Andrew Cyrille with Bob Stewart and Roy Campbell
(MAJOR-A-MUSIC, ASCAP)

Andrew Cyrille – percussion
Bob Stewart - tuba
Roy Campbell - trumpet

Andrew Cyrille was born in Brooklyn, NY. As well as studying privately, he attended the Juilliard and Hartnett schools of music. He has performed with Jazz artists ranging from Coleman Hawkins, Illinois Jacquet and Mary Lou Williams to Kenny Dorham, Muhal Richard Abrams, Horace Tapscott, John Carter, Mal Waldron and David Murray. In 1964 he formed an association with pianist Cecil Taylor that would last for 11 years. He played drums for many notable dancer-choreographers from the mid to late 1960’s. Cyrille was artist-in-residence and teacher at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio from 1971 to 1973. Cyrille has also taught at the Graham Windham Home for Children in New York. He is currently a faculty member at the New School University (formally The New School for Social Research) in New York City. His sterling work has earned him a number of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and Meet the Composer, including a commission to create a new work for the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company in 1990. In 1999, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition. Starting in 1969, Cyrille began to organize the first of several percussion groups, including Dialogue of the Drums, Pieces of Time, and Weights and Measures. Some of the distinguished artists who played in these groups were Kenny Clark, Milford Graves, Famoudou Don Moye, Michael Carvin and Obo Addy. Starting in 1988 through the present time, he has toured and performed here and abroad with the renowned Russian percussionist, Vladimir Tarasov. In 1975, Cyrille formed a band called Maono (feelings) featuring various instrumental voices determined by his compositions. He is a member of Trio 3 featuring alto saxophonist, Oliver Lake and bassist, Reggie Workman. Also from time to time, he leads another group called Haitian Fascination, playing music inspired by the musical tradition from Haiti. Within the past several years, he has been collaborating and working with musicians such as saxophonist, Archie Shepp, trombonist, Roswell Rudd, trumpeter, Dave Douglas, bassists, Henry Grimes and William Parker, pianists Dave Burrell and Marilyn Crispell, and vibraphonist, Karl Berger. He continues to record and perform with duo, trio, quartet, quintet and big band formations.

Bob Stewart is a freelance concert artist, educator, and studio musician. Stewart has received his Bachelor of Music Education degree from the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts and his Masters in Education at Lehman College Graduate School. He also teaches privately and has been involved with public education for over twenty years. He is now teaching at the Juilliard School and is a “Distinguished Lecturer” at Lehman College. Stewart has toured and recorded with such artists as Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Carla Bley, David Murray, Taj Mahal, Dizzy Gillespie, McCoy Tyner, Arthur Blythe, Freddie Hubbard, Don Cherry, Nicholas Payton, Wynton Marsalis, Charlie Haden and many others both in the United States, Europe and the Far East. “The Tuba, as you know, was phased out of most ensembles around 1923 with the introduction of the “walking” upright bass. Since then it has only been in the last 20 years that composers and arrangers have begun hearing the instrument. As a result, there are more instances in which the Tuba appears in ensemble work.” Stewart is bridging the gap between 1923 and the present by bringing the Tuba back into the modern ensemble as the bass in the rhythm section and as a horn available for melodic lines and soloing.

Roy Campbell’s composing, arranging, and playing embrace a wide range of roots and styles, including jazz, funk, rock, rhythm & blues, hip-hop, rap, classical, reggae, and more. Whether performing, writing, arranging, or producing, Roy Campbell’s abilities burst forth in an electrifying stream of talent and originality. His virtuoso instrumental performances have been praised by fans, critics, and fellow musicians alike. All of the bands he leads have inspired and uplifted audiences to spiritual heights, and each band is unique and highly acclaimed by all. Robert Innapollo, in a review from Cadence Magazine (January, ‘9O), stated, “Campbell is a monster trumpeter. He’s the latest in a long line that has extended from Navarro through Brownie through Booker Little and beyond.” Program notes from the 1998 Fire in the Valley Festival praise his “approach and technique, taking the influences of both Lee Morgan and Booker Little and hauling them into the future.” A few of the leading innovators among contemporary musicians Campbell has worked with include: Rashied Ali, Billy Bang, Evelyn Blakey, Dave Douglas, Carlos Garnett, Henry Grimes, Eddie Harris, Makanda Ken McIntyre, Jemeel Moondoc, David Murray, Sunny Murray, William Parker, Hannibal Marvin Peterson, Sun Ra, Woody Shaw, Cecil Taylor, Charles Tyler, Wilbur Ware, Frank Wright, John Zorn, and a countless host of other bands and ensembles. Roy and his contemporary bands play virtually constantly in concerts, on tour, and in festivals all over the world. In the year 2OO1, JazzTimes designated Roy Campbell’s CD Ethnic Stew and Brew (Delmark 528) number 3 of the top 5O jazz CD’s of the year. Roy was also nominated trumpeter of the year by the Jazz Journalists’ Association in 2OO2, and he will receive an award as a Harlem Unsung Hero of Afrikan~Amerikan Classical Music at the Lenox Lounge in November, 2OO3. Roy Campbell’s life experience reflects his belief that music is the voice of universal truth. His music has continued to grow throughout the ‘9O’s and into the new millennium. His sound combines ancestral voices, modern artistry, and futuristic vision. He is a master trumpeter, musician, and being, and a universal force to be reckoned with.

Marilyn Crispell with Lotte Anker
(Crispell Publishing and Harry Fox, BMI)
(Lotte Anker, Koda)

Marilyn Crispell - piano
Lotte Anker - saxophones

Marilyn Crispell is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music where she studied classical piano and composition, and has been a resident of Woodstock, New York since 1977 when she came to study and teach at the Creative Music Studio. For ten years she was a member of the Anthony Braxton Quartet and the Reggie Workman Ensemble and has been a member of the Barry Guy New Orchestra and guest with his London Jazz Composers Orchestra, as well as a member of the Henry Grimes Trio, Quartet Noir (with Urs Leimgruber, Fritz Hauser and Joelle Leandre), and Anders Jormin’s Bortom Quintet. In 2005 she performed and recorded with the NOW Orchestra in Vancouver, Canada and in 2006 she was co-director of the Vancouver Creative Music Institute and a faculty member at the Banff Centre International Workshop in Jazz. Besides working as a soloist and leader of her own groups, Crispell has performed and recorded extensively with well-known players on the American and international jazz scene. She’s also performed and recorded music by contemporary composers Robert Cogan, Pozzi Escot, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Manfred Niehaus and Anthony Davis (including four performances of his opera, X, with the New York City Opera). In addition to playing, she has taught improvisation workshops and given lecture/demonstrations at universities and art centers in the U.S., Europe, Canada and New Zealand, and has collaborated with videographers, filmmakers, dancers and poets. Crispell has been the recipient of three New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grants (1988-1989, 1994-1995 and 2006-2007), a Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust composition commission (1988-1989), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005-2006). In 1996 she was given an Outstanding Alumni Award by the New England Conservatory, and in 2004, was cited as being one of their 100 most outstanding alumni of the past 100 years.

Lotte Anker (Soprano, alto, tenor saxophones) is known for her intense playing and as one of the strongest improvisers in the freeform/improv field in Denmark. Anker currently works as co-leader of the highly acclaimed 12-piece group, Copenhagen Art Ensemble, and a trio with Craig Taborn and Gerald Cleaver. Other current working groups and ongoing collaborations include: The Quartet Ictus (with Marc Ducret, Peter Friis-Nielsen, Stefan Pasborg. Also Mokuto Quartet (w/ Herb Robertson, Peter Friis-Nielsen, P.O. Jørgensen and projects with Tim Berne, Benoit Delbecq, Arve Henriksen, Sylvie Courvoisier, Paal Nilssen-Love. Anker has also played with a.o. Peter Brötzman, Andrew Cyrille, Marilyn Mazur. Lotte Anker has received several working grants, commissions and awards: a.o. a 3-year working grant from the State Arts Council in ‘96, DJBFA compositional prize 2002, BG-Foundation Artist in Residence (New York) 2005. As a composer, Anker has written for small groups, big band, chamber orchestras and choir. Both as a musician and composer her main interests are in the worlds of modern/free/improv jazz and contemporary music and the combination of the two.

Oliver Lake
The Oliver Lake Reunion Trio
(Talkin’ Stick Music, SESAC)

Oliver Lake - reeds
Pheeroan Ak Laff - drums
Michael Gregory - guitar

Whether performing, painting or composing major commissioned works for the Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra the Brooklyn Philharmonic; for the Arditti and Flux String Quartets, World Sax Quartet, San Francisco Contemporary Players, arranging for pop diva Bjork, rocker Lou Reed and rap group A Tribe Called Quest, collaborating with poets Ntozake Shange or Huang Xiang: choreographers Ron Brown and Marlies Yearby, Native American vocalist Mary Redhouse, Korean kumongo player Jin Hi Kim, Chinese bamboo flute player Shuni Tsou; doing performances with, actress/author Anna Devere Smith and writer/law professor Patricia Williams; sharing the stage with hip-hop artist Mos Def and pop star Me’shell Ndegeocello; or leading his own groups and cooperative ensembles the World Saxophone Quartet and Trio 3; Oliver Lake views it all as parts of the same whole. Lake attributes much of his diverse array of musical styles and disciplines to his experience with the Black Artists Group (BAG), the legendary multi-disciplined and innovative St. Louis collective he co-founded with poets and musicians over 35 years ago. Additionally, as a co-founder of the internationally acclaimed World Saxophone Quartet in 1977, Oliver continues to work with the WSQ, his various groups, and collaborations with many notable choreographers, poets and a veritable Who’s Who of the progressive jazz scene of the late 20th century, performing all over the U.S. as well as in Europe, Japan, Africa and Australia. Always a strong proponent of artist self-empowerment and independence, in 1988 Lake founded Passin’ Thru, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit, dedicated to fostering, promoting and advancing the knowledge, understanding and appreciation of jazz, new music and other disciplines in relation to music.

Joan La Barbara

Shimmer (2007)
ROTHKO (1986, revised 2007)
(All works ASCAP)

Joan La Barbara – voice
Kurt Ralske – video

Shimmer is heat rising from the desert floor, shimmer is light sparkling on water, shimmer is wraiths passing along the back walls, shimmer is the aurora borealis, shimmer is in ghostly conversations. Shimmer (2007) is the latest scene from an opera in-progress, for multiple voices and layered sonic “atmospheres”. Here, I am exploring sounds inside the mind, impossible sounds, fragile sounds, transparent, ghostly sounds, shimmering voices and modular fragments. A series of inhales with no exhale, separated by sonic blackness, silences of varying lengths are shattered by a sudden burst of underwater wails, as the work moves from interior to exterior space and back again.

“ROTHKO” was conceived after my first visit to The Rothko Chapel in Houston. I was so moved and overwhelmed by the majesty, the depth and complexity of Mark Rothko’s exquisite final paintings that I wanted to create a work in homage to those images. In 1985, I composed “A Rothko Study”for voice and chamber ensemble, premiered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1986, I composed “ROTHKO” for multiple layers of vocal multiphonics and reinforced harmonics interwoven with bowed piano, and premiered the 8-channel work with live vocal overlay in the octagonal space of the Rothko Chapel, as part of the New Music America festival. The performance for RouletteTV is the New York premiere of a new mix combining elements of the original recordings with remixes from the version that appears on track 2 of my New World cd, “ShamanSong”. “ROTHKO” is both monochromatic and intricately infinite, as are the paintings which inspired it.

Joan La Barbara, composer, performer, sound artist has created sound scores for film, video and dance in addition to concert music. “One of the great vocal virtuosas of our time” (San Francisco Examiner), her multi-layered compositions often utilize her signature extended vocal techniques, a unique vocabulary of experimental sounds including multiphonics, circular singing, ululation and glottal clicks that bridge the line between text, soundart and song, garnering her awards including American Music Center Letter of Distinction, Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition, DAAD Artist-in-Residency in Berlin, 7 NEA grants, ISCM International Jury Award; Meet The Composer; ASCAP and numerous commissions for concert, theatre and radio. Recordings include “ShamanSong” (New World) and “Voice is the Original Instrument” (Lovely Music), hailed as one of The Wire’s 10 best reissues of the year. “73 Poems”, her collaboration with text-artist Kenneth Goldsmith, was included in The American Century Part II: SoundWorks at The Whitney Museum of American Art. “Messa di Voce”, an interactive media performance work, premiered at ars electronica 2003. Her score for voice with electronics for “Children’s Television Workshop/Sesame Street” has been broadcast worldwide since 1977. She has been soloist in her own and other composers’ works with the orchestras of New York, San Francisco, Den Haag, Houston, and Los Angeles and at international festivals including Brisbane Biennial, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Warsaw Autumn, Frankfurt Feste, Lincoln Center, Metamusik-Berlin and Olympics Arts Festivals. La Barbara’s current composing commissions include a new spoken word opera, “An American Rendition”, a work for solo flute and sonic atmosphere, both for premiere in 2008, in addition to ongoing work on an opera in-progress. www.joanlabarbara.com

Kurt Ralske’s video installations and performances are created exclusively with his own custom software. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art. Kurt programmed and co-designed the 9-channel video installation that is permanently in the lobby of the MoMA in NYC. In 2003, his work received First Prize at the Transmediale International Media Art Festival in Berlin, as a member of the video ensemble 242.pilots. He is also the author/programmer of Auvi, a popular video software environment in use by artists in 22 countries. Kurt is the recipient of a 2007 Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship. Kurt resides in New York City. He is Visiting Professor of Digital Art at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is on the faculty of The School of Visual Arts, NYC, in the MFA Computer Art Department.

Lois V Vierk

Matthew Gold - marimba
Sachiko Kato - piano
Jody Redhage - cello
Guy Klucevsek - accordion

Words Fail Me, first movement (2005) for cello and piano
I wrote the melody for the first movement sometime soon after September 11, 2001. I usually don’t write melodies. My family and I watched horrid events of that day live out our apartment window, as thousands of people were murdered before our eyes when the World Trade Center was shot down. It is an image I will never ever forget of smoke and dust drenching lower Manhattan in a horrible white cloud of debris that used to be a building vibrant with the energy of many living, breathing people.  After spending some weeks in a kind of daze I eventually picked up musical sketches I had been working on before. The materials in those sketches seemed so irrelevant that I threw them away. Then I wrote simple music. There is room for some improvisation. It is slow and sad.

Demon Star (1996) for cello and marimba
The demon star is Algol in the constellation Perseus. Algol (literally “the demon’s head”) was observed for over a century to periodically get bright, then suddenly dim, but no one knew why. It wasn’t until 1782 that the astronomer John Goodricke offered the explanation that Algol is really a pair of stars orbiting around a common center. Approximately every 69 hours the dimmer star passes in front of the brighter star, partially blocking its light, to someone watching on earth. He had made the first identification of an “eclipsing binary” star.  This is the imagery that inspired my piece Demon Star.  This work sometimes brings one or the other of the instruments to the foreground, eclipsing the other, as it were, contrasting their sounds. At other times it blends and intertwines the instruments to form new timbres.

Manhattan Cascade (1985) for 4 accordions
This 20-minute piece is a slowly unfolding work which, like much of my music from the 1980’s, was influenced by the Japanese Gagaku court music that I was studying and performing, and by music of long-tone minimalist composers like Phill Niblock. My pieces from this period are for ensembles of like-instruments--8 cellos, 18 trombones, 8 violins, 8 ryuteki flutes, etc., and this work for 4 accordions. In my pieces for multiples of the same instrument, two or more of the instruments act together, forming a “sound shape”.  The beginning of this work consists of relatively simple sound shapes of accordion trills and tremolos.  More musical materials are introduced. Gradually these sounds develop into complex and dynamic scales, repeated chords and clusters, accents and dynamic patterns. The piece utilizes principles which I call exponential structure, in which rates of change of musical materials are constantly increasing by an exponential factor.  Little by little, Manhattan Cascade is transformed from a gentle flow of sound to its cascading conclusion, crashing like a giant waterfall.  This piece was commissioned by Guy Klucevsek, who plays the live accordion part and all 3 pre-recorded parts in this performance.
(All works Frog Peak,  ASCAP.)

Blue Gene Tyranny

A Letter From Home, the branching harmonies
White Button Moon
(BMI)

Improvisation is maybe too general a word to describe the musical approach used in this concert. Thinking-with-feeling-at-the-piano (contemplating, commenting, investigating sound with and without meaning or allusions, obsessing, and so on) is perhaps more to the point. Specific techniques are being collected in the on-going piece called The Time-Transposing Pianist.

A Letter From Home (1974) is a modular composition with components -- a text concerning the development of consciousness along three timelines, sampling chorus, rhythm with and without memory, harmonic branching, drone -- which can be performed independently or in any combination. The entire ensemble can be heard on the album “Out of the Blue” recently re-released on the Unseen Worlds label, and reviewed by the New Times as a “moving masterpiece” (boy, was I surprised). In this piano (and the piano duo) realization, a spontaneous dialogue develops as the harmonically-derived chord roots re-calibrate (a new way to modulate).

The two songs written for The Talking Band’s production “Flipside” (2007), and sung by the women’s quartet known as the Smithereens (from Smith College), perfectly express the souls of the characters Frank and Daisy. “If Only”, another chromatic tune, is a song of regret, and “White Button Moon” is a song of fascination (“That’s not the moon, that’s Frank”, one of my favorite lines in Ellen Maddow’s comically surreal script).

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, composer and pianist of avant-garde music, has toured extensively in solo and group concerts throughout the U.S., Europe, Canada, Mexico and Brazil. He also played in teenage rock bands and for a gospel church. He has composed over fifty works for electronic, instrumental and vocal ensembles, over thirty film and video soundtracks, and fifty scores for dance and theatre productions.

Phoebe Legere

Phoebe Leger, -Voice Piano, Electronics
Joanna Frankel - violin
Erin Wight - viola
Victoria Bass - cello

World Premiere
STARS
From The Imaginary Opera
Pete escapes the Corporate City and sees the stars for the first time in his life.

World Premiere
SUITE (2007)

1.Improvisation #1
2.Andante
3.Improvisation #2
4. Jazz Allegro
5.Improvisation #3
6. Cantabile Con Moto

World Premiere
DARK HARBOR (2007)
for String Trio and Sneakers
(For Ved Mehta)
From The Prime of CEFAC BEDEAG

SENTIENT PROGRAM (2007)
for Piano and Cello

CREATION HYMN
Abenaki traditional

IF WE FELL IN LOVE
From The Imaginary Opera
This song is sung by an outlaw artist named Pete who lives in a future time when the world is run by a single corporation.
(All works Hemenway Music Publishing, ASCAP)

PHOEBE LEGERE is a TRANSMEDIA ARTIST using many different forms of media: film, music, installation, electronics, paint, circuits, invented instruments, traditional instruments, performance art, poetry, costumes and movement. Her hybrid art form explores the reciprocal relationships between disciplines in an interaction of location, science, music, painting, television and gender. Phoebe Legere is a dynamic performer on piano, accordion, Native American flute, and synthesizer, with a four and half octave vocal range. She has a highly creative approach to mixing jazz, classical, rock and Native American music. Still a teenager when she became the resident composer for the Wooster Group with Spaulding Grey and Willem Defoe, she then went on to study with John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Legere graduated from Vassar College, studied at Juilliard attended NYU Graduate School of Music Composition. She led highly influential downtown rock bands, from Monad, to Ultra Monad, To Blond Fox, To the 4 Nurses of the Apocalypse. During the past decade, Legere has dedicated her creative energy to adventurous, genre bending serious music composition. Legere developed an assistive device for disabled children called the Rap Shoes which she has since incorporated into her live performances. Her Sneakers of Samothrace 4.0, a wearable computer for music and art improvisation, were presented at a lecture/performance at IRCAM’s Resonances Aux Festival in Paris in 2004 and at STEIM electronic music foundation in Amsterdam, Holland in 2006. ADIDAS SALOMON financed a second pair of Legere’s Rap Shoes. Legere has released seven CDs of original music, and has appeared on National Public Radio, CBS Sunday Morning, PBSs City Arts, and Charlie Rose. She records for Einstein Records, a label known for experimental and adventurous music.

Kathleen Supove

THE BODY OF YOUR DREAMS by Jacob TV (Ter Veldhuis)
(2002--revised 2004) (BUMA/STEMRA)
A SHAKING OF THE PUMPKIN (2007) by Michael Gatonska (ASCAP)
DIGITS (2005) by Neil Rolnick (BMI)

Pianist Kathleen Supové is not only one of the most acclaimed interpreters of contemporary music in this country, but also an artist who is continually evolving an answer to the question of what music gets presented and how it gets presented. She has commissioned, premiered and performed countless works by emerging and important composers and, in always being at the forefront of seeking out new voices, she has established herself as an integral part of recent music history. Ms. Supové presents concerts under the name of The Exploding Piano. In recent seasons, she has developed The Exploding Piano into a multimedia experience by using electronics, theatrical elements, vocal rants, performance art, staging, and collaboration with artists from other disciplines. Much of this has been developed during her years in residency at The Flea Theater in Tribeca. The Exploding Piano concerts have taken place these past two seasons in universities, conservatories, and performance spaces throughout the US. This past season, she was a featured artist at the Ussachevsky Memorial Festival in Claremont, CA, as well as the NIME 2007 Festival in NYC. During this upcoming season, she will be a guest artist at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco and the Music On The Edge series at University of Pittsburgh. Supové has also appeared with The Lincoln Center Festival, The Philip Glass Ensemble, Bang On a Can Marathon, Music at the Anthology, Composers’ Collaborative, Inc., and at many other venues, ranging from concert halls such as Carnegie to theatrical spaces such as The Kitchen to clubs such as The Knitting Factory, The Stone, and The Cutting Room. She has already commissioned a large body of works for piano and electronics, as well as works for the Yamaha Disklavier. In 2001, Ms. Supové became a Yamaha Artist. Her most recent CD, INFUSION, appears on the Koch International Classics label. Other recordings can be found on the Tzadik, CRI, New World, Innova, Neuma, Bridge, Centaur, OO, and XI labels.

“THE BODY OF YOUR DREAMS”
“The Body of Your Dreams”, for piano and boombox (soundtrack) was commissioned by Deutschlandfunk and composed December 2002, revised in 2004. It is based on spoken word samples from an American television commercial about the Ab Tronic Pro: a kind of belt that produces 3000 muscle contractions in just ten minutes. Pitch and rhythm of each and every piano tone is determined by one-liners from the commercial. The composition is a kind of work out for the pianist too, who has to be in good shape...(adapted from Jacob ter Veldhuis’s note in the score). Some quotes from the soundtrack: “It’s one of the easiest ways ever to get your body in the shape you want it.....You can use it while watching television, doing the dishes, mowing the lawn....you decide....”etc.

“A SHAKING OF THE PUMPKIN”
Music for this piece was written for Ms. Supové and with the intention of creating a continual refreshment of compositional structures, piano techniques, and sound forms from beginning to end; the composition pushes towards diversity in the levels of music environments and relationships rather than a single or fixed point of view. The overall shape or formal unfolding of the music is loosely based on a series of songs from the Seneca that celebrate and honor both plants and animals during the Fall harvest season. To accompany such events, pumpkins and squash were dried and used as rattles. The optional bass drum being placed over the piano strings is not only symbolic in this way, but it is also asked to perform as an amplified filter that selects/reveals spectral content that will add both girth and nuance to the overall piano sound(s).

“DIGITS”
Obviously, digits are what we use both to play the piano and to operate computers. This piece makes some fairly extreme demands on both types of digits. The piano part, written for Kathleen Supové, exploits her incredible technique to play a bit more than is humanly possible. The computer, which plays only sounds that originate from the piano, integrates with the live playing in a way which is seamless and, hopefully, a bit magical. Digits is a composition for solo piano and digital processing. The pianist must bring virtuoso technique to the performance, and the processing is designed to amplify the piano’s sound in ways that are both subtle and arresting.  All the processed sound comes from the piano. There can also be a video component of the piece. Designed by R. Luke DuBois, using Jitter, the video track processes live images of the pianist’s fingers (her digits) as she performs the piece, and projects them on a screen inside or above the piano lid. The overall effect of the piece is of a classical, virtuoso piano sonata, in which the piano itself has been bent slightly out of shape, amplified, and multiplied, and the images of the player’s fingers are brought directly to the audience and manipulated to complement the music.

Dutch ‘avant pop’ composer JacobTV (aka Jacob Ter Veldhuis, 1951) started as a rock musician and studied composition and electronic music at the Groningen Conservatory, where he was awarded the Dutch Composition Prize in 1980. During the eighties he made a name for himself with melodious compositions, straight from the heart and with great effect. ‘I pepper my music with sugar,’ he says. Jacob TV is preoccupied with American media and world events and draws raw materials from those sources. His work possesses an explosive strength and raw energy combined with extraordinarily intricate architectural design. Long queues at the box office for the four-day Jacob TV Festival in Rotterdam in 2001 already attested to his growing popularity. He has become one of the most performed European composers. His works were recently performed by such orchestras as The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Russian State
Academy Orchestra and the Düsseldorf Symfoniker, and by soloists such as Branford Marsalis, James Galway, Arno Bornkamp, Kathy Supové, Kevin Gallagher and Evelyn Glennie.  His so called boombox works, based on speech melody, like THE BODY OF YOUR DREAMS,became world famous. Various choreographers, like Hans van Manen, have been inspired by his music.  His ‘coming-out’ as a composer of ultra-tonal, mellifluous music reached its climax with his video oratorio Paradiso. May 2007, the Whitney
Museum of American Art organized a 3 day JacobTV  mini festival in New York City. In 2007 the box set trilogy, an anthology of his work with 12 hours of audio and video was released by Basta. www.bastamusic.com <http://www.bastamusic.com>
www.jacobtv.net <http://www.jacobtv.net

Michael Gatonska studied composition with K. Penderecki,  M. Stachowski, and Z. Bujarski at the Academy of Music in Krakow, Poland, and with E. Tanenbaum at the Manhattan School of Music.  His music has been performed by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, the Hartford Symphony, the Pacific Symphony, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and twice he participated in the Minnesota
Orchestra Reading Sessions & Composer Institute.  He has recently written a solo work for the electric-cellist Jeffrey Krieger, and his string orchestra work Transformation of the Hummingbird was recorded by SONYC and released this past June on Albany Records.

Since he moved to New York City in 2002, Neil Rolnick’s music has been receiving increasingly wide recognition and numerous performances both in the US and abroad. A pioneer in the use of computers in performance, beginning in the late 1970s, Rolnick has often included unexpected and unusual combinations of materials and media in his music. He has performed around the world, and his music has appeared on 13 CD’s.

Though much of Rolnick’s work has been in areas which connect music and technology, and is therefore considered in the realm of “experimental” music, his music has always been highly melodic and accessible. Whether working with electronic sounds, improvisation, or multimedia, his music has been characterized by critics as “sophisticated,” “hummable and engaging,” and as having “good senses of showmanship and humor.”

 Works completed in 2007 include Hammer & Hair for violinist Todd Reynolds and pianist Kathleen Supové; Love Songs for the Albany Symphony, with soloists Theo Bleckmann and Todd Reynolds; and The Bridge for the Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire ensemble. In 2006 Rolnick completed the iFiddle Concerto for the American Composers Orchestra, with soloist Todd Reynolds, which was premiered in Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York. In 2006 he also wrote Uptown Jump for the trio MAYA, and Segal’s Billboard for harpist Jacquiline Kerrod, and Innova Recordings released his 13th CD, Digits, which received enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times and in Time Out New York.

Rolnick teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, where he was founding
director of the iEAR Studios.

MARGARET LENG TAN, piano
THE STEEL QIN: NEW OLD CHINESE MUSIC

LITTLE SISTER LOVES A HARDWORKING MAN (trad. Sichuan)
BITTER VEGETABLES, BITTER YINYIN (trad. Sichuan) Arranged by Erik Griswold (APRA)
prepared piano
(New York premiere)

GU YUE (Ancient Music) (1986)   Ge Gan-ru (b.1954) (ASCAP)
Qin (Chinese zither), Pipa (Chinese lute), Drum, prepared/string piano
written for Margaret Leng Tan

 My program, The Steel Qin, presents sui generis Chinese compositions realized on that most archetypal of Western instruments, the piano. I have chosen these particular pieces because they capture that imperative which lies at the heart of Chinese musical aesthetics, the living essence of every tone.

LITTLE SISTER LOVES A HARDWORKING MAN (trad. Sichuan)
BITTER VEGETABLES, BITTER YINYIN (trad. Sichuan)
Arranged by Erik Griswold
These Sichuan folk song arrangements were shaped by Erik Griswold’s experiences in Chengdu during the winter of 2001-02. “Bitter Vegetables, Bitter Yinyin” is reminiscent of the Afro-American spiritual, “Motherless Child”. The character, Yinyin, is abandoned in the asbestos mining town of Shimian in Sichuan Province and the song tells of her loneliness and despair. The prepared piano, invented by John Cage in 1940, uses mutes of various materials wedged between the strings of a grand piano completely transforming its sound characteristics and endowing each note with a unique timbre. In preparing the piano with rubber, bolts and screws, Griswold has literally coaxed a Chinese orchestral ensemble out of the instrument, the high notes suggesting the pipa (lute), the middle and lower registers, the qin (7-stringed zither) and gu zheng (17-stringed zither) respectively.

GU YUE(Ancient Music) by Ge Gan-ru
I wanted Ge Gan-ru to make me a piece that would highlight the piano’s identity in Chinese nomenclature as a steel qin or steel zither. I introduced him to the string piano innovations of Cage, Cowell and Crumb and Ge came up with timbres and techniques of playing on the piano strings in keeping with his own Chinese sensibilities. The individual movements of Gu Yue (Ancient Music) are named after Chinese instruments. Ge Gan-ru has unwittingly created an interesting paradox: in order to produce sonorities inspired by traditional Chinese instruments, he has used the piano in a most untraditional fashion as befits China’s first avant-garde composer.

 I am fascinated by music that breaks new ground, that takes the piano to its ultimate frontiers.
- Margaret Leng Tan

Margaret Leng Tan has established herself as a major force within the American avant-garde: a highly visible, visionary pianist whose work embraces theater, choreography, and music that transcends the piano’s normal boundaries. A featured artist at international festivals, she has appeared at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and records for Mode, New Albion and ECM. Originally from Singapore, Tan was the first woman to earn a doctorate from the Juilliard School. Exploring cultural crosscurrents between Asia and the West led her to John Cage in 1981 and an active collaboration ensued establishing her as his pre-eminent interpreter.  Tan is fascinated by the artistic potential of toy instruments and her groundbreaking album, The Art of the Toy Piano (Philips/Universal), made her the world’s premiere toy piano virtuoso. Evans Chan’s 2004 documentary, Sorceress of the New Piano: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan, has been invited to numerous international film festivals and is now a Mode Records DVD release together with Chan’s The Maverick Piano (2007) featuring filmed performances by Tan (mode 194).

Eclectic Australian-American musician Erik Griswold fuses experimental, jazz and world music traditions to create works of striking originality. Specializing in prepared piano, percussion and toy instruments, he has created a musical universe all his own that is “sincere” (neural.it), “playful” (igloo magazine), “colourful and refreshingly unpretentious” (Paris Transatlantic). Griswold performs as a soloist, in Clocked Out Duo (with percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson), and collaborates with musicians from diverse backgrounds as well as visual artists, writers, dancers and circus performers.

Ongoing interests in Minimalism, Jazz, Op Art, Free Improvisation, Dada, Latin percussion and Chinese traditional music have all influenced his work. Since 2000 he has pursued studies of Sichuan Opera percussion and folk music traditions during artistic residencies at Sichuan Conservatory and Sichuan University. Most recently he has created a number of new works for diverse instruments including percussion ensemble, pipe organ, and miniature music boxes.

Griswold has appeared in major international venues such as Melbourne Jazz Festival, Queensland Music Festival, London Jazz Festival, Sydney Opera House, Big Sur Experimental Music Festival, Tonic (N.Y.), The Empty Bottle (Chicago), Chengdu Arts Centre, Improvisa Festival (Barcelona), Nordic House (Reykjavic) and El Cruce (Madrid). He has recorded three solo albums, two Clocked Out Duo albums, and appears on several compilations (Clocked Out Productions, Room:40, Accretions/Circumvention, Newmarket). In addition, his compositions have been performed and recorded by adventurous musicians such as Margaret Leng Tan, Steven Schick, Anthony Burr, Topology, and Gabriella Smart.

He has received grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Queensland, and the AsiaLink Foundation. He currently teaches at Queensland Conservatorium and Queensland University of Technology and holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego.

Ge Gan-Ru, born in 1954 in Shanghai, has been called China’s first avant-garde composer. He received degrees in both violin and composition at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he also served as Assistant Professor of Composition. In 1982, when China was still largely unfamiliar with 20th-century Western music, he wrote a controversial piece called Yi feng for solo cello which used unorthodox extended techniques to produce timbres simulating Chinese percussive instruments. In 1983, he was awarded a fellowship to attend Columbia University where he studied with Chou Wen-chung and Mario Davidovsky.

Ge has composed music for theatre, dance, and documentary and feature films as well as concert music. The New York Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, BBC Orchestra, Tokyo Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Hong Kong Philharmonic, the Kronos Quartet, and many other ensembles have performed his works. He is a board director of Meet the Composer. Ge’s music reflects his deep interest in amalgamating Eastern and Western musical aesthetics. He writes, “While in Western music, composers are deeply concerned with the relationships between pitches, in Chinese music what is important is the particular pitch and its microtonal and timbral character. I try to combine contemporary Western compositional techniques with my Chinese feeling and experience along with Chinese musical characteristics inherited from thousands of years ago, so as to set up a universal music world expressing natural and primitive beauty.”

David Behrman

LONG THROW
(BMI)

“Long Throw” was one of three works by three composers commissioned by the Cunningham Dance Company as music for the 2007 dance, eyeSpace. Around the time of the commission, in 2006, I was listening to a vinyl double album called “John Cage: Music for keyboard 1935—1948” which I had produced in 1969 for Columbia Records. I was listening to it again because New World Records had expressed interested in re-issuing the recording as part of their Anthology of Recorded American music. Hearing that music again after almost four decades was a fresh re-discovery. I felt close especially to “Music for Marcel Duchamp,” a spare, elegant piece for prepared piano which John Cage composed in 1947. It occurred to me that the “eyeSpace” music that I was working on would be premiered in 2007, the sixtieth anniversary of “Music for Marcel Duchamp.” I reflected on the close relationship among Duchamp, John Cage and Merce Cunningham over the decades; on the long, distinguished trajectory of Merce and his Company; and also remembered that my own first music commission for the Company, “Walkaround Time” in 1968, had involved the art of Duchamp. Long Throw has a piano part which includes John Cage’s preparations for his 1947 piece and evokes something of the quality of that music. It also makes use of 21st Century digital technology — music software and sound sensors — and has performance roles for the core musicians of the Company in 2007: Christian Wolff, Takehisa Kosugi, John King and Stephan Moore. In the style I am working with, partially-notated and partially based on interactive relationships between performers and laptop software, my pieces tend to continue to change and develop after they are first made. This version for Roulette is partially pared-down (two performers only) and partially newly extended, with features developed in the last several months.

David Behrman has been an active composer and artist since the 1960s, creating sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as compositions for performance in concerts. Recordings of his works are published by XI, Lovely Music, Alga Marghen and Classic Masters. Behrman’s sound and multimedia installations have been exhibited in New York, Massachusetts, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Cologne, Berlin, Linz, Paris and other places. Among the installations are Cloud Music (1977, a collaboration with Robert Watts and Bob Diamond); In Thin Air (1997), Pen Light (2002), and View Finder, most recently exhibited at Stanford University in March 2005. Together with Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma, Behrman founded the Sonic Arts Union in 1966, performed extensively in North America and Europe through 1976. He toured as composer/performer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1970 until 1976 and also worked with John Cage during that time on several projects. His association with the Cunningham Company has continued intermittently to the present and he has created music for several of the Company’s repertory pieces. He is currently a member of the Music Committee at MCDC. Behrman has received grants from the NEA, NYSCA and NYFA, and residencies from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the D.A.A.D. in Berlin. From the Foundation for Performance Arts he received an Artist’s Grant in 1995 and the John Cage Award in 2004. In 2005 he was a recipient of the Henry Cowell Award from the American Music Center. He has been a member of the faculty at the Avery Graduate Program in the Arts at Bard College since 1998. His most recent CD release: “My Dear Siegfried” (2-CD set on XI, 2005) with performers Eric Barsness, Thomas Buckner, Jon Gibson, Maria Ludovici, Ralph Samuelson, Peter Zummo, and others.

John King, composer and guitarist, has had his music presented in many major festivals, including the tba/Time-Based Arts Festival (Portland, OR); Fronteras Festival (London); Next Wave Festival (NY); Schleswig Holstein Musik Festival (Hamburg); Intermedium 1 Festival (Berlin); Creative Time’s “Music in the Anchorage” (NY); Warsaw Autumn and Bang On A Can (NY).  Mr. King’s experimental opera, “La Belle Captive”, based on texts by Alain Robbe-Grillet, was premiered in Buenos Aires at the Centro Experimental de Teatro Colon in April 2003, receiving further performances in London and NYC. He has had many working bands over the years, including ELECTRIC WORLD (with Abe Speller and Jean Chaine), VIBROVERB (with Nioka Workman and Michael Wimberly), and KING KORTETTE (Jonathan Kane, Nicki Parrott and Christopher McIntyre), all blues/funk/jazz based. He plays lead guitar with the avant-blues group Deep Blue Sea, led by French avant-noise guitarist Jean-Francois Pauvros and art rock drummer extraordinaire Jonathan Kane; and also performed with: William Parker’s “Little Huey Creative Orchestra”, Butch Morris’ “Conduction #115 E-Mission”; Guy Klucevsek’s “Ain’t Nothin’ But A Polka” band; and Rhys Chatham’s 6-guitar band. His commissions and collaborations include those for the Kronos Quartet; Red {an orchestra}, Ethel; the Albany Symphony/”Dogs of Desire”, Bang On A Can All-Stars; Mannheim Ballet; the Royal Danish Ballet; New York City Ballet/Diamond Project, Stuttgart Ballet, Ballets de Monte Carlo; SüdWestRundfunk (Baden-Baden), Pennsylvania Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.  He has written music for the Clussgarten Theater in Ludwigsburg, Germany (Shakespeare’s  “Tempest”, Goethe’s “Faust” and Hesse’s “Steppenwolf”) as well as Target Margin, in NYC and the Children’s Theater Company, in Mpls., MN. He has received grants from the NEA/Music in Motion, New York State Council on the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, Meet The Composer/Readers Digest Dance Commissioning Program, Minnesota Composers Forum, the Fund for US Artists at International Festivals, and New York Foundation for the Arts. John King curated the music for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s EVENTS at the Joyce Theater and at The Barbican Center in London.  He was Music Curator at The Kitchen from 1999-2003 and is currently a member of the Music Committee at MCDC.