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sfSoundSeries is a concert series in the san francisco bay area featuring contemporary and experimental music. our programs reach from the latest music of the european avant-garde to the grittiest sounds of the west coast improv-underground, encompassing recent trends in instrumental technique, conceptual art, music theater, and electronic sound. ANNOUNCING our new bi-tuesday series, sfSoundSalonSeries! at the center for new music in san francisco! a new series dedicated to MUSIC music that sounds new, creative, culturally relevant, and experimentally interesting to us -- TODAY! upcoming concerts may 14, 2013 - christopher burns, bill hsu, iannis xenakis, charles boone, monica scott, matt ingalls may 28, 2013 - maggi payne, john ingle, edgard varèse june 11, 2013 - luciano chessa & benjamin kreith june 25, 2013 - grosse abfahrt with torsten müller & alfred harth july 9, 2013 - andrew claussen & michal rataj july 23, 2013 - boris baltschun & serge baghdassarians august 13, 2013 - dan joseph & séverine ballon august 17, 2013 - sfSoundSeries is back!!! august 27, 2013 - tbd :: view previous 2013 concerts here :: |
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Selected Compositions by Maggi Payne, John Ingle, and Edgard Varèse Local composer, flutist, and electronic music instructor Maggi Payne performs selected compositions, including works for flutes (live and pre-recorded), multi-channel tape, and video. In addition, members of sfSound will join Maggi in a performance of Shh, a work for chamber ensemble commissioned by sfSound that features "acoustic spatial diffusion". Straight from Hunter's Point, sfSound's own John Ingle presents a new improvisatory solo for alto saxophone. The concert concludes with a reprisal of their recent "radical transcription" project premiered on Berlin's Faithful! Festival. Quadrande is a deconstruction of Edgard Varèse's Octandre that synthesizes the original material with sfSound's unique sound palette with a nod to early minimalism. sfSound performers include Monica Scott, Benjamin Kreith, Matt Ingalls, and Kyle Bruckmann. Maggi Payne is Co-director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches recording engineering, composition, and electronic music. She also freelances as a recording engineer/editor and historical remastering engineer. In her works she architects/sculpts the acoustic space so that the sounds build a geometric shape, then reorient, contract, or expand to an entirely different shape, shrink to a pinpoint, then stretch again to form yet another “world,” etc. At times multiple spaces coexist. There is always a sense of “place,” an atmosphere, in these acoustic constructs. The sounds are choreographed, as if they are dancers in three-dimensional space, with no walls, ceilings, or floors to constrain them. Her electroacoustic works often incorporate visuals, including dancers outfitted with electroluminescent wire and videos she creates using images ranging from nature to the abstract. She has composed music for dance, theatre, and video, including the music for Jordon Belson's video Bardo. She has collaborated for several years with video artist Ed Tannenbaum in his Technological Feets performances. Her works have been presented in the Americas, Europe, Japan, and Australasia. She has received Composer's Grants and an Interdisciplinary Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and video grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowships Program, and has received four honorary mentions from Bourges and one from Prix Ars Electronica. Her works appear on Innova, Starkland, Lovely Music, Root Strata, Music and Arts, Centaur, Ubuibi, MMC, CRI, Digital Narcis, Frog Peak, Asphodel, and/OAR, Capstone, and Mills College labels. Saxophonist/composer/improviser John Ingle is originally from Memphis, TN and now resides and works in San Francisco. His music is informed and influenced by contemporary concert music, improvised music, electronic music, jazz, various Asian folk music traditions, and the blues and gospel of his native Southeast US. He collaborates with electronics innovator Laetitia Sonami, and in duo with NYC-based composer/dulcimerist Dan Joseph and is a founding member of the sfSoundGroup. John's solo saxophone music emphasizes multiphonics, vocal harmonics and subtle control of extended saxophone techniques, while his chamber music explores such musical parameters as spiral time, linear pulse, and non-linear harmony, and indulges in both simple resonance as well as complex timbre and auditory sleights-of-hand. |
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Luciano Chessa and Benjamin Kreith Garrett - Confusing Salon Music and Noise since 2013 Local new music champions Luciano Chessa and Benjamin Kreith perform Garret - Confusing Salon Music and Noise since 2013 for violin, piano, bullhorn, saw, piano, Aardvark synth app, harmonica and voice. A concert-length program consisting of original pieces, Erik Satie transcriptions, Futurist noise poetry, Robert Schumann, a Fluxus piece, Carlo Prosperi's "Chant", delicate improvisations, Albeniz/Kreisler, and: Piedigrotta (1913): considered to be the pinnacle of Futurist sound poetry: Cangiullo's epic poem about the yearly Neapolitan street party dedicated to the Madonna di Piedigrotta. The explosions of firecrackers, the cries of street venders, the tenori battling at the annual song competition and, more in general, the sound of an entire city presented as a living organism, all reach a sudden jolt when the procession of the Black Madonna takes over the stage. By brilliantly hijacking onomatopoeic techniques typically found in Futurist poetry to mimic the explosions of mortars and shrapnels, and by forcing them to recreate the complexly articulated noise of a wild street party, Cangiullo truly succeeds here in celebrating-and synthesizing-life. Analfabeta (Illiterate, 1989/2013): Capo Caccia is a promontory punctuated by dramatic limestone cliffs. Under it, only a few miles from my hometown Sassari, caves run for miles by the Mediterranean coastline. As I utter the words "Capo Caccia," something specific resonates in the cavity. The exploration begins. With the marine sonar of the mind I locate a place at the heart of the deepest cave, and thus I name it: because it is a primordial, pre-cultural, pre-linguistic place. A retired Aleph-like situation where language is just as unnecessary as it is irrelevant. There, in my childish mind, I picture everything being unchanged since the Creation. Illiterate. I'm in search of the land of the water-filled men./Of arguing colors./Maybe you know/where it is located?/Capo Caccia, waterbeds, interconnected natural channels merges:/water, rocks, pools of warm water. Shells.../In between webs and ravines/there is a maze of pathways and subterranean springs,/labyrinthine caverns of stalactites,/limestone caves, meeting of waters./While freezing, guys, my urine turns blue./Poisonous giraffes, tropical fishes,/squirrels, spiders, scorpions and gnus,/cobalt blue monarch butterflies on their own wings,/river crickets, ocean cormorants,/what do you all know about all his problems?/Am I illiterate?/What "thing" means?/What "home" means?/You are illiterate./A rainy day, playing cards./Who was the first to utter "Z"?/Men filled with waters,/Laughing colors,/All the plane trees are in a good mood,/children and bunnies play bridge,/spheres smile while changing colors./A rainy day, playing Chess,/poisonous giraffes, tropical flowers/waves are breaking, reeds are rustling/a web of pathways and subterranean springs./Capo Caccia, groundwaters, interconnected natural channels merges:/water, rocks, pools of freshwater. Chessa/Kreith: Improvisation (2013) - for Vietnamese Dan Bau, Aardvark Synth App, Violin, Harmonica Erik Satie: Le Piège de Méduse (1913) - Transcribed for Violin and Piano by Chessa/Kreith (2012) Benjamin Kreith: O! Never Mind the Moon (2009) - for solo violin Robert Schumann: Intermezzo from the F-A-E Sonata (1853) Francesco Cangiullo: PP. G to N from Piedigrotta (1913) Luciano Chessa: Preludio e Siciliana (1987/2013) - for solo violin George Maciunas: Solo for Violin (for Sylvano Bussotti) (1962) - Score realized by Luciano Chessa Virgil Thomson: Alice Toklas, portrait No. 3 from Five Ladies (1930) Javier Arias Bal: Filipina para violín a la memoria de Felipa Martín (2009) Isaac Albeniz: Tango, No. 2 from the Suite España op. 165 (1890) - Transcribed by Fritz Kreisler (1927) Luciano Chessa: Analfabeta (1989) - Transcribed by Chessa/Kreith (2013) Luciano Chessa is active as a composer, performer, and “conductor”. His scores are published by RAI TRADE and Carrara and have been performed in Europe, U.S., and Australia. Recent compositions include “Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze!,” a large-scale work written for the quartertone vibe/quartertone electric guitar duo The Living Earth Show, and “A Heavenly Act,” an opera with video by Kalup Linzy commissioned by SFMOMA for the Ensemble Parallèle. Chessa is the author of “Luigi Russolo, Futurist” (University of California Press), the first English monograph dedicated to Russolo's Art of Noises. His Futurist expertise resulted in a commission by NYC's Biennial PERFORMA to direct the first reconstruction of Russolo's intonarumori orchestra and to curate/conduct concerts which received a 'Best of 2009' mention in The New York Times. In March 2011 Chessa conducted a sold-out intonarumori concert for Berliner Festspiele-Maerzmusik Festival; in December, for Art Basel | Miami Beach, he conducted the New World Symphony + Lee Ranaldo in the premiere of Ranaldo's “It All Begins Now!” Chessa teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, serves in the Advisory Board of TACET, the international research publication dedicated to Experimental Music from the Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, is a member of the Steering Committee of the SF Electronic Music Festival, and collaborates with SF's Italian Cultural Institute. Violinist Benjamin Kreith has performed as a chamber musician, soloist and orchestra player throughout the US and Europe. He has premiered solo works at the Strasbourg and Marseille festivals and performed as a guest artist with the Ying and Muir Quartets. Ben helped to found the Ensemble CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, and has also performed with sfSound, Barcelona 216, and the Harvard Group for New Music. Recently he spent several years in Montana as a member of the Cascade Quartet and concertmaster of the Great Falls Symphony. He has had the privilege of working directly with composers including Francisco Guerrero, Gunther Schuller, and Magnus Lindberg. His live recording of Christian Lauba’s Kwintus for violin solo is available on the Accord/Universal CD Morphing. Ben also plays the harmonica and experienced a brief moment of renown when his improvisations with Leonard Bernstein were broadcast on international television. He has taught at the Escola de Música de Barcelona, and served as artist-in-residence at the University of California, Davis. |
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Grosse Abfahrt with Torsten Müller and Alfred Harth Two German expatriates (Alfred Harth and Torsten Müller) living now in allies of America, adding to Grosse Abfahrt — a freely-improvising music continuum/community whose name means “great departure” — another departure of meaning. From out this departure of de-parts comes a salute to epic failure, a disaster in full-dress uniform, gold epaulets dangling off the corpse of Western culture. In solidarity the local American cultural-exile cohort of Grosse Abfahrt joins in: Polly Moller - flute, bass flute Kyle Bruckmann - oboe, English horn Matt Ingalls - clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabass garden hose, violin Tom Djll - trumpets, bandleader John Shiurba - guitar Gino Robair - electronics, percussion Tim Perkis via the internet - electronics Multi-instrumentalist (bass clarinet, alto saxophone, trumpet, and electronics), improviser, composer and visual artist Alfred Harth was born near Frankfurt in 1949. He first recorded at age twenty with the ensemble Just Music, with whom he recorded two LPs, one of which was issued on ECM. Throughout the 1970s he worked with musicians like pianist Nicole Van Den Plas, drummer Sven-Ake Johansson, bassist Peter Kowald, trumpeter Michael Sell and others in West European free music. In the late '70s, he became interested in punk music and in addition to a regularly-working duo with multi-instrumentalist Heiner Goebbels, he worked in punk / progrock / improvisation / modern composition combos like Cassiber and Gestalt et Jive. Since moving to Seoul, South Korea in 2001, he has been involved with Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Orchestra and his own multi-media projects. Torsten Müller (Born in Hamburg, Germany, 1957) is a free improvising bassist in Vancouver, Canada. He plays a 5-string double bass. He lived in Bremen and Hamburg from 1976 to 2001, where he started his musical career and worked as a radio host and producer at Radio Bremen, a public radio and television broadcaster. He came into the free improvised music scene in the mid 70s, first playing with Free Music Communion (an ensemble with guitarist Herbert Janssen and pianist Udo Bergner) recording three LPs on their own Fremuco Records label. He was a member of the large improvising ensemble King Ubu Orchestra for 10 years. He moved to Vancouver, Canada in 2001 where he has been performing at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival and acts as co-curator of the annual Time Flies Improvised Music Festival. He plays in various ensembles, including Vancouver based drummer Dylan Van Der Schyff's Bande X and his own ensemble, Hoxha, with British trombonist Paul Rutherford and Dylan Van Der Schyff. |
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