THE RICHARD B. FISHER CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS AT BARD COLLEGE
New Albion presents
Pauline Oliveros and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE)
Saturday, September 17, 2016 at 7:30 pm LUMA Theater
About the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, an environment for world-class artistic presentation in the Hudson Valley, was designed by Frank Gehry and opened in 2003. Risk-taking performances and provocative programs take place in the 800-seat Sosnoff Theater, a proscenium-arch space, and in the 220-seat LUMA Theater, which features a flexible seating configuration. The Center is home to Bard College’s Theater & Performance and Dance Programs, and host to two annual summer festivals: SummerScape, which offers opera, dance, theater, operetta, film, and cabaret; and the Bard Music Festival, which celebrated its 25th year in 2014. The Center bears the name of the late Richard B. Fisher, former chair of Bard College’s Board of Trustees. This magnificent building is a tribute to his vision and leadership. The outstanding arts events that take place here would not be possible without the contribution made by the Friends of the Fisher Center. We are grateful for their support and welcome all donations.
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The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College Chair Jeanne Donovan Fisher President Leon Botstein New Albion presents
Pauline Oliveros and the International Contemporary Ensemble Sound Listening
Ensemble Zach Layton, conductor
The Well and the Gentle
Ensemble Zach Layton, conductor
Magnetic Trails
Josh Modney, violin Jacob Greenberg, piano
Intermission Sound Geometries
Ensemble & Bard Conservatory Students
Accordion Solo
Pauline Oliveros
LUMA Theater Saturday, September 17, 2016 at 7:30 pm Running time for this performance is approximately 90 minutes. Please join us for a Q&A with the artists immediately following the performance.
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Program Notes Sound Listening (2013) for amplified table, objects, instruments and live recording playback, was commissioned by Alan Shockley, director of the New Music Ensemble of California State University at Long Beach. The premiere was in Daniel Recital Hall 2013. The audience is invited to meditate with the performers to begin Sound Listening. The Well and the Gentle (1982/1983) was first performed as an accordion solo by Pauline Oliveros for The Deborah Hay Dance Company in Austin, Texas in 1982. In 1983 The Well and The Gentle was commissioned by The Relaché Ensemble of Philadelphia and recorded for HatArt Records on a double LP. Relaché, along with Deborah Hay, performed The Well and The Gentle at the Kennedy Center in 1985. This text score includes a different scale for each section with instructions on how to use the pitches. The score is available in Anthology of Text Scores by Pauline Oliveros. Magnetic Trails (2008) for violin and piano was commissioned by pianist Margrit Schenker-Swiss to play with her friend, violinist Christine Ragaz. The title Magnetic Trails implies the properties of magnets to attract and repel depending on polarity. The score provides these extraordinary players with options for improvisation from their own polarity. Their navigation through the chart of given options is individual and independent of one another. The options are Combine, Separate, Unison, Microtonal, Sparse, and Dense, resulting in attractions and repulsions in the trails that they make through the movements – East, South, West and North. Each movement will have its own atmosphere and mood derived from the player’s own feelings for the meanings of each direction in their own lives and
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their choices of options. Either player may choose different or the same options during the course of the movements. Sound Geometries (2003) for Chamber Orchestra, Expanded Instrument System and 5.1 Surround Sound System by Pauline Oliveros was commissioned by Jean-Paul Dessy for Ensemble Musiques Nouvelle with the premiere performance in Brussels. Sound Geometries consists of three sections: I. Contemplative: Into the Dreaming, II. Traveling by Any Means: Walking, Running, Floating, Swimming, Flying ……. III. Arriving Anywhere, Nowhere, Somewhere…… These section metaphors are intended to guide the players in their feelings and approaches to conducted, guided and improvisational music making to create differing atmospheres for each of the three sections. Players’ sounds are picked up during the performance by microphones, processed in one of ten geometrical patterns (i.e. line, triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, nonagon and circle) by the Oliveros-designed Expanded Instrument System (EIS) to transform and move the player’s sounds in space in the 5.1 surround sound system. EIS was programmed by David Gamper and performed by Stephan Moore and Todor Todoroff in Brussels. Tonight, the US premiere of Sound Geometries will be conducted by Jackson McKinnon ’18 and performed by ICE together with Bard College Conservatory of Music musicians, and with Zach Layton and Paul Hembree performing EIS. Pauline’s Solo (2013 – 2016) for V accordion. “Listening to this space I sound the space. Listening to the energy of all who are present I sound this energy. Listening to my listening and your listening I make this music here and now with the assistance of all that there is. I dedicate this music to a world without war.” -Pauline Oliveros fishercenter.bard.edu 5
The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) Joshua Rubin, clarinet David Byrd-Marrow, horn Mike Lormand, trombone Josh Modney, violin Amanda Gookin, cello Jacob Greenberg, keyboard/piano Paul Hembree, electronics Zach Layton, electronics Nathan Davis, percussion Student participants from the Bard College Conservatory of Music Bridget Bertoldi ’17, flute Amy Cassiere ‘19, oboe Mátyás Dániel Fieszl ‘17 trumpet Gergő Tóth ’15/‘18, violin Matthew Norman ‘18, viola Andrew Behrens ’18, bass Jackson McKinnon ‘15/’18, conductor A Note from Pauline Oliveros My admiration for the musicians of ICE is deep! These musicians are accomplished, respectful, and flexible. They are open for challenges and enjoy meeting them. I am very privileged to have their attention to my music. Their musicianship honors my work and I very much appreciate it. My connection with Claire Chase founder and CEO of ICE began when I was a guest professor at Oberlin Conservatory in 1999. Claire was then a junior undergraduate. She wrote a grant and commissioned me for Elemental Gallop for her Elan Trio. This was possibly the beginning of ICE.
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Since then I have watched Claire develop the remarkable group that has become ICE. I marvel at her leadership as well as her profound musicianship and at the activities of ICE and their gift of support to young composers throughout the world. May ICE continue to grow and prosper! - Pauline Oliveros
Who’s Who For more than five decades, Pauline Oliveros has been an innovative force in the fields of non-jazz improvisation, meditative music, minimalism, and the politics and aesthetics of music generally. In the 1950s she, Terry Riley, and Loren Rush virtually invented the genre of free improvisation. As early as 1961 her choral work Sound Patterns was performed in Europe, won the Gaudeamus Prize, and had a significant subsequent influence on avant-garde European choral music. As director of the San Francisco Tape Music Center when it was taken in by Mills College, she played a central role in the early avant-garde, and her tape works Bye Bye Butterfly and I of IV are classics of process-based electronic music. With Meditation on the Points of the Compass (1970) she became concerned with including the audience as participants in the performance, something she has actively sought ever since, opening up the experience of performing music to legions of amateurs. Her beautiful solo works for accordion and voice, such as Horse Sings from Cloud (1977), partly define the genre of drone minimalism. Oliveros has been an important writer on feminist issues in music. Her article “On the Contribution of Women Composers” draws from a distinction between two types of creativity: “(1) active, purposive creativity, resulting from cognitive thought, deliberate acting upon
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or willful shaping of materials, and (2) receptive creativity, during which the artist is like a channel through which material flows and seems to shape itself.” “Oppression of women,” she continues, “has also meant devaluation of intuition, which is culturally assigned to women’s roles.” Oliveros’s activities are centered at her Deep Listening Center in Kingston, New York, but her activities have been global, sometimes using technology to connect artists and communities across the world from each other. That she won the 2012 John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts points to her status as a pioneer among women composers, and more generally as a towering figure in music of the last fifty years. -Kyle Gann Zach Layton is a guitarist, composer, curator, teacher, and media artist based in Brooklyn, NY. His work explores human and nonhuman sound production techniques, biofeedback, improvisation, indeterminacy, sound spatialization and histories of the visual representation of sound. His work has been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and members of the ICE Ensemble, and has performed and exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, the Kitchen, ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, Sculpture Center, International Computer Music Festival, Carnegie Mellon, PS1/MoMa, Performa, Exit Art, Transmediale Berlin, Audio Art Festival Krakow and many other venues in New York and worldwide. Zach is also founder of the experimental music series, “Darmstadt: Classics of the Avant Garde” (co-curated with Nick Hallett), former co-curator of the PS1/MoMa WarmUp music series and former curator of Issue Project Room. Zach is a recipient of numerous awards including the Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Award, Netherlands America Foundation, Danish Council for Visual Arts, Experimental Television Center, and was selected as a 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grants to artists award.
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The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is an artist collective committed to reshaping the way music is created and experienced. As performer, curator and educator, ICE explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. From youth in schools to audiences in established and alternative venues, ICE engages its listening public in the spark of musical invention. ICE’s thirty-five musicians are empowered through curated concerts that promote their virtuosity, versatility and expressive range. The members of ICE are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Emerging composers have anchored ICE’s programming since its founding in 2001. ICE’s recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music’s present. Founded by flutist and MacArthur Fellow Claire Chase, ICE has received American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award and ASCAP/ Chamber Music America’s Award for Adventurous Programming, and was also named Musical America’s 2013 Ensemble of the Year. The group currently serves as ensemble-in-residence at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ Mostly Mozart Festival, and previously led a fiveyear residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. ICE has been featured at the Ojai Music Festival since 2015, and at festivals abroad such as Acht Brücken Cologne and Musica Nova Helsinki. Other recent performance stages include the Park Avenue Armory, Nagoya Symphony Hall, ice floes during Greenland’s Diskotek Sessions, and boats on the Amazon River. From 2011 to 2014, the ICElab program created dozens of new works that grew from close performer/composer collaborations. OpenICE, with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, today brings the full scope of ICE’s programming and commissioning to broader audiences around the world in free concerts and online. In 2015, the EntICE education project was launched, uniting leading composers with youth ensembles in new works developed and performed side-by-side with ICE. Inaugural EntICE partners include The People’s Music School Youth Orchestra (Chicago) and Youth fishercenter.bard.edu 9
Orchestra L.A. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for ICE. Read more at iceorg.org. New Albion is a former record company (1984-2012) from San Francisco that released nearly 150 recordings (vinyl, cassette, and cd) of New Music. New Music is a term that refers to modern art music, contemporary composition, avant-garde, and experimental languages of sound. The idea behind the name is that New Albion is a poetic place in historical English writings, as well as the locale that Sir Francis Drake named the San Francisco environs when he discovered it for the Elizabethans. After the internet made the business model of New Albion moot the company began to contribute to concert production, currently collaborating with the Laboratory Nacional de Music Electroakustica in Havana to bring players and composers to perform in both the USA and Cuba.
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The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts Advisory Board Jeanne Donovan Fisher, Chair President Leon Botstein Carolyn Marks Blackwood Stefano Ferrari Rebecca Gold Milikowsky Denise S. Simon Thurmond Smithgall Martin T. Sosnoff Toni Sosnoff Felicitas S. Thorne Andrew E. Zobler Live Arts Bard Creative Council Alicia Davis Steven M. Dawson Jeanne Donovan Fisher Dr. Terry S. Gotthelf Richard and Jane Katzman Doris J. Lockhart Stephen Simcock Sarah and David Stack Administration and Programming Debra Pemstein, Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Bob Bursey, Executive Director Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of Theater and Dance Caleb Hammons, Producer, Theater and Dance Zia Affronti Morter ‘12, Associate Producer Jeannie Schneider, Business Manager Kieley Michasiow-Levy, Development Manager Lizabeth Malanga, Executive Assistant Production Vincent Roca, Production Manager Hellena Schiavo, Assistant Production Manager Stephen Dean, Production Coordinator, Concerts and Lectures Rick Reiser, Technical Director Josh Foreman, Lighting Supervisor
Moe Schell, Costume Shop Supervisor Seth Chrisman, Audio/ Video Supervisor Communications Mark Primoff, Associate Vice President of Communications Eleanor Davis, Director of Public Relations Darren O’Sullivan, Senior Public Relations Associate Amy Murray, Multimedia Web Editor Sara Wintz, Assistant Marketing Manager Publications Mary Smith, Director of Publications Cynthia Werthamer, Editorial Director Ann Forbes Cooper, Editor Karen Spencer, Designer Audience Services David Steffen, Audience Services Manager and Communications Coordinator Nicholas Reilingh, Box Office Manager and Database Administrator Emily Gildea ‘11, Assistant Box Office Manager Michael Hofmann ‘15, Box Office Coordinator Lizabeth Malanga, House Manager Jessica Dagg ‘18, Assistant House Manager Sophie Green ‘17, Assistant House Manager Austin Lehn ‘17, Assistant House Manager Facilities Mark Crittenden, Facilities Manager Ray Stegner, Building Operations Manager Doug Pitcher, Building Operations Coordinator Daniel DeFrancis, Building Operations Assistant Robyn Charter, Fire Panel Monitor Bill Cavanaugh, Environmental Specialist Drita Gjokaj, Environmental Specialist Patricia O’Hanlon, Environmental Specialist
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FALL EVENTS
THE ORCHESTRA NOW
COPLAND & BRUCKNER Sosnoff Theater Saturday, September 24 at 8 pm and Sunday, September 25 at 2 pm LIVE ARTS BARD
GOOD DIRT
Storyhorse Documentary Theater Written by Jeremy Davidson Directed by Mary Stuart Masterson Sosnoff Theater Sunday, October 2 at 3 pm
AN EVENING WITH DAVID SEDARIS
Presented in association with Shawn Nightingale Productions Sosnoff Theater Friday, October 7 at 8 pm
TWO AMERICAS: SONGS OF PROTEST AND RECONCILIATION With Jeremy Siskind, Justin Kauflin, and special guests Presented in association with Catskill Jazz Factory Sosnoff Theater Saturday, October 8 at 8 pm LIVE ARTS BARD
BETH GILL: CATACOMB LUMA Theater October 13-15 at 7:30 pm
AN AFTERNOON WITH ALAN CUMMING
Presented in association with Oblong Books & Music Sosnoff Theater Sunday, October 16 at 3 pm
845-758-7900 | fishercenter.bard.edu