08/08 NEW ALBION AT SUMMERSCAPE: A Festival Within a Festival

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Support for the New Albion festival has been provided by the Thendara Foundation.
Named for a beer that was itself named after the original term for California, New Albion has been, since its founding a quarter-century ago, the voice of West Coast new music. Directed by Foster Reed, it is so well respected for its innovative curating that many fans will buy every new release as it comes out, whether they’ve heard of the artist or not. Although its offerings feature composers as diverse as thorny modernist titan Elliott Carter and the neglected 15th-century master Johannes Ciconia, New Albion has created its own American aesthetic devoted to beauty, thoughtfulness, intensity of feeling, and wide open spaces.

Program Five
Electronic music is a term that still brings to mind a shudder of impersonal noises executed with machine-like precision. But the truth is that by 2008 electronics has pervaded every pore of music, and New Albion has long championed music that uses electronics in listener-friendly ways. These works by Turkish composer Erdem Helvacioglu, the Brooklyn based group Slow Six, and Richard Teitelbaum, Stephen Vitiello and Carl Stone present new music based in electronics that is nevertheless sonically rich and soulful. This concert will be a six hour marathon of the best new electronic work.

6pm From Nor’easter (2008) Slow Six
Gregor Kitzis, violin; Lorna Krier, keyboard; David Nadal, guitar; Stephen Griesgraber, guitar; Christopher Tignor, violin, keyboards, software

7pm From Bright and Dusty Things (2001) Stephen Vitiello
Stephen Vitiello, electronics; Pauline Olivers, accordion; Andrew Deutsch, video

8pm From Altered Realities (2007) Erdem Helvacioglu
Erdem Helvacioglu, acoustic guitar, electronics

9pm L’os a Moëlle (2008) Carl Stone
Carl Stone, laptop

10pm From Blends (1977) Richard Teitelbaum
Richard Teitelbaum, electronics; Ralph Samuelson, shakuhachi, Ehren Hansen, percussion

August 7 at 5:30 pm, $25

Program Six
Just as La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass established a minimalist movement centered in New York, Ingram Marshall, John Adams, and Paul Dresher represented a second-wave minimalism centered in the Bay Area. In Fog Tropes (the piece that put New Albion records on the map), Marshall pioneered a new, filmy kind of minimalism based more in texture and mood than in repetition or rhythm. His friend John Adams, though, became an overnight sensation with Shaker Loops, and became the more orchestrally accessible “fifth minimalist.” Meanwhile, Dresher stayed behind in San Francisco and devoted himself to theater music and chamber works of great melodic elegance. Included as well is an excerpt of Morton Feldman’s homage to Frank Ohara–Three Voices, sung by soprano Joan La Barbra.

Fog Tropes (1981) Ingram Marshall
Performed by Ensemble ACJW
Featuring alumni and fellows of The Academy – a program of Carnegie Hall, The Julliard School, and the Weill Music Institute, in partnership with the New York City department of Education.
Stephen Dunn, trombone; Paul Murphy, trumpet; Alexander Reicher, trombone;Alana Vegter, french horn; Nathan Botts, trumpet; David Byrd-Marrow, french horn

Shaker Loops (1978) John Adams
Owen Dalby, violin; Alexander Woods, violin; Caroline Adelaide Shaw, violin; Elizabeth Weisser, viola; Ezra Seltzer, cello; Ashley Bathgate, cello; Joseph Magar, contrabass

Toward the Night Somei Satoh
Owen Dalby, violin; Alexander Woods, violin; Caroline Adelaide Shaw, violin; Kisho Watanabe, violin; Elizabeth Weisser, viola; Kensho Watanabe, viola; Ezra Seltzer, cello; Ashley Bathgate, cello; Joseph Magar, contrabass

From Three Voices Morton Feldman
Joan La Barbara, voice

In the Nameless Paul Dresher
Paul Dresher and Joel Davel, Quadrachord and Marimba Lumina

August 8 at 8:30 pm, $25

Program Seven
The power of a single player standing before an audience in a performance is at the heart of musical experience. The soloist is like an orator, a poet, a singer. The works tonight are in that tradition. Ge Gan-Ru’s Yi Feng, for solo detuned cello, was written and first performed in 1982 and remains today as a work of incomparable beauty and invention — it is as though the sensibility of music is exploded across the social mind. The subtle and nuanced string of miniature works for electric bass by Jeffrey Roden; and then the concert length Journey That Never Ends, for solo bass by Stefano Scodanibbio, a consummate work.

Yi Feng (1982) Ge Gan Ru
Madeline Shapiro, cello

From seeds of happiness Jeffrey Roden
Jeffrey Roden, electric bass

Voyage that Never Ends Stefano Scodanibbio
Stefano Scodanibbio, bass

August 9 at 8:30 pm, $25

Program Eight
Stephen Scott has built a career around one of the strangest media ever: the bowed piano, a normal grand piano played by ensemble bowing the strings. It’s an extremely labor-intensive form of performance: several people lean inside the piano, bowing strings with nylon fish line and popsicle sticks treated with rosined horsehair, carefully choreographed not to get in each other’s way. Scott’s melodious music for the device made a splash in the late ’70s, and he has continued to develop the idiom for three decades, in larger and ever more powerful works.

Vikings of the Sunrise (1995) Stephen Scott
Bowed Piano
Stephen Scott and the Colorado College Bowed Piano Ensemble

August 10 at 3:30 pm, $15 ($5 children)

Program Nine
No one has contributed so much to the liberation of women composers as Pauline Oliveros, and not even so much liberation from male-dominated structures of performance and distribution, but even more internal liberation from male-centered ways of conceptualizing music. Based in Kingston, New York, Oliveros pioneered an approach to music based less on structure and method and more on receptivity and the intent openness to sound she’s come to call “deep listening.” She is joined for this event by Ellen Fullman, whose instrument of long, long strings conjures up an ecstatic solitude.

Free and Open to the Public (Note: this event will take place in Thorne Studio in the Fisher Center at 5:30 pm)

Long Stringed Instrument Ellen Fullman

Deep Listening Band
Celebrating 20 Years 1988-2008

Sounding the Bard without Shakespeare
I Listening to Mirrors
II Deep Mirroring
III Mirroring the Bard

Performed by the Deep Listening Band
Pauline Oliveros, accordion, voice
David Gamper, keyboard, overtone flutes, found instruments
Stuart Dempster, trombone, conch shells, didjeridus, toys

August 10 at 8:30 pm, $25