Wednesday, December 4, 2019

San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2020 Plans

Poster design for the 2020 festival (from the festival Web site)

Once again the concert season for the new year will get off to a sonorous beginning with the annual San Francisco Tape Music Festival. This remains our country’s only festival devoted to the performance of synthesized audio compositions projected into a three-dimensional space. That space is configured with 24 high-end loudspeakers; and, for many of the performances, the projection of the audio sources onto those speakers is controlled in real-time. The results are experienced by the audience sitting in total darkness. Programming will feature contemporary “fixed media” compositions by eighteen international composers, classics of tape music by Pierre Schaeffer, Pauline Oliveros, and Toru Takemitsu, and a generous survey of works by Bay Area artists. The festival will also pay tribute to two composers that died in 2019, Mario Davidovsky and Ken Nordine, the latter being the pioneer that brought “word jazz” into the domain of tape music.

As in the past, the festival schedule will consist of four concerts over the course of the second weekend in January. Specific dates and times are as follows:
  • Friday, January 10, 8:30 p.m.
  • Saturday, January 11, 7 p.m.
  • Saturday, January 11, 9:30 p.m.
  • Sunday, January 12, 7 p.m.
As in the past the second Saturday concert will feature late-night appropriate works that lean towards ambient and long-form explorations. The specific compositions to be performed at each of these concerts will be as follows:

Friday January 10, 2020 (8:30pm)
PIERRE SCHAEFFER - Étude pathétique [Étude aux Casseroles] (1948)
PAULINE OLIVEROS - Poem of Change (1992)
BARRY TRUAX - The Garden of Sonic Delights (2016)
ROBERT NORMANDEAU - Tunnel azur (2016)
MAGGI PAYNE - Heat Shield (2018)
BRAN(...)POS - martian brine pool (2019)
CLIFF CARUTHERS - New Work
MATTHEW BARNARD - Woche (with apologies to Ruttmann and Brock) (2011)
PARAZON - Opaque Fragments (2017)
LEAH REID - Sk(etch) (2018)

Saturday January 11, 2020 (7:00pm)
KEN NORDINE - selected works
FRANCIS DHOMONT - Here and There (2003)
NATASHA BARRETT - Urban Melt in Park Palais Meran (2017)
THOM BLUM - New Work
DOUGLAS MCCAUSLAND - ISOLATE (2019)
KRISTIN MILTNER - New Work
CECILIA CASTRO - ROMA III: The Ruin (2018)
SANGWON LEE - Torturing Piano (2019)
MICHELLE MOELLER - Spoke (2019)
FELIPE OTONDO - Irama (2012)
DANIELLE SAVAGE - Schizo Phonia (2018)
FULYA UÇANOK - Assembly (2017)


Saturday January 11, 2020 (9:30pm)
TORU TAKEMITSU - Vocalism Ai (1956)
KENNETH ATCHLEY - bay sky hills fog (2019)
BRUCE BENNETT - Stretch (2001)
SAVANNAH AGGER - Undercurrents (2016)
LÉA BOUDREAU - Quatre machines pour sauver le monde (2019)
NICOLA GIANNINI - Eyes Draw Circles of Light (2019)
TROND LOSSIUS - Listening understood as inhabiting (2015)


Sunday January 12, 2020 (7:00pm): a special three-set concert of works for instruments and fixed media featuring sfSoundGroup
KEN UENO - Ghosts of Ancient Hurricanes (2020)
- interval -
DENIS SMALLEY - Clarinet Threads (1985)
MARIO DAVIDOVSKY - Synchronisms #2 (1964)
MATT INGALLS & SFSOUND - Blue Sedan (2020)
- interval -
JONTY HARRISON - Force Fields (2006)
MARIO DAVIDOVSKY - Synchronisms #3 (1964)
KYLE BRUCKMANN - Clutterfields (2019)

All performances will take place in the Victoria Theatre, located in the Mission at 2961 16th Street, one block east of the 16th Street BART Station and the Muni bus stops on the corner of Mission Street. General admission will be $20 for each concert with a special $10 rate for balcony seating and for the underemployed. The one exception will be the 9:30 p.m. show on Saturday, which will be $10 for all. As in the past, there will be a festival pass sold for all four concerts for $50. Tickets will be available at the door after 7 p.m. on each of the three days of the festival, and only cash will be accepted. Brown Paper Tickets has created a Web page for advance ticket purchases for both individual concerts (using a pull-down menu to select the date) and the festival pass.

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