directly involved in these activities in recent years, serving only to offer a comment here or there. But I’m amazed at the amount of effort (and it indeed takes lots of effort) that goes into the planning and execution from year to year. (more…)

by Polly Moller
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Film Music, Opera, Premieres, San Francisco

Let’s ask Jack Curtis Dubowsky

Jack Curtis Dubowsky EnsembleSan Francisco-based composer, conductor, writer, educator, and filmmaker Jack Curtis Dubowsky is a very busy man.  This Wednesday night, September 9th at 7:30 p.m., he’ll take the stage along with the Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble in San Francisco’s Meridian Gallery, located at 535 Powell Street, convenient to Powell Street BART.  Next month, he has a new opera premiering. But fortunately, he wasn’t too busy to talk to me.

S21: How does it feel to be leading off the Meridian Gallery’s 11th season of Composers in Performance?

JCD:  It’s an honor to be selected to be a part of the Meridian Gallery’s prestigious Composers in Performance series. Anne Brodzky, the gallery director, is wonderful.  Tom Bickley is a brilliant series curator; the composer/performers he’s invited have been consistently cutting-edge, engaging, and talented.  I also owe thanks to Adria Otte at Meridian who has been very helpful.

Innova, the label of the American Composers Forum, has released Earth Music, a compilation CD of music selected from the first ten years of the series.  This CD has amazing solo performances on it.  It shows the high level of quality and wide variety of music at the series as well as Meridian’s commitment to new music. (more…)

by Polly Moller
Cello, Chamber Music, Concerts, Electro-Acoustic, Exhibitions, Experimental Music, Music Events, San Francisco

Good herb!

redwall

That’s what early settlers said about the wild mint growing all over the peaceful hills and oceanside that would one day be paved over and known as San Francisco.  In fact, for many years starting in 1835, that’s what the settlement was called, only in Spanish: Yerba Buena.

History lives on in the name of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, located on 3rd Street between Mission and Howard. YBCA’s New Frequencies performance series, curated by Performing Arts Manager Isabel Yrigoyen, is well underway, and offers a couple of intriguing choices in coming days.

First on Saturday evening, August 22, we have local avant-cabaret luminary Amy X Neuburg, backed up by the Cello ChiXtet of Jessica Ivry, Elaine Kreston and Elizabeth Vandervennet.  Their set consists of selections from The Secret Language of Subways, a song cycle for voice, cello trio, electronic percussion and live electronic processing which Neuburg conceived of while riding New York City subways.  It begins promptly at 8:00 p.m. in the YBCA Forum, and serves as an opener for Argentine singer/composer Juana Molina, who’ll take the stage at 9:05.  Tickets are $25 general and $20 for YBCA members, students, seniors, and teachers.

If visual art is your thing, you can have that plus contemporary music on the same evening on Thursday, August 27. Gallery visitors will find that’s one of the nights musicians have been called in to respond directly to the work of the eight visual artists commissioned for the Wallworks exhibition.  The August 27th contingent will be composer, pianist, and electronic musician Chris Brown, Mason Bates (as DJ Masonic), and upright bassist David Arend. Their sounds are free with gallery admission: $7 regular, or $5 for seniors, students, and teachers. (And non-profit employees, KQED members, and folks carrying a valid public transportation pass or a public library card.)

by Polly Moller
Experimental Music, Music Events, San Francisco, Video

New music and intermedia – the life of the party

Oakland Museum of California exterior

Making the pronouncement, “Oakland is to San Francisco as Brooklyn is to Manhattan”, is the quickest way to start an argument on either side of the Bay (or in the Big Apple, probably).  Over-simplified as that statement may be, there are times when I can see why people believe it.  I moved to Oakland for two reasons — one, to join the community of artists there; and two, because for the price of a room in San Francisco, I could have my own one-bedroom apartment in Oakland.

But I digress. We’ve got our own free weekly paper, the East Bay Express, and in honor of their 2009 “Best Of” issue, they’re throwing a party at the Oakland Museum of California on Friday, August 7th.  Centered as it is around the theme of “Subcultures”, they were nice enough to invite a new music and intermedia contingent to represent that segment of the East Bay’s sprawling underground.

The party itself goes from 5:00 p.m. to midnight, but perhaps you are fashionably late everywhere you go? If so, wait until 8:39 pm to show up. This is when the live cinema, experimental music, and intermedia happenings start. Full details of who and what’s involved can be found here, but I would go just to see Citta di Vitti perform new soundtracks to Monica di Vitti films…and David Slusser make his live audio collage…and Damon Smith mistake his contrabass for his BMX bike.

The Oakland Museum of California is located at 1000 Oak Street in Oakland. It’s conveniently located near Lake Merritt BART, but complete travel advice is available here.

by Polly Moller
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Improv, Music Events, San Francisco

Outsound New Music Summit kicks off on Sunday

San Francisco’s Mission District, home of so much that is cool, is a natural neighborhood for the arts.  The San Francisco Community Music Center located at 544 Capp Street is the the Bay Area’s oldest community arts organization and San Francisco’s largest provider of low-cost, high quality music education.  In 2008, 2,300 students of all ages, ethnicities and income levels enrolled in Music Center programs and over 16,000 people enjoyed musical performances at no or low cost.

Starting this Sunday, the SFCMC will host the eighth annual Outsound New Music Summit, a festival which for all its success and longevity has somehow stayed the Bay Area’s best-kept secret.  Sunday night’s “Touch the Gear” expo is free and open to the public, featuring 20 individual artists and ensembles and their homemade, customized, and startling instruments and electronic rigs.  All of them will be set up and ready to show you, the audient, how to make music and noise like they do.

Four concert nights follow on the subsequent Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. Artist Q & A sessions at 7:15 p.m. each evening set you up for performances starting at 8:00 p.m., starring:

  • Alicia Mangan & Spirit,  ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Vinny Golia (solo and with locals in a mixed ensemble) in “Free Improvision/Free Composition”
  • Forms of Things Unknown, Peter Kolovos, Conure, Hans Fjellestad, and Thomas Dimuzio in “Industrial Soundscapes”
  • Jess Rowland & The Dreamland Puppet Theater, Kathleen Quillian & Gilbert Guererro, and Bonfire Madigan in “InterMedia”
  • Natto, Ghost In the House featuring Waterphone inventor Richard Waters, and Left Coast Improv Group in “Deep Listening and Introspection”

Full scheduling details and performer bios can be found in the online schedule. Tickets are available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets, or for $10.00 at the door.

by Polly Moller
Concerts, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Improv, Just Intonation, Music Events, Percussion, San Francisco

Performances next week at the Lab celebrate 25 years of oddity

Tom NunnI’ve been working so hard today I’ve forgotten to eat, and it’s in that spirit of lightheadedness and poor impulse control that I share with you the following San Francisco Bay Area new music scene update.

The Lab’s 25th anniversary performance series is well underway, and in just one night, they’ll run the gamut of styles celebrating their audacious artistic vision.  On Thursday, July 2nd, Mills College’s own Chris Brown will curate and perform in a concert featuring Charles Johnson, Chad and Curtis McKinney, Tom Nunn and William Winant.

When Johnson et. al. take the stage, you’ll hear amplified string and percussion instruments tuned in just intonation, combined with analog electronics configured to create difference tones.  Chad and Curtis McKinney are twin brothers whose SuperCollider-based computer network music makes a tightly interwoven, visceral and strongly rhythmic combo. Chris Brown will put on his electroacoustic hat, teaming up with instrument inventor Tom Nunn to tangle with legendary percussionist William Winant.

If you can’ t make it this week, never fear, since the series will continue next week with Miya Masaoka and Tomas Phillips on Thursday, July 9th, and a multimedia event the next night with Nao Bustamante, Margaret Tedesco, and Cliff Hengst.  Performance artist Bustamante will embody 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez, using video and the body as a source of backdrop, narrative, and emotion, taking audiences on a journey all over the body and its bejeweled parts.

The Lab is conveniently located at 2948 16th Street, San Francisco, near the 16th and Mission BART station.  They’ll let you in for $8.00 at the door. For more information, call (415) 864-8855.

by Polly Moller
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Improv, Music Events, San Francisco

Summer Solstice in the Bay Area means the Garden of Memory

The San Francisco Bay Area  has a unique way of celebrating the first day of summer.  Our most popular new music event, the Garden of Memory, comes around every summer solstice, and reliably attracts more than 1,000 visitors while creating a parking nightmare for miles in every direction.  In 2007 I was forced, like many attendees, to park in the nearby cemetery and accidentally backed over the curb.  I left my car there and hurried away apologizing profusely for actually driving over somebody’s grave.

Every year over 30 composers, improvisers, and sound-artists take over the columbarium at the Chapel of the Chimes, located at 4499 Piedmont Avenue in Oakland. The concert takes place on the summer solstice regardless of the day it falls on, and this year it’s Sunday, June 21st, starting at 5:00 p.m. and continuing until 9:00 p.m. or sundown, whichever comes first.

The first time I attended the Garden of Memory concert was also the first year I participated, though I wasn’t on the list of lucky featured performers.  In 2003 my friend Christi Denton was assigned a space in the columbarium, as all participating artists are, for her multi-speaker sound installation.  Recordings of me playing flute multiphonics, and giving a tarot card reading, were among those she looped for the installation, whose speakers hung above a collection of ferns in one of the columbarium spaces, like the fruit of a robot tree, filling the room with the disembodied voices and music of women.

Few new music events in this or any city are as family-friendly, visually stunning and sonically varied.  If you plan to spend your Sunday evening in the Garden of Memory, public transit is recommended.  Admission is $15.00 general, $10.00 for students and seniors, and $5.00 for kids under 12 (kids under 5 are free). Tickets are available at the door, or in advance from www.brownpapertickets.com.

by Polly Moller
Contemporary Classical

Monday night mind-blowing

John CageIf, like me, you’re a San Franciscan who’d rather have your mind blown than numbed on a Monday night, Other Minds is hoping you’ll turn out for a benefit movie screening this coming Monday, June 15th.

The film, which bears the politicially-incorrect title The Revenge of the Dead Indians: In Memoriam John Cage, is neither a documentary nor a feature, but it’s scored with John Cage’s music, plus found audio landscapes.  Encounters with market vendors and street cleaners mix in with Cage tributes from Frank Zappa, Noam Chomsky, Yoko Ono, Frank Gehry, Ellsworth Kelly,  and Merce Cunningham, directed by Henning Loehner.

The event starts at 6:00 p.m. with a reception (complimentary drinks and hors d’oeuvres included), and moves on to the screening at 7:30 p.m. at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $15.00, $25.00, and $50.00, and all admissions benefit Other Minds.

by Polly Moller
Contemporary Classical

Matthew Sperry: Gone but Never Forgotten

Matthew Sperry and daughter Lila
Matthew Sperry and daughter Lila

On June 5, 2003, SF Bay Area musician Matthew Sperry was killed by an inattentive driver while riding his bicycle to work.  Grieving friends in the Bay Area music community gathered spontaneously at 21 Grand at that time to play together in his memory, and every year since then, there’s been a Festival in honor of Matthew.  It’s grown to include national and international artists drawn from Matthew’s wide circle of inspiration and collaboration — Tom Waits, M.C. Schmidt, Johannes Bergmark, Sean Meehan, Ellen Fullman, and many others have contributed to SperryFest in past years.  I was first invited to join a SperryFest large ensemble in 2005, and I’ll never forget local composer and cellist Theresa Wong using Matthew’s bicycle as an electro-acoustic instrument.

Organized by musicians and Sperry collaborators Gino Robair and John Shiurba, SperryFest convenes the Bay Area creative music community not simply in remembrance and reunion, but to make new work and uncommon musical events drawn from Matthew’s notebooks.  Each year there’s another recording released from Matthew’s unpublished discography, revealing new insights into his art and life.

Concerts begin this evening, June 2, at Studio 1510 in Oakland, CA. Trumpet player Lesli Dalaba returns to the Bay Area for a musical reunion with Fred Frith with Jason Hoopes, and rare duets with trombonist Gail Brand from the UK, with whom Matthew frequently collaborated. On Thursday, June 4th at San Francisco’s Luggage Store Gallery, Outsound Presents hosts a concert featuring works for large ensemble and the reprise of a composition based on Matthew’s quick sketch of a Jurassic karaoke machine called “Treasure Mouth” — which requires a band to follow along to lyrics as fast as they can be written out for them by others.  The final concert on June 5 at The Hillside Club in Berkeley features Gail Brand in a series of duos, trios and quintets with Morgan Guberman, Gino Robair, John Shiurba, Tim Perkis and Tom Djll.

Tickets to the first two concerts are $6 – $100 sliding scale, and Hillside Club admission is $15.00.  If, like me, you never had the privilege of knowing Matthew Sperry, you should still come by and witness the Bay Area new music community at its best.

by Polly Moller