New Sounds Live from Brookfield Place 2017
New Sounds Live at Brookfield Place
October 11-13, 2017, 7:30PM
Winter Garden
220 Vesey Street
Map
Admission FREE
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Ben Neill’s “Manitoga,” - Wednesday, October 11th at 7:30PM
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A Tribute to Pauline Oliveros. Darmstadt Ensemble led by Ben Neill and Zach Layton- Thursday, October 12th at 7:30PM
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Colin Stetson’s “Sorrow,” a remaking of Gorecki’s Symphony #3- Friday, October 13th at 7:30PM
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Phonemophones of Carol Szymanski, instruments on display
October 6-13, 2017
The New Sounds Live concert series returns to Brookfield Place for three nights of adventurous music, with composer Ben Neill's mutantrumpet & Carol Szymanski’s brass sculptures, a tribute to Pauline Oliveros featuring Ben Neill, & Colin Stetson's "Sorrow" - a reworking of Polish composer Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, " Symphony of Sorrowful Songs." All concerts are free, and will be recorded for later broadcast on New Sounds with John Schaefer.
Ben Neill’s Manitoga
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
7:30pm
Hear the New York City premiere of "Manitoga" (2014), composed for Neill's mutantrumpet and an ensemble of four players using Szymanski’s brass sculptures crafted to function as musical instruments. Also on the program is the world premiere of "STEAK abc," a new work based on a minimalist poem by Aram Saroyan composed for all 26 of Szymanski's instruments/sculptures.
"Manitoga" is a new environmental composition for the hybrid electro-acoustic instrument mutantrumpet, and brass ensemble playing Phonemophone Alphabet Horns created by artist Carol Szymanski. (Each instrument forms a letter of the alphabet in a font of her design.) Neill’s mutantrumpet will act as the controller for processing the other instruments along with sounds of the environment.
A Tribute to Pauline Oliveros
Darmstadt Ensemble led by Ben Neill and Zach Layton
Thursday, October 12, 2017
7:30pm
Pauline Oliveros was a musical pioneer several times over. She began exploring tape and electronic music as far back as the late 1950s. Her interest in the subtle properties of sound led her to the world of just intonation, a tuning system that leaves the notes in their natural state (as opposed to the “tempered” notes we find on a piano). The rich harmonic world she worked in was the perfect vehicle for her Sonic Meditations – a groundbreaking approach to music as not an intellectual exercise, but an emotional and physical experience. Her interest in “Deep Listening” led her to experiment with unusual sonic venues; she was particularly fond of places with rich reverberant properties (like the Winter Garden atrium), and developed a sophisticated electronic component for many of her works that enabled her to bring that sonic density to concert halls and venues around the world.
Oliveros also believed in the act of music-making as a communal art. She traveled the world leading audiences in Sonic Meditations where everyone in the venue would hum, or sing, or somehow contribute to the “performance.” She wrote hundreds of works where the score was not traditional notes on a staff, but rather a series of simple, practical instructions – or suggestions – on how to bring the piece to life. These works can be played by virtuoso professionals, or by anyone with open ears and the desire to try them. (-John Schaefer)
Colin Stetson’s “Sorrow,” a remaking of Gorecki’s Symphony #3
Friday, October 13, 2017
7:30pm
Sax player and composer Colin Stetson is probably best known for his work with Arcade Fire, Lou Reed, Bon Iver, and others, while his solo performances defy categorization. Recently, he released Sorrow, a reimagining of the third symphony of the great Polish composer Henryk Gorecki. Stetson is true to the long, aching melodies of Gorecki’s original. But instead of a symphony orchestra, he employs a mixed classical and rock ensemble, with alternately droning and snarling saxophone and climactic moments that echo the rhythmic and textural tension of black metal. Surely that is a sound that Gorecki would never have imagined, but it fits perfectly into Stetson’s thrilling, heartfelt, and slightly compressed take on this contemporary classic.
Ben Neill
Composer/performer Ben Neill is the inventor of the mutantrumpet, a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument, and is widely recognized as a musical innovator through his recordings, performances and installations.
Neill has recorded ten CDs of his music on the Universal/Verve, Thirsty Ear, Astralwerks, Six Degrees, Ramseur, New Tone and Ear-Rational labels. Horizonal, his latest album, was released on Vienna-based Audiokult Recordings in September 2015, and was presented as a collaborative installation with Andy Moses at the Ramapo College Art Gallery in 2016. His electronic opera The Demo, inspired by computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart and created with composer/performer Mikel Rouse, was premiered in April 2015 at Stanford University’s Bing Concert Hall.
Other performances include BAM Next Wave Festival, Lincoln Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cite de la Musique Paris, Moogfest, Spoleto Festival, Umbria Jazz, Bang On A Can Festival, ICA London, Istanbul Jazz Festival, Vienna Jazz Festival, and the Edinburgh Festival. Neill has worked closely with many musical innovators including John Cage, LaMonte Young, John Cale, Pauline Oliveros, Gary Lucas, Rhys Chatham, DJ Spooky, David Berhman, Mimi Goese, Nicolas Collins, and David Rothenberg.
Pauline Oliveros (Adapted from paulineoliveros.us)
The inimitable PAULINE OLIVEROS was an iconoclastic contemporary American composer whose career spanned fifty years. She influenced American music profoundly through her concert works, as well as her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.
Oliveros was as interested in finding new sounds as in finding new uses for old ones --her primary instrument was the accordion, an unexpected visitor perhaps to musical cutting edge, but one which she approached in much the same way that a Zen musician might approach the Japanese shakuhachi.
Pauline Oliveros coined the term "Deep Listening," which she described as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. She also founded Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer.
Montreal-based Colin Stetson has developed an utterly unique voice as a soloist, principally on saxophones and clarinets, his intense technical prowess matched by his exhilarating and emotionally gripping skills as a songwriter. Stetson’s astounding physical engagement with his instruments (chiefly bass and alto saxophones) produces emotionally rich and polyphonic compositions that transcend expectations of what solo horn playing can sound like. Stetson is equally at home in the avant jazz tradition of players who have pushed the boundaries of the instrument through circular breathing, embouchure, etc. (i.e. Evan Parker, Mats Gustafsson) and at the nexus of noise/drone/minimalist music that encompasses genres like dark metal, post-rock and contemporary electronics (i.e. Tim Hecker, Ben Frost – both of whom have mixed or remixed Stetson recordings).
Most recently, in a departure from his cultivated solo aesthetic and duo efforts with Sarah Neufeld (Constellation Records), came SORROW: a reimagining of Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony; Stetson’ s first major release as a band leader and the flagship album out on his record label, 52Hz (a collaboration with Kartel Music Group of the UK). 2017 has seen the release of several new works, including an offering from EX EYE (w/Greg Fox, Shahzad Ismaily, and Toby Summerfield) and his latest solo album, All This I Do For Glory.
