Jon Heilbron - double bass
Fredrik Rasten - e-bowed acoustic guitar, composition

Murmurations I (excerpt) - Arches - Jon Heilbron & Fredrik Rasten

An excerpt from the 20 min piece for trio:
https://ferdinandschwarz.bandcamp.com/track/for-trio

Eden Lonsdale - cello
Felix Hauptmann - piano
Ferdinand Schwarz - trumpet

recorded by Lukas Fehling at Loft Cologne
mixed by Lukas Fehling

cover photo by Henk Szanto

for trio (excerpt)

Performed by Oerknal live at Gaudeamus Muziekwiek 2023.

conductor: Hardy Li
flute: Susanne Peters
clarinet: Daniel Boeke
percussion: Christian Smith
organ: Ivan Pavlov
violin 1: Raphaella Engelsberg
violin 2: Ruth Mareen
viola: Lidwine Dam
cello: Anna Litvinenko

Constellations (2023)

Special episode of Radio Concrete composer by Karmen Ponikvar.

Symphony of clicks and bleeps echoing from the voltage control studio, modulated field recordings, disembodied voices, re-mixed radio samples and cassette sounds. Through decontextualization and reconstruction, I aim to translate the environment and its natural state of disorder. Tape manipulation, tape loops and sampling techniques are used. Juxtaposing raw, unaltered material and its modulated counterparts serves to create a dynamic interplay, inviting listeners to traverse the boundaries between real and imaginary.

Samples from: Female voice and viola, The Swamp in June, Jingles & Génériques, Radio Play Excerpt by Ulrike Haage on Eva Hesse, 180º, Jaap Vink and Recording of Shortwave Numbers Stations.

more Radio Concrete at:
https://open.spotify.com/show/2XsFbXXL8vXwB7PD6hc4UR
https://www.hagaizenberg.com/

Radio Concrete #51 - Karmen Ponikvar

oscillating ex 1

This episode is a feature on visionary composer Maryanne Amacher and her piece Petra, 1991, originally commissioned for the ICSM World Music Days in Boswil, Switzerland. 

Maryanne Amacher was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called “sound art,” although her thought and creative practice consistently challenges key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of this nascent genre. Often considered to be part of a post-Cagean lineage, her work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies. 

Amacher’s 1991 piece Petra was originally commissioned for the ICSM World Music Days in Boswil, Switzerland. Written for two pianos, Petra is a unique example of Amacher’s late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic compositions taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. The piece is a sweeping, durational work based on both Amacher’s impressions of the church at Boswil and science-fiction writer Greg Bear’s short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame. 

In May 2017, Blank Forms presented the American premiere of Petra in New York with Marianne Schroeder, who originally performed the piece alongside Amacher in 1991, and Stefan Tcherepnin, who performed it alongside Schroeder in 2012 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.  This third-ever performance was an expanded version based on a newly discovered notes and scores from the Maryanne Amacher Archive. 

Artistic director of the Giacinto Scelsi Festival in Basel, Marianne Schroeder is a Swiss composer and pianist specializing in the interpretation of New Music. She has collaborated with and premiered work by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dieter Schnebel, Anthony Braxton, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros and Giacinto Scelsi, with whom she studied. She is currently a professor at Hochschule der Künste Bern, and has also taught at the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt. 

Stefan Tcherepnin is an American electronic music performer, contemporary artist, and composer in fourth generation, continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin. As a family friend of Amacher’s and a student of hers at Bard College he is uniquely qualified to navigate the labyrinth of Amacher interpretation. With kind support from the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, Yamaha Artists Services and The Tin Man Fund.

You can see  Marianne Schroeder & Stefan Tcherepnin perform Petra live May 24, 2017 at St. Peter's Episcopal Church. Tickets for the performance can be purchased here

Blank Forms : : Clocktower.org

Blank Forms #11: Maryanne Amacher's Petra

KONRAD SPRENGER - Stack Music

Format: LP / Digital 
Cat. No: PAN 78 
Release Date: 2 June 2017

p-a-n.org

purchase: bit.ly/2rdmu6S

Released by:
PAN
Release date:
1 July 2017

Having felt restrained by the limits of traditional instruments and the techniques tied to them, composer, music producer and artist, Konrad Sprenger (b. Joerg Hiller), spent years developing various algorithms and custom instruments to realize his work. His recent focus has been on rhythmic patterns based on the Euclidean algorithm, using a computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar.

The unique system can create complex rhythmical patterns whilst tuning the strings during performance - sounding at once like an electronic instrument, a drum computer, a guitar, a harpsichord, even at times as a full orchestra. Hiller has long collaborated and performed with minimalist Arnold Dreyblatt, and musician/instrument builder Ellen Fullman amongst others, and first built primitive acoustic mechanical instruments, gradually developing a more complex, digitally-controlled system. “My guitar gives me the possibility to discover almost every aspect of the sound produced by the excitation of the string – as if scientifically under a magnifying glass.” He says. “I can control such parameters as the speed and time, length of the attack, the intensity, the pitch (allowing the use of different tuning systems), and the location of each string in space by the use of 6 speakers.”

Early on, Hiller realized that the harmonically complex sound of strings are impossible to reproduce digitally, and therefore became interested in the development of mechanical instruments, visiting European collections of Pianolas, Orchestrions in Belgium and Holland. Within his live performances and on this new recording, his music is influenced by the insistent rhythms from Minimalism, Krautrock and Techno, and their shared focus on transcendence through a propulsive, full-spectrum sound.

Informed by early American folk music and its descendants (John Fahey et al), his new album Stack Music presents a selection of recordings over the years from residencies and live performances, such as ’Opening’, an early live performance of the digital guitar system recorded in New York and composed at Phill Niblock’s Intermedia Foundation Loft, whilst ’Rondo’ consists of recordings of the guitar played by a motor with shoelace exciters, horns, and piano harp. In ‘Largo’, he utilises the software Melodyne to generate midi notes from a original guitar system recording.

The release is mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring artwork by Bill Kouligas.

Konrad Sprenger - Opening (PAN 78)

Words fall away as does everything else

Performance
Saturday, September 30th, 2017

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, September 30th, ISSUE is pleased to present WITH, the second evening of FOR/WITH, a mini-festival featuring new commissions with some of America’s most iconoclastic composers and performers. A celebration of individual languages and the spirit of collaboration, the series continues with the premiere of Stem-Flower-Root by Michael Pisaro, a performance of Annea Lockwood’s 1995 work I Give You Back performed by Kristin Norderval, and a performance of Christian Wolff’s open score Edges or Exercises. The evening and series will close with a roundtable discussion and Q&A with Nate Wooley and all four of the series’ composers: Annea Lockwood, Ashley Fure, Christian Wolff and Michael Pisaro.

Organized by performer, composer and former ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Nate Wooley, FOR/WITH simultaneously premieres distinct new compositions for solo trumpet while also embarking on a celebration of the independent work of the series’ commissioned composers.

Stem-Flower-Root, the title of Michael Pisaro’s commissioned work for trumpet and sine waves, provides an apt metaphor for the FOR/WITH series at-large. Wooley describes how each of the composers featured have something in common with the structure outlined in Stem-Flower-Root; they demonstrate a power and creativity that can remain hidden, yet essential, in the structure (stem) of their works. Pisaro, Lockwood, Fure and Wolff all work with sound, but with a sense that the sound is coming from a deep and settled, human place (root). And, as will be heard, the music and ideas from these four composers bloom in incandescent ways.

Annea Lockwood’s 1995 composition I Give You Back, performed by Kristin Norderval, is a lament for unaccompanied mezzo-soprano and is set to a text by celebrated Mvskoke poet Joy Harjo. The score notes evoke the piece as “the simple image of one woman onstage, barefoot, letting loose great octave leaps and glissandos peaking in sharp cries, projecting a beautifully unfettered freedom.”

The evening then features a performance of Christian Wolff’s Edges or Exercises featuring Nate Wooley (trumpet), Christian Wolff (small percussion and melodica), Michael Pisaro (electric guitar) and Kristin Nordeval (voice). In the liner notes for Wolff’s 10 Exercises, the American composer Frederic Rzewski describes the work as “not reproducing familiar forms, but revealing, behind these, life’s unpredictability. You could say it is political; improvisatory; concerned with collaborative, non-hierarchical forms of social organization; but you can’t really say what it is like (although John Cage came close when he said, after a performance of the Exercises in New York, that it was like the classical music of an unknown civilization).”

Michael Pisaro: Stem-Flower-Root (Nate Wooley) - LIVE at ISSUE / September 30th, 2017

Maryanne Amacher's Petra, available for pre-order here: https://blankforms.org/publications/

Maryanne Amacher (1938 - 2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called “sound art,” although her thought and creative practice consistently challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of the genre. Amacher’s work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies, yet due to its expansive interdisciplinary nature it has rarely been documented. Following two CDs for Tzadik and her inclusion in the monumental collection OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music (1948-1980), this publication of Amacher’s 1991 piece Petra marks her first commercially available instrumental work as well as the first time her music has ever been available on vinyl.

Petra was originally commissioned for the ICSM World Music Days in Boswil, Switzerland. Written for two pianos, the piece is a unique example of Amacher’s late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic composition taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. Petra is a sweeping, durational work based on both Amacher’s impressions of the church at Boswil and science-fiction writer Greg Bear’s short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame.

This solemn interpretation of Petra was recorded at its 2017 American premiere at New York’s St. Peter’s Episcopal Church with pianists Marianne Schroeder, who originally performed the piece alongside Amacher in 1991, and Stefan Tcherepnin, who performed it alongside Schroeder in 2012 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Weighing tranquilizing passages of glacially-paced serenity against stretches of dilapidated, jagged dissonance, the recording illuminates a crucial node in the constellation of Amacher’s enigmatic oeuvre.

Artistic director of the Giacinto Scelsi Festival in Basel, Marianne Schroeder is a Swiss composer and pianist specializing in the interpretation of New Music. She has collaborated with and premiered work by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dieter Schnebel, Anthony Braxton, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros and Giacinto Scelsi, with whom she studied. She is currently a professor at Hochschule der Künste Bern, and has also taught at the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt.

Stefan Tcherepnin is an American electronic music performer, contemporary artist, and composer in fourth generation, continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin. As a family friend of Amacher’s and a student of hers at Bard College he is uniquely qualified to navigate the labyrinth of Amacher interpretation.

Maryanne Amacher: Petra excerpt 2

A master of immersive sound installation, Amacher enveloped the Roulette space with layer upon layer of sonic magic. Or was it science?This document only hints at the experience. Her pioneering work in acoustics and architectural installation earned her numerous grants and prizes.

Roulette Concert Archive // roulete.org

Maryanne Amacher 9 Nov 2005

composer-performer
currently oslo, norway

for trio (excerpt)

Ferdinand Schwarz

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