Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Center for New Music: February, 2020

The Center for New Music (C4NM) schedule has now reached my self-imposed “critical mass” level of items on its February calendar. As usual, there is a good chance that more February events will be added; but as usual, I shall use my Facebook shadow site to put out the word about updates as the information becomes available. For those who do not yet know, C4NM is located at 55 Taylor Street, half a block north of the Golden Gate Theater, which is where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. All tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini event page. Hyperlinks to the appropriate Web pages will be attached to each of the dates in the following summary:

Saturday, February 1, 7:30 p.m.: Glenda Bates will curate an evening of musical portraits for solo cello performed by Icelandic-American cellist, Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir. The composers that will be represented on the program will be Jane Antonia Cornish, Melia Watras, Thuridur Jonsdóttir, Michelle Ross, and Kaija Saariaho. The charge will be $15 for general admission and $10 for C4NM members and students.

Saturday, February 8, 8 p.m.: Current Winds will be a program of new music for flutes shared by Areon Flutes and the Siroko Duo. The duo consists of Victoria Hauk and Jessie Nucho. They will play “Time and Place,” composed for them by Michael Kropf on a commission by the Guerrilla Composers Guild. The other works in their portion of the program were inspired by women poets. Izabel Austin’s “Speed of Darkness” is based on the second stanza a poem by Muriel Rukeyser with the same title; and “Hughes of Sylvia” by Chelsea Loew reflects on the depressions of Sylvia Plath (alto flute) and men who influenced her (flute), including fellow poet Ted Hughes.

Areon Flutes is the trio of Jill Heinke Moen, Kassey Plaha, and Meerenai Shim. They have sponsored international competitions and commissions to build their repertoire. “Personal Space” by Julie Barwick, co-founder of the Helia Music Collective, won Areon’s 2016 International Composition Competition; and “We Live in a Bubble,” which was scored for “flexible wind trio” and electronics, was written by Igor C. Silva through the 2018 Commissioning Prize. The remaining work to be performed will be Jane Rigler’s “Arboreous Incantations,” which will be included on a new album of Rigler’s music to be released this year.

The charge will be $15 for general admission and $10 for C4NM members and students.

Thursday, February 13, 8 p.m.: MANA Makes Sense! will mark the return of the saxophonists of the MANA Quartet to the Bay Area. They will present the West Coast premieres of works by Belinda Reynolds, John Halle and Randy Woolf, resulting from a recent collaboration with the Common Sense Composer Collective. They will also perform compositions by Kevin Villalta, Philip Glass, and others. The charge will be $15 for general admission and $10 for C4NM members and students.

Friday, February 14, 8 p.m.: MANA will return for a second performance, joined this time by the Friction Quartet of  violinists Otis Harriel and Kevin Rogers, violist Lucia Kobza, and cellist Doug Machiz. The performance will also include composer/pianist/scholar/activist John Halle, who has devoted the last two decades of his life to “obliterations and reconfigurations” of jazz standards by composers such as Richard Rodgers and Thelonious Monk. There will be no charge for this concert, but a $15 donation is suggested.

[added 2/6, 12:45 p.m.:

Sunday, February 16, 4 p.m.: The Surround Sound Salon Series, curated by Chris Brown, will continue with its second concert. The program will feature three local electronic music composers who present their fixed media and/or live electronic music through the 8-channel surround system, generously provided by Meyer Sound. The composers mix their sounds from the center of the space, and the audience is free to choose their own listening location, and to move within the space to hear the music from different vantage points. The first work on the program will be by Brown himself, and it will be followed by compositions by Brian Reinbolt and Kyle Bruckmann. The charge will be $10 for general admission and $5 for C4NM members and students.]

Monday, February 17, 7:30 p.m.: This will be the third concert in the past five months of a trio that brings saxophonist Larry Ochs together with Madalyn Merkey and Tim Perkis, both working with electronics. For this performance they will be joined by the Canadian clarinetist François Houle. This promises to be a stimulating evening of spontaneous improvisation. The charge will be $15 for general admission and $10 for C4NM members and students.

[added 2/6, 12:50 p.m.:

Tuesday, February 18, 8 p.m.: Soprano saxophonist Jacob Swanson is currently on a tour entitled wired. in concert. He is performing acoustic and electronic works for saxophones. The contributing composers are John C. L. Jansen, Ruby Fulton, Jared Yackiw, and Tim Bausch. Swanson will also perform works by Frank Zebel and Tritan Keuris. The charge will be $15 for general admission and $10 for C4NM members and students.]

[added 1/24, 5:15 p.m.:

Wednesday, February 19, 8 p.m.: The next Latitudes concert will be a two-set program. One set will present multi-instrumentalist, composer, and recording engineer Henry Birdsey. His performance will involve both pedal steel and lap steel guitars, a microtonal organ, violin, and homemade instruments. The music he makes is often drone-based and involves microtonal tunings, the amplification of metal, and fragments of church music. The other set will be taken by the Angel Archer combo that brings together Brian Lucas and Sheila Bosco of Dire Wolves, Gregory Hagan of Thomas Carnacki, and King Eider, formerly Common Eider. Their performance takes a ritualistic approach to a droning background based on tape manipulations and extended electronics with a foreground of psychdelic connotations. The charge will be $15 for general admission and $10 for C4NM members and students.]

Friday, February 21, 7:30 p.m.: The second program curated by Bates this month will present the premiere of Winter Migrant, a suite composed by Eldad Tarmu for oboe alternating with English horn and vibraphone. Bates will take the oboe part, accompanied by Tarmu on vibraphone. This program will be part of her Crossing Over Series, which explores the roles of classical and jazz performance practices, and the hybridization of the two. The charge will be $15 for general admission and $10 for C4NM members and students.

Wednesday, February 26, 7 p.m.: Kurt Rohde will curate a piano recital by Jared Redmond. Redmond will play his own new composition, “Doth” and will give world-premiere performances of music by Park Jung-eun and Noh Ji-ye. The program will also include Rohde’s music (“Trotsky’s Icepick”), as well as pieces by Michael Finnissy (“SKRYABIN in itself”) and Wolfgang Rihm (“Tombeau,” the fifth composition in his Klavierstück series). The charge will be $15 for general admission and $10 for C4NM members and students.

[posted 2/19, 9 a.m.: This event has been cancelled:

Friday, February 28, 8 p.m.: The Colibri Duo of violinists Michele Walther and Monika Gruber will present a program entitled Graphite. This will involve the juxtaposition of music by Kyle Hovatter with the artwork of Josh Dorman. The charge will be $15 for general admission and $10 for C4NM members and students.]

Saturday, February 29, 7:30 p.m.: Bates will curate one final concert to mark the end of the month. This will be the latest stage in her OboeTronics project of oboe performances with tape accompaniment. She will share the program with Trio Electrique, which just released an album on Edgetone Records. All three of the performers work with looping technology. Walther will play an electric violin supplemented with electronic effects. Edo Castro Woodhouse plays both seven-string and nine-string bass; and E. “Doc” Smith plays Zendrum, which is basically a MIDI controller played as a percussion instrument. His performance will involve working with sampled sounds. The charge will be $15 for general admission and $10 for C4NM members and students.

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