From Gustav Mahler to Radiohead to Katie Perry…the Eclectic Laboratory Chamber Orchestra (E.L.C.O.) mixes up the sounds of the summer on the KST stage for a special night of music, video, friends and fun!

DJ/VJ Casey Hallas joins the wildly diverse performers of E.L.C.O.  to  create Remix, a unique audiovisual performance combining turntables and flutes, classical and rock, with  electronics and innovation. Fusing classical training and modern technology, E.L.C.O. transcends genres and pushes music to the edge.

Find out all you need to know, then go!

Kelly-Strayhorn Theater
Reserve Tickets Online or call 800.838.3006 and then pay what you can at the door!

From Gustav Mahler to Radiohead to Katie Perry…the Eclectic Laboratory Chamber Orchestra (E.L.C.O.) mixes up the sounds of the summer on the KST stage for a special night of music, video, friends and fun!

DJ/VJ Casey Hallas joins the wildly diverse performers of E.L.C.O.  to  create Remix, a unique audiovisual performance combining turntables and flutes, classical and rock, with  electronics and innovation. Fusing classical training and modern technology, E.L.C.O. transcends genres and pushes music to the edge.

You can catch Alia Musica Pittburgh’s second spring concert at Saturdany night at 7 p.m. (Synod Hall). And that’s not all! If you order now (or even if you don’t) you can hear ELCO’s “Mixtape” concert Sunday night at the Brewhouse, and as you would hope, there will be lots of Duquesne Pilsner on hand as part of the festivities (and coffee for the under 21 set.)

Whew! Are you ready?

Art All Night
Iron City Brewery (3340 Liberty Avenue)

ELCO is extremely excited to announce that it will be the kick-off musical act for the 2011 Art All Night Festival. The event will take place at the old Iron City Brewery, 3340 Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh and ELCO will begin performing at 4:45. Immediately following ELCO @ 6 will be Pittsburgh-Rock legends The Spuds and soon-to-be Pittsburgh-Rock legends Chux Beta. Like the art, the music will continue all night long, including a second stage opening later in the evening. More information about Art All Night can be found at More information can be found at:http://www.artallnight.org/

This Sunday night the Eclectic Laboratory Chamber Orchestra will present Star Songs, a program that places the works of Stockhausen, Cage, and Monteverdi beside those of David Bowie and Lou Reed. The common thread: each piece is related to space.

Elizabeth Hoover describes the thought process behind John Cage’s Atlas Elipticalis, a major feature of Sunday night’s program:

’1961 was an important year for John Cage.  Not only did he sign with music publisher, C.F. Peters, but he also acquired an important position in Middletown Connecticut as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University.  By October, he published his first and most well-known book through its University Press: Silence, a collection of lectures and other writings that he had produced by that time.  To add to this list of accomplishments, Cage also received a commission by the Montreal Festivals Society to write a work for orchestra.  According to Cage, his inspiration for the piece stemmed from “a remark by Erik Satie to the effect that written music is nothing but points and lines.”  To find the points and lines for his orchestral composition, Cage visited the astronomical library in the observatory at Wesleyan.  After viewing many star maps in the library, he settled on a book titled Atlas Eclipticalis.

Named after this book, Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis was composed through a method of chance operations in which he copied the positions of stars from the astronomical maps onto transparencies.  These transparencies served as templates with which to transfer the positions of the stars to individual instrumental parts.  Each star transforms sonically into an individual tone; therefore, an aggregate of pitches represents a constellation.  Although there are eighty-six instrumental parts in total—each of which Cage dedicated to a friend, colleague or relative—all or some of these parts may be used in performance.  As a result, a performance of Eclipticalis may endure for an undefined length of time, and as Cage notes in his general directions for the piece, exists “at any point between minimum activity (silence) and maximum activity (what’s written).”  Despite levels of indeterminacy which operate in the instrumental parts, Eclipticalis is not lacking in control.  Cage specified the role of a conductor, whose function is not only to determine the length of a performance by keeping time throughout the piece, but also to decide which parts of the composition will be performed.   Though Cage created the parameters of the piece, it is the conductor’s aural view of Cage’s musical atlas that is ultimately experienced by an audience.  It was only appropriate, then, that Cage acted as conductor for the premiere performance—to provide his very own vision of the night sky.

Atlas Eclipticalis premiered on August 3, 1961 at the International Week of Today’s Music in Montreal, and was played simultaneously with Winter Music (for 1-20 pianos, completed in 1957).  Two days later, for the same festival, Eclipticalis was performed with choreography by Merce Cunningham, titled Aeon.  Although, the premiere performances of Eclipticalis did not incorporate electronic equipment, other performances of the piece may do so by attaching contact microphones to the instruments involved, whose output is then fed into amplifiers and loudspeakers.  In February, 1964, an electronic version of the piece was performed by the New York Philharmonic: the disappointing results of which Cage angrily lamented in numerous interviews throughout his career.  For this performance, Cage called on Max Mathews, an innovator in electronic music, to produce a fifty-channel mixer that received output from the instruments of the Philharmonic.  Unfortunately, due to a less than enthusiastic audience, technical glitches such as overwhelmingly loud electronic feedback, and instrumentalists’ who mocked the innovation of Eclipticalis by destroying Cage’s contact microphones and ignoring his written notation, the Philharmonic’s performance of Eclipticalis left much to be desired for everyone who had taken part in its electronic design.’

The performance starts at 8 p.m. Sunday at the Gray Box Theater, Lawrenceville.

Admission is $10, $5 for seniors, students and artists.

Details: 412-608-6120 or elco-orchestra.webs.com

ELCO looks upwards and ponders the mysteries of the universe on Sunday, October 23, 8PM at the Grey Box Theatre in Lawrenceville.  Join us for an evening of music connected by the themes of stars and space.  John Cage’s “Atlas Eclipticalis”, Monteverdi’s “Sfogava con le stelle” and celestial glam rock arrangements dot the evening’s performance for ELCO’s presentation of “Star Songs”.

Sunday, October 3
8PM
Grey Box Theatre
3595 Butler Street
Lawrenceville
Tickets $10/$5 students, seniors, & artists

Visit us on Facebook
and at http://elco-orchestra.webs.com/

Modern Formations Gallery
4919 Penn Ave.
Pittsburgh

$5 at the door (cash only)

Eclectic Laboratory Chamber Orchestra presents “B-Sides”, an evening of chamber music and improvised music, featuring solos and small ensembles comprising members of the Eclectic Laboratory Chamber Orchestra including special guests, The Outer Circle. The evening features composed music by Philip Glass, Paul Arma, and Elliott Sharp, as well as improvised music by members of the ensembles.

Join us to see what members of ELCO are up to and enjoy complimentary light fare. Libations available to those age 21+

We have a tremendously diverse array of contemporary music taking place over the next week. It all starts on Monday, April 19 with Dave Bernabo’s DJ Responsibility installation at Carnegie Library Main (the installation runs through May 31st), continues with a performance by The Outer Circle at Morning Glory Coffee House on Friday, April 23, and will finish off with Eclectic Laboratory Chamber Orchestra’s Das Uber-Kabarett at the Grey Box Theater on Sunday, April 25. All the details are in the Events Calendar, so check it out.