Time | Again
Friday December 8th, 2023
8:00PM-9:30PM
University Settlement House
184 Eldridge StreetNew York, NY, 10002
PROGRAM
Victoria Cheah It only has shelves (2023) [world premiere]
for violin, cello, trombone, electronics
Henning Christiansen Requiem of Art (NYC) (fluxorum organum II)(1973/2014)
Score realization & soundtrack by Anton Lukoszevieze
COMPOSER BIOS
VICTORIA CHEAH - COMPOSER, ELECTRONICS
Victoria Cheah is a composer whose work concerns boundaries, transitions, sustained effort, and intimacies within social-performance rituals. Her work has been commissioned and/or featured by ensembles and presenters including Non-Event, Switch Ensemble, Line Upon Line, Han Chen, andPlay, Yarn/Wire, Wavefield Ensemble, MATA Festival, Guerilla Opera, Ensemble Dal Niente, Vertixe Sonora, Marilyn Nonken, PRISM Quartet, and performed by others. Recordings of their music can be found on Dinzu Artefacts, New Focus Recordings, and XAS Records. Cheah currently serves as Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory, as well as Director of Operations of Talea Ensemble.
From 2011-2015, Cheah served as the founding executive director of Boston new music sinfonietta Sound Icon. She has worked with ensembles and festivals including Composers Conference, Manhattan Sinfonietta, Argento Chamber Ensemble, Composit Festival, and Cantata Profana towards the realization of contemporary music events in New York, Boston (USA) and Rieti (IT). Previously, Cheah has taught music, research, and writing related courses as an instructor at Longy School of Music, Brandeis University, and as a teaching fellow at Harvard University. As a composer, she has attended academies including Sommerakademie Schloss Solitude, Darmstadt, Fontainebleau, VIPA, SICPP, The Walden School, and others. Cheah holds a B.A. in music from City University of New York Hunter College (Macaulay Honors College) and a Ph.D. in music composition & theory from Brandeis University.
HENNING CHRISTIANSEN - COMPOSER
Henning Christiansen (1932-2008) - 1993/94 artist bio via Akademie Schloss Solitude:
Born 1932 in Copenhagen. Studied at the Royal Danish Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. Musician and composer.1962 and 1964 participation at FLUXUS events in Copenhagen and Aachen. Compositions, actions, sculptures, drawings, texts. Often collaborated with other artists and musicians. 1965-85 frequent collaborations as a performer with Joseph Beuys. Selected exhibitions/actions: 1980 the “große grüne Zeltsymphonie” – great green tent symphony (with birds), 10 Tage vor dem Opernhaus in Düsseldorf (10 days in front of the Düsseldorf Opera House). 1985 “Friedensbiennale” (Biennale of Peace) at the Hochschule für bildende Künste HfbK (Academy of Visual Arts), Hamburg. Since 1985 guest professor at the HfbK, Hamburg.
Henning Christiansen lives on the island Møn in Denmark.
For detailed information about HC’s life and work, read Christiansen scholar Mark Harwood’s essay from 2014.
PERFORMER BIOS
MARGARET LANCASTER - VOICE
“New-music luminary” (The New York Times), Margaret Lancaster has premiered well over 100 pieces and built a large repertoire of new works composed specifically for her. Performance highlights include Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, Santa Fe New Music, Whitney Museum, Edinburgh Festival and Festival D’Automne. She has recorded on New World Records, OO Discs, Innova, Naxos and Tzadik, and was selected for Meet the Composer’s New Works for Soloist Champions project. Noted for her inter-disciplinary performances, Lancaster, who also works as an actor, choreographer, dancer, and amateur furniture designer, presents solo and chamber music concerts worldwide and acts in Lee Breuer’s OBIE-winning Mabou Mines Dollhouse.
margaretlancaster.com
CHRISTOPHER MCINTYRE - TROMBONE & CURATOR
Christopher McIntyre is a Brooklyn-based trombonist, curator, composer, band leader, and educator. Known for his involvement in Julius Eastman’s music, Chris serves as Director of TILT Brass (co-founder in 2003) and as Curator and trombonist for Either/Or Ensemble. He specializes in ensemble work meshing improvisative & interpretive material as a player and as a composer and music director. He regularly performs in groups such as TILT, Either/Or, SEM and Talea Ensembles, and American Composers Orchestra, among many others. McIntyre leads an active career as an independent concert programmer in New York (The Kitchen, MATA Festival, Ne(x)tworks, and ISSUE Project Room) and currently teaches at Mannes School of Music at The New School and in the ACO’s Teaching Artist program. cmcintyre.com
JOHN POPHAM - CELLO
Cellist John Popham was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. The New York Times has described his playing as “warm but variegated” and “finely polished”. About his recent premiere of Vincent Raikhel’s cello concerto, Cirques and Moraines, the New York Times wrote that he played “with energy and a touch of poetry.” John holds a BM and MM from the Manhattan School of Music where he was a student of David Geber and David Soyer. An active chamber musician, he is the resident cellist of Red Light New Music and a member of the Toomai String Quintet. John has performed throughout North America, South America, and Europe with ensembles such as the Argento Chamber Ensemble and the Talea Ensemble. He has recorded for Tzadik, Carrier, and Arte Nova Records and teaches in the Mason Gross School of Music’s Young Artist Program at Rutgers University. www.johnpatrickpopham.com
ALEX LAUGH - SOUND TECHNICIAN
Alex Lough is a composer, performer, and multimedia sound artist. His work focuses on implementing experimental technology in order to discover new performance contexts with particular attention given to the body and the physicality of sound. His research is primarily concerned with the new taxonomic distinction of “performed electronics” and embodied performance practices as an electronicist. He holds a PhD in new Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology from UCI where he studied with Mari Kimura, Nicole Mitchell, Simon Penny, and Chris Dobrian. Alex earned his B.A. in Music from Wesleyan University and his M.M. in Music Technology from Florida International University.
Driven by a shared passion for adventurous music for piano and electronics, Alex Lough and Mark Micchelli founded Teeth and Metals in early 2017. The duo presents fully notated music, completely improvised music, and everything in between. Teeth and Metals has performed across the United States and internationally, at festivals and venues including ICMC, SPLICE, Art Basel Miami, Stanford University, UC Irvine, and Mark’s pandemic apartment in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh.
RICHARD CARRICK - KEYBOARD
Richard Carrick is a New York based composer, pianist and conductor. Described as “charming, with exoticism and sheer infectiousness” by Allan Kozinn of The New York Times, Richard Carrick's music has been performed throughout the Americas, Europe, and Japan by the New York Philharmonic (Ensemble Series), Vienna’s Konzerthaus, ISCM World Music Days, Darmstadt Summer Festival, the Nieuw Ensemble, the JACK Quartet, Tony Arnold, Magnus Andersson, Rohan de Saraam and others. Recent works include Prisoner's Cinema for large ensemble and image projection, Harmonixity for Saxophone Quartet, Adagios for String Orchestra, and The Flow Cycle for Strings ( released on New World Records in 2011). As a pianist and conductor he regularly premieres new works, working closely with composers including Lachenmann, Czernowin, Radulescu, Lewis, Greenwood, Rehnqvist, Saunders, Sharp and others. He teaches composition at Columbia University, New York University and for the New York Philharmonic and has guest lectured about his music in Japan, South Korea, Sweden, France, Germany, The Netherlands and the US.
DENNIS K. SULLivAN - PERCUSSION, VOICE
Born in Akron, Ohio, Dennis K. Sullivan II is a percussionist and composer based in Queens NY. Dennis explores cross-genre coalescence between acoustic, electronic and timbral based noise music. As a percussionist, Dennis is a founding member of the performance duo, Radical 2 with percussionist/engineer, Levy Lorenzo and Popebama, a high octane experimental percussion/saxophone duo with composer/saxophonist Erin Rogers, . In addition, Dennis has shared the stage with ICE, Ensemble ECCE, Ensemble Court Circuit, Either/Or, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Ensemble Mise-en and others. As an improviser he shares the stage with artists such as Brandon Lopez, Levy Lorenzo and Peter Evans. His compositions have recently been featured on the International Contemporary Ensemble's OpenICE series, SPLICE Festival, Ball State Festival of New Music, Edmonton Fringe Festival, Omaha Under the Radar, Times Two, VU Symposium and the North American Saxophone Alliance National Convention. Upcoming commissions/performances include works for the New Thread saxophone quartet, The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Yarn/Wire and the Decoder Ensemble (Hamburg, DE) as well as a European tour with Popebama. Dennis holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts (DMA) from Stony Brook University. He currently serves as adjunct professor of percussion and director of the wind ensemble at Adelphi University.
ANTHONY COlEmAN - KEYBOARD
Anthony Coleman is a composer, improvising keyboardist and teacher, born in New York City on August 30th, 1955. His ensembles have included the trio Sephardic Tinge (three CD’s: Sephardic Tinge (1995), Morenica (1998), and Our Beautiful Garden is Open (2002) – all on Tzadik) and Selfhaters Orchestra (two CD’s: Selfhaters (1996) and The Abysmal Richness of the Infinite Proximity of the Same (1998), both on Tzadik). Other CD’s include the cycle by Night (1987 – 1992), a series of works inspired by Coleman’s experiences in (the ex-) Yugoslavia (Disco by Night, Avant 1993). Coleman has toured and recorded with John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Marc Ribot, Shelley Hirsch, Roy Nathanson and many others. Coleman is currently on faculty at Mannes College the New School for Music and the New England Conservatory.
Coleman has recorded 14 CDs under his own name, and he has played on more than 100 others. His most recent CDs are The End of Summer (Tzadik), which features his NEC Ensemble Survivors Breakfast, Shmutsige Magnaten (Tzadik), a live solo performance from the 2005 Krakow Jewish Culture Festival that features interpretations of the songs of Mordechai Gebirtig; Pushy Blueness (Tzadik) and Lapidation (New World), both recordings of his chamber music, and Freakish: Anthony Coleman Plays Jelly Roll Morton (Tzadik, 2009). His Damaged by Sunlight (2010) was issued on DVD by the French label La Huit.
PROGRAM NOTES
Victoria Cheah’s new work for EO, scored for violin, cello, trombone, and electronics (featuring the composer), continues her ongoing compositional project focused on layering, depth via accumulation, and how placement of events and their preparation relate to ritual and the objectivizing of preparation itself. In her words, “To know you have a place to put something, where something can belong, where the fact of its emptiness suggests its readiness to receive instead of impose, to me suggests the possibility of belonging.” All three EO players bring a particular sensitivity to the work, as evidenced in EO’s 2022 performance of Chiyoko Szlavnics’s music: Pala Garcia on violin, John Popham on cello (both co-founders of the acclaimed trio Longleash), and event curator Chris McIntyre on trombone.
Danish composer and visual artist Henning Christiansen (1932-2008) led a uniquely individual life in the progressive arts. He studied clarinet and composition at the Royal Danish Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. He also studied at Copenhagen’s Det Unge Tonkekunstnerselskab (The Young Composers Society), where he met Nam June Paik. He was asked to leave DUT after a particularly provocative performance but persisted in continuing his musical life with renewed focus on composition. He attended several Darmstadt Summer Courses in the early-to-mid ‘60s but rejected the epochal ‘parametric music’ (as he called it) being espoused. His solution was to essentialize the language of his music. Christiansen identified his best known work from the period, Perceptive Constructions (1966), as an exemplar of what he called the “New Simplicity” (‘Ny enkelhed’.) Soon thereafter his work pivoted, eschewing traditional concert music. After meeting in 1964, it was during this period that he extensively collaborated in various media with renowned German conceptual artist Joseph Bueys. It is also this period during which the music Either/Or will present on Dec. 8th was created. Event curator Chris McIntyre views the original Requiem of Art… as “a sort of portrait of the sound world Christiansen conjured for Bueys’ real-space rituals.” Requiem of Art (NYC) (fluxorum organum II) (1973/2014) is a scored realization (by UK cellist, composer, and visual artist Anton Lukoszevieze) of the 1973 studio creation comprising material from his then-recent Beuys projects.
In the liner notes to Penultimate Press’ 2016 re-issue of Requiem of Art…, Ursula Reuter Christiansen (Henning’s wife) wrote:
In the summer of 1969 we made a collective film "The Search" on the heath in Jutland, Denmark. Henning Christiansen made on site field recordings for the individual scenes with Peter Sakse as sound master. The music was first used during the performance at the festival Strategy: Gets Art exhibition organised by Richard De Marco at Edinburgh College of Art, on August 21, 1970 with Joseph Beuys and Henning Christiansen. Henning Christiansen sampled the field recording into the organ music from [Bueys’ 1968 performance film] Eurasienstab. He gave this composition subsequently the title Requiem of Art fluxorum organum II Opus 50. That means a requiem over the role of art in the 1960s.