ONCE. MORE. 50th Anniversary Festival Guide

OC E .

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Nurtured by mutual support and driven by youthful idealism, they refused to let financial or logistical barriers dampen their plans....

The ONCE phenomenon testifies to the productive and energizing power of community—the interactions and crossinfluences of the artists who created it, and the reactions of the patrons who attended its productions.

A 50th Anniversary Celebration of Ann Arbor’s ONCE Festival November 2–6, 2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Creativity of Community

ONCE. MORE. Symposium

by Mark Clague

28

Symposium Schedule

ONCE. MORE.

29

Symposium Biographies

How It Came To Be…

by Michael Daugherty

10

Welcome

The Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series

by Daniel Herwitz

32

The John Cage Trust

Indeterminacy

Exhibitions

12

Curator’s Statement

by Amanda Krugliak

Closing Receptions + Celebrations

12

ONCE. MORE.

36

Celebration of the John Cage and

An Exhibition

ONCE. MORE. Exhibitions

14

Why Cage?

36

Outlier: Hauntings of the Avant Garde

By Daniel Herwitz

16

John Cage’s

Lecture on the Weather (1976)

ONCE. MORE. ONCE NOW

Introductions 4

8

38

Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma,

Brown Bag Lecture

Roger Reynolds, + Donald Scavarda

18

The Book as Such in the Russian

Recent music + films from the

Avant-Garde

ONCE Festival composers

by Nancy Perloff

40

Composer Biographies

44

Artist + Ensemble Biographies

Rackham Lobby Installation

18

Specious Present

Performing Arts Technology 25th Anniversary Celebration

ONCE. MORE. ONCE THEN

48

Welcome

by Mary Simoni

20

Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo,

50

25th Anniversary Celebration Schedule

Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds,

52

25th Anniversary Concert

+ Donald Scavarda

Music + films from the historic

ONCE Festivals

Collaborators, Thank Yous, + Credits

55

Funding Partners

55

Collaborators

55

Sources + Further Reading

PHOTO: Makepeace Tsao

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3 ONCE. MORE. SYMPOSIUM / WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3

L–R: Mary Ashley, Annette Tsao, Robert Ashley (1963).

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The Creativity of Community: Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan, and the ONCE Phenomenon, 1961–68

by Mark Clague, PhD associate professor of musicology, University of Michigan

“Once” signals intensity, a singularity of purpose. Never a thing, once is always in action: a fleeting opportunity to be seized in time and witnessed. Once is energy, excitement, ambition, possibility, community. Every art, in its broadest sense, aspires to once. Performance catalyzes intent to transform time into communication: while materials may be reused—performer, audience, and context are always in motion, always changing, and thus artistic expression occurs in precisely the same way only once. Yet art is often frittered away as timeless rather than timely. Static, hung on a wall or embalmed in history, its process unappreciated, it fails to communicate even once. When composers Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, Donald Scavarda, and their colleagues announced ONCE—they trumpeted the raw ambition to create sounds that were original, certainly, but that also engaged, sparked debate, and echoed into the future.

Thus, some five decades later, their creativity is heard “ONCE. MORE.”—not as nostalgia but as ongoing exploration. The periods in the name signal once again their interest in expression over continuity.

The first ONCE Festival of avant-garde performance comprised four concerts on successive weekends—February 24–25 and March 3–4, 1961—in Ann Arbor’s Unitarian Church (now the Vitosha Guest Haus at 1917 Washtenaw). Concerts alternated between guest artists typically from Europe or New York and recitals by the host composers. The opening concert featured members of Pierre Boulez’s “Domaine musical” ensemble from Paris with composer Luciano Berio and multi-vocalist Cathy Berberian. Pianist Paul Jacobs presented music by Schoenberg, Webern, Krenek, Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen on the third concert, while concerts two and four included chamber works by Ashley, Cacioppo, Mumma, Reynolds, and Scavarda, along with then-graduate students Sherman Van Solkema and Bruce Wise. Ashley also contributed an electronic accompaniment to George Manupelli’s film The Bottleman. The concerts sold to capacity and Ann Arbor’s Dramatic Arts Center (DAC), which sponsored the event, covered a deficit of only about $125 on a total budget of $1300 (ca. $9000 in 2010 dollars).

Even before the first festival closed, its success inspired talk of a second. All told, there would be six ONCE festivals over the course of five years (1961–65), while the ONCE Group, a theatrical troupe led by Robert and Mary Ashley, remained active through 1968.

Critics moaned “Once is enough” and “Once too often,”

yet the festivals grew. The fourth was the largest at eight performances, while the last, held on the roof of Ann Arbor’s Thompson Street parking garage (and thus providing for the sale of more tickets), even returned a small profit to the DAC. Programs for a total of 29 festival events list some 170 works by 92 composers. Guest artists included John Cage, Eric Dolphy, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, LaMonte Young, and others. By any measure, ONCE was monumental. Reviews appeared in the local press, as well as in the Musical Quarterly, Boston Globe, Toronto Star, and Preuves (Paris). Dozens of guest appearances took ONCE artists to Detroit, New York, San Diego, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, and beyond, to perform under rubrics including ONCE Friends, ONCE a Month, ONCE Removed, ONCE-Off, and ONCE Echoes. Related initiatives by ONCE artists, especially Ashley and Mumma, such as the Collaborative Studio for Electronic Music, the Truck Ensemble, New Music for Pianos, and the Sonic Arts Group (later Union), carried Ann Arbor’s experimental music, film, and theater far and wide, only increasing the impact and reputation of ONCE. Similar festivals arose in Seattle, Toronto, and Tucson, while in 1963 the Ann Arbor Film Festival arose from its cinematic efforts. ONCE artists even recreated Milton Cohen’s Space Theatre at the 1964 Venice Biennale, and the festival propelled several participants to careers outside of Ann Arbor: Reynolds to the CROSS TALK presentations in Tokyo and then to UC San Diego, Mumma to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York (and later to UC Santa Cruz), and Ashley to Mills College in Oakland.

The primary driving force of ONCE, however, was not fame (and certainly not fortune), but the deep desire of its composers to hear their music. Many ONCE composers were also fine musicians; their passion for new music and dedication to excellence in its performance was clearly infectious, attracting dozens of volunteer instrumentalists and even administrative talents eager to share in their work. Yet the momentum of the festivals also inspired creativity: Scavarda notes, “Suddenly we could write anything we wanted and have it heard.”1 Although deliberately cutting edge, ONCE was not doctrinaire. Performances embraced a wide range of materials (found sound, text, film, multiphonics, non-metrical time), methods (serialism, graphic notation, indeterminacy, improvisation, electronic synthesis, tape manipulation, audience involvement, theater), and aesthetics (modernism, expressionism, collage, happenings). ONCE compos1 Miller, 87 .

PHOTOS: Makepeace Tsao

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From top-left to bottom-right: Alvin Lucier (conductor, Brandeis University Chamber Chorus) (1964); Bonnie Jean Cross (1963); Gordon Mumma (1963); Robert Ashley (1964); Milton Cohen in the Space Theatre loft (1964); unknown performer (1965); Larry Leitch (ONCE pianist) and Max Neuhaus (guest percussionist) (1965); Anne Opie Wehrer (1963); L–R: Alex Hay, Harold Borkin, Steve Paxton at the VFW Hall (Hay and Paxton, members of Judson Dance Theater) (1964).

INTRODUCTIONS

ers shared a common goal, but never a single artistic manifesto. For Mumma the festival was radical; for Scavarda it was simply pragmatic.

Progressive politics saturated the university’s social milieu in the 1960s. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held its first meeting in Ann Arbor in 1960 and on October 14 of that same year President John F. Kennedy proposed the Peace Corps from the steps of the Michigan Union. Yet many ONCE compositions were focused explorations of musical materials and procedures; they assert a right to individual creative radicalism without additional reference to contemporary events. Politics motivates the art of ONCE directly only in certain instances (e.g., Reynolds’ A Portrait of Vanzetti) but often appears obliquely (e.g., Ashley’s in memoriam…). As Ashley remembers, “Everybody was into those ideas by default because they were all around you. But the ONCE Group, by some tacit agreement, we never did anything political; it seemed in bad taste because you’d be preaching to the congregation.”2 Nevertheless, political overtones can be heard frequently in the music of ONCE, possibly because such issues were so much a part of the era’s socio-cultural discourse.

The spark that ignited ONCE is often attributed to a car ride back to Ann Arbor from Stratford, Ontario, where Ashley, Cacioppo, Mumma, and Reynolds had attended the International Conference of Composers (August 7–14, 1960). Intended to foster exchange among the world’s leading modern composers, the symposium welcomed participants from 20 countries.

These musical pioneers included Berio (Italy), Henri Dutilleux (France), Josef Tal (Israel), and Elizabeth Maconchy (England), as well as Ernst Krenek, Otto Luening, George Rochberg, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and the 75-year-old Edgard Varèse—all then living in the US. While symposium concerts were open to the public, papers and discussions were not, and thus Ann Arbor’s contingent left frustrated after having managed to speak with only a handful of their famous colleagues. They concluded that they could do a better job on their own.

Yet attributing ONCE to a single inspiration ignores other influences. The festival grew from a confluence of opportunities, the first of which occurred in 1949 with the hiring of composer Ross Lee Finney (1906– 97) as a tenured professor at U–M’s School of Music (as it was then known) and the subsequent creation of its graduate program in composition. Having studied with Alban Berg, Nadia Boulanger, and Roger Ses-

sions, the Minnesota-born Finney brought a new level of professionalism to the program and connected the university to European musical currents. His personal interests included Bartók, Stravinsky, and American folk music, and while sensitive to his students’ need to develop an individual voice, Finney championed traditional harmonic and contrapuntal skills as well as immaculate habits of notation. His energy and expectations inspired, while his critiques could be devastating: “Finney was incapable of being indirect,” recalls Reynolds, “he said what he felt and thought without any filter, and, of course, this rubbed a lot of people the wrong way or even injured them.”

2 Unless noted, all quotes are from personal interviews by the author with the composer.

3 Miller, 28.

4 Finney, 160.

Yet Finney laid many of the entrepreneurial foundations for ONCE. He organized the campus’ original “Composers’ Forum,” for which student composers recruited and rehearsed performers to present their work to the community each semester. He invited prominent composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Luigi Dallapiccola, Walter Piston, and Karlheinz Stockhausen to speak on campus. (Stockhausen, in fact, lectured the young composers to assume responsibility for performances of their own works.3) Finney also fostered peerto-peer collaboration by hosting a four-hour discussion seminar each week: “I…felt that composers learned as much from their peers as from their teachers….” writes Finney in his autobiography. “My object was to organize a peer group that would function outside of the classroom as well as in it.”4 Finney’s efforts encouraged the formation of the Interarts Union, an extracurricular student group combining art, theater, and mu-

sic that sponsored events off campus. This group later influenced the creation of the Dramatic Arts Center, which would sponsor ONCE. “Finney was a remarkable man,” notes Reynolds. “There’s probably no composition teacher in American music history who has dealt with as large and as diverse a group of successful composers as he.”

The 1950s were a period of rapid growth and intellectual excitement at the University of Michigan, in which enrollment, driven by the G.I. Bill, increased and the faculty expanded. Research funding grew and, as the Cold War deepened, many placed hope in the nation’s scientific and technological prowess.

U-M scientists successfully tested Salk’s polio vaccine (1955) and operated the “Phoenix” nuclear reactor (1957–2003). Cross-disciplinary interchange was vigorous and as a result science, architecture, engineering, and mathematics would deeply influence several ONCE composers. Ashley was initially enrolled through the Speech Research Institute, and, after Finney threw the manuscript to one of Mumma’s compositions out the eighth-floor window of his Burton Memorial Tower office, the young composer transferred to the literature department, later working in a seismology lab and all the while constructing electronic sound equipment for his home studio. Reynolds was not initially trained as a musician at all, but completed a bachelor’s degree in engineering before returning to U-M to earn a master’s in composition in 1961. Collaboration was modeled as well. From 1958, Mumma and Ashley created live sonic accompaniments using prepared tapes plus improvised live sound for U-M art professor Milton Cohen’s Space Theatre. Subtitled “Manifestations in Light and Sound,” these avantgarde light shows also featured creative contributions

by Manupelli and Harold Borkin, then a graduate student in U-M’s architecture program. Increasing from invitation-only affairs to twice-weekly public events, the Space Theatre fostered Ann Arbor’s audience for experimental art.

ONCE composers also learned important lessons in publicity and marketing. Written and premièred at Tanglewood in 1959, Scavarda’s Groups for Piano explores the question of how concise a piece of music might be (its five movements require just 55 seconds to play). Performed the following spring for the Midwest Composers Symposium at the University of Illinois, Groups again sparked heated debate about the nature of music. Its success taught ONCE artists the

PHOTOS: Makepeace Tsao

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with literature and philosophy. His campus lecture, “Is Modern Music Growing Old?” offered an emphatic refutation to Theodor Adorno’s Dissonanzen (1956), while ranging broadly from Aristotle and Charles Burney to the poets Paul Valéry and Wallace Stevens. Ultimately Gerhard’s message affirmed individual exploration.

“The contemporary confusion in the field of music…”

Gerhard said, “is rather what one would expect from a social body deep in ferment and teeming with creative energy. It would seem a poor show if an epoch does not… develop its ‘contemporary’ ideas fully in all directions, to the utmost limits of contradiction. Even by linguistic implication, contradictions evidently belong together…. We move in all directions at once, and in each to the fullness of our bent.”5 (The same May as Gerhard’s lecture, composer John Cage and pianist David Tudor, as well as Berio, visited Ann Arbor, further whetting Ann Arbor’s appetite for the avant garde and inspiring the soon-to-be ONCE composers to seize the means for their own artistic expression.) On campus for only a term and free of institutional entanglements, Gerhard liberated the creative energies of those around him. A crucial event in the planning for ONCE took place when eight of Gerhard’s seminar participants took inventory of their compositions to see if there were sufficient works to merit a public performance.

Accounts of the School of Music’s relationship to ONCE vary widely, maybe not surprisingly given the university’s decentralized authority located in individual faculty. While the ONCE composers had each studied at the university’s School of Music, the festivals were independent events wholly organized, supported, and housed by the local community. ONCE was not a rejection of the establishment as much as an extension of ongoing creative work. Most of its composers were alumni, and thus the festivals created vital performance opportunities now that university programs were no longer open to them. Many younger music faculty, such as theorist Wallace Berry, composer Paul Cooper, and musicologist Wiley Hitchcock, were interested in ONCE, and the campus radio station WUOM (where Cacioppo worked) recorded each concert. Likewise, Finney attended the first festival and contributed by convincing band director William Revelli to loan some of the school’s percussion instruments to the event.

The school’s talented pool of instrumentalists was also essential. Yet, especially as the festivals grew, their notoriety overshadowed official university activities. In response, the School of Music organized its own contemporary music events and for “the 1964 ONCE Festival,”

writes Mumma, “there was a nearly unanimous boycott of the concerts by the School of Music faculty…on the grounds that such activities were everything from immoral to academically and culturally disreputable.”6 Although individual works by ONCE composers have been performed by School of Music faculty and the school’s Contemporary Directions Ensemble offered a memorial concert for George Cacioppo in April 1985, ONCE. MORE. represents the first comprehensive celebration of ONCE and its alumni by the University.

For Reynolds, the ultimate message of ONCE is simple: “If you don’t like the way things are, do something to change the situation.” Indeed ONCE should inspire students today, especially as the Internet makes selfpromotion only more accessible. In the 1960s, ONCE composers depended on the organizational skills of a small coterie of non-musician supporters including Mary Ashley, Harold Borkin, Cynthia Liddell, George Manupelli, plus Anne and Joseph Wehrer, who mailed countless letters, reserved venues, set up chairs, and contributed their own creative energies. Yet while the Internet facilitates, it also encourages competition; in 1961 by contrast, ONCE entered a veritable vacuum as little avant-garde musical activity happened outside of New York and the Cage/Tudor tours, giving ONCE events immediate prominence.

For Mumma, ONCE continues to offer advice to artists today: “Limit your habits,” “define innovative goals and build your discipline to achieve them,” and “work together generously while developing the best of your individuality.” Mumma’s last bit of advice hints at what is potentially the most important legacy of ONCE—its example of the power of an arts community. The festivals ended because DAC funding dried up, not because artistic cooperation failed. ONCE was made possible by a radical alliance of imagination that mustered collaboration in the service of artistic expression—a conspiracy for creativity that runs counter to the Western ideology of the lone artist working in isolation. The increasing tendency of ONCE towards theater reflects this same communal understanding of creativity. Further, ONCE benefited from the social and creative environment of its hometown, and, in turn, increased and perpetuated those values of association, diversity, tolerance, ambition, and innovation that continue to make Ann Arbor a dynamic place. Thus, ONCE affirms a three-dimensional community model of art requiring collaboration among creators, supporters, and an engaged audience. Reynolds sums up the result succinctly: “Common interests have uncommon power.”

5 Gerhard, 206.

6 Mumma, 390.

Udo Casemets, rehearsing at WUOM studio, Ann Arbor (1965).

7 INTRODUCTIONS

value of controversy, and Groups was subsequently featured on the first ONCE composers program. For festival two, controversy struck over the artistic viability of LaMonte Young and Terry Jennings’ performance and again provided ONCE with national attention.

Most famously, the group’s 1964 publicity poster featuring political activist Martina Algire reclining nude on the counter of a local diner favored by music students—Red’s Rite Spot—produced another beneficial fracas, although it offended some in the DAC. In the end, however, such scandals were less tactics than endemic to the ONCE enterprise. As Mumma notes, “Anything or everything we did was controversial for someone.”

The rigor Finney’s teaching inculcated among ONCE composers was ultimately released by his winter 1960 sabbatical replacement—Catalan modernist composer Roberto Gerhard (1896–1970). Steeped in Spanish nationalism but later studying extensively with Arnold Schoenberg, Gerhard taught a seminar at U-M in serial techniques that sparked excitement.

“Gerhard had never taught before he came to Ann Arbor,” Reynolds recalls. “He was very intense and intellectual, but extremely retiring and without pretenses.” Gerhard offered an affirming voice and graciously supported student initiatives. “He never missed a Space Theatre performance,” recalls Ashley. Mumma likewise was inspired: “Gerard was wide open and positive about innovation.”

Although he emphasized method, Gerhard challenged his students to extend tradition in new directions while modeling a broad engagement

ONCE. MORE.

How It Came To Be…

by Michael Daugherty, co-director ONCE. MORE., professor of composition, University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance

In 1991,

when I joined the composition faculty at the University of Michigan School of Music, I remember telling composer György Ligeti the good news that I was moving to Ann Arbor. During the years I studied with him in Hamburg, Germany, he had already mentioned Ann Arbor: “That was where the ONCE Festival happened… very famous!” In 2002, at the Venice Biennale, I met composer Mauricio Kagel who, like Ligeti, was one of Europe’s most eminent 20th-century modernist composers. When I mentioned to him that I lived in Ann Arbor, he had a similar reaction: “Oh, the ONCE Festival!”

It was then and there that I decided it would be a great idea to (once again) celebrate the ONCE Festival, and the pioneering contributions of the five composers who masterminded it: Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, and Donald Scavarda.

But where to begin? I knew the music of Ashley: I heard him perform his opera Perfect Lives at Centre Georges Pompidou when I was a student in Paris in 1980. I was acquainted with Mumma’s and Scavarda’s music from the New World Records compilation Music from the ONCE Festival: 1961–1966. But I did not know any of them personally. George Cacioppo had passed away in 1984.

Fortunately, I had studied composition with Roger Reynolds at Yale in 1982 and stayed in touch with him over the years, hearing his music performed at IRCAM in Paris and seeing him years later in San Diego, where he still teaches at UC San Diego. In 2008, I approached Reynolds with the idea of a ONCE celebration in Ann Arbor. It was his brilliant suggestion to organize two concerts: ONCE THEN, featuring historic works from the original ONCE Festival of the 1960s, and ONCE NOW, featuring recent music by the four living composers.

Reynolds reached out to Ashley, Mumma, and Scavarda for repertoire suggestions; all agreed to participate and return to Ann Arbor for the celebration. It was Scavarda who suggested we wait until 2010, to properly celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the ONCE group (1960–2010).

But to put all this together I needed help!

I first approached Daniel Herwitz, director of the Institute for the Humanities, and he immediately expressed his enthusiasm. In addition to the two concerts, he proposed a symposium and exhibition about the ONCE Festival, hosted by the Institute, which also provided significant financial support to bring the ONCE composers to Ann Arbor. The staff of the Institute, including Fellows Coordinator Doretha Coval, Communications Coordinator Stephanie Harrell, and Curator Amanda Krugliak, have done a wonderful job

coordinating the travel arrangements for the composers as well as media and exhibition logistics.

Next, Michael Kondziolka, director of programming at the University Musical Society (UMS), joined the cause. He lent his expertise and UMS resources to help produce the concerts and tie everything together.

UMS’s amazing staff has done a fantastic job, including Programming Manager Mark Jacobson who assembled and co-edited this ONCE. MORE. Festival Guide, and Sara Billmann and Jim Leija who coordinated media support for the celebration.

Mary Simoni, then director of Performing Arts Technology (PAT) at the University of Michigan, signed on to serve as co-director of ONCE. MORE. Mary offered important technology support and assistance from PAT for the ONCE concerts. In addition, it was decided to organize a 25th Anniversary PAT Concert to round off the weeklong festivities. Roger Arnett, performing arts sound and recording engineer, agreed to do the hard work of putting the technology together for all three concerts: no easy task!

U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance faculty Christopher James Lees, lecturer of conducting; Andrew Bishop, assistant professor of jazz and contemporary improvisation; and Amy Porter, professor of flute; kindly agreed to help assemble the musicians to perform in the ONCE THEN and ONCE NOW concerts. Music librarian Kristen Castellana offered her impeccable assistance to procure the scores and parts for the concerts.

University of Michigan musicologist Mark Clague graciously agreed to write the ONCE. MORE. festival guide opening essay.

Special thanks to faculty and student performers at the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance for the many hours of hard work and rehearsals it has taken to prepare the extremely demanding and rewarding music for these concerts. The George Cacioppo Memorial Fund of at the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance helped to defray some of the concert expenses.

Finally, my deep gratitude goes to composer Paul Dooley, DMA candidate in composition at the University of Michigan. Paul worked tirelessly at all hours of the day and night to help me answer and sort through hundreds of ONCE-related emails during the past year.

At last after years of planning, November 2010 is here and it is now time for us to experience in Ann Arbor the magic of the music of Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, and Donald Scavarda ONCE. MORE.

PHOTO: Donald Scavarda

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Gathering of students of Roberto Gerhard, Ann Arbor, 1960. (bottom, L–R): Leslie Bassett, Ralph Bassett (son); (second row, sitting): Roger Reynolds, Roberto Gerhard; (third row, squatting): Robert Ashley, Sherman Van Solkema, David Bates, (sitting) Leopoldina Gerhard, Anita Denniston Bassett; (standing at back): George Cacioppo, Ed Coleman, Tom Schudel.

9 ONCE. MORE. SYMPOSIUM / WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3

WELCOME

by Daniel Herwitz, director, University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities

It is a privilege to reconvene a festival that became ONCE, once upon a time in the 1960s, when the avantgarde could stake terrain between music, poetry, and the flow of sound in gestures so fresh and experimental that the composers were invited to occupy a kind of Salon des RefusĂŠs down the street from the official University of Michigan campus, where they had all studied. Their relentless, irrepressible energy is hard to recapture in these, our more market-driven, neo-liberal times, and experimentation has perhaps shifted into more technological domains, given that they performed what they performed before computers were widely available, the Internet was invented, and digital realities became that. The recovery of the power in their sounds is a pleasure and also a task, perhaps a moral task if one is humanist about it, subscribing to the belief that nothing human is ever finally too foreign to regain, in some creative way or other.

Now, a half century after these inventions were produced, is the time for an Institute for the Humanities to regain them, but certainly not alone, certainly not without the partnerships built with the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance and the University Musical Society, with composers like Michael Daugherty and impresarios like Kenneth Fischer. The Institute for the Humanities strives to build these kinds of sustaining partnerships because without them ONCE could not turn into ONCE. MORE. And when ONCE does turn into ONCE. MORE., as it will in the first week of November 2010, the question will not simply be how to think about what was, and how to hear it again and perhaps even better, certainly differently. The question will also be: What kind of new meaning is to be found in this enlivening music 50 years later? How does time loop back onto this music in a way that proves its purpose? These events will occasion responses to these questions. I for one cannot wait to see what happens to happen.

The Institute for the Humanities is delighted to add a John Cage installation into the mix, in its gallery, since Cage, although somewhat peripheral to the original ONCE festival, is everywhere entwined with the history of experimental music that happened before, during, and after it. We are even more delighted that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has generously supported the ONCE. MORE. festival.

This catalogue is a mere guide and primer for the occasion. It is the occasion that matters. Go for it.

PHOTO: Makepeace Tsao

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11 ONCE. MORE. SYMPOSIUM / WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3

Milton Cohen and Space Theatre, Ann Arbor.

ONCE. MORE. An Exhibition Monday, September 20– Thursday, November 4, 2010 U-M Institute for the Humanities Osterman Common Room 202 South Thayer Street Ann Arbor

John Cage’s Lecture on the Weather (1976) Monday, September 20– Thursday, November 4, 2010 U-M Institute for the Humanities Gallery 202 South Thayer Street, Room 1010 Ann Arbor

Free and open to the public.

8:00 am–5:00 pm, Mondays–Fridays

In the Institute for the Humanities Gallery, John Cage’s multi-media stage work Lecture on the Weather, based on the texts of Henry David Thoreau, brings together speech, music, film, lighting, and a weather soundscape to form a softly political piece as relevant today as the year it was written.

In the Institute’s Osterman Common Room, original programs, manuscripts, and photographs document the influential avant-garde ONCE Festival held annually in the early- to mid-1960s in Ann Arbor and attended by Cage. A now-and-then exposition, it reprises the phenomenon of the event, the brazen energy of the new-music scene from the era, and honors the talents of the ONCE founding composers Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, and Donald Scavarda.

Cage and the ONCE composers ran parallel, overlapped, and intersected professionally and personally in their inquiries and collaborative efforts. Deeply passionate about musical experimentation and the concept of indeterminacy, the constant for Cage and the ONCE composers was ultimately their persistence and their commitment to their work.

Cage spoke of time as horizontal rather than vertical: “The past is not a fact but simply a big field that has a great deal of activity in it.” These exhibitions in duet continue the conversation in time both real and imagined, without the notations of a clear beginning or end, recognizing that it is the ongoing question rather than certainty that leads to discovery.

—Amanda Krugliak, arts curator, University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities

IMAGE: courtesy of the John Cage Trust

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Cover page of John Cage’s Lecture on the Weather, ©Henmar Press, Inc.

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Why Cage?

by Daniel Herwitz, director, University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities

John Cage attended

the ONCE Festival as a cheerful avant-garde friend. But more than that he was among the once primogenitors. Cage’s experiments in the 1950s included the introduction of chance operations into musical composition and performance, the blurring of the distinction between music and sound per se (whatever sounds happen to happen at a particular time), and the turning of performance into theater or spectacle. All of these were of importance to the ONCE Festival. Wishing to put a full stop to two centuries of common practice and modernist musical traditions, Cage replaced control over sound (the essence of the musical score), expressivity (the communication of the soul), and the cult of genius with a structured roll of the dice that would get the listener off these fixations (as he believed them to be) and restore the listener to a celebration of the flow of contingency.

The cult of (musical) genius seemed to Cage a delusion of unbridled superiority over sound, wherein the composer forges music as if a Wagnerian sword symbolically unleashed upon life. This big connection between culture and politics linked the cult of musical control to larger systems of Euro-American expansion central to colonialism, nationalism, and modernity. Its practitioner in music was above all Richard Wagner, although Cage had it in for Beethoven. Cage’s musical experiments were meant to inaugurate a new practice of listening that would counter the forging of the musical sword on the anvil of composition by suspending the composer’s own tastes and voice in a structured environment of chance and contingency. By creating musical works which integrated compositional choice with whatever happens to happen in the world at the moment of their performance, Cage felt he was replacing directed listening (listening through a composition to its directed endpoint in a way that focuses on expression and related intensities) with a meditative rhythm of contingency. The key was to structure the work so that contingency rolled out in forms of repetition preventing mere chaos from being unleashed. Scale proved critical: gradually the listener slows down, drops the impatience with waiting for modulation, development section, recapitulation, and fugue, and begins to get inside the peculiar rhythm of what is happening. Meaning is not imposed on sound but instead an emptying of meaning takes place within the flow of sound. This leaves one with one’s feet a little off the ground, in a strange inexplicable place, Cage the Zen student would say. It is a place neither of transcendence nor of immanence but of immersion and suspension of hierarchical values, so he believed.

Cage’s aims were being put into practice in the 1950s and 1960s when America ached for such relief.

Having endured decades of Great Depression, Great War, and the repetition of war since, living daily life on a chess board of potential cold war annihilation, his was a moment when America was in need of relief from the manic state of its febrile temperature. The most radical of his works, 4.33 directs the pianist towards four minutes and 33 seconds of non-playing. This so-called silent work is about placing the entire institution of music in relief: score, instrument, performer, concert hall, audience. It was first performed in Woodstock in 1952, a location about as far from New York and as rural as Jackson Pollock’s Montauk of the same time period, where the painter went to escape the pressures of the city and his own alcoholic deterioration and where in the solitude of his barn he achieved his artistic breakthrough. Pollock ended up drunk and dead in an auto accident; Cage was more cheerful, and practical. He took the route of producing an art that would improve life rather than escape from it into autonomous transcendental genius, about which Cage was skeptical as to whether it was not the same pattern of obsessive conquest, control, achievement that had wracked modern life to its anguished core.

Both Pollock and Cage were in 20th-century terms about as far from the center of things as Walden Pond from Concord town. Henry David Thoreau went to Walden to find the solitude necessary for him to take the measure of his own soul, and of that human enterprise called living, and in the silence of that place found the ability to think. His two years at Walden were an “experiment” which easily could have failed. “I went to Walden to discover if life was mean and if so to publicize that fact,” Thoreau writes in the opening beats of his masterpiece, revealing all his sense of uncertainty, experiment, risk, and resolution. That Walden was a success, both in the act of the experiment and in its completion through the seven hard years of composing the book, is an achievement that could in no way have been predictable in advance, above all by Thoreau himself. Cage’s experiments in sound have proved equally aspirational, and equally fortuitous. His idea is practical and utopian by equal measure. Thinking changes when an experiment in living is put into place which carries the risk of unpredictable failure but whose wager is that the scale of the event/experiment is life changing for the mind’s capacity to limn the world without and within. Cage’s meditative practice was put in place at the moment (the 1960s) when Thoreau returned to America after years of neglect to

inhabit the unlikely position of rock star. Such iconic celebrity would have made him shudder. But there was reason for it. His different drummer was demanded by an America on the edge of annihilation and also suburban conformity. Thoreau’s greatest student was perhaps John Cage, American transcendentalist after the fact, for whom, as he put it in the forward to his Lecture on the Weather, the work he wrote for the American Bicentennial in 1976: “It may seem to some that through the use of chance operations I run counter to the spirit of Thoreau (and ’76, and revolution for that matter). The fifth paragraph of Walden speaks against blind obedience to a blundering oracle. However, chance operations are not mysterious sources of ‘the right answers.’ [i.e. oracular]. They are a means of locating a single one among a multiplicity of answers, and at the same time, of freeing the ego from its taste and memory, its concern for profit and power, of silencing the ego so that the rest of the world has a chance to enter into the ego’s own experience whether that be outside or inside.”

The Institute for the Humanities has chosen John Cage’s Lecture on the Weather for its sound installation because this work is the clearest example of Cage’s utopian desire to free the mind to think and accept otherness, be it in sound, in text, or in nature and people.

This bicentennial address to America at its great moment of self-adulating nationalism says nothing is more American than the retreat from the America of the city, the monument, the fireworks, the bulkhead, the settler claim of sovereignty over land and native, the politics of Cold War domination, to a place a few miles lateral where through experiment life can be experienced otherwise and thinking can become new.

Later in his career he will compose his works in the form of a mesostic, a poetic form invented by Cage which subjects materials from source texts to a computer generated program of chance operations, mixing words into seemingly random order and spewing them out in the form of a single, long, vertical string. The Lecture on the Weather relies on chance operations for the choice of text fragments which are taken from the works of Henry David Thoreau. These fragments are read out, that is, performed by 12 speaker-vocalists and/or instrumentalists, each of whom relies on an independent sound system distinguishing them from the others. The performers first reach consensus about the total length of the work. Once time length has been established each is free to perform within that unit of time at a rate of speed of their choosing, also pausing when they like.

The result is a polyphonic choral address to America poised between contingency and anarchy, concordance

15 EXHIBITIONS

PHOTO: Alix Jeffry, 1968

L–R: David Behrman, David Tudor, John Cage, Gordon Mumma, and Eric Salzman (1968).

and disunity—a performed human and choral multiplicity refusing hierarchy and hanging together in ways that place received practices of voice-leading, phrase structure, and musical through-composition on their head.

It is too simple to say either that these voices are, or are not, communicating. They happen to happen at the same time, like the weather in various parts of the world. But perhaps this is mere contingency. On the other hand various inflections of response, each voice to the other, cannot help but happen in the course of performance, implying partial conversation. This piece, begun in group consensus with everyone then free to engage as they do, cannot help but appear as an image of the ideal origin and practice of governance: governance in an agreement that regulates and makes possible freedom. The piece is an image of equality that is however decidedly anti-national, since it is a celebration of voices which refuse to match up except in their derivation from the source texts of Thoreau and his vision of an America spiritualized by differences, refusals, and harmonies achieved through things both willed and sudden/unpredictable. National narratives are forms of control placed on time, rewritings of the past in the name of group and state empowerment.

This piece aims to free time from such bicentennial straight-jackets, and in doing so to free America from its inheritance of manifest destiny. Time is given back to people who frame its length and are free to variously inhabit it/make it happen.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way this kind of wind blows. One should be less clear about the world and one’s place in it after thinking through the terms of this peculiar lecture on the weather. One thing is clear: it aspires to a future of toleration instead of one of marking its trees and forests like a certain kind of male animal.

Cage’s intervention in the future of humanity is now part of our past. And yet, it strangely remains vibrant.

What he called tolerance and respect within nature, what he called meditation and the openness to working with things as they happen within the flow of time and materiality, we would now call sustainability. His Lecture on the Weather, which took the temperature of America at a moment of its most vivid nationalism, is even more apt at a moment of global warming. Its aim of cooling down the temperature of Beethoven, Wagner, Schoenberg, not to mention George Washington, should be outsourced to China where energy is being eaten alive to produce a ruination of landscape as buildings arise with the speed of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. We are driving ourselves crazy….once more, once again.

EXHIBITIONS

John Cage’s Lecture on the Weather (1976) In some respects, Lecture on the Weather is an atypical work for Cage in its overtly political tone. It came about as a commission from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, in 1975, who wanted a work “in observance of America’s bicentennial.” Cage chose to create a piece that would engage as performers 12 expatriate American men who had settled in Canada during and shortly after the Vietnam War. As you hear in his preface, which begins any performance, Cage used this work as an opportunity to articulate his dissatisfaction with American government. His observations are noteworthy, both for the sentiments expressed—prescient and still timely, from our current perspective—but also that he said them out loud.

By the end of his life, Cage didn’t really favor “critical” response, preferring instead “composition.” If you don’t like something, the “proper” response, in his view, would be to make something better.

But Cage’s preface to Lecture on the Weather is not the only place a political statement is being made. What Cage also did, here and elsewhere, was to embed political ideas into the very forms and practices of his composition. Lecture on the Weather, like virtually all of Cage’s works from the 1950s forward, was conceived through a variety of chance means, and it comprises a delicate balance between what he called law elements and freedom elements—that is, law elements where he felt they were needed, freedom elements everywhere else.

For a multimedia slideshow and performance of the “Preface” to Lecture on the Weather as read

by John Cage, please visit www. photoshow.com/watch/ru3tm8MZ or scan the QR code (left) with your mobile device.

John Cage (1912–1992) was a singularly inventive, highly influential, and much beloved American composer, writer, philosopher, and visual artist. Beginning around 1950, and throughout the passing years, he departed from the pragmatism of precise musical notation and circumscribed ways of performance. His principal contribution to the history of music is his systematic establishment of the principle of indeterminacy: by adapting

Zen Buddhist practices to composition and performance, Cage succeeded in bringing both authentic spiritual ideas and a liberating attitude of play to the enterprise of Western art. His aesthetic of chance produced a unique body of what might be called “once-only” works, any two performances of which can never be quite the same. In an effort to reduce the subjective element in composition, he developed methods of selecting the components of his pieces by chance, early on through the tossing of coins or dice and later through the use of random number generators on the computer, and especially IC (1984), designed and written in the C language by Cage’s programmerassistant, Andrew Culver, to simulate the coin oracle of the I Ching. Cage’s use of the computer was creative and procedural, and resulted in a system of what can easily be seen as total serialism, in which all elements pertaining to pitch, noise, duration, relative loudness, tempi, harmony, etc., could be determined by referring to previously drawn correlated charts. Thus, Cage’s mature works did not originate in psychology, motive, drama, or literature, but, rather, were just sounds, free of judgments about whether they are musical or not, free of fixed relations, free of memory and taste. His most enduring, indeed notorious, composition, influenced by Robert Rauschenberg’s allblack and all-white paintings, is the radically tacet 4’33” (1952). Encouraging the ultimate freedom in musical expression, the three movements of 4’33” are indicated by the pianist’s opening and closing of the piano key cover, during which no sounds are intentionally produced. It was first performed by the extraordinarily gifted pianist and long-time Cage associate, David Tudor, at Maverick Hall in Woodstock, NY, on August 29, 1952.

recordings, performances, workshops, festivals, and more. The John Cage Trust is now a resident organization at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where all of its materials are housed and maintained.

The John Cage Trust at Bard College provides access to these holdings through courses, workshops, and concerts, and continues to develop new programs around this extraordinary resource. Dr. Kuhn, in addition to maintaining and operating the John Cage Trust at Bard College, holds the position of John Cage Professor of Performance Arts at Bard College.

UMS presents

Merce Cunningham Dance Company The Legacy Tour Friday, February 18, 2011 Saturday, February 19, 2011 Power Center, Ann Arbor When the always forward-thinking Merce Cunningham passed away in July 2009 at the age of 90, he left behind a plan for the dissolution of his dance company and the preservation of his works: a two-year legacy tour that would end on December 31, 2011 with a performance in New York City. UMS presents two seminal Cunningham works on consecutive evenings in February 2011: Squaregame (1976) and Split Sides (2003). Please visit www.ums.org for further information and event tickets.

When John Cage died, in August of 1992, his significant holdings passed to his longtime friend and collaborator, the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. The John Cage Trust was legally formed shortly thereafter, with a board of directors consisting of Cunningham, Anne d’Harnoncourt (director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art), David Vaughan (archivist at the Cunningham Dance Foundation), and Laura Kuhn (who had been Cage’s assistant since 1986), who continues to serve as its founding executive director.

The primary functions of the Trust are to maintain a sizable archive and to monitor and administer rights and licenses to Cage’s published and unpublished work. In both ways, the John Cage Trust creates and encourages educational experiences, enhances public access, and enlivens global awareness through new Merce Cunningham, performing in John Cage’s Lecture on the Weather, Bard College (2007).

PHOTOS: (Below) Donald Dietz, courtesy of the John Cage Trust; (Opposite) Makepeace Tsao

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17 ONCE. MORE. SYMPOSIUM / WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3

Pop Art Lecture (November 1963).

Brown Bag Lecture:

The Book as Such in the Russian Avant-Garde Visiting Fellow Nancy Perloff, curator of modern and contemporary collections, Getty Research Institute Tuesday, November 2, 2010 at 12 noon U-M Institute for the Humanities 202 South Thayer Street, Room 2022 Ann Arbor Free and open to the public.

Specious Present A Rackham Installation

by Alex Drosen and Matthew Rose

Specious Present –noun. a short time span in which change and duration are directly experienced.

Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday November 2, 4, and 6, 2010 Pre- and post-concerts Rackham Auditorium Inner-Lobby Restrooms 915 East Washington Street Ann Arbor

Since the 1970s,

scholarship on the historical avantgardes has extended well beyond painting to encompass the illustrated book and other forms of print media.

Yet modernist studies still pay little attention to the collaborative books of the Russian Futurists—poets Alexei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov and artists Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, and Kazimir Malevich. It is Nancy Perloff’s contention that these pocket-sized, hand-lithographed books, with their transrational language of zaum or “beyonsense” and their neo-primitive, Cubo-Futurist, and Rayist imagery, are crucial to our understanding not only of the Russian avant-garde, but of modernism more broadly.

Zaum was both archaic incantation and Futurist neologism and marked the beginning of sound poetry. Poets and artists juxtaposed sound with word and image, and used humor and parody to explore tensions between

Specious Present is an interactive algorithmic sound and video installation created specifically for the ONCE. MORE. festival. The piece celebrates the anniversaries of the ONCE Festival and the U-M Performing Arts Technology program with an exploration of the concept of the passage of time from both aesthetic and historical perspectives. The piece manipulates and distorts timing and duration with its structure and content.

Informed by the original ONCE composers, Specious Present takes a historical look at the techniques and attitudes of these innovative electronic composers.

Simultaneously, the piece takes advantage of new technology, using interactive digital systems to influence sound and image in real-time.

past and future, sacred and secular, rural and urban.

This analysis will place these tensions and the role of the avant-garde book as a vessel of sound within the context of the crisis enveloping Russia between the 1905 Revolution and the Bolshevik takeover of 1917.

Please refer to page 30 for a biography of Nancy Perloff.

PHOTO: Makepeace Tsao

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ONCE. MORE. ONCE THEN Michael Daugherty and Mary Simoni Co-Directors Faculty Artists of the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, Creative Arts Orchestra, and Digital Music Ensemble Christopher Albrecht, Trumpet Chad Burrow, Clarinet Michael Daugherty, Piano John Ellis, Piano Daniel Gilbert, Clarinet Joseph Gramley, Percussion Pia Greiner, Cello David Jackson, Trombone Fritz Kaenzig, Tuba Nancy Ambrose King, Oboe Cary Kocher, Percussion Kristin Kuster, Piano Samuel Livingston, Percussion Jeffrey Lyman, Bassoon Ryan Mackstaller, Guitar Stacie Mickens, French Horn Seth Allyn Morris, Flutes Amy Porter, Flutes Linnea Powell, Viola Theresa Prokes, Violin George Shirley, Narrator Adam Unsworth, French Horn

Music + films from the historic ONCE Festivals

Roger Reynolds

Mosaic (1962) for flute and piano

Robert Ashley

Gordon Mumma

Donald Scavarda

Ms. Porter, Mr. Ellis

in memoriam… Crazy Horse (symphony) (1963) for 32 instruments Creative Arts Orchestra Mark Kirschenmann, Director

Large Size Mograph 1962 (1962) for solo piano Mr. Ellis, Piano

Groups for Piano (1959) Mr. Ellis, Piano

Intermission

Ashley

in memoriam… Esteban Gómez (quartet) (1963)

Scavarda

Digital Music Ensemble Stephen Rush, Director

FilmSCORE for Two Pianists (1962)

Roger Arnett, Technical Director Paul Dooley, Technical Assistant

Tuesday, November 2, 2010 at 8:00 pm Rackham Auditorium 915 East Washington Street Ann Arbor

Scavarda

GREYS, A FilmSCORE (1963) silent version

Visuals by Scavarda/ Electronic music

by Mumma

GREYS (1963) stereo electronic music for Donald Scavarda’s FilmSCORE

132nd Annual UMS Season ONCE. MORE. The photographing or sound and video recording of this concert or possession of any device for such recording is prohibited.

Mr. Daugherty, Ms. Kuster

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Cassiopeia (1962)

Mr. Daugherty

Mumma

Sinfonia (1958–60) 12 instruments and magnetic tape Ms. Porter, Ms. King, Mr. Lyman, Mr. Jackson, Mr. Kaenzig, Mr. Mackstaller, Mr. Ellis, Mr. Gramley, Ms. Prokes, Ms. Powell, Ms. Greiner Christopher James Lees, Conductor

Intermission

Scavarda

Matrix for Clarinetist (1962) Mr. Gilbert

Reynolds

A Portrait of Vanzetti (1962–63) for narrator, instruments, and stereophonic electro-acoustic sound (Text edited by the composer from the letters of Bartolomeo Vanzetti) Mr. Shirley, Ms. Porter, Mr. Morris, Mr. Burrow, Mr. Unsworth, Ms. Mickens, Mr. Albrecht, Mr. Jackson, Mr. Gramley, Mr. Kocher, Mr. Livingston Mr. Lees, Conductor

Special thanks to all of the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance faculty artists for their ongoing commitment of time and energy to this special performance.

In the interests of saving both dollars and the environment, please either retain this festival guide and return with it when you attend other festival events or return it to your usher when leaving the venue.

ONCE. MORE. ONCE THEN / TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2

George Cacioppo

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Robert Ashley’s score for in memoriam… Esteban Gómez (quartet) (1963).

Roger Reynolds Born July 18, 1934 in Detroit, Michigan Mosaic for flute (piccolo) and piano is subdivided into 12 sections, and temporal proportion is established here by small number groupings (2 7s=14, 3 8s=24, 5 4s=20, etc.) which are arranged so as to result in a gradual expansion of sub-section duration (24”, ...48”, ...100”, 132”). Here, a new level of attention is paid to instrumental “color” and the shaping influence of texture. There are—it is hardly surprising—12 categories of musical articulation specified in the sketches, ranging from trills and repeated notes, to pitch glissandi and percussive sounds such as key clicks.

Program note by Roger Reynolds.

in memoriam… Crazy Horse (symphony) (1963) for 32 instruments Robert Ashley Born March 28, 1930 in Ann Arbor, Michigan in memoriam . . . Crazy Horse (symphony) is one of a group of four pieces (a quartet, a trio concerto, a symphony, and an opera) that I hoped were pure and accurate abstractions of those musical forms as I understood them from the European tradition. (Each of these forms was given the name of a “New World” hero from different times in our history, because it seemed from my reading of European musical history and American social history that there was a remarkably curious coincidence between the emergence of a musical form in Europe with the emergence of a very “similar” social idea represented by the American hero. It was as if the same “idea” happened on both continents at the same time, but had to be represented differently in the two places, because the form of the idea had to come from what was available to be changed: in Europe, in music; in America, in social organization.)

Program note by Robert Ashley.

Large Size Mograph 1962 (1962) for solo piano Gordon Mumma Born March 30, 1935 in Framingham, Massachusetts This solo piano work is from a series of differentsized pieces for various combinations of pianos ti-

tled Mographs. The activities of each Mograph were derived from seismograph-recorded P-wave and S-wave patterns of earthquakes and underground nuclear explosions. I was intrigued with the relationship similarities between the time-travel patterns of P and S waves and the sound-reflection characteristics of musical performance-spaces. The title-pun should be accessible.

Program note by Gordon Mumma.

Groups for Piano (1959) Donald Scavarda Born 1928 in Iron Mountain, Michigan Scavarda composed Groups for Piano at Tanglewood in 1959. In this work he poses the question: How short can a piece be and still be perceived as complete and coherent? The five groups have durations respectively of 7, 8, 10, 8, and 7 seconds with specified silences between them. Total duration is 55 seconds. To create a sense of spatial depth every note is given its own specific dynamic, frequently with dramatic contrasts.

Leon Kirchner, with whom Scavarda studied at Tanglewood, invited Paul Jacobs to première Groups at a Composers Forum. The piece created a storm of controversy and dominated the audience discussion.

able. This sonority will provide, for the individual performers, a tonal reference for the various sound activities that constitute the performance.

Whenever any performer is playing his contribution to the reference sonority, time (duration) is unmeasured (free) for him.

Whenever any performer is playing through the (16) measured pulses of a quadrant, he must deviate continuously, but as gradually as possible, from his contribution to the reference sonority.

The performance begins with the reference sonority. At any time, then, individual performers may play through any (starting) quadrant. Subsequently, they will continue reading circularly, alternating unmeasured periods of their contribution to the reference sonority with measured periods of assigned deviations.

Whenever any performer first becomes aware of a deviant element (other than his own) in the reference sonority, his pattern of assigned sound elements (quadrants) shifts circularly so that the mode of deviation he recognizes is assigned to the quadrant opposite that in which he is playing or will play next. (As the pattern of quadrants remains constant, thus, all quadrants will be re-designated.) The pattern of quadrant designations remains in its changed position until the performer has played through the succeeding (newly designated) quadrant, after which it is subject again to transposition through the appearance of deviant elements in the sonority.

Program note by Robert Ashley.

Program note by Donald Scavarda.

Timbre refers to tonal color changes effected through the use of mutes, filters, bow movement, etc.

2 Density refers to the mixing of tonal ingredients, as in flutter-tongue, double-stops, mixed vocal and instrumental sound, etc.

1

in memoriam… Esteban Gómez (quartet) (1963) Ashley The graph is read circularly (see opposite, page 22).

Each dot represents a constant unit of time that is determined privately by each performer. This unit should be a natural pulse that does not tend to subdivide in the performer’s mind.

The individual performer assigns to each quadrant of the score one of the following sound elements: pitch; intensity; timbre1; density2. These sound elements may be assigned to the quadrants in any pattern, and that pattern—while it will “revolve” in its relationship to the score—will remain constant (in the relationship of its parts) throughout the performance.

The ensemble should prepare a sonority within which the individual instruments are not distinguish-

FilmSCORE for Two Pianists (1962) GREYS, A FilmSCORE (1963) silent version GREYS (1963) stereo electronic music for Donald Scavarda’s FilmSCORE Scavarda/Electronic music by Mumma In these two interdisciplinary works, Mr. Scavarda redefines and expands the entire concept of musical notation. He explores the physical properties of film itself and produces a kind of visual music, an abstract film which simultaneously contains symbolic infor-

23 ONCE. MORE. ONCE THEN / TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2

IMAGE: courtesy of Robert Ashley

Mosaic (1962) for flute and piano

ONCE. MORE. ONCE THEN / TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2

mation for performers. Mr. Scavarda transformed common objects into variously colored discs which seem to be illuminated from within. In FilmSCORE for Two Pianists they move at different speeds, in every direction and through all dimensions. The climactic section contains 12 separate and independent layers of visual information. It is a dense, complex contrapuntal texture which suddenly erupts in a frenzy of activity.

Although GREYS employs the same kind of abstract symbols as the earlier film, the form is quite different.

It is structured as a multi-layered, single direction, continuous flux of varying densities and speeds. At its most dense the film contains 18 layers of material.

PHOTO: (Left) courtesy of Donald Scavarda

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Program note by Donald Scavarda.

Cassiopeia (1962) George Cacioppo Born September 24, 1927 in Monroe, Michigan Died April 4, 1984 in Ann Arbor Some of Cacioppo’s Pianopieces, such as Cassiopeia, use a distinctive notational system (see facing score, page 25). The player may follow any given path from one note to another. (For paths with undefined pitches, the player chooses them.) In Cassiopeia, volume is proportional to the size of a black circle, note lengths to linear space. Convex paths indicate a slowing of tempo, concave ones an acceleration. Asked to explain the advantages of this notation, Cacioppo replied that it gives the performer “an opportunity for his eye to roam about the score and stimulate him to find perhaps a more unique way of realizing the notes.” He compared the experience to seeing “a cloud go by or a sunset, knowing that every time you see it, the experience and the images will be different.”

L–R: Donald Scavarda and clarinet soloist John Morgan, Matrix for Clarinetist (1962).

Each of the four movements is of substantially different character. The first movement squeezes the busy instruments into a two-octave range. The pointillist second movement spreads over five octaves. The complex thematic counterpoint of the third movement evolves into a sound-specified quasi-improvisation that absorbs into electronic music. The fourth movement overlaps the third as a dramatic scene change—a quietly sustained instrumental soundscape with occasional isolated motifs. Although the Sinfonia continues to have subsequent performances, I think none has matched the careful preparation and enthusiastic energy of the ONCE Festival première.

Program note by Leta E. Miller, courtesy of the author.

Program note by Gordon Mumma.

ducing only single tones. In 1962, Mr. Scavarda published his revolutionary Matrix for Clarinetist in the University of Michigan’s Generation Magazine. The score provided special fingerings and instructions which, for the first time, enabled the clarinetist to produce multiple simultaneous tones. John Morgan premièred Matrix for Clarinetist at a ONCE Friends concert in East Lansing, Michigan, on May 25, 1962.

Program note by Donald Scavarda.

A Portrait of Vanzetti (1962–63) for narrator, instruments, and stereophonic electroacoustic sound Reynolds

Sinfonia (1958–60) 12 instruments and magnetic tape

Matrix for Clarinetist (1962)

Mumma

Scavarda

Following the classic four-movement template, Sinfonia’s title indicates its structure and brevity, and echoes my classical origins. The chamber ensemble of only 12 instruments is joined by an electronic music sequence in the last part of the third movement.

Donald Scavarda is widely recognized for his early discovery and development of clarinet multiphonics.

For centuries, these magnificent sounds remained dormant in the clarinet, their existence unknown. It was believed that the instrument was capable of pro-

A Portrait of Vanzetti, for chamber ensemble, narrator, and electro-acoustic sound, was my first extended composition to combine electronic with instrumental resources. (I had done Dervish, a brief work for piano and percussion with tape, a year before, in Ann Arbor.) The duality present in Wedge was extended and radicalized now as an interplay between the thread of narration and the ensemble’s perspectives.

25

George Cacioppo’s notational system for Cassiopeia (1962).

ONCE. MORE. ONCE THEN / TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2

The place of political forces in my life was sharpened by Köln (it was bleak: still an intermittent patchwork of rubble and rudimentary new construction), and I decided to set a less abstract text—though still a poetic one—edited from the letters of anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

After a brief, assertive “Introduction,” there is a pause, and a voice begins gently, announcing its “common, harmless presence,” but soon pressing the anarchist theme: “We have war because we are not sufficiently heroic for a life which does not need war.” There is an episodic interaction between its first narrator Jack O’Brien’s urgent, articulate insinuations, and the shrill, raucous, often asymmetrically stabbing but sometimes even velvety perspectives of the ensemble. Vanzetti’s words claim that “anarchy is as beautiful as a woman for me…” while the instrumental interjections themselves sound anarchic: each a unique amalgam utilizing some small subset of the total instrumental resource.

A piercingly intense coda closes the piece.

Creative Arts Orchestra

Program note by Roger Reynolds.

Clarinets/Saxophones Patrick Booth Colin Johnson Molly Jones William Marriott Daniel Padamos Gabriel Saltman Eric Schindler

Please refer to page 40 for complete ONCE THEN composer and artist biographies.

Mark Kirschenmann, Director Violins Philip Coonce Ashley Martin Joachim Stepniewski Katherine Van Duisen Elizabeth Wright Viola Joshua Holcomb Bass Joseph Fee Benjamin Linstrum Benjamin Rolston William Satterwhite

Trumpet Derek Worthington Trombone Vincent Chandler Tuba Michael Musick Harp Christen Tamarelli Piano Michael Malis

PHOTO: Makepeace Tsao

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27 ONCE. MORE. SYMPOSIUM / WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3

Robert Sheff (at piano), ONCE performer, the VFW Hall (1964).

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ONCE. MORE. Symposium

Symposium Schedule

9:00–9:15 am

Refreshments

Wednesday, November 3, 2010, 9:00 am–4:00 pm Rackham Amphitheatre and Assembly Hall 915 East Washington Street Ann Arbor

9:15–9:30 am

Introduction by Daniel Herwitz, director, University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities

Session One

9:30–10:00 am

10:00–10:30 am

Leta Miller, professor of music, University of California, Santa Cruz

10:30–11:30 am

Discussion and Break

11:30 am–12:00 noon

12:00 noon–12:30 pm

Marjorie Perloff, Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities, Stanford University and Florence Scott Professor Emerita, University of Southern California

12:30–1:00 pm

Discussion

1:00–2:00 pm

Lunch Break

Session Two

2:00–4:00 pm

A Conversation with ONCE Composers Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, and Donald Scavarda

Free and open to the public.

Nancy Perloff, curator of modern and contemporary collections, Getty Research Institute

Richard Crawford, Hans T. David Distinguished University Professor of Musicology Emeritas, University of Michigan

facilitated by Michael Daugherty and Daniel Herwitz

ONCE. MORE. Symposium Biographies

29 ONCE. MORE. SYMPOSIUM / WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3

Richard Crawford, widely acknowledged as the most

Michael Daugherty is co-director of ONCE. MORE. and

eminent Americanist in the field of musicology, has helped to shape the scholarly directions of American musicology for more than 40 years. He retired from teaching in 2003 but remains the Hans T. David Distinguished University Professor of Musicology Emeritus at the University of Michigan. His books include America’s Musical Life: A History, An Introduction to America’s Musical Life, and The American Musical Landscape: The Business of Musicianship from Billings to Gershwin—one of the seminal works of American music history. Crawford was the first Americanist to serve as president of the American Musicological Society, where he left an indelible mark and initiated the important publications series Music in the United States of America, of which he is editor-in-chief. Currently, he is working on a biography of George Gershwin.

professor of composition at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. According to the League of American Orchestras, Mr. Daugherty (b.

1954 Cedar Rapids, Iowa) is one of the 10 most performed American composers. He has been hailed by The Times (London) as “a master icon maker” with a “maverick imagination, fearless structural sense, and meticulous ear.” Mr. Daugherty first came to international attention when the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performed his Metropolis Symphony with David Zinman at Carnegie Hall in 1994. After teaching composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, he joined the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance in 1991. His music has been performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, BBC Symphony Orchestra, RAI Orchestra of Turin, and the London Symphony Orchestra. Current commissions for the 2010/11 season include a new wind ensemble work for the University of Michigan Symphony Band and orchestral works for the RAI Orchestra of Torino (Italy) and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (Santa Cruz). His music is published by Peermusic Classical and Boosey & Hawkes and can be heard on Naxos, Argo, Nonesuch, and Equilibrium labels.

Daniel Herwitz has been director of the Institute for the Humanities and Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities at the University of Michigan since 2002.

He also holds professorships in comparative literature, philosophy, and history of art in the college, and is adjunct professor in screen arts and culture. He holds tenure in the School of Art & Design. Before coming to Michigan, Mr. Herwitz lived and worked in South Africa, where he was chair in philosophy at the University of Natal (1996–2002) and director of the Center for Knowledge and Innovation there. His book of essays, Race and Reconciliation (Minnesota, 2003) is the result of that stay, along with short stories published in the Michigan Quarterly Review. Mr. Herwitz has three recent books which appeared in 2008: The Star as Icon (Columbia), Key Concepts in Aesthetics (Continuum), and (edited with Ashu Varshney) Midnight’s Diaspora: Critical Encounters with Salman Rushdie. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago.

PHOTO: courtesy of the John Cage Trust

ONCE. MORE. SYMPOSIUM / WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3

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Leta Miller is the author of the 100-page historical essay in the booklet accompanying New World Records’ five-CD set, Music from the ONCE Festival. She has published widely on mid-20th-century music, including two books on composer Lou Harrison, a critical edition of his works, and about two dozen articles in musicological journals and essay collections on Harrison, John Cage, Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, and music in the San Francisco area. Her article “Henry Cowell and John Cage: Intersections and Influences, 1933–1941” (in the Journal of the American Musicological Society) won the 2006 Lowens Award from the Society for American Music for the best article on an American music topic. She has also been featured as flute soloist (on baroque and modern flute) on more than 15 recordings. Miller has just completed a book, Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, which will be published in 2011. She is the editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music.

Marjorie Perloff

teaches and writes on 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. Her first three books dealt with individual poets—Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O’Hara; she then published The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), which led to her extensive exploration of avant-garde art movements in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986 & 1994), and subsequent books (13 in all), the most recent of which is Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2005). The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, co-edited with Craig Dworkin, was published in 2009 and UNORIGINAL GENIUS: Poetry by Other Means in the TwentyFirst Century will be published in 2010. She has been a frequent reviewer for periodicals from TLS and the Washington Post to major scholarly journals, and has lectured widely in the US and abroad. She was recently the Weidenfeld Professor of European Literature at Oxford University. Perloff has held Guggenheim, NEH, and Huntington fellowships; served on the advisory board of the Stanford Humanities Center; and has recently completed her year as president of the Modern Language Association. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recently was named honorary foreign professor at Beijing Modern Languages University. She received an honorary degree from Bard College in May 2008.

Nancy Perloff’s

scholarship addresses the Russian avant-garde, European modernism, and the relationship between sound and the visual arts. Her 2004 exhibition, “Sea Tails: A Video Collaboration,” recreated the American composer David Tudor’s only video work and inspired her 2004 article for Leonardo Music Journal. Her essay, “Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde,” appeared in fall 2009 in The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound and she published “Schwitters Redesigned: A Postwar Ursonate from the Getty Archives” in the Journal of Design History (June 2010). Her exhibition, “Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910–1917”—which travels to Northwestern University’s Block Museum in 2011—uses the GRI’s Russian modernist collections to highlight the avant-garde’s transformation of the book and experimentation with word-image-sound. Her Monuments of the Future: Designs by El Lissitzky and subsequent book, Situating El Lissitzky, also featured GRI holdings. Current projects include an essay on Natalia Goncharova and continued research on the early Russian avant-garde.

Please refer to page 40 for biographies of the ONCE composers.

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L–R: David Tudor, John Cage (circa 1962).

The Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series Presents

The John Cage Trust Indeterminacy with Director Laura Kuhn and DJ Tadd Mullinix Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 5:10 pm Michigan Theater 603 East Liberty Street Ann Arbor Free and open to the public.

A program of the U–M School of Art & Design

Indeterminacy John Cage first performed Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music as a lecture at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. One week before, he began to prepare the lecture in a Stockton hotel room. Remembering an earlier suggestion from his long-time collaborator David Tudor that he “...make a talk that was nothing but stories,” Cage wrote 30, which he then read at Expo ’58, without accompaniment. Sixty more stories were written the following year to fill out a 90-minute lecture Cage and Tudor were to give at Columbia Teacher’s College, for speaker and live musician. Shortly after, the two men recorded all 90 for what is now an enduring, historic Smithsonian/ Folkways recording.

Cage’s idea for Indeterminacy was simple: each of the stories would be read aloud in the space of precisely one minute: thus, if a story is long, it is read very, very fast; if short, then very, very slowly. At the same time, Tudor would simultaneously perform a spontaneous musical counterpoint comprising selections from two earlier Cage compositions: Concert for Piano and Orchestra (piano) and Fontana Mix (tape).

Most of the stories in Indeterminacy are about Cage or his friends, and almost all of them have an element of puckish humor. Some have an almost magical-realistic theme, others are amusingly absurd, and still others make you laugh out loud. And while the stories are a delight purely on their own, the added layer of unexpected musical counterpoint complements in ways that can’t ever be predicted.

The John Cage Trust was established in 1993 as a notfor-profit organization with a mandate to preserve, enhance, and maintain the integrity of the artistic works of the late American composer, John Cage. Its founding board of trustees was comprised of four long-time Cage associates: Merce Cunningham, artistic director, Cunningham Dance Foundation; Anne d’Harnoncourt, director, Philadelphia Museum of Art; David Vaughan, archivist, Cunningham Dance Foundation; and Laura Kuhn, who serves as its executive director. In 2008, with the passing of d’Harnoncourt, Margarete Roeder, Cage’s long-time gallerist, joined the ranks; in 2009, Cunningham was replaced by Melissa Harris, long-time editor of Aperture Magazine.

In its 17 years of existence, the John Cage Trust has been both proactive in its work to collect, inven-

tory, catalog, and place Cage’s various manuscript collections, and responsive in its attempts to serve the ongoing and emerging needs of scholars, creative artists, and performers the world over by providing information, assistance, and access to its archives, which includes extensive monographs and recorded materials by and about John Cage, as well as a permanent collection of Cage’s visual arts works, which are lent to museums and galleries worldwide. And, in addition to initiating and participating in educational settings and programs throughout the world, the Trust actively promotes new projects utilizing its holdings; publications, recordings, theatrical realizations, and new media products, often utilizing innovative technologies.

Laura Kuhn enjoys a lively career as a writer, performer, scholar, and arts administrator. She worked during her graduate school years in the early 1980s with the Russian-born infant terrible of American musicology, Nicolas Slonimsky, becoming successor editor, upon his death in 1996, of his acclaimed music dictionaries Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and Music Since 1900. In 1986, upon completion of her MA degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (her thesis a comparative study of the theoretical ideas of German composer Richard Wagner with the montage film theory of the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein), she also began working with the American composer, visual artist, and philosopher John Cage in

Laura Kuhn and John Cage

PHOTOS: (Below) Betty Freeman, courtesy of the John Cage Trust; (Opposite) James Klosty, C.F. Peters Editions, Indeterminacy

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John Cage on Indeterminacy.

THE PENNY STAMPS DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER SERIES / THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4

New York on a variety of large-scale projects, including his six “mesostic” lectures for Harvard University as holder of the Charles Eliot Norton Chair in Poetry (published as I-VI, Harvard University Press, 1990) and his first full-scale opera, Europeras 1 & 2, for the Frankfurt Opera. This work subsequently became the subject of her 1992 doctoral dissertation from UCLA, John Cage’s “Europeras 1 & 2”: The Musical Means of Revolution. From 1991 to 1996 she served as one of 10 founding faculty members at Arizona State University West in Phoenix, where she helped to develop and implement an innovative interdisciplinary arts program. Simultaneously, upon Cage’s death in 1992, she worked with Cage’s long-time friends and associates Merce Cunningham, Anne d’Harnoncourt, and David Vaughan to found the John Cage Trust for which she continues to serve as executive director. In this capacity, Ms. Kuhn travels extensively, lecturing and conducting performance workshops in venues as diverse as the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Warsaw’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Brussels’ International Arts Festival. In 1999 she even prepared a macrobiotic dinner for 80 (using Cage’s recipes) to celebrate the first-ever installation of Cage’s celebrated Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake at Belfast’s Queens Festival! Other projects for the John Cage Trust under her direction have included a CD-ROM of sampled piano preparations from Cage’s landmark composition, Sonatas & Interludes (1946–48) for use by MIDI keyboard musicians, and the adaptation of Cage’s whimsical 1982 radio play, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet, to the stage, which in 2000–2001 she directed in seven venues around the world, including the US, Australia, Germany, and the UK. In 1999–2000, on a bit of a lark, she also joined the cast (as an onstage singing guest) of Mikel Rouse’s irreverent “talk-show” opera, Dennis Cleveland, last mounted at New York’s Lincoln Center in May 2002. In 2007, the John Cage Trust went into residential placement at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson New York, where Ms. Kuhn became the first John Cage Professor of Performance Arts. In celebration, she directed a fully staged version of Cage’s softly political theater piece, Lecture on the Weather, with an all-star cast that included Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, John Ashbery, Leon Botstein, John Ralston Saul, John Kelly, and others.

She is currently working with the award-winning biographer Ken Silverman toward a collected edition of John Cage’s correspondence for Wesleyan University Press (2011).

Tadd Mullinix

In 1998,

after seven years of playing classical cello and various instruments in punk bands, Tadd Mullinix began to DJ in galleries and clubs while composing music with a personal computer and synthesizers.

Disenchanted with reading sheet music and playing in ensembles, he positioned himself for a career in arranging and editing his own digital recordings. He produced music of contrasting styles and created aliases in order to distinguish his projects. Being repeatedly asked why he created separate aliases and didn’t combine his projects under one name, Mr. Mullinix found that there was an illusion that electronic music must be too quickly evolving to refer to its own heritage. In a time where a new ease of use and accessibility to computer technology should be stoking creativity, he had the view that electronic music, despite its young evolutionary line as a genre, was dependent on its context in order to be effective or subversive.

After meeting Todd Osborn at Dubplate Pressure, a record store in Ann Arbor which Osborn owned, the two started a ragga-jungle style drum ’n bass label called Rewind! Records. They wrote and produced nine 12inch vinyl singles under the names Soundmurderer (Osborn) and SK-1 (Mullinix). Several years later, the drum ’n bass world witnessed a wave of ragga-jungle reinterpretations. Rewind! singles were repressed on UK vinyl and reissued by Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label.

Mr. Mullinix relocated to Ann Arbor and started working at Dubplate Pressure, where he met Sam Valenti IV, owner of the then young Ghostly International record label. To Ghostly, he signed music that would be

slated for release under the names of his other aliases: Charles Manier, influenced by groups including Talking Heads, Liaisons Dangereuses, and Severed Heads; James T. Cotton, dance music in the styles of jackin’ house and Detroit techno; Dabrye, hip-hop influenced

by J Dilla and other golden-era beat-makers; Tadd Mullinix, experimental and braindance electronica that draws inspiration from artists like Aphex Twin, Autechre, Morton Subotnick, and post-Second World War classical and avant-garde composers.

As Dabrye, his collaboration with the late James Yancey (aka J Dilla) on the single “Game Over” became a Detroit underground anthem and lead to notoriety for his Dabrye project in the hip-hop world. While this project brought light to the connection between hip-hop and electronic music, it is viewed as having influenced a shift in electronic music from having rigid quantized rhythms to a loose humanized feel.

Tadd Mullinix currently resides and works in Ann Arbor and performs worldwide.

The Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series Established with the generous support of U-M School of Art & Design alumna Penny W. Stamps, the series looks to present visionary leaders who have used their creative practice effectively. It celebrates those who have made lasting marks by transcending traditions and set a progressive, influential tone with their work.

The series brings emerging and established artists/designers from a broad spectrum of media to conduct a public lecture and engage with students, faculty, and the larger university and Ann Arbor communities. Unveiling the leading voices of the day to a broad audience, the series has become a revered weekly event, serving as a forum for social dialogue, not only for the academic and creative community, but for the greater regional area. Lectures take place on Thursday evenings at the historic Michigan Theater in downtown Ann Arbor, are free of charge, and are open to the general public.

PHOTO: Makepeace Tsao

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ONCE Group at Robert Rauschenberg’s loft after Judson Dance Theater Festival, New York, 1965. (Front, L–R): Joseph Wehrer, Robert Ashley, unknown, George Manupelli; (second row, L–R): Yvonne Rainer, George Kleis (leaning against palm), unknown, Gordon Mumma, unknown, Cynthia Liddell; (third row, L–R): Jackie Leuzinger, Annina Nosei, unknown; (seated in back on the right holding sandwich) Caroline Blunt; others unknown.

CLOSING RECEPTIONS + CELEBRATIONS

Celebration of the John Cage + ONCE. MORE. Exhibitions

Outlier: Hauntings of the Avant Garde

Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 6:30 pm Immediately following the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series presentation of The John Cage Trust: Indeterminacy

Thursday, November 4, 2010 Immediately following ONCE NOW concert 1301 South University Avenue (former UMMA Off/Site) Ann Arbor

U-M Institute for the Humanities 202 South Thayer Street Ann Arbor

$5 cover charge at the door; complimentary admission with ONCE NOW ticket stub. Open to the public.

Free and open to the public.

ONCE NOW concert performance to follow reception at Rackham Auditorium.

Imagine a room overwhelmed with sound + vision— snatches of music, throbs + echoes, and sights unseen until this night that somehow seem familiar. Haunted by fever dreams of the avant-garde past, Outlier combines the heavy influence of 20th-century composition with contemporary approaches to experimental music and performance art in a space filled with psychedelic majesty. Is it real? How will you explain it to others? How will you explain it to yourself? Ann Arbor producer HOTT LAVA brings a stellar cast of musicians, composers, performance artists, and filmmakers including Laurel Halo, Todd Osbourn, Sean Patrick, Tom Buckholz, and Ted Kennedy to create a dynamic installation work that will delight, provoke, and overload the senses.

A collaboration with

and First Martin & Co.

PHOTO: Makepeace Tsao

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ONCE Group performance (November 1963)

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ONCE. MORE. ONCE NOW Michael Daugherty and Mary Simoni Co-Directors Faculty Artists of the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, Ann Arbor Improvisation Collective, and ONCE Quartet Kyle Acuncius, Percussion Melissa Bosma, Oboe Jeremy Crosmer, Cello* Michael Daugherty, Piano Daniel Goldblum, Contrabassoon Woody Goss, Piano Joseph Gramley, Percussion Daniel Graser, Alto Saxophone Cecilia Kang, Clarinet Mark Kieme, Bass Clarinet Yi-Ting Kuo, Violin* Ryan Mackstaller, Guitar Gordon Mumma, Piano Hoi Yue Ng, Viola* Anna Skálová, Violin* Ming-Hsiu Yen, Piano *denotes member of the ONCE Quartet Roger Arnett, Technical Director Paul Dooley, Technical Assistant Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 8:00 pm Rackham Auditorium 915 East Washington Street Ann Arbor

Recent music + films from the ONCE Festival composers

Robert Ashley

Van Cao’s Meditation (1991) for piano

Gordon Mumma

Ms. Yen

Than Particle (1985) for live-percussion with synthesized percussion Mr. Gramley

Intermission Donald Scavarda

CINEMATRIX (2002) a filmSCORE performed silently

Scavarda

CINEMATRIX (2002) a filmSCORE performed with multiple instrumentalists Ann Arbor Improvisation Collective Ms. Kang, Mr. Goldblum, Mr. Goss, Mr. Acuncius Andrew Bishop, Director

Gordon Mumma

Scavarda

Gambreled Tapestry (2007) for solo piano with internal electro-acoustics Mr. Mumma

Sounds for Seven (2010) for chamber ensemble Ann Arbor Improvisation Collective Ms. Bosma, Ms. Kang, Mr. Kieme, Mr. Graser, Mr. Mackstaller, Mr. Goss Mr. Bishop, Director

Roger Reynolds

Ariadne’s Thread (1994) for string quartet, computer-synthesized, and spatialized sound ONCE Quartet Special thanks to all of the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance faculty artists for their ongoing commitment of time and energy to this special performance.

132nd Annual UMS Season ONCE. MORE.

In the interests of saving both dollars and the environment, please either retain this festival guide and return with it when you attend other festival events or return it to your usher when leaving the venue.

The photographing or sound and video recording of this concert or possession of any device for such recording is prohibited.

Please join ONCE. MORE. artists immediately following tonight’s concert at Outlier: Hauntings of the Avant Garde, a festival closing reception, at 1301 South University Avenue (formerly UMMA Off/Site).

Van Cao’s Meditation (1991) for piano

A few years ago I saw a photograph in National Geographic magazine of an old man with long white hair seated at a piano in a sunny music room with French doors leading to a garden patio. This was part of an article on North Vietnam today. The caption explained, cryptically, that this man, Van Cao, was a hero to the Vietnamese, that he had been a famous composer in prewar times, that he had written the national anthem for North Vietnam and that now in his old age he mostly sat at the piano, improvising and humming to himself.

I had an intense desire to hear him play the piano and hum. I found out from a friend who travels to Vietnam that his piano is, perhaps, only one of two in the whole country and that his situation is even more unimaginable to an American than the caption had suggested. I made half-hearted attempts to get some American agency to send me to Vietnam, but I could not follow through in this effort. I could not allow myself, because I thought of my “desire” as almost purely musical. I would go without any political strings attached, and of course that is fantasy. Certainly, Van Cao would see my visit in political terms. And probably he wouldn’t like my music at all, so it would be hard to be honest with him.

I was given a recording of some of Van Cao’s early music. It is a collection of charming love songs in a French cabaret style, surprisingly what one would expect. I don’t want to hear the national anthem. But the “image” from the photograph persists, in all of its musical and human mystery, and it is that image that this composition represents.

Program note by Robert Ashley, November 1991.

Than Particle (1985) for live-percussion with synthesized percussion

ments, performs from a notated score, and at times employs defined fields of creative improvisation.

The music is composed in 10 seamless, one-minute sections joined together with transitional seams, and the overall structure has an umbrella of four sections. Part of the composer’s inspiration for this music was nourished by the sometimes wonderfully absurd sound results of digital computer FM synthesis algorithms attempting to achieve the acoustical complexities of real percussion sonorities. Than Particle thrives on these differences.

As with so many technological advances, the Yamaha computer used for the first performances, with its usual software bugs, became obsolete, folkloric, and then disappeared. Thus current performances are done from a recording of the original computer sound-output.

Than particles are short-lived surrogate phenomena, allegorically analogous to a 14th-century headbashing game that involved, typically, facial laceration and rampant wagering.

Than Particle was composed for percussionist William Winant, who premièred the work, with the composer, at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute on November 7, 1985, for the New Music America Festival, Los Angeles.

Program note by Gordon Mumma.

CINEMATRIX (2002) a filmSCORE performed silently CINEMATRIX (2002) a filmSCORE performed with multiple instrumentalists

in a fixed group of overall designs. A performance represents one of those designs selected from the group.

Gambreled Tapestry can also be performed with an optional electronic component, designed by the composer and applied to aggrandize the resonant characteristics of the sound board inside the piano.

The titles of Mumma’s compositions often have a variety of meanings, descriptive or poetic, even extending to the absurd. A tapestry is made from two sets of interlaced threads. The result is a warp of length with a welt at the width, resulting in defined patterns. A gambrel is a symmetrical, two-sided sloping structure with additional internal angles, often used in roof design for efficient use of space. In Gambreled Tapestry it is applied to a flexible, tapestry-like structure for the use of time in the musical composition.

Program note by Gordon Mumma.

Sounds for Seven (2010) for chamber ensemble Scavarda Sounds for Seven is the fourth in a series of works designed to expand the concept of musical notation and encourage greater creative participation by the performers. The single-page score is completely abstract. It is also in color, thus emphasizing the composer’s intention that the performers explore the full range of instrumental timbres.

Donald Scavarda Born 1928 in Iron Mountain, Michigan

Program note by Donald Scavarda.

This is the third abstract film intended for musical interpretation. The Matrix in motion.

Ariadne’s Thread (1994) for string quartet, computersynthesized, and spatialized sound

Program note by Donald Scavarda.

Roger Reynolds Born July 18, 1934 in Detroit, Michigan

Gordon Mumma Born March 30, 1935 in Framingham, Massachusetts

Gambreled Tapestry (2007) for solo piano with internal electro-acoustics

Than Particle (1985) is music for electronic and acoustical percussion. The acoustical component is performed by a percussion virtuoso; the electronic component is achieved, typically, by computer synthesis.

The performance score is notated with conventional five-line staves, one for the percussionist, the other for coordination with the computer-synthesized part.

The percussionist chooses specific contrasting instru-

Gambreled Tapestry (2007) for solo piano was composed with “construction-set” procedures, to be assembled for performance by the pianist. Most of the sound resources are provided by two short musical gestures, strictly specified by music notation, which can then be assembled in a limited number of combinations. The combination limits are defined by the composer to result

Mumma

Ariadne’s Thread arose out of a longstanding interest in line, whether evoked as sound or inscribed graphically by such masterful hands as those of Sengai, Klee, or Rembrandt. Continuity, directionality, inflection, intensification, rarefaction, whimsy, even violence are subsumed in the manifestations and depictions that line allows. Ariadne’s Thread is for string quartet and also computer-generated sound which supports, augments, alternates with, and occasionally replaces the instrumentalists’ efforts, expanding the range of what an unaided string ensemble can accomplish, and adds a choreographic spatialization to the music’s linear evolution.

39 ONCE. MORE. ONCE NOW / THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4

Robert Ashley Born March 28, 1930 in Ann Arbor, Michigan

ONCE. MORE. ONCE NOW / THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4

Elements from the myth inform the piece—the Minotaur’s vertiginous rage, the number seven, the strategy of surreptitious substitution, and Dionysus “in the wings”—but, after all, it is not meant as illustration. Having composed two earlier works that address the quartet traditions, I allowed a less reasoned obsessiveness to invade this one, an obsession that requires a particular sort of unanimity.

Ariadne’s Thread was written for the Arditti Quartet, and premièred by them in Messiaen Hall at Radio France on December 2, 1994. The piece was jointly commissioned by Radio France, The Florence Gould Foundation, and Les Ateliers UPIC. The computer materials were realized in Paris at the UPIC studios and assembled at the University of California, San Diego, where Timothy Labor was my musical assistant. (Michael Theodore was the musical assistant in the quadraphonic version.)

Program note by Roger Reynolds.

ONCE THEN / ONCE NOW Composer Biographies Robert Ashley (born 1930) is known for his work in new forms of opera. In the 1960s, Mr. Ashley organized Ann Arbor’s legendary ONCE Festival and directed the ONCE Group. During the 1970s, he directed the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, toured with the Sonic Arts Union, and produced and directed Music with Roots in the Aether, a 14-hour television opera/ documentary about the work and ideas of seven American composers. Mr. Ashley wrote and produced Perfect Lives, an opera for television widely considered the precursor of “music-television.” Staged versions of Perfect Lives and Atalanta (Acts of God) and the monumental opera tetralogy Now Eleanor’s Idea have toured throughout Europe, Asia, and the US. He wrote and directed Balseros for Florida Grand Opera, Dust for première at the Kanagawa Arts Foundation in Yokohama, and Celestial Excursions for the Berlin Festival and Hebbel Theater Berlin. Made Out of Concrete was premièred at La MaMa E.T.C. in New York in 2009, and his latest opera, Quicksand, is scheduled for workshop performances in New York during the spring of 2011.

As a creative artist, George Cacioppo (1926–1984) was a gentle chemist. His life and work didn’t move in straight lines from one point to another. After his early compositions of the 1950s, each musical work has its own unique identity and character. That uniqueness is heard in his individual overlappings of sound-painting, his sense of forward motion in time, and the lyrical characteristics and poetic implications of each composition. Cacioppo was careful with the details of mixing things, but rhapsodic in his large-scale thinking, and poetic in the fanciful titles for his music.

Through his life, Cacioppo was variously present; at times congenially gregarious, at other times mysteriously absent or invisible. He had many devoted artist friends, particularly his occasional composition students at the University of Michigan Residential College.

His primary money-earning profession was as a radio engineer and program director for U-M’s WUOM FM. Cacioppo’s imagination appeared with Bestiary I, Eingang (1961). Thereafter he made one unique work after another, some so different from the preceding compositions that the character of his creative continuity was not easily apparent. The 1960s activities of the ONCE Festival were the primary impetus for Ca-

cioppo’s extraordinary creativity during that decade.

During this period, everything he composed was performed by devoted musicians. Cassiopeia (1962) became an immediate classic, partly because of its mysterious but practical map-like score. As the ONCE Festivals continued, something of a fan-club of performers developed, anticipating the rehearsals of his next piece.

Listening through Cacioppo’s music now, many decades later, my memories still hold true. His use of instruments (and voice) is sublime. Each individual instrument plays with indigenous sense, as though he performed it himself. The diverse ensembles of his compositions are translucent and clear-sounding even within relatively complex sound-textures. With the “limits” of sonority inherent in his solo piano pieces—sounds articulated mostly from the keyboard—Cacioppo mysteriously extends the resulting sound-spectrum without exaggerated physical foolishness. Finally, it is Cacioppo’s timeless imagination with the theatrical unfolding of sonorous events and textures that elevates each of his compositions, all of which bear well the passage of time.

Upon his untimely death in 1984, friends and former students established the George Cacioppo Memorial Fund to promote and preserve Cacioppo’s music and provide opportunities for student composers enrolled at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance.

Biography by Gordon Mumma, May 2006.

Gordon Mumma (born 1935) studied horn and piano in Chicago and Detroit following his earliest performing activities as a choral singer. For many years was an active hornist in orchestral and chamber music. His diverse instrumental performances have included the musical saw, cornet, percussion, and bandoneon.

In Ann Arbor, along with Robert Ashley, Mr. Mumma co-founded the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music (1958–66). Also with Ashley, he collaborated in Milton Cohen’s Space Theatre (1957-64), and interacted with a group of creative individuals in art, architecture, theater, and film. He was one of the organizers and performers in the historic ONCE Festival (1961–66). It was from the mid-1950s that he developed circuit-design skills for use in his electronic and live-electronic music.

From 1966 to 1974, with John Cage and David Tudor, Mr. Mumma was a composer-musician with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, for which he composed four commissioned works, including Mesa

PHOTOS: (from top-left to bottom-right): Cacioppo by Donald Scavarda; Ashley by Makepeace Tsao; Ashley by Stephanie Berger; Mumma by Makepeace Tsao; Mumma by unknown; Reynolds by Donald Scavarda; Reynolds by Malcolm Crowthers; Scavarda by Barbara Scavarda; Scavarda by Barbara Scavarda

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Then + Now (from top-left to bottom-right): George Cacioppo, Robert Ashley (1963), Gordon Mumma (1964), Roger Reynolds (1963), and Donald Scavarda (1963).

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(1966) and Telepos (1971). During those years he also performed in the touring Sonic Arts Union with Mr. Ashley, David Behrman, and Alvin Lucier.

Gordon Mumma’s compositions have involved both the electronic media and music for various ensembles of acoustical instruments. Recordings of his music are available from Lovely Music, New World Records, and Tzadik. A 2-CD set of his solo piano music was recorded in 2007 by Daan Vandewalle; a co-production by New World Records and HR2 Frankfurt.

From 1975 to 1994, Mr. Mumma was professor of music at the University of California. In 2000 he received the Biennial Award of the New York City Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Since 2002 he has lived in both British Columbia and California.

Roger Reynolds’ (born 1934) life was marked from the beginning by interplay between the imagined and the manifest. Music entered Mr. Reynolds’ life abruptly after a chance encounter with a Vladimir Horowitz recording of Chopin’s A-flat Polonaise which led to piano studies. Eventually, music gave way to the pragmatic attractions of an engineering physics program at the University of Michigan. Life as a systems development engineer in California felt incomplete, though, and he returned to Michigan to study music. Only at the “advanced” age of 25 did he understand that composition would be his calling.

Two inspirational teachers guided his studies: American Ross Lee Finney and Spanish expatriate Roberto Gerhard. Both had studied with Second Viennese masters (Berg and Schoenberg, respectively). Mr. Reynolds sought out creative perspectives of a less traditional sort, making contact with Varèse, Cage, Partch, and later Nancarrow. While still in Ann Arbor, Mr. Reynolds was a co-founder of the ONCE Group. He and his flutist partner, Karen, embarked on seven years of European and Asian travel with Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller support. Returning to the US in 1969, Mr. Reynolds assumed a tenured position at the University of California, San Diego Department of Music. The Reynolds have collaboratively undertaken a series of new music presentations including the Séances de travail at Paris’ American Students and Artists Center, CROSS TALK in Tokyo, The Pacific Ring Festival in La Jolla, Xenakis @ UCSD, and, in 2010, CHANGES:seasons in Washington, DC. Immediately after settling in La Jolla, Mr. Reynolds’ secured funds (in 1971) from the Rockefeller Foundation to launch the Center for Music Experiment at

UCSD. Existing international relationships were now woven into his southern California existence: composers Xenakis, Cage, Takemitsu, Nancarrow, Feldman, and Babbitt visited; Harry Partch was already living in San Diego.

The technological thread re-emerged in the late 1970s when John Chowning invited Mr. Reynolds to Stanford’s CCRMA summer courses in computer music. Shortly thereafter, Ircam offered a commission and extended residency. Thus began a decades-long interaction with the Parisian center—dedicated to an integrated engagement with technological and musical innovation. This interaction spurred the integration of computational faculty and resources into UCSD’s Music Department.

Roger Reynolds’ work has frequently addressed distinctive architecture (Arata Isozaki’s Art Tower Mito, Louis I. Kahn’s Salk Institute, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, Christian de Portzamparc’s Cité de la musique, and Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall), and has involved collaboration with conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Robertson, Seiji Ozawa, Ralph Shapey, Gunther Schuller, and Leonard Slatkin, with ensembles including Ensemble InterContemporain, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Ensemble Recherche, Alarm Will Sound, Court-Circuit, The Paul Dresher Ensemble, the Group for Contemporary Music, The New York New Music Ensemble, choreographers Lucinda Childs and Bill T. Jones, and a career-long relationship with Irvine Arditti and his String Quartet. (Mr. Reynolds has recently completed a fourth string quartet for this ensemble entitled not forgotten.)

Roger Reynolds’ life has also involved collaborations with poets, among them John Ashbery (Whispers Out of Time, a string orchestra work inspired by an Ashbery poem which garnered him the 1989 Pulitzer Prize) and inventor-philosopher, Buckminster Fuller.

Mr. Reynolds continues to be a sought-after mentor, presenting master classes at the major North American universities and at prestigious international centers including the National Conservatory in Beijing, the Sibelius Academy, the Paris Conservatoire, and at Ircam, and Darmstadt.

C.F. Peters, New York, publishes Roger Reynolds’ music exclusively and it is widely represented on record labels in North America and abroad. The Library of Congress established The Roger Reynolds Special Collection in 1998 and supports an extensive website detailing his work. He is the author of Mind Models: New Forms of Music Experience (1975; second edition, 2000 ) and Form and Method: Composing Mu-

sic (2002). Writing about the première of his ILLUSION at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed described him as “an all-around sonic visionary.” The Washington Post termed the National Gallery of Art’s presentation of his Sanctuary in 2007, a “once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Donald Scavarda (born 1928) is a native of Iron Mountain, Michigan. He earned a Masters degree in musical composition at the University of Michigan where he studied with Ross Lee Finney. In 1953, Mr. Scavarda received a Fulbright Scholarship for study in Hamburg, Germany. One year later BMI Inc. of New York awarded him the 1953 “First Prize” for his Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra.

During the summer of 1960, Donald Scavarda cofounded the ONCE Festival of Musical Premieres and in the succeeding years produced a series of groundbreaking works. His most recent compositions reflect the influence of his work in the visual arts. He works and resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

L-R: Gordon Mumma with visiting composer Morton Feldman, ONCE Festival (1964).

PHOTO: (Below) Donald Scavarda

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Title page to 1963 ONCE Catalog of compositions, installations, and films.

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ONCE THEN / ONCE NOW Artist + Ensemble Biographies The Creative Arts Orchestra is one of the many courses and ensembles offered by the Program in Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation at the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance. Utilizing strings, double-reeds, and instruments more commonly associated with improvised music, the Creative Arts Orchestra’s musical horizons encompass jazz, rock, contemporary concert music, and a myriad of ethnically influenced music, as well as collaborations with dancers, poets, and actors. While part of the ensemble’s programming includes compositions of students and faculty, the 20–25 member group is one of the very few ensembles of its size in the world which performs entirely improvised concerts, with no parameters set forth in advance. The group presents several concerts per year of this nature. The Creative Arts Orchestra has performed at New York’s Knitting Factory (with Gregg Bendian as featured soloist), the Detroit Jazz Festival, the International Association of Jazz Educators Chicago conference, the Eastman School of Music, Cornell University, and Humber College.

Students from music, art, engineering, and dance make up the Digital Music Ensemble (DME) directed by Stephen Rush.

Students work to collaborate in the creation of new work or perform innovative/new works from the past. The DME has given works of varying content and approach, and has achieved a remarkable reputation in just over a decade, performing at neighboring institutions, festivals, and abroad. The DME has premièred works by composers La Monte Young, John Cage, and Philip Glass, as well as performing and recording with Pauline Oliveros and “Blue” Gene Tyranny.

A graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy, Kyle Acuncius (percussion) received his bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music, his master’s degree from Indiana University (where he was an Associate Instructor of Percussion), and is currently pursuing a specialist’s degree in percussion as well as receiving a second master’s in chamber music literature from U-M. He has served as principal percussionist of the Terre Haute Symphony Orchestra and is currently section percussionist with the Ann Arbor Symphony. Mr. Acuncius can be heard on the Eastman Wind Ensemble’s release Manhattan Music, featuring the Canadian Brass, and also on the Interlochen Percussion Ensemble’s self-titled album.

Roger Arnett (technical director) has served as the media engineer for the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance since 1978.

He has worked with a wide range of artists including composers George Crumb and Karlheinz Stockhausen, film producer Robert Altman, conductor Leonard Bernstein, jazz legends Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Taylor, and Bob James, blues singers Sippie Wallace and Leon Redbone, and Marcel Marceau.

Andrew Bishop (director, Ann Arbor Improvisation Collective) is a versatile multi-instrumentalist (saxophone, clarinet, flute), composer, improviser, educator, and scholar comfortable in a wide array of musical idioms. He maintains an active national and international career and serves as an assistant professor of jazz and contemporary improvisation at U-M where he teaches applied jazz saxophone, composition, and improvisation. Mr. Bishop’s two recordings as a leader, Time and Imaginary Time and the Hank Williams Project (Envoi Recordings), received widespread critical acclaim. He leads a variety of projects including a jazz trio Bishop/Cleaver/Flood; a roots chamber ensemble, Andrew Bishop’s Hank Williams Project; a mainstream jazz group, the Andrew Bishop Quartet; and a global blues project called Blue Origami. As a composer and arranger, he has received over 20 commissions from professional organizations and universities. He has also received recognition and awards from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP); The Chicago Symphony Orchestra; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and a nomination from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Melissa Bosma (oboe) is pursuing a master’s degree in oboe performance with Nancy Ambrose King. She received her bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Southern Methodist University where she studied with Erin Hannigan. Ms. Bosma was recently a semi-finalist for the Texas Young Artists Competition.

Chad Burrow (clarinet) was appointed to the U-M faculty in 2009.

He is the winner of prizes and awards from the 2001 Young Concert Artist International Competition in New York City, the 2000 Woolsey Hall Competition, the 2000 Artist International Competition, and the 1997 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition.

The former principal clarinetist of the Oklahoma City Philharmonic and the New Haven Symphony, Mr. Burrow was also associate professor of clarinet at the Wanda L. Bass School of Music at Oklahoma City University. In 2007, he was also named principal clarinet of the Quartz Mountain Music Festival, clarinetist for Camerata Pangaea, instructor at the Alpen Kammermusik Festival, and Artist/Clinician for Buffet Crampon, USA. Mr. Burrow appears in concerts internationally.

Jeremy Crosmer (cello, ONCE Quartet) is a doctoral student at U-M, studying cello with Richard Aaron. He is also studying composition as a masters student under Paul Schoenfield. Mr. Crosmer is an avid performer of new music and has premièred over 30 works in addition to his own compositions. Last year his work for string quartet and electronics, Chrysalis Infinitum, was premièred at U-M. Please refer to page 29 for a biography of Michael Daugherty.

John Ellis (piano) is associate professor of piano and chair of the piano department at U-M. He is in demand, nationally and internationally, as a master class clinician, adjudicator, and lecturer on piano pedagogy. His recent travels have taken him to the University of South Florida, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland, and Hawaii. As a pianist, Mr. Ellis has performed

as soloist, lecture-recitalist, and collaborative artist in New York City (Weill Recital Hall, Steinway Hall), Rutgers University, SUNY Purchase, Notre Dame University, Montclair Museum of Art, the University of Helsinki, and the Sibelius Academy (Finland), and Freiburg in Breisgau (Germany). He has recorded the piano music of Arthur Cunningham.

Daniel Gilbert (clarinet) joined the U-M faculty as associate professor of clarinet in 2007. Previously, he held the position of second clarinet in the Cleveland Orchestra from 1995–2007.

Mr. Gilbert teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and also served as the associate professor of clarinet at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music from 2000–2001. A native of New York City, Mr. Gilbert received a BA from Yale University and both a MM degree and a professional studies certificate from The Juilliard School. Before joining the Cleveland Orchestra, Mr. Gilbert was active as a freelancer in New York City, appearing regularly with groups including The Metropolitan Opera, American Ballet Theater, New Jersey Symphony, Solisti New York, the Stamford Symphony, and the New Haven Symphony, where he played principal clarinet from 1992–1995. He has appeared as soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Heights Chamber Orchestra, the Suburban Symphony Orchestra, the New Haven Symphony, Solisti New York, and the Aspen Mozart Orchestra. He is an active chamber musician, playing regularly on the Cleveland Orchestra Chamber Series, the Cleveland Museum of Art Chamber Series, and the Oberlin Chamber Music series. Mr. Gilbert’s master classes and recitals have received critical acclaim throughout the world.

Daniel Goldblum (contrabasson) is an undergraduate bassoon performance major at U-M. He maintains a career as an electric bassoon soloist and an improviser between Ann Arbor and Los Angeles, his home town.

Joseph Gramley (percussion) is a professor of music at the University of Michigan and director of the university’s famed Percussion Ensemble. Mr. Gramley’s dynamic and exciting performances as a soloist have garnered critical acclaim and enthusiasm from emerging composers, percussion aficionados, and first-time concert-goers alike. He is committed to bringing fresh and inventive compositions to a broad public and often commissions and premières new works. His first solo recording, American Deconstruction, an expert rendition of five milestone works in multi-percussion’s huge new modern repertoire, appeared in 2000 and was reissued in 2006. His second CD, Global Percussion, was released in 2005. An invitation from Yo-Yo Ma in 2000 led Mr. Gramley to join Mr. Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. In addition to participating in the group’s extended residencies in cities across the globe, he has toured with Mr. Ma and the Ensemble throughout the world. This past season, Mr. Gramley was the featured guest artist for both the New York and Alabama Days of Percussion sponsored by the Percussive Arts Society.

Daniel Graser (saxophone) is currently a doctoral teaching assistant at U-M studying with Donald Sinta. Mr. Graser earned

Pia Eva Greiner (cello) studied with professors Jan-Ype Nota and Michel Strauss at the Prins Claus conservatory in the Netherlands beginning in 2001. During this period she won several national competitions. Ms. Greiner is continuing studies at U-M with professor Richard Aaron where she graduated with her master’s degree in May 2010.

David Jackson (trombone) was featured soloist at several recent engagements, including performances at Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic in Chicago, Music at Gretna in Mt. Gretna, PA, and with the Ann Arbor Concert Band. He was also guest soloist with the Los Angeles Symphonic Winds, both in Los Angeles and at the MidEurope Festival in Schladming, Austria. Other recent solo performances include the Interlochen World Youth Wind Symphony and with the Idyllwild Festival Wind Ensemble at Disney Hall in Los Angeles. An advocate of new music, Mr. Jackson has commissioned and performed the world premières of numerous works for the trombone. He is a Conn-Selmer artist and clinician.

Fritz Kaenzig (tuba) has served as principal tubist of the Florida Symphony Orchestra and as additional or substitute tubist with Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and the symphony orchestras of Detroit, San Francisco, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and St. Louis, under such conductors as Bernstein, Haitink, Leinsdorf, Ozawa, Salonen, and Slatkin. He has recorded and performed as soloist with several of these orchestras, as well as appearing as soloist with the US Air Force and Navy Bands. Since 1984, Mr. Kaenzig has been principal tubist in the Grant Park (Chicago) Orchestra during summers, which has played to capacity audiences since moving to the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park in 2005. Mr. Kaenzig has performed in ensembles accompanying artists as widely varied as Alan Ginsberg, Luciano Pavarotti, and the Moody Blues.

Nancy Ambrose King (oboe) is the first-prize winner of the Third New York International Competition for Solo Oboists, held in 1995. She has appeared as soloist throughout the US and abroad, including performances with the St. Petersburg, Russia, Philharmonic, the Janácˇek Philharmonic, the Tokyo Chamber Orchestra, the Puerto Rico Symphony, the Orchestra of the Swan in Birmingham, England, the Festival Internacionale de Musica Orchestra in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the New York String Orchestra, Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, and Sinfonia da Camera. She has performed as recitalist in Weill Recital Hall and as soloist at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. She has recorded three CDs for Boston Records, two for the British la-

bel Cala Records, and one with Naxos Records. She will soon release recordings of the Jennifer Higdon Oboe Concerto with the U-M Symphony Band, and the works of Dutilleux for oboe.

Ms. King was a finalist in the Fernand Gillet Oboe Competition held in Graz, Austria, and has been heard as soloist on WQXR radio in New York City and NPR’s Performance Today. She has appeared as an international recitalist and was a member of the jury for the esteemed 2009 Barbirolli Oboe Competition.

Mark Kirschenmann (director, Creative Arts Orchestra) whose pioneering live electric trumpet performances are internationally acclaimed, is a composer, performer and scholar of creative improvisation. He is also the creative force behind the band E3Q (blockmrecords.org), an eclectic jazz-influenced trio with his wife, cellist Katri Ervamaa, and percussionist Michael Gould. Most recently, he released the solo album entitled This Electric Trumpet (sonikmannrecords.com), recorded with the Nashville-based electronica duo Sub-ID and has appeared with pianist Thollem McDonas, bassist Henry Grimes, flutist Nicole Mitchell, cornetist Rob Mazurek’s Sao Paulo Underground, saxophonists Oliver Lake and Arthur Blythe, and pianist Iiro Rantala of Trio Töykeät. As a composer and writer, he explores the confluence of composition and improvisation. He has published articles on Messiaen’s use of improvisation as a compositional technique, and on new approaches to melodic jazz improvisation. He is on the faculty at U-M, where he shares his time between the School of Music (Jazz) and the Residential College. He also directs U-M’s Creative Arts Orchestra, an innovative, creative improvisation ensemble, and the Michigan Youth Jazz Ensemble. Mr. Kirschenmann holds PhD degrees in composition and music theory from U-M and lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and their three children.

Cary Kocher (percussion) trained at U-M under Michael Udow, the late Charles Owen, and Salvatore Rabbio. He has a diverse performing schedule that includes work with the Ann Arbor Symphony and other area orchestras. He has a weekly gig with Latin jazz group Los Gatos, and plays drums with the Easy Street Jazz Band. He co-leads a classic vibraphone quartet with bassist Paul Keller, provides vibes for Dave Bennett’s tribute to Benny Goodman, and plays drums and sings with Espresso. As a middle school music teacher in Ann Arbor, Mr. Kocher adjudicates at jazz festivals and clinics, directed the Gold Jazz Ensemble at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp for several years, and teaches jazz vibes and drums at U-M. Yi-Ting Kuo (violin, ONCE Quartet) was born and raised in Taiwan. Currently, she is a doctoral student at U-M, studying with Yehonatan Berick.

Composer Kristin Kuster (piano) “writes commandingly for the orchestra,” and her music “has an invitingly tart edge” (The New York Times). Professor Kuster’s colorfully enthralling compositions take inspiration from architectural space, the weather, and mythology. American Composers Orchestra

(ACO) commissioned and premièred her Myrrha for voices and orchestra in Carnegie Hall in May 2006. Her orchestral work The Narrows won the top prize of ACO’s Underwood Emerging Composer Commission in the ACO’s 2004 Whitaker New Music Readings. Ms. Kuster earned her DMA from U-M and divides her time residing in both Ann Arbor and New York City. Ms. Kuster joined the faculty of the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance as assistant professor of composition in 2008.

Christopher James Lees (conductor) has appeared in concert with the National Arts Centre Orchestra (Ottawa, Canada), Ensemble Orchestral de Paris (Vendome, France), Cabrillo Festival Orchestra (Santa Cruz, CA), Cleveland Heights Chamber Orchestra, and the Michigan Sinfonietta. In 2007 he made his debut in South America with a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 at the Festival Internacional de Inverno de Campos do Jordao (Brazil). As only the second American conductor selected for the Zander Conducting Fellowship with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, Mr. Lees assisted conductor Benjamin Zander in performances with the Boston Philharmonic, Ulster, and London Philharmonia orchestras. Mr. Lees received the 2009 Arts Alive Award for Rising Star Young Artist while serving as associate conductor for the Akron Symphony Orchestra and has worked with musicians including Lorin Maazel, Pinchas Zuckerman, Marin Alsop, and Gustav Meier.

A dedicated advocate for contemporary American music, Mr. Lees has given première performances of numerous orchestral and chamber works, founded a Composer-in-Residence program as music director of the Akron Youth Symphony, and served as associate conductor of the Boston-based Juventas New Music Ensemble. He holds a master’s degree from U-M, where he studied with Kenneth Kiesler.

Sam Livingston (percussion) is currently a senior at U-M where he pursues undergraduate studies with Joseph Gramley, Michael Udow, Cary Kocher, Ian Ding, and Brian Jones. He is a native of Madison, WI, and has performed as a soloist with the Concord Chamber Orchestra in Milwaukee.

Jeffrey Lyman (bassoon) has established himself as one of the première performers, teachers, and historians of the bassoon in the US. He has been associate professor of bassoon at U-M since 2006, and, prior to that, held positions at Arizona State University and Bowling Green State University. He has been a member of numerous orchestras across the country and has performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the Opera Company of Philadelphia, the Savannah Symphony, the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, the Grand Rapids Symphony, and the Michigan Opera Theater. Mr. Lyman has frequently appeared on the international festival circuit, most notably at the Moscow Autumn Festival, the Festival dei Due Mondi (Spoleto, Italy), Académie Européene d’Été de Musique (Tournon, France), Colorado Music Festival, Vermont Mozart Festival, Bellingham Music Festival, Saint Bart’s Music Festival (French West Indies), and the Chamber Music Conference and Composers’ Forum of the East at Bennington

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a master’s degree from U-M and bachelor’s degrees in music theory/history and saxophone performance as a student of Dr. Timothy McAllister at the Crane School of Music. He has performed twice as soloist with the U-M Symphony Band and was a two-time finalist in the U-M Concerto Competition. At the invitation of music director Michael Tilson Thomas, Mr. Graser is saxophone fellow at the New World Symphony during the current 10/11 season.

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College. He performs annually at the conferences of the International Double Reed Society and is a popular clinician at bassoon master classes. Mr. Lyman is also known as an author and advocate of new music, and has many publications and commissions to his credit, including works by Yuri Kasparov, John Steinmetz, John Allemeier, David Gompper, Bill Douglas, and Kathryn Hoover. His article After Shostakovich, What Next?, an annotated bibliography of recent music by Moscow composers, helped to spread that repertory around the world.

Stacie Mickens (French horn) is currently pursuing her doctorate of musical arts at U-M. She previously served on the music faculty at Luther College in Decorah, IA, and at Winona State University in Winona, MN, where she was a horn and brass instructor and chamber music coach. In addition to her teaching, she is a frequent solo recitalist and chamber music participant.

Her primary teachers include Adam Unsworth, Douglas Hill, Bryan Kennedy, and Michael Gast.

Hoi Yue Ng (viola, ONCE Quartet), started playing the violin at the age of six and in 2005 was awarded Fellowship of Trinity College London (in violin). Born and raised in Hong Kong, Hoi Yue won numerous prizes at the annual Hong Kong Schools’ Music Festival. Hoi Yue is currently an undergraduate pursuing a dual degree in viola performance and biology at U-M. Three-time international prize-winning flutist Amy Porter (flutes) has been acclaimed by major critics as an exciting and inspiring American artist who matches “her fine controlled playing to a commanding, sensual stage presence.” Ms. Porter first leapt to international attention winning the Kobe International Flute Competition in Japan, which led to invitations to perform throughout the world. She is a touring concert artist who performs recitals in the major concert halls of Asia and the US with pianist Christopher Harding. She has performed internationally as concerto soloist with orchestras and has been heard in recital on NPR and highlighted on PBS’s Live From Lincoln Center.

Recently, Ms. Porter has had four world-première commissions composed for her. In 2010, Carl Fischer Publishing produced and released her latest DVD, The ABC’s of Flute Playing for the Absolute Beginner, with Larry Clark, Vice President, Editorin-Chief of Carl Fischer Music. This year she will visit Slovenia for the 8th Slovenian Flute Festival, Brazil for the International Flute Festival, the Oklahoma Flute Society, the Texas Flute Society, Classic Chamber Concerts in Naples, Florida, the National Flute Association Convention in Anaheim, and participated in the 2010 ARIA International Summer Academy.

Theresa Prokes (violin) began studying the violin at the age of four at Buffalo Suzuki Strings. In the Buffalo area she has appeared as a soloist with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Ars Nova Chamber Orchestra, the Clarence Summer Orchestra, and the Amherst Symphony Orchestra. She is currently pursuing a master’s in violin performance at U-M with Yehonatan Berick.

Please refer to page 54 for a biography of Steven Rush.

Anna Skálová (violin, ONCE Quartet), native of the Czech Republic, started playing the violin at the age of four. In 2007 she participated in the New York String Orchestra Seminar as assistant concertmaster and in 2009 she won “First Prize” in the American String Teachers Association Competition in Atlanta. She is a senior at U-M studying with Stephen Shipps. Ms. Skálová has played concerts in Germany, Italy, France, Poland, the US, and Singapore and has participated in master classes with Shlomo Mintz, Rugierro Ricci and Jacques Israelievitch.

One of America’s most versatile tenors and enlightened musicians, George Shirley (narrator) remains in demand nationally and internationally as performer, teacher, and lecturer. He has won international acclaim for his performances with the Metropolitan Opera and with major opera houses and festivals internationally. Mr. Shirley has recorded for the RCA, Columbia, Decca, Angel, Vanguard, C.R.I, Capriccio, Philips, and Albany labels; he received a Grammy Award in 1968 for his role (Ferrando) in the RCA recording of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. He has performed more than 80 operatic roles over the span of his 51year career, as well as oratorio and concert literature with some of the world’s most renowned orchestras and conductors. He was the first black tenor and second African-American male to sing leading roles with the Metropolitan Opera, where he remained for 11 years as leading artist. He was the first black high school vocal music teacher in the Detroit Public Schools and the first black member of the US Army Chorus in Washington, DC. Mr. Shirley is The Joseph Edgar Maddy Distinguished University Emeritus Professor of Music and Director Emeritus of the Vocal Arts Division of the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance.

Before coming to U-M, Adam Unsworth (French horn) served as fourth horn of The Philadelphia Orchestra from 1998– 2007.

Prior to his appointment in Philadelphia, he spent three years as second horn of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He also served as a guest principal horn with the St. Louis Symphony as well as principal horn of the Colorado Music Festival. A former faculty member at Temple University, he has appeared at many universities throughout the US as a recitalist and clinician. Mr. Unsworth recorded Jazz Set for Solo Horn (2001) as part of Thoughtful Wanderings, a compilation of Hill’s works for horn. In 2006, he released his first jazz CD entitled Excerpt This!, which features five of his original compositions for jazz sextet and three unaccompanied works.

Ming-Hsiu Yen (piano), a native Taiwanese, is an active composer and pianist. Her compositions have been played by the Minnesota Orchestra, YinQi Symphony Orchestra and Choir (Taiwan), University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, and by the PRISM Saxophone Quartet, Brave New Works, and OSSIA. She has been the winner of the Heckscher Composition Prize, the governmental Literary and Artistic Creation Competition (Taiwan), Sun River Composition Competition (China), and League of Composers/ISCM-USA Competition, and has re-

ceived commission awards from the Hanson Institute for American Music, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, New Music Project, and Asia Trombone Seminar. Her music has been recorded on the Innova and Blue Griffin Recording labels. Ms. Yen is currently on the faculty at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, teaching music composition.

PHOTO: Will Calcutt/Andrea Steves

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Andrea Steves’ PAT undergraduate thesis performance.

WELCOME

by Mary H. Simoni, University of Michigan associate dean for research and community engagement, professor of performing arts technology

25th Anniversary of the U-M Center for Performing Arts Technology Friday, November 5, 2010, 11:00 am–6:45 pm University of Michigan North Campus Ann Arbor Free and open to the public.

I am intrigued by the irony of it all. Twenty-five years after ONCE, the regents of the University of Michigan inaugurated the Center for Performing Arts & Technology (CPAT). What happened after ONCE that laid the foundation for CPAT? The simple answer is the persistent, visionary leadership of Paul Boylan and the unwavering support of James Duderstadt. By the time I arrived in Ann Arbor in 1986 from the Berklee College of Music, Paul and James had already sown the seeds for that first planting. My job, as I saw it, was to cultivate the fields that seemed bound only by human imagination and technological prowess. No one really knew exactly what that first harvest might bring.

By now, we know.

PHOTO: Makepeace Tsao

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Mary Ashley amongst Space Theatre projection screens (August 1964).

U-M CENTER FOR PERFORMING ARTS TECHNOLOGY 25TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION / FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5

SCHEDULE 11:00 am–12 noon Mobile Phones for Musical Performance Design Lab #1, Duderstadt Center 2281 Bonisteel Boulevard This workshop explores how current mobile smart phones such as Apple Computer’s iPhone can be used as musical instruments. We will investigate urMus, a platform that allows us to define what kinds of musical instruments we want to use and how they should sound. Along the way, we will explore what music-making with mobile devices means and think about playing in a mobile ensemble. Far beyond playing ring tones and mp3 songs, this workshop will focus on how to create new ways to play, perform, and enjoy music. Led

by Georg Essl.

12 noon–1:00 pm Lunch Break 1:00–1:55 pm Timbral Sensitivity: Developing Aural Skills for Electronic Music Composition and Sound Recording Audio Studio, Duderstadt Center Timbre can be described as the tone quality or texture of sound. Since timbre is used as a means for artistic expression in the fields of electronic music composition and sound recording, a heightened sensitivity to timbre and the sonic effects of audio equipment are required for composers and engineers. This workshop will explore some of the aural skills that are addressed through technical ear training. Led by Jason Corey.

2:00–2:55 pm Integrating Emerging Technologies and Music Performance Teleconference Room, Duderstadt Center This workshop will investigate new technologies being used by composers and performers and explores how these tools have influenced modern music. The session will include live performance, demonstrations, as well as a brief historical look at technology’s role in music performance. Led by Jeremy Edwards and Tim Flood.

3:00–3:55 pm the questions that tempt the sleeper A play by Shannon Dowd and Mary Simoni featuring the Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble Georg Essl, Director Video Studio, Duderstadt Center

Mary Simoni and PAT students, Music and Sound Design the questions that tempt the sleeper is composed of three interwoven monologues, each centered on different methods of enquiry in the moments between sleep and wakefulness. Each monologue employs a set of musical and literary devices that reference the history of the art while suggesting a unique interaction of the literary and performing arts. The mobile phone ensemble becomes a modern-day chorus, while contemporary dance and theater inform motifs drawn from literary modernism and surrealism. Ultimately, however, the piece seeks to draw insight from the moments in which we are made aware of ourselves and others, of searching and loss, as inspired by Virginia Woolf, from whose novel To the Lighthouse the title is derived.

4:00–6:00 pm Reception Studio 2, Walgreen Drama Center 1226 Murfin Celebrate the 25th Anniversary of U-M’s Center for Performing Arts Technology 6:00–6:45 pm Gypsy Pond Music XII: An Interactive Installation by the Digital Music Ensemble Stephen Rush, Director “The Pond,” East side of the Earl V. Moore Building The Digital Music Ensemble celebrates the 12th year of Gypsy Pond Music, based on a story about Stephen Rush. Visiting Hungary and longing to hear Gypsy music, Mr. Rush went to cafés and roamed the streets only to be disappointed. After two weeks of searching, he decided to take the train. There, at the train station, he heard a two-hour impromptu concert of authentic Gypsy music. As John Cage noted, “Music is (indeed!) all around us, if only we had ears to hear.”

Students from music, art, engineering, and dance studies enroll in the Digital Music Ensemble. The students create a site-specific work on “The Pond” that is inspired by their deep and personal encounter with these stories and traditions. The Digital Music Ensemble has recorded with Pauline Oliveros and “Blue” Gene Tyranny, and has premièred works by Philip Glass, John Cage, and La Monte Young.

25th Anniversary Celebration Artist Biographies As associate professor and chair of the department of performing arts technology, Jason Corey teaches and conducts research in the areas of sound recording and production, technical ear training, and multichannel audio. He recently published Audio Production and Critical Listening: Technical Ear Training (Focal Press/ Elsevier). He is a member of the Audio Engineering Society, the Acoustical Society of America, the International Computer Music Association, and the Society for Music Perception and Cognition.

Jeremy Edwards is a drummer/percussionist, recording engineer, composer, and educator. He received a bachelor’s degree in music technology and percussion and a master’s degree in improvisation from U-M. Mr. Edwards has actively toured the US and Canada performing original music and continues to perform locally with rock, jazz, and experimental music groups. He works for the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance as a music and multimedia computer specialist.

Georg Essl, assistant professor in computer science and performing arts technology at the University of Michigan, holds a PhD in computer science from Princeton University. He is founder and director of the Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble and has also helped co-found and co-direct the Stanford University and Berlin Mobile Phone Orchestras. His current research in mobile phones as musical instruments is motivated by his belief that the joy of music-making should be accessible to all people and inventing new expressive technologies are essential to this goal.

Tim Flood is a composer, improvisor, and programmer specializing in live interactive electronic performance.

Currently, he is a lecturer of performing arts and technology at the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance.

He has also taught electronic music and media courses at Alma College, and bass performance at Albion College. Mr. Flood has recorded a critically acclaimed CD entitled Bodies and Soul (CIMP) with free-jazz legends Frank Lowe and Charles Moffett.

Please refer to page 54 for a biography of Stephen Rush.

Please refer to page 54 for a biography of Mary Simoni.

PHOTO: Makepeace Tsao

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51 ONCE. MORE. SYMPOSIUM / WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3

Milton Cohen’s Space Theatre, Ann Arbor.

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U-M Center for Performing Arts Technology 25th Anniversary Concert Michael Coletti, Percussion Dane Crozier, Percussion Katri Ervamaa, Cello Arthur Greene, Piano Andy Kirshner, Video Projections and Sound Design Stephen Rush, Piano Solomia Soroka, Violin

Written, Composed, and Directed by Andy Kirshner

Connect the Dots

Jennifer Furr

peacock blue for loudspeakers

Erik Santos

KATA-KATA for Percussion Duo and Recorded Sound Mr. Coletti, Mr. Crozier

Intermission

Saturday, November 6, 2010 at 8:00 pm Rackham Auditorium 915 East Washingtong Street Ann Arbor

Mary Simoni

Piano Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello with Electronics

Free and open to the public.

Roger Arnett, Technical Director

Movement I Movement II Movement III

Stephen Rush

Ms. Ervamaa, Mr. Greene, Ms. Soroka

BukMix for Computer and Piano Mr. Rush

Connect the Dots Andy Kirshner

Program note by Andy Kirshner.

peacock blue for loudspeakers (2010) Jennifer Furr

KATA-KATA for Percussion Duo and Recorded Sound (2005) Erik Santos KATA-KATA for percussion duo was written for Eric and Stacey Jones (aka Equal Temperament Percussion Duo) for the 2005 Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Columbus, Ohio. Kata-kata is the name of a particular style of Japanese rattle that is used to brighten a child’s spirit when they are sad or scared.

In the darkness, a voice whispers in Japanese: “Now it begins. Don’t forget, you don’t have to be afraid...” The text was written and spoken by Toko Shiiki.

Program note by Erik Santos.

Piano Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello with Electronics (2009–10) Mary Simoni Piano Trio is a three-movement work that explores the number five and its relationship to the fingers of the human hand. The technological premise of the piece correlates the grouping of five with a device known as the

Program note by Mary Simoni.

BukMix for Computer and Piano (2001) Stephen Rush Programming by Greg Syrjala Bukmix is another installation in my lifelong fascination with poet Charles Bukowski (madman? genius? drunk?). It is especially fitting for the ONCE. MORE. Festival to feature Bukowski, since his publisher, Black Sparrow Press, had deep connections to Ann Arbor in the 1960s.

The text from BukMix is taken from Bukowski’s readings from Ham On Rye, his autobiography (of sorts). The texts reflect deeply felt hatred of his parents’ friends, a stifling father, and a search for deep beauty amid dysfunction. These things all rang sadly true for me as well, hence my sordid interest in these particular quotes from Ham On Rye. The quotes are “fed” to the performer—as well as to the audience—in chapters, or families. Each chapter has a short pre-written composition (á la Well-Tuned Piano by La Monte Young). The performer then plays the written work, followed with improvisation based on the composition. The improvisation is definitely inspired, as well, by “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s work. “Blue” was originally known as Robert Scheff, a member of the ONCE Group. The text and the improvisation (piano-music) are manipulated by a computer running MAX/MSP, programmed by my lifelong friend and collaborator, Greg Syrjala, an engineer from Rochester, New York.

All told, the performance is an integrated environment with “computer mitigation” certainly, but an opportunity for the audience member as well as the performer to reflect on his or her childhood, and contemplate one’s own journey, both the pluses and minuses. All things in balance.

Program note by Stephen Rush.

Artist Biographies Please refer to page 44 for a biography of Roger Arnett.

Finnish-born cellist Katri Ervamaa, DMA, is a versatile performer who specializes in chamber music, new music, and creative improvisation. Her current groups include the Muse String Trio, Brave New Works new music ensemble, and E3Q, an improvisation-based genre-defying trio with her husband Mark Kirschenmann and percussionist Michael Gould. She is on the faculty at U-M’s Residential College where she is the head of the music program. Ms. Ervamaa is a mother of three and lives in Ann Arbor with her family.

Jennifer Blair Furr holds a DMA in composition from the University of Michigan where she was a Regents Fellow. Her works have won awards from SCI/ASCAP, IAWM, and have been performed at ICMC, the U-M Electronic Music Studios Microfestivals, and the Aspen Music Festival. Most recently her work has been featured on WCBN’s radio show Special Ed. Ms. Furr is currently a lecturer in the University of Michigan department of performing arts and technology.

Born in New York, Arthur Greene studied at Juilliard with Martin Canin. Mr. Greene was a Gold Medal winner in the William Kapell and Gina Bachauer International Piano Competitions, and a top laureate at the Busoni International Competition. He performed the complete solo piano works of Johannes Brahms in a series of six programs in Boston, and recorded the complete etudes of Alexander Scriabin for Supraphon. He has performed the 10-sonata cycle of Alexander Scriabin in Sofia, Kiev, and Salt Lake City. He has recorded together with his wife, the violinist Solomia Soroka, the Violin-Piano Sonatas of William Bolcom and the ViolinPiano Sonatas of Nikolai Roslavets, both for Naxos. He gave the Ann Arbor première of John Corigliano’s Piano Concerto with the University Symphony Orchestra, Kenneth Kiesler conducting, in February 2006.

Andy Kirshner is a composer, writer, performer, and filmmaker who makes hybrid performances and musical films. An associate professor at U-M, Mr. Kirshner is jointly appointed by the School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and the School of Art & Design. His work has been commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts, Artserve Michigan, Meet the Composer, and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust.

53 U-M CENTER FOR PERFORMING ARTS TECHNOLOGY 25TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT / SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 6

Connect the Dots is the first completed scene from a feature film that I am currently developing, entitled Liberty’s Secret: The National Security Musical. It is the story of Liberty Smith, an aspiring star of “Christ-centered musical comedy,” who becomes vice-president of the US. When innocent young Liberty stumbles onto a shocking government secret, she’s confronted by the full force of American Power—and only the teamwork of a family-values preacher and a lesbian biker gang can save her. The development of the project has been supported by the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan. For further information, please visit www.libertysecretmovie.com.

Hot Hand. This device contains technology that senses human motion and transmits the data wirelessly to a receiver connected to a computer. The computer analyzes the data from the Hot Hand and responds by creating a sonic signature that corresponds to the speed and trajectory of the human hand. The composer modified the Hot Hand from its original form as a ring to a bracelet that is attached to the bow arm of the violinist and cellist.

U-M CENTER FOR PERFORMING ARTS TECHNOLOGY 25TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT / SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 6

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Stephen Rush has premièred and recorded his classical and jazz compositions worldwide as well co-authored a book on jazz theology, Better Get It In Your Soul. He has performed with Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Grimes, Steve Swell, Eugene Chadbourne, Pauline Oliveros, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, the late Peter Kowald, and his band, Yoganaut. His music has been performed by Leonard Slatkin, Neeme Jaarvi (Detroit Symphony Orchestra) and has been recorded by members of the Cleveland Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.

Erik Santos is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and singer in many musical genres, including rock, classical, electronic, and music for theater and dance.

Awards for his music include the Charles Ives Scholarship and the Charles Ives Fellowship from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), the MacDowell Colony. His recordings can be found on the Naxos American Classics, Centaur, Eroica and Oddfellow labels.

Mary Simoni, associate dean for research and community engagement at the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance, has done post-doctoral studies at the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, the City University of New York Center for Computer Music, and the Mills College Electronic Music Studios. Her music and multimedia works have been performed in Asia, Europe, and widely throughout the US, and have been recorded

by Centaur Records, the Leonardo Music Journal published by the MIT Press, and the International Computer Music Association. She is a recipient of the Computer World Honors Award for her research in digital music information retrieval. Professor Simoni has appeared as a pianist, using live electronics at the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the US and the International Computer Music Association, of which she is a past president. She has authored books, A Gentle Introduction to Algorithmic Composition, published by the University of Michigan, and Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music, published by Routledge. The Knight Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs have funded her research.

Violinist Solomia Soroka, born in L’viv, Ukraine, is among the most accomplished Ukrainian musicians of her generation. She has won top prizes in three prestigious international violin competitions held in the former Soviet Union—the Prokofiev, Lysenko, and Zolota Osin’ competitions. Ms. Soroka earned her master’s degree summa cum laude and completed postgraduate studies at the Kyiv Conservatory later serving on its faculty in the chamber music department. She has a DMA from the Eastman School of Music.

COLLABORATORS, THANK YOUS, + CREDITS MAJOR FUNDING PROVIDED BY Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

ADDITIONAL FUNDING PROVIDED BY George Cacioppo Memorial Fund The Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series of the University of Michigan School of Art & Design University of Michigan Digital Media Commons of the Duderstadt Center University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities University of Michigan Office of the Vice President for Research University Musical Society of the University of Michigan

For Mark Clague’s The Creativity of Community, Sources + Further Reading: Gerhard, Roberto. “Is Modern Music Growing Old?” in Gerhard on Music: Selected Writings, edited by Meirion Bowen (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000).

Finney, Ross Lee. Profile of a Lifetime: A Musical Autobiography (New York: C.F. Peters, 1992).

Interviews by the author with Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, and Donald Scavarda (July 2010).

“International Conference of Composers” in The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (online) at www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com.

James, Richard S. “ONCE: Microcosm of the 1960s Musical and Multimedia Avant-Garde,” American Music 5:4 (Winter, 1987), 359–90.

Miller, Leta. “ONCE and Again: The Evolution of a Legendary Festival,” essay in Music from the ONCE Festival, 1961–1966 (New York: New World Records 80567-2, 2003), 13–104. Note: this 5-cd set of archival ONCE Festival recordings is recommended to those interested in further listening.

Mumma, Gordon. “The Once Festival and How It Happened,” Arts in Society 4:2 (Summer, 1967), 379–98.

Peckham, Howard H. The Making of The University of Michigan, 1917–1992 (Ann Arbor: Bentley Historical Library, 1994).

Reti, Jean. “An International Conference of Composers,” Tempo 55/56 (Autumn-Winter, 1960), 6–7.

Weingarten, Emily. “The Music of ONCE: Perpetual Innovation,” unpublished student paper, 2008.

Credits

COLLABORATORS

Makepeace Tsao’s ONCE photographs courtesy of the Tsao Family.

The Institute for the Humanities is a center for innovative, collaborative study in the humanities and arts. We provide fellowships for Michigan faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars who work on interdisciplinary projects. We also offer a wide array of public and scholarly events, including weekly brown bag talks, public lectures, conferences, art exhibits, and performances. Our mission is to serve as a national and international centerpiece for scholarly research in the humanities and creative work in the arts at the University of Michigan. We exist to deepen synergies between the humanities, the arts and other regions of the university, to carry forward the heritage of the humanities, and to bring the voices of the humanities to public life.

Donald Scavarda photographs courtesy of the composer.

Special thanks to Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, and Donald Scavarda for their time, generosity, and essential contributions to ONCE. MORE. Special thanks to Laura Kuhn, executive director of the John Cage Trust; and Leta Miller, professor of music, University of California, Santa Cruz, for generously allowing the reprinting of her work in this publication.

ONCE. MORE. festival guide co-edited by Mark Jacobson, University Musical Society of the University of Michigan (UMS) and Stephanie Harrell, U–M Institute for the Humanities.

Designed by Savitski Design, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Founded in 1880, the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance is one of the finest performing arts schools in the country. Encompassing programs in dance, music, musical theater, and theater, it is consistently ranked among the nation’s top performing arts schools. Its setting within a highly ranked research university adds to its uniqueness and opens up a breadth and depth

of academic possibilities for its students. The school itself offers a wide range of programs, from traditional to cutting-edge, from primarily performance-based to academically centered.

The faculty is first rate, with active performing careers, yet still very much resident. The School of Music, Theatre & Dance offers its students extraordinary performance opportunities, with more than 450 concerts, recitals, and staged performances presented each year.

One of the oldest performing arts presenters in the country, the University Musical Society of the University of Michigan (UMS) is committed to connecting audiences with performing artists from around the world in uncommon and engaging experiences. With a program steeped in music, dance, and theater, UMS contributes to a vibrant cultural community by presenting approximately 60–75 performances and over 100 free educational activities each season. UMS also commissions new work, sponsors artist residencies, and organizes collaborative projects with local, national, and international partners. While proudly affiliated with the University of Michigan and housed on the U-M campus, UMS is a separate not-for-profit organization that supports itself from ticket sales, grants, contributions, and endowment income.

Please refer to page 34 for information on the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

For further information on additional festival events and exhibits, please visit www.ums.org/ONCE or scan the QR code to the left with your mobile device.

Front Cover (L–R): Roger Reynolds, Donald Scavarda, and George Cacioppo (Ann Arbor, 1963); photo: Bernard Folta.

Gathering of students of Roberto Gerhard (Ann Arbor, 1960) (see page 9 for complete identification of subjects); photo: Donald Scavarda.

ONCE Group at Robert Rauschenberg’s loft (New York, 1965) (see page 35 for complete identification of subjects); photo: Makepeace Tsao.

Back Cover (L–R): Mary Ashley’s famous 1964 ONCE Festival poster. (L–R): Gordon Mumma, Donald Scavarda, George Cacioppo, Robert Ashley, Martina Algire (model).

Outdoor performance of Mary Ashley’s Truck (1963); photo: Makepeace Tsao.

Milton Cohen’s Space Theatre (1964); photo: Makepeace Tsao.

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