Interval 2.1 - Sept. 17!
August 28, 2008 – 1:07 am
Web Resources from 2.1 Release
August 26, 2008 – 4:33 pm|
WEB RESOURCES >Bulletin M [myspace] >Turf Boon [myspace] >Ukeoirn O’Connor [myspace] |
MEDIA Violetta Mahon >excerpt from The King, Poto and Deauville (mp3)
Turf Boon |
Jennifer Walshe bio
August 26, 2008 – 2:03 pm
“Without a doubt, hers is the most original compositional voice to emerge in Ireland in the last 20 years.”
– Michael Dervan, The Irish Times
Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1974. She studied composition with John Maxwell Geddes at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Kevin Volans in Dublin and graduated from Northwestern University, Chicago, with a doctoral degree in composition in June 2002. Her chief teachers at Northwestern were Amnon Wolman and Michael Pisaro. In 2003-2004 Jennifer was a fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; during 2004-2005 she lived in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm. From 2006 to 2008 she is the composer-in-residence in South Dublin County for In Context 3. In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York.
Jennifer’s work has been performed throughout Europe, the U.S. and Canada by ensembles such as Alter Ego, ensemble récherche, Ensemble Resonanz, Apartment House, ensemble Intégrales, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Stuttgarter Kammerorchester, Schlagquartett Köln, CrashEnsemble, ensemble ascolta, Champ d’Action, ensemble surplus, the Rilke Ensemble, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the Irish Youth Wind Ensemble, the Bozzini Quartet, Ensemble 2000, Concorde, Ensemble Musica Nova, ensemble chronophonie, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Wind Quintet, the Hebrides Ensemble, Psappha, and Q-02 among others. She has received commissions from organizations including Radio Telefís Éireann, (RTÉ), Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Sudwest Rundfunk (SWR), the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, Maerzmusik, Musik der Jahrhundert, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Dresdener Tage der zeitgenössischen Musik, Wien Modern, the Dresden Semper Oper, ZKM (Karslruhe), the Irish Chamber Orchestra, CrashEnsemble, the Project Arts Centre and the National Concert Hall, Ireland, as well as commission awards from the New Music Scheme of the Arts Council of Ireland and the Scottish Arts Council. In 2003-04 Jennifer was composer-in-residence at the National Sculpture Factory, Cork. In 2000 Jennifer won the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, and received first prize in the SCI/ASCAP 2002 Commission Competition. In July 2002 she returned to Darmstadt to lecture in composition at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. Her work been in a room and a room and a room and a room was shortlisted for the 2003 Gaudeamus Foundation composition prize; moving in/love songs/city front garden with old men was shortlisted for the 2002 Gaudeamus Foundation composition prize.
In addition to her activities as a composer, Jennifer frequently performs as a vocalist, specialising in extended techniques. Many of her recent compositions were commissioned for her voice in conjunction with other instruments, and her works have been performed by her and others at festivals such as RTÉ Living Music (Dublin), Båstad Kammarmusik Festival (Sweden), Ultraschall (Berlin), Ars Musica (Brussels), Wien Modern, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, Donaueschinger Musiktagen, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Composer’s Choice (Dublin), SoundField (Chicago) the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, Stockholm New Music, BELEF (Belgrade), Traiettorie (Parma), Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), SPOR (Denmark) and Music at the Anthology (New York). Jennifer is also active as an improviser, performing regularly with musicians in Europe and the U.S.
Recent projects of note include Physics for the Girl in the Street, a music theatre work commissioned by the Maerzmusik Festival, Berlin, performed by Jennifer Walshe and the Schlagquartett Köln in Berlin, Wiesbaden and Cologne; My Extensive Relationship with Mr. Stephen Patrick M., a piece for ensemble commissioned by Wien Modern, performed by Jennifer Walshe and Apartment House in the Sammlung Essl, Austria; and Grove of Drift, a sound installation commissioned by the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, exhibited in the Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, and the Project Arts Centre. Upcoming performances include solo performances at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Ultrasound Festival, Tel Aviv, and a performance of the chamber opera for Barbie dolls XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! in the Auditorium Parco Della Musica, Rome.
Grúpat Collective Bios
August 25, 2008 – 11:57 pmDowager Marchylove
The Dowager Marchylove uses her notoriety and flair for excess to bring attention to sonic ecology, the music of walking, the excavation of memory, and the crossmediation of sound, text, and image. Known for employing a wide variety of performative, compositional, aesthetic, and theoretical approaches, the Dowager’s catholic tastes expose themselves in sound poetry, fashion, photography, music, installations, objects and more confrontational practices such as engagements, situations, and interventions. The Dowager has made her name bending rules and shattering expectations, working tirelessly to remind people that ìthe beauty is in the breaking.î
The Dowager Marchylove erupted full-grown from the forehead of Archbishop Fiachra Trixibelle Proust in 1998, blossoming into the world like a gleaming ivory flower and bringing with her a bad, bad love for all the dirty ones. She got her start taking naughty pictures and has since progressed to naughty sounds. One of the most successful alter egos used by the multimedia performance artist Niall Quinlan, the Dowager opens up paradoxes of liminality and identity at the same time as she transgresses boundaries of time and space. Niall Quinlan was born in 1978 and graduated from Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design, and Technology in 2000, with a degree in Visual Arts Practice. He began his career as artist working in photography and performance art, most notably with transgressive radical lesbian artist Jilly McGee in the duo DUL AMACH, where the Dowager Marchylove first made her appearance known. Quinlan continues to explore image, identity, and performance through a variety of ìpersonalitiesî to this day.
The Dowagers works have been performed at Soundeye Poetry Festival (Cork, Ireland), VOX Festival (Vancouver, Canada), Heritage Festival at the Sirius Arts Centre (Cobh, Ireland), Coulorscape Music Festival (London, England), and elsewhere. Her photography, text, sound, and sculptural installations have been exhibited at Tallaght Community Arts Centre (Tallaght, Ireland), Parochialkirche Klostertrasse (Berlin, Germany), Catalyst Arts (Belfast, Northern Ireland), Art/Not Art (Edinburgh, Scotland), and Roscommon Arts Centre (Roscommon, Ireland). She has held residencies at Cit_ des Artes (Paris, France) and the Mobile Academy (Warsaw, Poland), and won the ìBest Newcomer Awardî as DUL AMACH (with Jilly McGee) in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2002 and the ìMedia Poetry Prizeî at the 2006 Biennale Internationale des Po_tes en Val-de-Marne. She has also won ìBest Handwritingî (2005), ìBest Home-made Swiss Rollî (2003), ìBest Child_s Matinee Coatî (2002), ìBest Photograph Featuring Waterî (1999), and ìBest Tweed Pictureî (1999) at the Virginia Show (Cavan, Ireland).
Some of the Dowager’s more notable works include Flaneur du Klang, Music for Eight 10 Year-Olds, It’s Not You, It’s Me, Oh! Tom Cruise!, Want to Believe, Float, The Pale, Made LOVE Not WAR tuba, Six (in), You May Wish To Linger, and You Kiss Your Mother With Those Lips. The Dowager lives in Dublin with her many, many cats.
Violetta Mahon
Violetta Mahon presents a complex, ambivalent figure: a profoundly private artist, her most important works are holy grottoes built as her own form of public art. Situated in fields, along roads, and half-hidden among various rural and urban landscapes, Mahon’s holy grottoes present themselves as deeply personal expressions of folk art impulses, as if she were speaking her own invented words but in our common tongue. The strange blend of uncanniness and familiarity that evinces itself in Mahon’s work develops out of her abiding concern with symbols, dreams, the unconscious, religion, spirituality, and alternative languages. Mahon_s artistic vision encompasses a heterogeneous spirituality, using religious symbology from around the world, absorbing it all into her own intuitive visionary structure and transforming the exotic into the personal, the banal into the wondrous.
Born in 1976 in Dublin, Violetta Mahon graduated from University College Dublin in 1998 with a BA in Celtic Studies. Mahon has struggled with spiritual and psychological crises throughout her life, and as a result has always been a reclusive and solitary artist, devoting herself wholeheartedly to her artistic vision without showing much concern for exposing her work to a wider public or for promoting artistic career. After graduating from college she worked a series of jobs, including phone-operator at a suicide hotline, caregiver at a home for adults with Down’s Syndrome, labourer on an organic farm, and postal worker. Her unique, innovative work went unrecognized and relegated to the realm of roadside oddities and second-hand shops until a chance meeting with Flor Hartigan brought her into the artist_s collective known as Grúpat. Since then, represented by Hartigan and the other members of Gr_pat, Mahan has seen interest in her work flourish. Although she herself refuses to partake in the professional aspects of her artistic career, her work speaks for itself.
Mahon’s work can be seen in situ at numerous sites throughout South Dublin County, and has been exhibited at The Stone Gallery, Monster Truck, Pallas Studios in Dublin, The Model Arts & Niland Gallery in Sligo, The Crawford Arts Center in Cork and Denniston Hill in New York, and can also be found in private collections. Her work has been reviewed in Wire, Artforum, Diagram, Signal to Noise, and elsewhere. She shows almost exclusively with other artists from Gr_pat.
Mahon currently lives in Dublin, where she works as a delivery driver. She eschews publicity and personal appearances, preferring to insulate herself and her artistic practice from commercial concerns. She is represented by Flor Hartigan.
Detleva Verens
Detleva Verens works to explore the spatialization of sound and the sonorousness of space. She considers the cybernetic systems operating in natural phenomena and the chaotic nature of complex technological systems. Verens operates in the paradoxical, liminal, and microscopic. Often working with acoustic micro-sounds, she is interested in the deployment of non-musical organizational structures. According to Verens, music doesn’t merely have a shape but shapes the world. She says the two most important events in her life were examples of music that changed the world we live in: the Singing Revolution, the series of spontaneous mass demonstrations of singing all over Estonia, from 1987 to 1991, that ended in Estonia’s winning its independence from Soviet Russia; and “Everybody,” Estonia’s winning entry into the 2001 Eurovision Song Contest, performed by Tanel Padar, Dave Benton and 2XL, which was the first Eurovision win by a former member of the USSR and also the first grand prize win by a black performer. Detlava Verens considers herself working in the tradition of revolutionary Estonian musical power.
Born in 1977 in Tartu, Estonia, Detlava Verens studied information technology at the Tallinn University of Technology, receiving her MS in 2002 with a specialization in cybernetics, phonetics, and speech technology. She was also in 2002 awarded the ALEA Composition Prize for her piece, Ad Astra Per Aspera, which convinced her to shift her focus from academic research in cybernetics to artistic experimentation. Since then, Verens has worked to explore the spatiality of sound, the confluence of technology, vocality, and the natural world, micro-sounds and micro-scapes, and cybernetic approaches to music. She moved to Ireland in 2004.
Her works have been performed by groups including Black Hair, Ensemble Klang, KNM Berlin, Champ d’Action, Gr_pat, and Concorde. Installations and projects of hers have been commissioned by South Dublin County Council, ZKM Center for Art and Media (Germany), Catalyst Arts (Northern Ireland), Darklight (Dublin), and the Museum of Timi_oara (Romania). She has held residencies at Europos Parkas (Lithuania), the Hungarian Multiculture Centre (Hungary), and Yaddo (USA).
Ukeoirn O’Connor
Ukeoirn O’Connor works in what he calls ìthe mix of it all,î blending a rigorous concern for ethnomusicology with a deft improvisational approach into a practice of composition and performance that seeks to bring the multicultural tensions and energies of an increasingly globalized world into a musical dynamism that looks at the same time back and ahead, across the world and right at home, inside, outside, even upside down. He is a composer and musician who started his career drawing pictures. He is a hard-working improviser known for his innovative scores. O_Connor works to explode the definitions he finds himself struggling with, like Irish, Japanese, composer, performer, experimental, and traditional, in the attempt to blend and mix things not into a bland monocultural pap but rather a lively, complex relation.
Born in 1972 in Dublin, Ireland, Ukeoirn O’Connor studied Fine Arts at the National College of Art and Design, graduating in 1995. He began his artistic career as a painter and visual artist, but after meeting Flor Hartigan he realized that his lifelong love for music could be explored in a much more innovative and interesting way than he_d previously realized. He started playing, improvising, and composing experimental music and never looked back. O_Connor tends to work with extended vocal techniques, rhythmic drone structures, and scratch tones, and is keenly interested in exploring intercultural musical collaboration and confluence.
O’Connor is a prolific composer and performer, active in both Irish and international circles. He regularly improvises and performs with a variety of groups and musicians, including Oh! Number, C’ca Mil’s, Kenta Nagoro, Caoimh’n Murch’, Slavek Kwi, Chris Forsyth, and X-Tract. His work has been commissioned by the South Dublin County Council, the Sligo New Music Festival, the Bozzini Quartet, the Dublin Fringe Festival, and Apartment House, among others, and has been performed at the Kilkenny Arts Festival (Ireland), the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), the International Contemporary Music Festival (Vilnius, Lithuania), and elsewhere. He has held residencies at Bord Bia (Berlin, Germany) and the Skellig Arts Centre (Ireland). He has received grants and awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, the Fingal County Council, and Culture Ireland.
Some of O’Connor’s most recent works include Three Songs, bipbipbipbipbidilee bam bam, ìohno!î at last, wandering, NOW.YOU.GO., and TETSUOROURKE. He currently lives in Rathfarnam and works as a forester for Coillte Teoranta.
Turf Boon
Turf Boon works as a sculptor, sound artist, and musician. Over the last decade, Turf Boon has created over 40 sound installations and sculptures, focusing on building innovative, spatially and sonically provocative pieces from found and recycled items. He is concerned with turning the detritus of society into sustainable artistic practice, and in bringing to everything he does a global and local attention to the textures and sounds of what we throw away or ignore. His ìFreeganî approach is rigorous and all-encompassing: ìI don’t buy materials,î he says, ìI_ve never bought materials. I use what_s there.î
Born in 1971 in Wicklow, Ireland, Turf Boon studied sculpture at the Glasgow School of Art. After graduating, Boon straightaway began creating works. His first fame was made as a guerilla sculptor, creating unsanctioned sculptures in public places, including the noted series Public Werkers. This soon developed into commissioned work, especially at concerts, festivals, and in Dublin_s underground techno scene. His interest in the placed mutability of sonic structures led him more and more to build sound and music into his work, and to explore the promise of sound itself. Many of his works suggest sound rather than instantiating it, provoking explorations of expectation and intent.
His works have been exhibited at the Dran_cht Arts Centre (Blanchardstown, Ireland), the Project Arts Centre (Dublin, Ireland), the Tulca Arts Festival (Galway, Ireland), Eigenart (Berlin, Germany), Darklight (Dublin), Living Music (Dublin), Wien Modern (Austria), Abstract Adventures (Brussels), and Soundfield (Philadelphia, USA). He has held residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annamakerrigh (Ireland) and at the Headlands Center for the Arts (California, USA). He has been commissioned by Rhizome, South Dublin County Council, and others.
Boon’s most recent works include Kir#73astria, 5 23 16, Kultscheltiermarimbaphon, Shoepipes, The Sacred Geometries, the Community Choir Series, and The Softest Music in the World. He lives in Lucan, where he offers workshops on organic farming and building straw bale houses.
Mario Diaz de Leon curatorial statement & bio
February 15, 2008 – 9:28 pmMyself, Zeljko McMullen, and Doron Sadja have been collaborating on music projects for the last 5 years. The bulk of our work together has been in the form Symbol, a free improvisation group with fluid membership. Despite our long collaborative history, our individual compositions are realized in differing ways, and are rarely heard in context with one another. MATA Interval 1.3 will be a unique opportunity to do just this, in a presentation of common aesthetics, regardless of differing techniques or tools. Using unique fusions of acoustic instruments and electronics, our musical styles are explorations of the psychedelic and otherworldly. As is often the case, this curatorial project leaves out many key figures in our circle, the family of Shinkoyo.
We explore polarities : solitude / togetherness, comfort and fear, new age and noise, sub-bass and ultra-high frequencies, ancient and futuristic….a meditation in the middle of an air raid. The blurring and superimposition of acoustic and electronic, the self and the other, mind and matter, the material and immaterial. Boundaries and boundlessness. Beginning with improvised actions - exploring extended instrumental techniques in a studio, a group improvisation in a chapel, four collaboratively tuned guitars, electronic systems pulsing in feedback with themselves. From this realm of “playful seriousness”, the recordings may become pieces in themselves, or source material for composed works. In the latter case, they are analysed, structured, and re-contextualized, or simply become living cells in the larger body of influences.
Zeljko, in the press release for Red and Blue describes his work as “bardo music, meant to guide you between the states of your being.” While I don’t think it’s necessary (or helpful) to try and pin our approaches to something easily explainable, I find statements like this to be helpful gateways. They may lead us to a discourse about things we undoubtedly share, but become more elusive when using words - the spiritual dimensions of our work. It is these types of things, the visionary, the out of body, the cosmic, the sublime ambiguities, that we seek to channel in our works, and explore as collaborators. A successful Symbol jam might feel like some kind of wild spaceship. These group efforts, with their emphasis on exploration and sharing, deeply influence our individual works, which are part of a larger system evolving in continuous dialogue with itself. From there, our works manifest themselves in a variety of ways.
Since the release of his widely successful debut album A Piece of String, A Sunset (12k, 2003), Doron has moved from studio based computer music to more improvisational, performative work. This has been developed concurrently with Sadjeljko (his duo with Zeljko) and Symbol. His current instrumentation features an array of analog pedals operating in a feedback loop, in addition to saxophone, clarinet, electric guitar, flute, and other instruments. The feedback loop aspect of this arrangement creates a “…dialogue in which the performer must struggle to control (and react to) and unpredictable electronic instrument.” Simlarly, a common approach of Doron’s is to use the instruments on which he is trained and re-configure them in such a way that they cannot be performed traditionally, such as a trombone with a clarinet mouthpiece. Doron will present a solo performance of a new work, “The Guided Guild”, for flombone (any configuration or re-configuration of a clarinet, saxophone, and trombone), live electronics, and 4 channel sound. The work will be his first composition for this performance arrangement!
Zeljko McMullen uses samples of acoustic instruments and improvisations to compose dense walls of electronic sound, which are diffused in immersive multi-channel environments. In Zeljko’s own words, “…I utilize sounds to deconstruct the present physical space of the listener, replacing it with a perpetually shifting acoustic architecture. Intended as a counter-din to the information saturation of present day society, my music serves as a cathartic release, a womb-like shelter of imploding space that allows the listener to have an introverted experience.” The recording process, collaboration, and improvisation are key elements in each step of the composition process. Zeljko’s source material comes from many areas, including solo and group improvisations on acoustic and electronic instruments. These are then meticulously edited, re-layered, and collapsed into each other. Up to 100 layers of sound may be used to create the album versions, which are often improvised in live mixing sessions. On the Red and Blue double album (Shinkoyo, 2006) Zeljko brought his work into a spatial domain through the use of Neumann’s “Fritz” head, a microphone in the shape of a mannequin head, designed to capture stereo sound in the way our ears do. Diffusing his original compositions through multiple speakers and space, Red and Blue highlights the experience of a listener moving through conjoined spaces “a church crammed into a closet poured out on a mountain raining out of the sea…” Each track on the record is monumental, creating multi-layered, multi-temporal evocations of out-of-body experience.
My works for acoustic instruments and electronics fuse the two elements into unified “meta-instruments”, and often use recordings of our group improvisations as electronic source material. Like many other works from this period (2002 - present), I envision the form of the work as a progression between vision states, culminating in a kind of ascent. As the title might suggest, the work explores darker, occult energies, with a latent meditativeness and melancholy. My overall language is based on open strings, harmonics, and noise derived from extended instrumental techniques, on both bowed strings and electric guitars. These are used to create gestures and spaces that are both intimate and immersive. My piece was realized through a combination of structural and improvisational approaches. In an early stages of the piece, I presented semi-improvised versions of this work featuring the electronics, violin, viola and myself on electric guitar. Recordings from these performances became the impetus for further development, and many elements in the final score are interpretive transcriptions from these improvisations. The sound research component was key as well - many of the electronic sounds are taken from studio sessions with bowed strings and electric guitar - the final section of the piece is built around a loop from a viola improvisation, performed by Zeljko.
-Mario Diaz de Leon
Mario Diaz de León (b. 1979 in St. Paul, Minnesota) is a composer and performer. His growing body of works for small ensembles with electronics bridge a range of stylistic influences. They include composers and genres such as Scelsi, Ligeti, Maryanne Amacher, Iancu Dumitrescu and Romanian spectral music, black metal, drone/doom metal, shoegaze, as well as American noise bands such as Metalux, Sejayno, and Symbol. He performs in solo and group settings on electric guitar, voice, zither, and electronics.
Mario grew up playing in punk and metal bands, and began composing notated music in 2001. He has been collaborating with Jay King on multimedia works since 1995. Other projects include the band Symbol (also featuring Doron Sadja and Zeljko McMullen) and a duo with Severiano Martinez. He is a member of the Shinkoyo music and art collective. He has performed and exhibited work internationally, at locations such as Roulette, The Stone, Paris London West Nile, Rose Studio at Lincoln Center, Merkin Concert Hall, PS1 Contemporary Arts (NYC), Franklin Art Works (Minneapolis), Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris), Pavillion XXI (Romania), and Espace Demeer (Brussels). He has toured the US several times with Symbol, Sejayno, and as a solo performer. Compositions have been performed in the USA by the International Contemporary Ensemble and in Europe by the Hyperion Ensemble. Received his B.M. from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and currently pursuing his doctorate at Columbia University in New York. Teachers include George Lewis, Maryanne Amacher, Fabien Lévy, Randolph Coleman, and Tom Lopez. He is a recipient of the 2005 Meet the Composer/Van Lier Fellowship, Columbia University’s Faculty Fellowship, and a winner of ICE’s 21st Century Young Composers Project.
Zeljko McMullen bio
February 15, 2008 – 9:26 pm
Zeljko McMullen : Born in February of 1980 / raised in Massillon, Ohio - moved to Chicago and then Oberlin, attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Studied orchestral and electronic composition, sound art/installation. Helped form the Shinkoyo art + music collective. Currently resides in Brooklyn, NY - studying towards MFA at Bard College. Primarily deals with walls of sound as imaginary architecture and moveable spaces. Active experimenter with both binaural perceptive beating and binaural spatial recordings. Participates regularly in the music + art group Symbol. Co-curates and runs Paris London New York West Nile music venue and gallery. paints, photographs, and is currently shooting his first feature film, which entails collaborations with Severiano Martinez, Tony Conrad, Maryanne Amacher, Jay King, Doron Sadja, Carly Ptak, and many more.
Has received commissions from the Jerome Foundation, Roulette, Neumann/Sennheiser. Has performed and/or installed work in North America, Europe, and Asia. Has 7 solo and/or collaborative releases on Shinkoyo records. Has or does play music with Doron Sadja, Mario Diaz de Leon, MV Carbon, Justin Craun, Owen Cannon, Johnny Misheff, Lauren Luloff, Brooke Gillespie, Stefan Tcherepnin, and Lou Reed.
Doron Sadja bio
February 15, 2008 – 8:13 pm 
Doron Sadja is a sound/visual artist originating in Los Angeles and ending in New York by way of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, London, and Berlin. Co-founder of Shinkoyo music and art collective, he currently lives in Williamsburg where he runs ParisLondonWestNile, an experimental performance space and gallery. His releases include a solo album, A Piece of String, a Sunset, as well as a collaboration with Motion (both on 12k), a collaboration with Zeljko McMullen called Sadjeljko, a solo album (Sotto Voce) on Shinkoyo, and a compilation on Atak (Japan).
Interval 1.2 pics [part 2]
January 29, 2008 – 12:10 amImprov Trio
Ha-Yang Kim - cello, Marco Cappelli - guitar, Lukas Ligeti - balafon
Miscellaneous Snaps
Curatorial Assoicate Ha-Yang Kim
Sound checking…
Left - MATA’s new Tech Director Dan Bora, Right - MATA Exec Dir Missy Mazzoli
MATA’s Intern Michael Chinworth
The crowd heading out at intermission…
ISSUE Project Room team - Suzanne Fiol & Zach Layton.
Zach started working at IPR very soon after curating MATA Interval’s debut in November!
Interval 1.2 pics [part 1]
January 26, 2008 – 9:28 pmOdd Appetite
Ha-Yang Kim - cello, Nathan Davis - percussion
Flux Quartet
Tom Chiu & Conrad Harris - violin, Max Mandel - viola, Ha-Yang Kim - cello (guest)
Q+A with Lukas Ligeti
January 23, 2008 – 1:00 am1. Can you briefly describe how you first were exposed/inspired by non western music?
I only started playing music after graduating from high school, and rather than “coming from” a certain musical style or world, I began listening to all kinds of music at the same time, anything I could get my hands on. And for some reason, I’m not quite sure why, I liked many types of non-Western music. I guess I was mainly interested in ways of thinking about music that I had not been aware of previously…different ways of conceptualizing rhythm, for example, or timbre. I wanted to create my own music and was looking for conceptual inspiration, for ways to go in a different direction so as to create something new. From the beginning, I defined the creation of something original as my main purpose as an artist, and I was looking for foundations to base my thinking on - and I wanted the challenge and the potential of foundations that were little known to me and that had not been overused in the area of art music.
Way before that, as a child, I was always dreaming of far-away places. I loved looking at maps way before I could read, and projected my phantasies and dreams onto these unknown worlds. I also invented my own countries, planets, etc. - in fact, I was a veritable assembly-line for the invention of new countries! And these countries needed to be populated, though music was only one of my many concerns; the countries needed everything from indigenous peoples to writers, artists, politicians (I especially enjoyed inventing dictators), etc.
2. What qualities attract you to have personal experiences with non western music/musicians? What do you find meaningful in this exchange and why?
I guess my first time actually working with non-Western musicians was in 1994, during my first trip to Africa. I was sent to the Ivory Coast to collaborate with traditional musicians. I had two weeks to rehearse with them, and at the end of the two weeks, a joint concert was scheduled, so it was sink or swim. 150 musicians showed up to work with me: far too many. So I played them some of my music, to scare them away, and that was successful: the next day, 15 musicians came. Over the next two weeks, those musicians became some of my closest friends; it was just a very lucky thing, and inspired me to continue along this path, and I continue working with some of those same people to this day.
In order to facilitate meaningful cultural exchange, I think it’s important to be curious about each other. It’s important to talk, because it makes no sense to “use” musicians from a different culture to participate in works based on concepts that participants from another culture will not understand - that makes the participating musicians into pawns, and is a patronizing situation that happens all too often. So it’s necessary to discuss and to try to understand each other’s cultural values and concepts as well as possible. My idea in cultural exchange is not to try to play the music of the other culture, or to impose my own music on people of a different cultural background, but to create something that could only exist through the combination of our diverse backgrounds. Everyone should maintain their identity, but at the same time everyone is free to define their own identity, to adopt values from other cultures that they feel strongly about, rather than being obliged to represent a certain culture in a wholesale way.
3. In what ways have these experiences changed or affected your creative process, in composition and performance?
My experiences in cultural exchange - which have occurred mainly in Africa - have permeated every fibre of my being. African music theory is as much an ingredient of my music as is Western music theory. The melodies and timbres I’ve heard have become part of my own imagination: I can no longer clearly separate my Western influences from my non-Western ones. Due to my family history, I’m an eternal immigrant, a rootless cosmopolitan, and through my musical experiences, some other cultures have been added to the mix. That mix is my cultural identity. Sometimes it’s hard not really having a home, but it also means being able to feel at home almost no matter where.