Considering Satie’s Vexations: 12 hours of new music
From Before Midnight to Midday + Brunch
Performers:
Peter Ablinger (AT) TIM Song
Reinhold Friedl (DE) plays an interpretation of the classic Satie piece
Manfred Werder (CH), Koen Nutters (NL) + guests: actualizing a new score and featuring 2 works by Toshiya Tsunoda in extended performance
Jost Muxfeldt (DE/US) Morning Raga
+ more!
inm Series, Composing This Space
This event kindly supported by inm.
N.K. Projekt Berlin will stage 12 hours of performances in response to Northern Spark’s staging of Erik Satie’s “Vexations.”
http://2014.northernspark.org/project/erik-satie
Warm brunch served at 10:00 !
Performance Times:
23:00 Reinhold Friedl
24:00 Peter Ablinger
1:00 PT I: Manfred Werder, Koen Nutters & guests
6:00 Jost Muxfeldt
7:00 PT II: Manred Werder, Koen Nutters & guests
9:00 TBA
Context: Vexations in Minneapolis
“Vexations” (1893) is a musical work by Erik Satie, presumably written for solo piano, that bears the inscription “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.” Satie did not publish the work in his lifetime, and is not known ever to have performed or mentioned it. The piece was first printed in 1949 by John Cage in Contrepoints N°6.
The first of the ‘marathon’ performances of Vexations was produced by John Cage and Lewis Lloyd at the Pocket Theatre in Manhattan in 1963; it lasted over 18 hours and included relay piano performances by Cage, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Phillip Corner and others.
Northern Spark Festival 2014 will stage this seminal piece at the Northrop Auditorium in which 12 young performers will successively play Satie’s piece in one-hour-long turns, resulting in an ongoing performance that lasts from 6pm on June 14th until 6am June 15th.
NK Responsive Performance
Rather than re-staging Satie’s seminal work or another historical durational piece, NK complements their MN-partner event by hosting contemporary works in the spirit of Vexations. Based on the endurance/performance concept, the invited composers & musicians will present new works that explore & challenge perception via (means not limited to) duration, dynamic extremes, psycho-acoustic techniques such as difference tones, spatial configuration, new technological applications, or dismantling the performer/audience hierarchy. These experimental musicians approach composition, improvisation and/or performance through computer music, electroacoustic, or as instrumentalists. The performances span a 12 hour period synchronized to the Minneapolis event & also to a similar responsive performance in Bombay, India at the Clark House Initiative Bombay. http://clarkhouseinitiative.org/
Note, the Berlin program will be broadcast live to St. Paul, Minnesota where audience members can watch & listen.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES:
Reinhold Friedl, born 1964, lives in Berlin since 1987. He studied piano with Renate Werner, Alan Marks and Alexander von Schlippenbach, mathematics and musicology in Stuttgart and Berlin. As a performer, interpreter and composer, he has received various fellowships – Eurocréation Paris, the Rome Fellowship (Villa Serpentara) of the Berlin Academy of Arts, STEIM Amsterdam-, as well as various composition commissions. Reinhold Friedl has published articles in newpapers and professional journals and conducted a seminar on “Music and Mathematics” in the department of Mathematics at the Berlin Free University together with Prof. Behrends. He founded and directs the ensembles Piano-Inside-Out and ZEITKRATZER. Friedl has worked as a curator for the Podewil center for contemporary arts Berlin and directed the Off-ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) Berlin 2000. He has been invited to take part in the Jury of the Ars Electronica and Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisboa. As pianist and composer, he has worked with musicians and composers such as Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), Phill Niblock, Helmut Oehring, Nicolas Collins, Lou Reed, MERZBOW a.k.a., Masami Akita, Radu Malfatti, Bernhard Guenter, Mario Bertoncini (nuova consonanza), Keiji Haino, and has made countless radio and CD recordings. Lately he realized the “spazialisation piano-project” at ZKM Karlsruhe and Asphodel Studios in San Francisco. The main focus of Reinhold Friedl’s work is the inside-piano. He played all respective literature using inside-piano techniques and released several articles in this field.
http://www.reinhold-friedl.de/
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfJrSOb5PRw
About the Composer:
Peter Ablinger was born in Schwanenstadt, Austria in 1959. He began studying graphic arts and was enthused by free jazz, but completed his studies in composition with Gösta Neuwirth and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati in Graz and Vienna. Since 1982 he has lived in Berlin, where he has initiated and conducted numerous festivals and concerts. In 1988 he founded the Ensemble Zwischentöne. In 1993 he was a visiting professor at the University of Music, Graz. He has been guest conductor of ‘Klangforum Wien’, ‘United Berlin’ and the ‘Insel Musik Ensemble’. Since 1990 Peter Ablinger has worked as a freelance musician. Peter Ablinger is one of the few artists today who uses noise without any kind of symbolism – not as a signifier for chaos, energy, entropy, disorder, or uproar; not for opposing something, or being disobedient or destructive; not for everything, for eternity, or for what-have-you. As in all these cases of music deliberately involving noise, noise is the case, but for Ablinger: this alone. Peter Ablinger has also come a long way in questioning the nature of sound, time, and space (the components usually thought central to music), and his findings have jeopardized and made dubious conventions usually thought irrefutable. These insights pertain to repetition and monotony, reduction and redundancy, density and entropy. (Christian Scheib, edited by Bill Dietz) » english texts
TIM Song
a Pop Song (2012)
any duration
TIM Song is a Pop Song. It’s for a speaking voice and accompaniment. The accompaniment is for any Pop instrumentation. The voice should be miked. The text is the original text of the BBC telephone time. The song can have any duration (10 seconds, 3’30″, endless), but it has to be sung always at the accurate time! A recording of it therefore is not an option!
http://ablinger.mur.at/txt_augst_tim.html
http://ablinger.mur.at/
Manfred Werder Composer, performer, curator, lives in situ.
Manfred Werder focuses on possibilities of rendering the practices regarding composition and field.
His recent scores have featured either found sentences from poetry and philosophy, or found words from whatever impacts.
His performances, both indoors and outdoors, aim at letting appear the world’s natural abundance.
Earlier works include stück 1998, a 4000 page score whose nonrecurring and intermittent performative realization has been ongoing since December 1997.
Program: Manfred Werder actualizing a new score and featuring 2 works by Toshiya Tsunoda in extended performance
Manfred Werder will be actualizing his new score 2014/1.
The score consists of a sentence found in Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound.
The extended performance will also feature 2 works by Toshiya Tsunoda, Low Frequency Observed at Maguchi Bay (hibari, 2007) and The Temple Recording (edition.t 2013).
Dislocation of ideas about composition, scores, objects, actualizations. Evidences of a working process. Coincidences of worlds, emerging and submerging beyond meaning.
http://www.anothertimbre.com/werder2005(1).html
http://manfred-werder.blogspot.de/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjH8kQ1Ojsc
http://vimeo.com/63067197
Jost Muxfeldt is a German/American artist, composer, philosopher, and programmer, whose work often focuses on trans-media and phenomenology, exploring the rational and irrational channels between artistic and conceptual disciplines, and pursuing their self-transfiguring implications.
In 1991 he moved to Berlin, where he began working as an artist and composer, independently as well as with other artists such asArnold Dreyblatt, Martin Riches, Laura Kikauka, and Stephan Wunderlich. He also began working in architecture for Daniel Libeskind, Arata Isozaki, Axel Schultes, and later with many other prominent Berlin architects.
The first performances of his music and sound works were organized in Darmstadt and in Munich by Stephan Wunderlich in 1998/1999. He has published and lectured in philosophy, in part on the work of Arakawa & Madeline Gins. His audiovisual work, Audio Kinematics, has been shown in numerous venues through Europe, including the Tesla Media Art Center at both the Ultraschall and Transmediale Festivals, in the Centre D’Art Santa Mònica for the Sónar Festival in Barcelona, at the Via Festival in Maubeuge, and at the Exit Festival in Paris-Créteile. Continuing developments of initial ideas for Audio Kinematics have led him to further philosophical and artistic inquiries into the question of “What is space?”.
Morning Raga is a spatial audio piece and was specifically assembled for the NK Projekt Vexations concert, using a variety of new and older material of mine.. It was composed with the idea in mind, that it would be played at or close to sunrise. It stretches over an hour, is slow moving, with several sustained sections which display ever new combinations of sounds distributed and moving in space, sometimes slowly, sometimes at breakneck speed until they get distorted. The spatial effect is amplified if your eyes are closed, and for a really good time, sit in full lotus posture while listening.