University Series: “Elektro/Acoustik”

Featuring composers Mason Bates and Mark Applebaum
October 23, 2008 8pm at SF State University


Listen to Elektro/Acoustik:

 

ADORNO Ensemble presents an “Elektro/Acoustik” concert celebrating Bay Area composers Mark Applebaum and Mason Bates. In a continuous flux between acoustical and electronic works, the program will feature members of ADORNO with Bates and his electronic lounge music, and Applebaum with this famous homemade “Mouseketier” sound sculpture. Mr. Bates (a.k.a “Masonic”) has been both a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and an American Academy in Berlin Prize. Spanning the classical concert hall to the clubs and lounges where he DJs electronica, his music was hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “lovely to hear and ingeniously constructed.” A professor at Stanford University, composer Mark Applebaum is also active as a jazz pianist and builds electroacoustic instruments out of junk, hardware, and found objects for use as both compositional and improvisational tools. His music can be heard on recordings on the Innova, Tzadik, Capstone, and SEAMUS labels.


Program:

Mason Bates on electronics: solo work
Mason Bates: White Lies for Lomax for solo piano
Mark Applebaum: Theme in search of Variations (recording not available)
Mason Bates on electronics: solo work
Mark Applebaum solo work: Mousketier Praxis - Mouseketier sound-sculpture and live electronics
Mark Applebaum: Accretion/Deletion for 2 violins, viola, cello, and double bass
Mark Applebaum: Identity Sport for 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, electric guitar, and percussion
Mason Bates on electronics: solo work
Mason Bates: Red River for violin, clarinet, piano, cello and electronics

Revolution No. 9 - video responses

The Beatles eight-minute avant-garde work, Revolution No. 9 is a bizarre “musique concrete” piece that bears influences from Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse, Luigi Nono, and John Cage. In my research on Revolution No. 9, it turned up a lot of interesting and very creative video responses from YouTube, which I’ve included for our Pith Music audiences. Check them out…. you may want to hear the piece in it’s original form (which I’ve posted here on our home page) without all the video art, first. Read more

“Supersonic” by Alex Ross

Alex Ross writes in the New Yorker about Stockhausen, and Berlin Philharmonic’s performance of his the massive work “Gruppen”.

Luciano Berio: Composer of Mind and Heart - NYTimes

Read more on Luciano Berio in the New York Times obituary, written by Paul Griffiths on May 28, 2003.

Stockhausen and the Beatles

For a more in depth look at Stockhausen and his relationship with the Beatles, visit Stockhausen.org, the official site for the composer here.

Luciano Berio

His work constantly re-invented continuities where others saw only the possibilities of rupture. Not that he was ever tempted by the assorted nostalgias that haunted some part of the music of the last century. On the contrary, he maintained an insatiable curiosity about the explorations of his contemporaries – musical or otherwise. But his dialogues with literature, with linguistics, with structural anthropology, with ethnomusicology always proved to be the most inventive of piratical raids – seizing the materials that he needed as a musician, and drawing from them creative consequences often far removed from their original context. They are a fraternal “homage”, not an imitation. Beyond his apprentice years of the late forties and early fifties, much the same might be said of his response to his musical contemporaries. His oblique relationship to the post-Webernian mainstream was the first instance of a trait that has remained central to his work ever since. Seizing with relish upon its demonstrations of inexhaustible metamorphic potential, he expanded this into a basic principle: you may always re-write what is already written. The exuberant melodic confidence of his work from the late fifties and sixties – whether the nervous brilliance of the flute Sequenza I, or the by now classic lyrical intensity of works written for Cathy Berberian, such as Circles or Sequenza III – bears witness to the confident authority with which he grasped these means. Equally, the series of Chemins that revisit solo Sequenzas demonstrate not just a Joycean “work in progress”, but our obligation to treat each completed work as a “listening in progress”. But the sixties also saw the first indices of an unwillingness to side-line issues central to his rigorous sense of musical tradition. Where some contemporaries seemed content to treat harmony as simply a sub-category of “texture”, Berio insistently returned to the harmonic dimension as central to his larger musical aspirations. Training his own and his listeners’ ears to find their way through the harmonic jungle was at first a matter of brilliantly alert intuition – in, for instance, Sequenza IV for piano – but was soon absorbed into a focussed framework, first in O King, but then in many subsequent works of the early seventies, by exploring the consequences of harmonic projections from a line. The fruits of this patient process of exploration came in the major works of the eighties and nineties, where harmony resumed its rights as the organising force behind such major theatre works as La vera storia, Un re in ascolto, and Outis, but could equally determine the masterly concision of Sequenza XIII for accordion. Although Berio drew admiration in the late fifties as an exuberant explorer of electronic resources, his vivid empathy for the risks and rewards of live performance tended to gain the upper hand over any disembodied search for “new sounds”. However fragile and temporary the community created in the concert-hall by a brilliant performance, it is one that Berio served with singular fixity of purpose. Since the sixties a vigorous inhabitant of McLuhan’s “global village” (of which any concert-hall or radio station may propose itself as a temporary microcosm) he asserted music’s obligation not only to its own singular history, but also to the re-statement of human concerns that, without such patient and committed reiteration, could so easily evaporate. His is a music that “refuses to forget”.

-David Osmond-Smith - Universal Editions

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Composer (born August 22nd 1928 in Mödrath, near Cologne, died December 5th 2007 in Kuerten). Stockhausen composed 370 individually performable works, published 10 volumes of TEXTE zur MUSIK / TEXTS about MUSIC,and a series of booklets comprising sketches and explanations about his own works (Stockhausen-Verlag). His first 36 scores were published by Universal Edition in Vienna and, since its establishment in 1975, the Stockhausen- Verlaghas published the rest of his works. In 1991, the Stockhausen-Verlagalso began to release compact discs in the Stockhausen Complete Edition which comprises 139 compact discs to date. All Stockhausen scores, CDs, books, videos and music boxes may be ordered directly by mail or e-mail (Kettenberg 15, 51515 Kuerten, Germany; Fax: +49 (0)2268- 1813; www.stockhausen.org / stockhausen-verlag@stockhausen.org). Since 1998, the Stockhausen Courses Kürtenfor composers, interpreters, musicologists and auditors take place annually.

In 1977, Stockhausen began to compose the music-scenic work LICHT (LIGHT)The Seven Days of the Week. LICHT with its Seven Days of the Week comprises about 29 hours of music: THURSDAY from LIGHT 240 minutes; SATURDAY from LIGHT 185 minutes; MONDAY from LIGHT, 278 minutes; TUESDAY from LIGHT 156 minutes; FRIDAY from LIGHT 290 minutes; WEDNESDAY from LIGHT 267 minutes; SUNDAYfrom LIGHT 298 minutes.

Following the world première on October 16th 2004 of LICHT-BILDER (LIGHTPICTURES), the last scene Stockhausen composed of his work LICHT (LIGHT), Stockhausen began the work KLANG(SOUND), The 24 Hours of the Day. Until 2007, he composed the 1st Hour HIMMELFAHRT (ASCENSION) to the 21st Hour PARADIES (PARADISE).

Already the first compositions of “Point Music” such as KREUZSPIEL (CROSS-PLAY)in 1951, SPIEL (PLAY) for orchestra in 1952, and KONTRA-PUNKTE (COUNTER-POINTS) in 1952/53, brought Stockhausen international fame. Since then, his works have been opposed to the extreme by some and admired by others. Fundamental achievements in music since 1950 are indelibly imprinted through his compositions:

The “Serial Music”, the“Point Music”, the “Electronic Music”, the “New Percussion Music”, the “Variable Music”, the “New Piano Music”, the “Space Music”, “Statistical Music”, “Aleatoric Music”, “Live Electronic Music”;new syntheses of “Music and Speech”,of a“Musical Theatre”,of a “Ritual Music”,“Scenic Music”;the “Group Composition”, polyphonic “Process Composition”, “Moment Composition”, “Formula Composition”to the present “Multi-Formula Composition”;the integration of “found objects” (national anthems, folklore of all countries, short-wave events, “sound scenes”, etc.) into a “World Music”and a “Universal Music”;the synthesis of European, African, Latin American and Asian music into a “Telemusic”;the vertical “Octophonic Music”.

From the beginning until now, his work can be classified as “Spiritual Music”;this becomes more and more evident not only in the compositions with spiritual texts, but also in the other works via “Overtone Music”, “Intuitive Music”, “MantricMusic”, reaching “Cosmic Music”in STIMMUNG(TUNING), AUS DEN SIEBEN TAGEN (FROM THE SEVEN DAYS), MANTRA, STERNKLANG(STAR SOUND), INORI, ATMEN GIBTDAS LEBEN (BREATHING GIVES LIFE), SIRIUS, LICHT(LIGHT), KLANG(SOUND).

In a spherical auditorium conceived by the Stockhausen, most of his works composed until 1970 were performed at the Expo ’70 world fair in Osaka, Japan for 5 1/2 hours daily for 183 days by twenty instrumentalists and singers, thereby reaching an audience of over a million listeners.

Stockhausen is the perfect example of the composer who – at nearly all world premières and in innumerable exemplary performances and recordings of his works world-wide – either personally conducted, or performed in or directed the performance as sound projectionist.

In addition to numerous guest professorships in Switzerland, the United States, Finland, Holland, and Denmark, Stockhausen was appointed Professor for Composition at the State Conservatory in Cologne in 1971. In 1996 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Free University in Berlin, and in 2004 received an honorary doctorate from the Queen’sUniversity in Belfast. He is a member of 12 international Academies for the Artsand Sciences,was named Honorary Citizen of Kürten in 1988, becameCommandeur dans l’Ordredes Arts et des Lettres, received many gramophone prizes
and, among other honours, the Federal Medal of Merit, 1st class,the Siemens Music Prize,the UNESCO Picasso Medal, the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine Westfalia, 8 awards from the German Music Publisher’sSociety for his score publications, the HamburgBACH Prize, the Cologne Culture Prize and, in 2001, the Polar Music Prizewith the laudation: Karlheinz Stockhausen is being awarded the Polar Music Prize for 2001 for a career as a composer that has been characterized by impeccable integrity and never-ceasing creativity, and for having stood at the forefront of musical development for fifty years.

Joel Phillip Friedman

ADORNO is delighted to feature composer Joel Phillip Friedman, who teaches extensively on the Beatles and is faculty at Santa Clara University, Notre Dame de Namur, and the Stanford University’s Adult Extension courses. Friedman has always had the spirit of collaboration at the core of his musical activities whether serving as co-composer for the award-winning Off-Broadway and London West End hit musical Personals, Read more

Cain Schulte: A Treasure Upstairs

Cain Schulte Contemporary Art on Townsend in SF




People often don’t think of Pacbell Park area in San Francisco as a gallery scene, but with all the large warehouse lofts near this former industrial area, it is a natural fit. Cain Schulte is a real treasure hidden upstairs located in 101 Townsend near 2nd Street. Read more

Elastic Band

ADORNO Gallery Sessions presents

Works by the Beatles, Stockhausen, Berio, Yoko Ono, and Friedman
January 16, 2008 7pm

at Cain Schulte Gallery
101 Townsend Street, Suite 207
San Francisco, CA 94107
Tel. 415.543.1550
Email. info@cainschulte.com

In 1966, Paul McCartney of the Beatles took time to explore the avant-garde scene and discovered the electronic music of Stockhausen and Berio. Later John Lennon (with influence from wife Yoko Ono) turned to these same avant-garde composers for such works as “Revolution No. 9″. This experimental approach was first heard on the Beatles’ early psychedelic-influenced track Tomorrow Never Knows, the final track of their 1966 studio album “Revolver”. The use of tape loops, electronically altered sound, as well as new recording techniques raised the bar in popular recording and opened new and exciting vistas of creative expression that are still reverberating today. Read more

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