John Bischoff Monique Buzzarté Sarah Cahill The Cardew Choir Luciano Chessa Beth Custer Matt Davignon and Gretchen Jude Del Sol Quartet Thomas DiMuzio Paul Dresher and Joel Davel Larnie Fox Guillermo Galindo & Lisa Sangita Moskow Gautam Tejas Ganeshan Philip Gelb Wayne Grim Brenda Hutchinson Laura Inserra Jaroba and Keith Cary Henry Kaiser Stephen Kent Kitka Juraj Kojs and Adrian Knight Dohee Lee, Adria Otte and Donald Swearingen The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble The Lightbulb Ensemble The Living Earth Show, Adam Fong and Brent Miller Amy X Neuburg Maggi Payne Tim Phillips Dan Plonsey Eric Glick Reiman ROVA Santomieri-Farhadian Duo Jason Victor Serinus Edward Schocker Carl Stone Wang Fei The Willam Winant Percussion Group Theresa Wong Pamela Z
John Bischoff has been active in the experimental music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 35 years as a composer, performer, and teacher. He is known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis and the pioneering development of computer network music. He was a founding member of The League of Automatic Music Composers in 1978, considered to be the world’s first computer network band, with Jim Horton and Rich Gold. He co-authored an article with Horton and Gold on the League’s music that was published in Foundations of Computer Music (MIT Press 1985). He is also a founding member of The Hub, a computer network band that has further developed the network music form since 1987. He is currently an Associate Professor of Music at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Monique Buzzarté
Monique Buzzarté, trombonist/composer, is an avid proponent of contemporary music who commissions and premieres many new works for trombone alone and with electronics in addition to creating her own compositions. This year she’ll be performing a series of pieces inspired by inner and outer soundscapes for trombone and prerecorded sounds.
Monique Buzzarté and Francis White discuss interpretations
Sarah Cahill
Photo by Marianne La Rochelle
Sarah Cahill is a pianist performing both new music and classical music. She has commissioned, premiered, and recorded numerous compositions for solo piano. She is also president of New Music Bay Area, which presents the Garden of Memory summer solstice concert at the Chapel of the Chimes. Sarah will be performing some of Mamoru Fujieda’s Patterns of Plants. Her new two-CD set of Fujieda’s music will be released by Pinna Records later in June.
Sarah Cahill performs Mamoru Fujieda’s Patterns of Plants at Rothko Chapel
Sarah Cahill performs Henry Cowell’s Rhythmicana (1938)
Cardew Choir
The Cornelius Cardew Choir is a SF Bay Area-based vocal performance ensemble. Situated at the intersection of community & experimental music, these professional, amateur, & novice singers work collectively to turn ideas into sonic action.
Program Note: The Heart Chant by Pauline Oliveros (2001) is a sonic meditation for healing all that needs healing. We stand in a circle, each person’s right hand over their own heart, their left hand on the back of the person to your left (back of their heart). We join in singing the syllable “ah” for a length of breath, on a note of each person’s own selection, breathing deeply, and forming a beautiful chord. As we continue singing in that way, the chord changes in pitch, loudness, and tone color, according to the decisions of each participant. Members of the Cardew Choir provide simple directions for comfortably and gracefully entering and leaving the circle. Participants sing for as long as they wish (up to four hours!
Cardew Choir performing Oliveros’ Heart Chant
Luciano Chessa
Luciano Chessa is among the most interesting and inventive minds currently working in the Bay Area. Active as a composer, performer, conductor and musicologist, Chessa’s work draws heavy influence from experimentation, blending unorthodox ideas with classical form. Imaginative in its embrace of the avant-garde, Chessa’s music quickly reveals the promise of the timbral and conceptual possibilities afforded by his innovative approach.
Photo by Melesio Nuñez
Program Note: I intend to present the Appunto 55 titled “Il Pratone della Casilina”, an extensive (and infamous) passage from Pasolini’s unfinished novel Petrolio. The text is rendered with a megaphone signing/reading technique I have been recently developing. A commonality of graphic themes in between Il Pratone and Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon is only the most evident of the many connections between this Appunto 55and the oeuvre of Robert Ashley.
Thus this new work is dedicated to Robert Ashley In Memoriam.
Music for 15 Futurist Noise Intoners
Beth Custer
Beth Custer is a San Francisco based composer, performer, bandleader, and the proprietor of BC Records. She composes for theatre, film, dance, television, installations and the concert stage. Beth has created four musicals with award winning writer Octavio Solis. Her collaborative scores with inventor and MacArthur Fellow Trimpin lead her to compose Vinculum Symphony, a site-specific, large-scale work that unites chamber musicians with experimental instrument builders. She has over twenty-five recordings out with her ensembles Eighty Mile Beach, Clarinet Thing, Trance Mission, The Beth Custer Ensemble and Club Foot Orchestra.
Beth Custer Ensemble at Yoshi’s, SF
Matt Davignon and Gretchen Jude
Matt Davignon is an experimental musician living in Oakland, California, best known for combining drum machine with a variety of electronic processing devices to create an expressive, organic-sounding synthesizer. His distinctive sound palette is informed not only by past experience with field recordings, household objects, prepared instruments and live sound collage, but also his love of psychedelic and space music.
Gretchen Jude sings, plays and creates traditional,classical, experimental, electronic and improvised music. She holds an MFA in Electronic Music & Recording Media (with the Donna Peterson Vocal Prize) from Mills College, as well as koto certification from the Sawai Koto Institute in Tokyo. Her combined interests in electronics and traditional Japanese music led to the development of the photo-koto, which uses light sensors to translate the koto player’s gestures into digital sounds.
Matt Davignon Live at Noisebridge
Del Sol Quartet
The San Francisco based Del Sol String Quartet is breaking the boundaries of classical music in riveting performances of new music with a global pulse. This critically acclaimed group of high energy master musicians explores new ways to interact with audiences, composers, and artists across cultures and art forms.
Del Sol String Quartet performs Mason Bates’ “Rough Math”
Thomas DiMuzio Thomas Dimuzio is a composer, musician, mastering engineer and label proprietor based in San Francisco. Long regarded as a musical pioneer for his innovative use of live sampling and looping techniques to create consistently compelling works, Dimuzio has earned a deserved reputation worldwide as an avant-garde sound artist in touch with the aesthetic pulse of time and technology. A true sonic alchemist who can seemingly create music events out of almost anything, Dimuzio’s listed sound sources on his various CDs include everything from ‘modified 10 speed bicycle’ and ‘resonating water pipe’ to short-wave radios, loops, feedback, samplers and even normal instruments such as clarinet and trumpet, while his current work is immersed in the deep expanses of modular synthesis. Effortlessly moving from electroacoustic and noise to glitch, dark ambient, improv and drone, Dimuzio’s eclecticism bespeaks a career equally informed by profound dedication to his craft and collaborations with friends, artists and technologists alike. Thomas Dimuzio’s recordings have been released internationally by ReR Megacorp, Asphodel, RRRecords, No Fun, Sonoris, Drone, Record Label Records, Odd Size, and other independent labels. Among his collaborators are Chris Cutler, Dan Burke, Joseph Hammer, Nick Didkovsky, Due Process, Voice of Eye, Fred Frith, David Lee Myers, 5uu’s, Matmos, Wobbly, and Negativland.
Paul Dresher and Joel Davel
Paul Dresher is an internationally active composer noted for his ability to integrate diverse musical influences into his own coherent and unique personal style. He pursues many forms of musical expression including experimental opera and music theater, chamber and orchestral composition, live instrumental electro-acoustic music performances, musical instrument invention, and scores for theater, dance, and film.Joel Davel is an active performer dedicated to breaking new ground in a variety of musical contexts. In addition to his work with Paul Dresher Ensemble, Joel performs with jazz group Jack West and Curvature and in solo appearances. His aesthetic is greatly influenced by his young professional association, as a composer and live musician, with innovative theater companies in Milwaukee. Joel holds a BM in percussion from Northern Illinois University and an MFA in electronic music from Mills College.
Paul Dresher’s “Glimpsed From Afar” – Paul Dresher/Joel Davel Invented Instrument
Thea Farhadian and Dean Santomieri
Thea Farhadian is an interdisciplinary artist and performer based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Berlin. Her projects include solo violin and interactive electronics, improvisation, laptop performance, sound art, and video. Thea’s work has been seen internationally in venues in Berlin, London, Armenia, San Francisco, and New York.
Guitarist Dean Santomieri composes and improvises using electric resonator guitars. He also regularly performs as a spoken word artist. In addition to his solo and duo work he has been associated with the groups: Donkey Boy; Malcolm Mooney & the 10th Planet; I Franzen, Ghost in the House and the Cornelius Cardew Choir.
Program Note: The Santomieri-Farhadian Duo play structured improvisatory avant-garde chamber music (violin & guitar). We also invite the audience to create graphic scores, which we will then perform.
Santomeri-Farhadian Duo
Larnie Fox and Friends
Larnie Fox is a visual and sound artist known for monumental bamboo sculpture, sound installations and performances. His kinetic/sound sculptures and new instruments have been shown in numerous one-person and group shows and performances in the SF Bay Area and Salt Lake City, Utah. Collaborations with his wife Bodil have included set design for Theatre of Yugen’s “Cycle Plays” at Theatre Artaud and a giant kinetic dragonfly for the DuPage Museum near Chicago. He is a founding member of 23five, a San Francisco based organization that promotes sound art and currently directs the Crank Ensemble, a fourteen-member group that performs on hand-cranked instruments he built.
Larnie and Bodil Fox, and a few other associates will be performing on new instruments, built especially for the GoM ~ the “Twin Floor Harps”. The harps are bamboo structures designed to hold 12 ft. long nylon strings near the floor so that they can be activated by rotating plastic coffee lids, and tuned with short bamboo sticks. Each harp has four strings, and a piezo contact microphone attached on with popsicle-stick clips. The signals from the strings are sent to a mixing board, and then to a DVD player that amplifies the sound. No computers or effects are used. The resulting sound is a slowly changing rhythmical drone.
The Dark Continent – Larnie Fox
Guillermo Galindo and Sangita Moskow
Blurring and redefining the conventional limits that define “music” and the art of music composition itself are pivotal in Guillermo Galindo’s artistic work. His extensive interpretation of concepts such as musical form, time perception, music notation, sonic archetypes and sound generating devices span through a wide spectrum of artistic works. Sangita’s Moskow’s musical career reflects a personal global consciousness and delight in the wonderful variety of artistic expression we have available to us in today’s world.
Program Note: Taking their expertise on traditional music into new musical frontiers, (Lisa) Sangita Moskow (scholar of North Indian classical music) and Guillermo Galindo (post-Mexican contemporary composer and electronic musician) form a duo of masterful musicianship which paints vibrant imaginative soundscapes within and without time/space. They journey into a wide range of emotional states, both nuanced and compelling, integrating alternative tunings and complex rhythmic structures into an original narrative.
Sangita Moskow and Lucian Balmer perform “Show Me the Path”
Voices of the Desert (Voces Del Desierto) by Guillermo Galindo & Quinteto Latino
Gautam Tejas Ganeshan
Gautam’s performances allow listeners an unprecedented experience of the structure of Carnatic music, and a natural purchase on its elaborate song forms. With texts in English, his native tongue – he was born in Texas with the middle name to show for it – his renditions offer “an incredible presence…gentle renegade perfomance” (Berkeleyside).
Live at Duende, February 2, 2014
Phil Gelb
Philip Gelb is a shakuhachi player. He performs and, although, mostly teaches traditional music (both Japanese and Jewish), he focuses as a performer on new and contemporary music, working with numerous composers to develop new repertoire as well as composing some of his own works. His set will be solo pieces for shakuhachi, new and traditional as well as improvisations with various other members of the festival.
Wayne Grim and Ronald Aveling are Jarktagons
Wayne Grim is a composer and sound artist based in Berkeley, California. He has performed and collaborated with musicians in the U.S., Germany, Japan, U.K. and Indonesia. For the past 15 years he has focused on improvisational development, composing for small ensembles, making field recordings, designing multi-media works, and creating a generative compositional languages that explore temporal extremes. The ongoing project Thee Obscurantist is a blog that includes 70+ full-length works to date and spans audio releases, a graphic score book, installations, and videos.
Ronald Aveling is a Creative and Performer who works across visual and sonic media. He is currently residing in Los Angeles, California – yet his heart lies somewhere in the south east of Terra Australis. He holds an Honors degree in Visual Arts from Australian National University, and a Graduate Certificate in Spatial Information Architecture from RMIT University. Ronald has collaborated with numerous musical projects including Scienta Dystene (UK), Left Sensory Bypass (USA) Roberto Salvatore (AUS) and continues to create with Wayne Grim under the moniker of Jarktagons. Ronald has a continuing interest in the cultivation of new socio-cultural forms that shed positive light on the mystical ecologies of man, matter and cosmos.
Wayne Grim at The Garden of Memory
Brenda Hutchinson This is the 7th year of the dailybell project that Brenda began in 2008. It has been part of this Solstice celebration every year since then, and we invite you to join us again this evening. Sunset is at 8:34 PM. Please bring your bells from home. For the bell-less, Brenda will have a few bells on hand to share. Daily Bell
Brenda Hutchinson is a composer and sound artist whose work is based on the cultivation and encouragement of openness in her own life and in those she works with. Hutchinson encourages participants to experiment with sound, share stories, and make music.
Laura Inserra
Laura Inserra is a classically trained musician with a strong improvisational background. She plays contemporary and world music in different projects as a percussionist, multi-instrumentalist and composer. “Laura Inserra’s Hang playing is captivating. She effortlessly floats her melody lines on top of intricate rhythmic expressions, dancing gracefully. It truly sounds like more than one person playing the Hang. Listening carefully, you hear brilliant control and cascading multiple parts all played flawlessly together. Laura truly creates magical soundscape experiences with the Hang. A must hear!“ – Lumin White. Recording Engineer at Santa Rosa Symphony
Solo Hang Performance
Jaroba and Keith Cary
Photo by Michael Zelner 2011 – Jaroba at The Garden of Memory
Henry Kaiser American guitarist and composer, known as an idiosyncratic soloist, a sideman, an ethnomusicologist, and a film score composer, recording and performing prolifically in many styles of music, Kaiser is considered a member of the “first generation” of American free improvisers.
Henry Kaiser will be playing solo electric guitar in collaboration with synaesthetic painter Brandy Gale, who will simultaneously make paintings.
Stephen Kent
In Australia, in 1981, as Music Director of Circus Oz he first connected with Australian Aboriginal culture and the Didjeridu.
Inspired by the power of the land, and the support the group gave to Aboriginal issues, he learnt circular breathing and wrote music for brass instruments, sounding unmistakably like the Didjeridu. While he has always had great respect for Aboriginal people and their culture Stephen has never tried to imitate traditional styles on the Didjeridu. Instead he has pioneered his own unique style, with the Didj at the center of his many compositions in contemporary music.
Stephen Kent – Energizer
Kitka
“Even God stops to listen when KITKA—unamplified, without sets, props, instruments, or even lyrics most people can understand—opens its collective mouth. The sound is so chillingly beautiful, by anyone’s standards, that the entire audience sits enraptured, most of them with eyes shut. My own eyes flooded with tears.”
— Summer Burkes, THE GUARDIAN
Program Note: The Bay Area’s trailblazing and internationally acclaimed women’s vocal ensemble, Kitka, is pleased to announce the world premiere of I Will Remember Everything. Performing an original score by award-‐winning composer and choral conductor Eric Banks, Kitka gives voice to the long-‐censored love poems of “Russia’s Sappho”, Sophia Parnok.
KITKA on KQED’s Spark
Juraj Kojs and Adrian Knight
Juraj Kojs is a Slovakian composer, performer, multimedia artist and producer permanently residing in the US. Juraj’s creative and research work reaches to the areas of music at the threshold of hearing, action-based acoustic and electroacoustic music, cyberinstruments created with physical modeling synthesis, tactile music, native instruments from central Europe, contemporary concert music, dance music, interactive audio-visual performance, muscle-powered multimedia, music with everyday objects and toys and graphic notation.
Adrian Knight, born in Uppsala, Sweden is a composer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Between 2006 and 2009 he studied with Pär Lindgren and Jesper Nordin at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and between 2009 and 2011 with David Lang, Christopher Theofanidis, Martin Bresnick and Ezra Laderman at the Yale School of Music in New Haven. His music has been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, the Living Earth Show, the Swedish Wind Ensemble, Red Light New Music, loadbang, Yale Philharmonia and Kungliga Musikhögskolans Symfoniorkester.
Dohee Lee, Donald Swearingen, and Adria Otte
Born on Jeju Island in South Korea, Dohee Lee studied Korean dance, music, percussion and vocals at the master level. Since her arrival in the US she has been a vital contributor to both the traditional and contemporary arts landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Dohee’s work focuses on integration of traditional forms and contemporary arts through music, movement, images, costumes and installations. 
Donald Swearingen is an Oakland, California-based composer, performer, media artist, and designer of interactive performance systems and installations. For the past 20 years, his work has revolved around the use of movement and gesture as the source of media control in an expanded, computer-assisted performance environment, leading to the design custom instruments and software for both himself and other artists, including Pamela Z, Miya Masaoka, Dohee Lee, Adria Otte, Guillermo Galindo, Todd Shalom, Elise Kermani, and Thea Farhadian.
Adria Otte is a multi-instrumentalist whose primary focus has been on violin and guitar. She has performed in ensembles ranging from string quartets to rock bands to free improvisation groups and currently frequently collaborates with Dohee Lee and Navarrete x Kajiyama Dance Theater, focusing on sound design and electronics.
Program Note: This new trio work is actually something new, currently being developed for Dohee Lee’s MAGO performance in November 2014 at YBCA. Donald Swearingen is developing a collection of wearable, wireless motion-tracking devices that will communicate with his custom software for the interactive control of sound, image and other media. Both Donald and Adria will receive and process signals from the sensors that Dohee will be wearing and throughout the course of the four hours, solos, duos and trios will emerge. This Garden of Memory performance opportunity is especially inspiring for us, as the context seems to flow seamlessly from the recent “seasonal rituals” that Dohee has been presenting at YBCA (http://www.ybca.org/dohee-lee) which involves strong elements of audience interaction and durational performance.”
Dohee Lee and Adria Otte
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble will perform Laurie San Martin’s new composition inspired by Walter Mosley’s work of fiction, Reply to a Dead Man, with text performed by local actor David E. Moore. Through music and narrative, audiences will experience an introspective view of the transformation of the main character, Roger Vaness, after an unexpected visitor arrives with a letter from his departed brother. After reading the letter, Vaness notes, “I could have sat there and guessed for a hundred years and never come up with what my brother had to say.” Mosley reveals Vaness’ relationships and decisions through ruminations, conversations with a variety of unexpected characters, and a series of life-changing letters, written and read. “Combined with this narrative,” said Anna Presler, LCCE’s Artistic Director, “Laurie San Martin’s accessible and sophisticated music offers the public a rich artistic experience, while Mosley’s text provides a bridge of understanding to the music of our time.”
Left Coast Ensemble performs George Crumb’s Vox
The Lightbulb Ensemble- “PRANA”
Adam Fong, Living Earth Show, and Brent Miller will be performing together. “We are planning a very quiet, meditative set. We are putting together a four hour set that includes various duos, trios, and quartets by Cage, Wolff, Adam Fong, and Brent Miller.” Adam Fong has worked as a composer, performer, and producer of new music since completing his MFA in Music Composition at California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with James Tenney and Wadada Leo Smith. Brent Miller (b. 1978) is a composer and a performer based in San Francisco, CA. He studied composition at the University of Arkansas with Robert Mueller (undergraduate) and University of Missouri-Kansas City with James Mobberley and Paul Rudy (masters). Recent projects include works for Rova Saxophone Quartet, violinist Eric km Clark, Dither Electric Guitar Quartet, Sqwonk, and the Navitas Ensemble.
The Living Earth Show – electric guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson – has developed a reputation as one of the most versatile and virtuosic contemporary chamber groups on the west coast. Memorizing every work it performs, The Living Earth Show thrives on pushing the boundaries of technical and artistic possibility in its presentation of commissioned electro-acoustic chamber music.
The Living Earth Show performs Family Man by Adrian Knight
<
Amy X Neuburg at Garden of Memory, June 21 2012. Photo by Tom Holub – All rights reserved.
Amy X Neuburg has been developing her own brand of irreverently genre-crossing works for voice, live electronics and chamber ensembles for over 25 years, known for her innovative use of live looping technology with electronic percussion, her 4-octave vocal range and her colorful — often humorous — lyrics. “She loops her voice and sings over her alter egos until she’s a whole chorus, an opera, a circus act… More musical than Laurie Anderson and a hell of a lot cheerier than Diamanda Galas, Neuburg has scoped out her own territory in the gulf between pop and classical.” — Kyle Gann, Village Voice
Amy X Neuburg at Chapel of the Chimes
Orchestra Nostalgico The 9-piece ensemble that rose from the ashes of Club Foot Orchestra to tackle the film music of Nino Rota, will showcase material from its upcoming 2nd CD, adding works by Ennio Morricone, Bernard Herrmann, John Morris, and John Barry to Rota’s rollicking Fellini music.
Maggi Payne
Maggi Payne is Co-Director (since 1992) of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, Oakland, CA, where she teaches recording engineering, composition, and electronic music. She also freelances as a recording engineer and editor and a historical remastering engineer.
Photo by Styrous
Program Note: Theremin Morph, interactive installation—Maggi Payne
Come play a supercharged Theremin! It’s a magical experience for kids and adults. The movement of your hands towards and away from the two antennas affects the sound of the Theremin and two synths that it controls.
Tim Phillips
Tim Phillips is an English sound artist, musician and inventor based in Oakland, CA. His work looks at making people curious about sounds and rhythms, while using participation and collaboration to encourage interdisciplinary and unexpected outcomes.
The Bubble Organ is an acoustic instrument that has a system of manual bellows allowing the performer to blow bubbles into a variety of acoustic chambers filled with water. Each chamber plays differently pitched bubbling tones that can be either individual bursts or drones up to two minutes in length. The unique sounds of the Bubble Organ are combined into multi-layered, rhythmic compositions through live digital looping to create gradually evolving moist soundscapes.
The Bubble Organ on Soundcloud
Dan Plonsey at The Garden of Memory 2011. Photo by Michael Zelner.
Eric Glick-Rieman
Performing on a variety of instruments, including the prepared/extended Rhodes electric piano, as well as piano, melodica, celeste, organ, Waterphone, and toy piano, SF Bay Area composer/improviser Eric Glick Rieman performs improvised and previously structured music in several settings, both solo and in groups, He has performed with the Mills College Contemporary Performance Ensemble in Oakland, CA, USA since 1999, and received an MFA from Mills in Electronic Music and the Recording Media in 2001.
What I Did Not Notice
ROVA
Rova Saxophone Quartet explores the synthesis of composition and collective improvisation, creating exciting, genre-bending music that challenges and inspires. Rova is one of the longest-standing groups in the music movement that has its roots in post-bop, free jazz, avant-rock, and 20th century new music, and draws inspiration from the visual arts and from the traditional and popular music styles of Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States. In noting Rova’s innovative role in developing the all-saxophone ensemble as “a regular and conceptually wide-ranging unit,” The Penguin Guide to Jazz calls its music “a teeming cosmos of saxophone sounds” created by “deliberately eschewing conventional notions about swing [and] prodding at the boundaries of sound and space…” Likewise Jazz: The Rough Guide notes, “Highly inventive, eclectic and willing to experiment, Rova [is] arguably the most exciting of the saxophone quartets to emerge in the format’s late ’70s boom.”
photo by Miles Boisen
Edward Schocker will be performing new works on his collection of glass instruments. These musical glasses are of special resonance and tuned in relationship with natural frequencies of the earth
.
Jason Victor Serinus This past April, music and audiophile critic Jason Victor Serinus performed six sets in four days at Seattle’s Moisture Festival, the largest varieté show in the world. Once you hear him, you’ll understand why he chose his name, Serinus, for the genus of songbirds that includes canaries. In the world of musical whistlers, JVS stands out. After all, he whistled Puccini as the Voice of Woodstock, the Peanuts gang’s favorite little bird, in the internationally televised, Emmy-nominated Peanuts cartoon, She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown. After winning multiple awards and serving as a judge at whistling competitions, “The Pavarotti of Pucker” was inducted into the Whistler’s Hall of Fame in 2003. He has also whistled on the soundtrack of Reindeer Games, and survived the skepticism of David Letterman on The Tonight Show. If you think that whistling is solely for calling pets, invoking “Dixie,” and blasting approval at sporting events, come see what can be done by someone who whistles from the heart while maintaining a healthy sense of humor.
Kent Sparling and Jeffrey Foster will be performing 4 40-minute sets of music at the 2014 Garden of Memory in the “Garden of (Low) Fidelity”. The first and third set will be a live re-interpretation of the seminal work by Folke Rabe, entitled “What?”. This piece builds pure harmonics on top of each other to create a very slowly shifting drone whose fundamental slips and slides mysteriously, making for a rich and evolving immersive piece. The original recording of “What?” was produced with pure electronic tones, but our interpretation will utilize autoharp, vinyl loops, hand-built resonators and modified speakers, as well as “traditional” raw electronics and oscillators. Our version of the piece is entitled “What Next?”. The second and fourth sets of music will be live improvisations using turntables, autoharp, shozygs, loopers and found sounds along with live electronics. No laptops or software will be employed. The “Garden of (Low) Fidelity” should be considered a quiet backwater, where small sounds find voice in a corner away from some of the more dynamic performers in the Garden of Memory.
Carl Stone
Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” and “one of the best composers living in (the USA) today.” He has used computers in live performance since 1986. Stone was born in Los Angeles and now divides his time between California and Japan. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East. In addition to his schedule of performance, composition and touring, he is on the faculty of the Information Media Technology Department, School of Information Science and Technology at Chukyo University in Japan.
Program Note: a set of laptop pieces blending field recordings made through Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Japan) with appropriated music mostly from street cassettes, processed and resynthesized.
Wang Fei
王菲 is an international award winning artist, published writer, and accomplished musician who has toured internationally. Wang Fei was professionally trained in literature, music and art since childhood and studied with several masters in these fields. Not only is she one of the few scholars who have truly mastered the qin and who can bring qin music to a wider audience, she is also one of the few qin performers who still maintain the qin in the traditional way as a scholarly art.
Program Note: Wang Fei will be performing guqin masterpieces ranging from one of the world’s oldest surviving written music, 1400 years old, to newly composed guqin works and improvisation. She will also share the legends and folktales behind the music and use her own commentary and insights to bring ancient works to life.
Chinese Music – Guqin – Wang Fei
William Winant Percussion Group
…”one of the best avant-garde percussionists working today” according to music critic Mark Swed (Los Angeles Times), he has performed with some of the most innovative and creative musicians of our time. “Percussion music is revolution,” John Cage proclaimed in 1939. William Winant is one of the few contemporary percussionists who have taken Cage at his word. His performances consistently convey an exhilarating sense of expansion and enrichment in the world of sound.
Performing John Zorn’s “Gri Gri” at the Metropolitan Museum
“Fads and Fancies in the Academy” (1940) by John Cage
Fugue performed by Willie Winant Percussion Group
Theresa Wong at Garden of Memory, June 21, 2010. Photo by Michael Layefsky, all rights reserved.
Theresa Wong is a cellist, vocalist, composer and improviser actively exploring the intersection where music meets with the creative spirit of experimentation, improvisation and the synergy of multiple disciplines. Bridging areas of music, dance, theater and visual art, she is interested in finding the potential for transformation in each work for both the artist and receiver alike.
Venice is a Fish
Pamela Z
Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and media artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampling technology, and video. One of the pioneers of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers in her solo works that combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds.
Pamela Z will be performing by the pool in Garden of Ages, a spot she has inhabited nearly every year of this event. This year, she will be sharing the niche with duo Juraj Kojs and Adrian Knight, and they will alternate half-hour sets throughout the evening.
Z will perform works for voice and live electronics – processing her voice in real time, and using gesture-activated controllers to manipulate sampled and processed sounds. As has become her Garden of Memory tradition, she will honor the “inhabitants” of Chapel of the Chimes by occasionally weaving their names into the textures of her performance.
Click Here to visit the Brown Paper Tickets event page.
“>
