Elliott Sharp and Steve Horowitz perform

Electronic Music Foundation
presents

The Extended Piano

April 1—3, 2011

White Box
329 Broome Street

Admission $15 / $10 EMF Members & Students

This event is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

 

Additional support has been provided by Meet The Composer's Cary New Music Performance Fund, Amphion Foundation, and several individuals.




↓ Program

PROGRAM



Friday, April 1, 8pm

Nolnoc.........................................................................................................................Elliott Sharp
    for disklavier and bass clarinet

Equilibrium...............................................................................................................R. Luke DuBois
    for disklavier and visuals

Arbelos..............................................................................................................Stefano Bassanese
    Performed by Jenny Lin on piano, assisted by Viniero Rizzardi

Balls.........................................................................................................................Miya Masaoka
    for laser Koto, disklavier, and ping pong balls

pf...................................................................................................................................Pamela Z
    for voice, electronics, disklavier, and ultrasound controller

The Talking Cure........................................................................................................Nicolas Collins
    for recitation, electronics and disklavier

TBD.............................................................................................................................Lukas Ligeti



Lukas Ligeti performing with drums and disklavier



Saturday, April 2, 8pm

CD release party of Stations of the Breath by Steve Horowitz


Connecticut Nocturne, Moon over Mudge Pond ...............................................................Steve Horowitz
    for disklavier

The Ceremony of Souls................................................................................................Steve Horowitz
    for disklavier and cello, featuring Dave Eggar

Like Powder to the Light...............................................................................................Steve Horowitz
    for disklavier

The Ghost of Juniper Ledge .........................................................................................Steve Horowitz
    for disklavier

The Stations of the Breath ...........................................................................................Steve Horowitz
    for disklavier

New Piece for Disklavier ...............................................................................................Steve Horowitz
    for disklavier and percussion, featuring Michael Evans



Saturday, April 2, 12 - 4pm / Sunday, April 3, 1 - 6pm

Installed works for disklavier by Claudio Ambrosini, Dan Becker, Anthony Coleman, Diego Dall'Osto, Carl De Pirro, Fred Frith, Annie Gosfield, Seth Horvitz, Dafna Naphtali, Veniero Rizzardi, Frank Rothkamm, Carl Stone, Paulo Troncon, and Hans Tammen


ABOUT THE ARTISTS


Elliott Sharp
Composer, multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp leads the projects Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane. He has been featured at New Music Stockholm, Frankfurt Klangbiennale, The Kitchen, and the Venice Biennale. His collaborators include Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, The SEM Ensemble, and Christian Marclay, and he has released more than 200 albums.


Steve Horowitz
Steve Horowitz is a bandleader and composer, composing for unusual ensembles such as his Code Ensemble, disklavier, dance, film, television, cartoons, and interactive media (video games). He has toured internationally and been commissioned by Meet the Composer, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts NL, Fund for the Interactive Sound Arts Netherlands, Alternate Currents Ensemble and Music at the Anthology to name a few.


R. Luke DuBois
R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Maya Lin, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season.


Veniero Rizzardi
Veniero Rizzardi is a composer, musicologist and media scholar. He has taught at the Universities of Venezia Ca' Foscari (Italy), Freiburg (Switzerland), and is currently at the State Conservatory at Castelfranco (Italy). He has published essays on 20th century music, a book on Miles Davis' album Bitches Brew, edited scores by Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna, the complete writings by Luigi Nono, and produced readers on early electronic music in Italy and Nino Rota. He is currently curating the educational activities of the Biennale Musica in Venice.


Miya Masaoka
Miya Masaoka, composer, sound/installation artist, has created works for solo koto, laser interfaces, explosive powders, model trains, laptop and video, sculpture installations. She often works with spatialization and sonification of data, and maps the behavior of plant, brain activity and insect movement to sound. Her work has been performed at the Venice Biennale 2004, V2 (Rotterdam), IRCAM (Paris), KunstRadio (Vienna ), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Other Minds Festival, and more.


Pamela Z
Pamela Z is a composer, performer and media artist. She has toured internationally, with her work presented at Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), the Venice Biennale, and the Dakar Biennale. She's created installation works and composed scores for dance, film, and new music ensembles. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Creative Capital Fund, the CalArts Alpert Award, The MAP Fund, the ASCAP Award, an Ars Electronica honorable mention, and the NEA/JUSFC Fellowship.


Nicolas Collins
Nicolas Collins is a composer, author and collaborator. He was Visiting Artistic Director of Stichting STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin. He is editor-in-chief of the Leonardo Music Journal, and a Professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The second edition of his book, Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking, was published by Routledge in 2009.


Lukas Ligeti
Lukas Ligeti is a composer and improviser. His commisions include Bang on a Can, the Vienna Festwochen, Ensemble Modern, Kronos Quartet,the American Composers Forum, ORF Austrian Broadcasting Company, Radio France, and more; he has performed and/or recorded with John Zorn, Henry Kaiser, Raoul Björkenheim, Gary Lucas, Marilyn Crispell, Benoit Delbecq, Jim O’Rourke, Daniel Carter, Eugene Chadbourne, and many others.




ABOUT THE MUSIC

The Extended Piano presented a series of concerts and installations highlighting the unique and rarely composed-for disklavier. A robotic, MIDI controlled, grand piano, the disklavier allows composers to create works with techniques and dynamics beyond human capabilities and to be presented without a performer. These characteristics make it an instrument challenging for composers and particularly qualified for installed works.

 

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Elliott Sharp performed Nolnoc for bass clarinet, electronics, and Disklavier. Composed in 1996 and premiered at The Extended Piano, a Disklavier Festival that Sharp created and curated in NYC that year, Nolnoc uses composed scores and a set of open instructions that allow the composer/performer to effect various strategies to control the Disklavier sounds from the sonic output of his bass clarinet. Nolnoc is dedicated to the visionary compsoer and inventor Conlon Nancarrow whose pioneering work with the player piano in his Mexico City studio in the 1940's paved the way for the disklavier.

 

· · ·

 

R. Luke Dubois presented the premiere of Equilibrium a work that leverages the Disklavier to generate a visual language that corresponds to performative action.

 

· · ·

 

Stefano Bassanese's Arbelos was a U.S. premiere, performed by Jenny Lin on piano, assisted by Veniero Rizzardi.

 

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Balls, by Miya Masaoka, for laser koto, disclavier and extra large ping pong balls was originally commissioned by Kathen Supove for piano, disclavier and ping pong balls. The music was based on the bouncing, rolling, and ricocheting of balls, both on a surface and the inside of the piano on the strings. Balls was inspired by the Buddhist concept of infinity, and the practice of Monks dropping pebbles into metal bowls: the pebbles accelerate, becoming faster and quieter, and infinity is imagined and contemplated upon. The pitch material was gleaned from transcriptions of the balls on the strings inside the piano and three gestures were created that are interpolated in different rhythms, layers and counterpoint. This version was an arrangement for laser koto and disclavier.

 

· · ·

 

Nicolas Collins' The Talking Cure, for recitation, electronics and Disklavier was performed by Nicolas Collins on recitation and electronics.

 

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Pamela Z performed pf, a structured improvisational work for voice, electronics, disklavier, and ultrasound controller. The live and processed singing and speaking voice was layered with sampled sounds and the sound of the live grand piano, which was played via physical gestures and vocal sounds translated into MIDI commands. Ms. Z also performed a version of Unknown Person (from Baggage Allowance) with an added diskavier interlude.

 

· · ·

 

Steve Horowitz celebrated the release of Stations of the Breath: Music for Disklavier (2010), a disc highlighting the composer’s activities on the Yamaha Disklavier, both in solo performance/composition and in duet settings. Live performers included Dave Eggar on cello, Elliott Sharp on guitar/bass clarinet, and Michael Evans on percussion. “The moods are straightforward, the ideas are right on the surface, and the execution is well worth experiencing” (Sequenza21).