Pittsburgh New Music Net

IonSound Project presents the first works from their Commissions for the Future project this Sunday night.

IonSound Project’s concert this Sunday would strike me as particularly significant even if I didn’t have a new piece on the program (but yes, it helps!). There are in fact, three new works on the concert, all by Pittsburgh composers: Christian Kriegeskotte, Nizan Leibovich, and myself. That in and of itself is important, since it illustrates once again that the Burgh is a center for the creation—not just the consumption—of art. But more important still is the reason why there are three new works on this concert, namely IonSound Project’s new Commissions for the Future program. IonSounders have been actively engaging members of the community to support commissions for new works and this is the first program to showcase the fruits of their efforts. It’s a great start to what we hope will grow into an ongoing partnership between a genuinely excellent new music ensemble and the local community.

As usual, the concert will be a treat to for the eyes and the ears. All the musical compositions reference visual art that will be projected on screen, and Rob Frankenberry’s transcription of  Pictures at an Exhibition will feature art by children from the Falk School. My piece is actually a collaboration with artist Ryan Day and his stunning digital animation is being presented for the first time as well. I hope you can come out and join us at Pitt’s Bellefield Hall Auditorium on Sunday night at 7. Tickets are $15 and $10 and you can learn more about the program here.

Elisa and Elisa in Wheeling.

Cellist extraordinaire Elisa Kohanski will be one of two soloists in Wheeling Symphony Orchestra’s premiere of Richard Danielpour’s Come Up from the Fields, Father. It’s a one night only Veteran’s Day celebration which you can find out more about here.

I’m also grateful to Michael Ceurvorst for sending me information about the CMU student composers concert this Saturday, Nov. 12 , 6 p.m. at Alumni Hall. It’s a free concert and open to the public and features all new works. Here’s more info about that event on FB. Check it out, if you can.

Let’s see, what else? Oh yeah. Tomorrow is Nigel Tufnel Day…

These go to 11.

Capitol Theatre

Tickets

So confusing to see tiny Elisa standing next to the life-size picture of Elisa.

Elisa Kohanski, well-known to Pittsburgh new music fans as the cellist in IonSound Project, has a few other gigs keeping her busy. Like opera and ballet orchestra at the Benedum and being principal cello in Wheeling Symphony. For instance. This week part of her work at Wheeling includes premiering a work by Richard Danielpour for solo cello and baritone voice and orchestra called Come Up from the Fields, Father. Her performance is part of a Veteran’s Day celebration concert by the WSO that will include Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from Westside Story and Copland’s Third Symphony. Cruise on down to Wheeling this Friday and give Elisa and the rest of the orchestra a listen.

Martin Bisi plays Thunderbird on November 9th.

… and you’d be walking through the woods and the trees would begin to sing a song—well several songs at once really—but they were all related in a way that you couldn’t quite put your finger on? Sort of like Martin Bisi’s new song, “Suffer the Moon”?

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Those crazy trees! But that reminds me: Martin Bisi is playing a set at Thunderbird on Wednesday, November 9th at 9 p.m. It’s a 21 plus show with Velcro Shoes and Maurice Rickard and you can find out more about it here.

The Music on the Edge Morton Feldman Symposium and Mini-Festival kicks off at Wood Street Galleries tonight at 8 p.m. with a concert featuring cellist Jonathan Golove and and pianist Amy Williams performing Patterns in a Chromatic Field. The two-part symposium takes place at Pitt’s Music Building tomorrow starting at 10 and , and the final event is a performance of Crippled Symmetry at 8 p.m. back at Wood Street Galleries with Amy Williams and Jan Williams, Amy’ father and the percussionist who premiered many of Feldman’s works, and the irrepressible Lindsey Goodman on flute.

It’s gonna be a great two days of music and insight into one of the true masters of the late 20th century. And don’t miss the fantastic preview by Mike Shanley in the City Paper that gives us a window into Jan and Amy Williams’ personal interactions with Feldman.

Thunderbird Cafe

Tickets, $5, 21+

also appearing

Velcro Shoes, Maurice Rickard, Raw Blow

A toast! To Martin Bisi!

Legendary perform and producer Martin Bisi returns to the Burgh for a concert at Thunderbird Cafe.  (Check out the PNMNet interview with Martin from 2010).

As a performer and record producer in New York City, Martin Bisi has been at a crossroads of indie/punk, avant garde, noire/cabaret rock, and electronic music since the early 80′s. He has realized albums by Sonic Youth, Swans, John Zorn, Africa Bambaataa, The Dresden Dolls, Herbie Hancock’s Rockit, Boredoms, Helmet, White Zombie, Cop Shoot Cop, Jon Spencer’s Boss Hog, Material/Bill Laswell, Foetus, Serena Maneesh and others. In the live performances he combinesheavier post-rock psychedelia with upbeat story-telling indie fare, and unique sound layering. 
 Bisi is readying a new release for 2012, titled Ex Nihilo - Latin for “out of nothing”. A darker tone dominates the new release, compared to ’08′s Sirens Of The Apocalypse and ’09′s Son Of A Gun EP -more an exploration of the psyche, with cathartic resolution. “Ex Nihilo” means “from, or out of nothing” -usually used in reference to creation by artists or God. The opening track “Suffer The Moon”, is a return to the ritualistic quality of his 1988 album Creole Mass. With this new recording, Bisi’s continues his history of sonic excess in the studio, which can be ambient and disorienting – as with the art-noise of Sonic Youth, or the industrial sensibilities of Swans and Foetus. 
 Bisi began his story in the downtown-meets-uptown scene of New York in the late 70′s, where hip hop from The Bronx coexisted with avant garde experimentalism, the punk/glam of CBGB’s, New Wave art-rock, and aggressive, nihilistic No Wave. In this world Bisi met Brian Eno who helped him start a recording studio in 1981, and he has since covered all these areas in his work.

Bellefield Hall Auditorium
Tickets at the door only: $15 for general admission, $10 for students and seniors.

Sight meets sound in IonSound Project‘s second program of the season, “From the Mundane to the Macabre.”  Packed with world premieres, this concert represents the first installment of IonSound’s Commissions for the Future project—a fundraising initiative to finance new compositions.  The group will perform commissions by three Pittsburgh composers, Christian Kriegeskotte, Philip Thompson, and Nizan Leibovich. Each work on the program is inspired by, or created in collaboration with a visual art form as promised by this season’s theme:  “aMuse, a Season of Inspiration and Entertainment.”

The range of inspiration spans from 16th century woodcuts to a brand new video collaboration. Christian Kriegeskotte’s Dances of Death explores the sonic possibilities of unusual instrument pairings, and are inspired by the wonderful miniature illustrations of 16th century German painter and engraver Hans Holbein.  In stark contrast, Nizan Leibovich’s Schéhérazade – “…Elle vit apparaître le matin. Elle se tut discrètement” is inspired by the colorful and joyous papercut work by French painter and artist Henri Matisse.  The title roughly translates to:  “…She lived to see the morning appear. She discreetly fell silent”, and evokes the intrigue and mystery of the compelling tale of Arabian princess Scheherazade that has influenced artists and composers for centuries. The third world premiere on the program, Kecow hit tamen, is a multimedia collaboration by composer Philip Thompson and artist Ryan Day which explores one of the popular legends surrounding the origins of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina—namely that they are descended from the Hatteras (or Croatan) and Raleigh’s Lost Colony. Thompson, whose father is a member of the Lumbee Tribe, based his instrumental and electroacoustic music on the few remaining words of Carolina Algonquian language spoken by the Hatteras, while Day used common images from Lumbee art to create a multi-layered digital animation. Kecow hit tamen can mean either “What is this? or “What is your name?”

A visual collaboration between Rob Frankenberry’s new arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition  and a presentation of musically inspired artwork by students from the Falk School completes the program.   IonSound musicians will visit with the students in the preceding weeks to encourage them to create artwork that focuses on two main ideas–recreating their own versions of Hartmann’s existing artwork, the inspiration behind Pictures at an Exhibition and replicating the experience of viewing an exhibit through video.  Join us on Sunday, November 20th at 7:00 pm at Bellefield Hall Auditorium in Oakland for this exciting program!

Do you love Morton Feldman? Well then, make your way to the Wood Street Galleries in early November for some top-rate performances and to the University of Pittsburgh for a day-long Symposium  comprising scholars from around the country and musicians who worked closely with Feldman. If you don’t like Morton Feldman, come anyway, and we’ll tell you why you should!

The works of Morton Feldman (1926-1987) occupy a central place in the American experimental tradition, not just within the music world. Feldman was very often inspired by non-musical sources, including Persian rugs, abstract expressionist paintings by Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, and texts of Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Kyle Gann remarked that, “in the current Babel of musical styles, Feldman is almost the only composer whose music appeals across stylistic boundaries, among minimalists, postserialists, 12-tone holdouts, electronic composers, academics, Downtowners, MAX programmers, DJ artists, and other miscellaneous wastrels.” Why does this music have such a broad appeal? This is one of the questions that will be explored during the symposium. The first session will include scholars whose research places Feldman within a larger historical context. The second session will call upon performers and composers who worked intimately with Feldman in the 1970s and 1980s.  The symposium will be framed by two concerts presenting two late chamber pieces, Patterns in a Chromatic Field and Crippled Symmetry.

View the complete symposium schedule here.

This celebration of Feldman’s musical legacy comes to Pittsburgh via another legacy—the one passed from percussionist Jan Williams to his daughter, composer/pianist Amy Williams. Jan Williams premiered many of Feldman’s works, while Amy Williams is a widely performed and commissioned composer and one half of the critically acclaimed Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo. The father/daughter duo first performed Crippled Symmetry in Buffalo in April 2011 and Amy Williams, a member of the composition and theory faculty at Pitt, is the driving force behind the two-day exploration of Feldman’s work. Jan and Amy Williams will be joined be Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble flutist Lindsey Goodman and cellist Jonathan Golove.

In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of Feldman’s inspiration, the two concerts will take place at Wood Street Galleries rather than a traditional concert venue, and feature readings by Jan Beatty, poet and host of WYEP’s Prosody, and Lynn Emmanuel, poet and Professor of English at Pitt.

Come out to the Galleries on Thursday November 3rd at 8 p.m. to hear Jonathon Golove (cello) and Amy Williams (piano) perform Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981). Before this 80-minute work, New York School poetry will be read aloud by Jan Beatty, poet and host of WYEP’s radio show, Prosody.

Join us once more on Friday, November 4th at 8 p.m. to take in a performance of Crippled Symmetry (1983) by Lindsey Goodman (flute), Amy Williams (piano) and Jan Williams (percussion). Before this 90-minute work, New York School poetry will be read aloud by Lynn Emanuel, poet and Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

For tickets, visit www.proartstickets.org or call 412-394-3353. Those attending both concerts can take advantage of a special Festival package rate:

• $20 for general admission and $15 for students and seniors for both nights when purchased in advance through ProArtsTickets
• $30 and $20 for both nights at the door.
• Individual concerts: $15 for general admission and $10 for students and seniors when ordered in advance through ProArtsTickets.
• Individual concerts at the door: $20 for general admission and $15 for students and seniors.
• Pitt students: free with valid ID.