PAIRINGS is a four-concert series of new music in November and December 2010 in New York City at the Tank. Each concert features a young composer (or composers) and an established composer in a "pairing" chosen by the ensemble that will present them.
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Ekmeles
November 8, 20107 p.m.Tickets $10
John Cage
Jude Traxler
Troy Herion
Song invokes instinct and tradition, two impulses unsettling and unsettled for modernist aesthetics. Throughout his life, John Cage had a close engagement with text and voice as well as a complicated relationship to tradition. The Ekmeles vocal ensemble will present Cage's Litany of the Whale in a double-pairing with new pieces by Jude Traxler and Troy Herion. These new works were produced in separate collaborations with Ekmeles, and for Herion’s piece, with an eye cast towards the productive possibilities of textual (mis)interpretation directly inspired by Cage’s exposure to Zen through a famous series of lectures by Alan Watts.
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Evans, Altieri, Pluta
November 15, 20107 p.m.Tickets $10
Peter Evans
Jim Altieri
Sam Pluta
Masters of improvisation Jim Altieri, Peter Evans, and Sam Pluta join forces in a concert of duos, trios, and solos. Previewing their upcoming album of duos on Carrier Records, this trio will melt your skull in quadraphonic surround sound only available in the live experience. Jim Altieri and Sam Pluta, collaborators for over six years, will present their new work, Glympses of Nymphes. Peter Evans will dazzle the audience with a solo performance reminiscent of his album Nature/Culture. Five new works. 3! combinations. 11/15/10. Infinite jest. Be there at 7.
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Either/OR
November 22, 20107 p.m.Tickets $10
Helmut Lachenmann
David Brynjar Franzson
One of the most significant figures in the European avant-garde, Helmut Lachenmann is known for his radical reinventions of instrumental technique and his treatment of the mechanics of sound production as a central part of his musical language. Either/Or has worked with Lachenmann since 2007, most recently bringing him to New York City as their guest for E/O's 2008 Spring Festival. Either/Or will pair Lachenmann with Icelandic composer David Brynjar Franzson, currently living in New York, who shares a similar concern with instrumental behavior and abstracted materials, as well as the evolution of discrete sonic objects as they collide or interact with each other in the course of a work.
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Mivos Quartet
December 6, 20109:30 p.m.Tickets $10
Wolfgang Rihm
Carl Bettendorf
Wolfgang Rihm is arguably the most prolific and well-known living German composer. He came of age in the late 70s as a member of the Neue Einfachheit (new simplicity) movement but has by now become a unique figure in the international new-music scene. A former studentof Rihm’s, German-born and now New York-based Carl Christian Bettendorf combines thisbackground—firmly rooted in German Romanticism and the Second Viennese School—with the very different aesthetics of his other main composition teacher, French Spectral guru Tristan Murail.