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Karen Bentley Pollick performs "Cluck..." in New York and Detroit Oct 5/10, 2014

In ,

Violinist Karen Bentley Pollick will be performing Cluck Old Hen Variations on October 5th, 2014 in New York City at SPECTRUM, a new alternative contemporary music venue, founded by Glenn Corbett. The performance will premiere a new film by Fred Kolouch, created specifically to be projected in combination with the live performance. (A sample still image from the film is shown below.)

On October 10th, 2014, Ms. Bentley Pollick will be performing the work at the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum as part of a concert of the Paul Dresher Double Duo.

CluckStill.jpg

Update

on 2014-11-16 06:38 by David A. Jaffe

On November 20th, 2014, Karen will be performing Cluck Old Hen Variations (with the film by Fred Kolouch) at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), the Knoll, Stanford University. More info here.

Update

on 2016-11-28 11:31 by David A. Jaffe

There have been many subsequent performances of this work in Lithuania, Seattle and elsewhere. See elsewhere on the web site for details.

Commission from Galax Quartet with Karen Clark

In

The Galax Quartet has commissioned me to write Eight O's in Woolloomooroo, based on a text by Mark Twain. In this work, Galax will be joined by contralto Karen Clark. Work on the piece is supported by a grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the San Francisco Early Music Society and the Galax Quartet.

From the first time I heard Galax, a year ago, I was immediately drawn to the subtlety and virtuosity of their playing. The Galax Quartet is modeled after an early version of the string quartet — two Baroque violins, Baroque cello and viola da gamba — developed by the eighteenth century composer and viola da gamba virtuoso, Carl Friedrich Abel. The personnel of Galax include some of the top early music musicians in the world: Elizabeth Blumenstock, David Wilson, Roy Whelden and David Morris.

I first met Karen Clark way back when I was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University. There,as part of the Composer's Ensemble, she gave a stellar performance of my work, Number Man, for the ghost of J.S. Bach for four voices and oboe. I was floored by the flexibility of her voice and by her musicality. I am very much looking forward to collaborating with her and Galax on this new work.

A new cadenza for a Mozart concerto

In Tags

Up until recent times, it was common for soloists to improvise or compose new cadenzas. Somehow, with the stratification and separation of roles (composer versus performer, classical player vs. improvisor), this approach has been neglected. Such"tampering" is considered off limits, even sacrilegious.

Yet, the music of the past is not a sacred relic, but a living organism. In that spirit, I've composed a new cadenza for the Mozart G Major violin concerto.

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Work in progress - "NotomotoN Unstrung" for mechanical percussion, mandolin and Radiodrum

In

Spent four days last weekend working with Andrew Schloss at the Universal Audio studio on a new duo quasi-improvised piece. The focus of the current effort is to combine acoustic sound, both performed directly and remotely via robotic actuators, with electronic processing of that sound. The new work is being presented at the ICIT “New Directions” Symposium at the University of California at Irvine, which is being held between March 1st and March 3rd, 2013.

The piece uses the "NotomotoN," an instrument designed by Ajay Kapur consisting of an Indian two-headed drum with ten remotely-controllable beaters. (The name of this instrument is a palindrome; I am not sure of the correct pronunciation, though I like "no-TOM-o-ton," i.e. rhyming with "automaton."

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100th birthdays

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Just completed my contribution to a kind of compositional game of telephone, in honor of John Cage's 100th birthday, in which 100 composers were selected to produce a composition in which each person sees only one measure from the person before him/her. Will be premiered in New York and Leipzig in 2013, also on the web. Info (in German): here.


Speaking of 100th birthdays, just returned from the University of Victoria, where I gave a lecture entitled "Composing, Computing and Creativity." One of several Alan Turing Lectures in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth, I discussed how and why I create both music and software and how the two are closer to one another than one might suspect. Other lecturers during the two-week celebration included Leslie Valient and Jaron Lanier.

Abstract below:

Jorge Luis Borges envisioned a library of every possible book of a given length and set of characters. The size of this library, while not quite infinite is effectively so, dwarfing the number of atoms in the known universe by eighteen hundred orders of magnitude. The plight of the creative artist is similar: to pick exactly one of these possibilities.

My background is unusual in that I have pursued music composition and computer programming with equal intensity and with a deep conviction as to their fundamental creative nature, drawing inspiration one from the other. These two seemingly different domains share much in common, as both can be modeled by similar paradigms: making something from nothing (additive synthesis), making something from everything (subtractive synthesis), making something from something else (genetic algorithms), etc. Combining these two pursuits has led me to develop a musical approach based on hybridization, abstraction and concretization. It is often said that music composition cannot be taught. A more accurate statement would be that it can be taught only in a personal way, based on detached self-observation, and without any assumption that past behavior predicts future actions. In this talk I examine my wanderings in the labyrinthine Library of Babel.