A live recording of Michael Pisaro's "asleep, desert, choir, agnes" (2016) for 22 musicians and 2-channel electronics, written for the University of South Carolina Experimental Music Workshop. The concert took place on September 20, 2016 at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, SC.

asleep, desert, choir, agnes (2016)
Michael Pisaro

University of South Carolina Experimental Music Workshop
Greg Stuart, director

Adam Bailey, Amanda Ferguson,Colby Hesseltine, 
Anna Kulangara, Kelsey Lantz, David Long, Jeremy Martinez, 
Clayton Mims, David Munn Carstensen, Belvin Olasov, Neema Patel, 
Jessica Rotheiser, Bailey Seabury, Justin Stombler, 
Joelle Strom, Nathan Wichmann; percussion/voice

Michelle Beck, horn
Brian Bethea, saxophone
Michael Pisaro, electronics/electric guitar
Philip Snyder, flute
Greg Stuart, percussion/melodica
Emily Stumpf, flute

Recording: Jeff Francis

Program Note:
Agnes Martin called a significant series of paintings from 1997 With My Back to the World.  By “the World” I think she meant what we sometimes call the “real world” – of commerce and the art market, of social life and family, of media and entertainment. But there are multiple worlds, and those paintings are emissaries from another world: of solitude and quiet, of nature and light, and of an emptiness so austere that it becomes radiantly full. This is a world that, unlike the day-to-day life in cities, requires full engagement to perceive at all. 

Martin abandoned New York and her painting career in 1967 (at the age of 55), and resettled in the New Mexico desert. When she began painting again in 1973 her work was markedly different: both lighter in color and mood and deeper in affect. This impression is nearly impossible get from photographs of the paintings, as it seems to lie as much in the manner in which the painting asks us to engage with it as it does with shape or color.

What I hope to do with asleep, desert, choir, agnes is to call up a series of sonic fragments of that world, not as they might actually have been if we’d recorded them, but as if their sonic traces had placed themselves onto one of her canvases. 
–Michael Pisaro

asleep, desert, choir, agnes

Recording of La Monte Young's "Poem For Tables, Chairs, Benches, etc." (1960) done by the University of South Carolina Experimental Music Workshop in September of 2013 in Columbia, SC.

Poem For Tables, Chairs, Benches, etc.

https://gregstuart.bandcamp.com/album/four-pieces-for-recorded-percussion-il-faut-attendre

A studio recording of Michael Pisaro's "A cloud drifting over the plain" from "Four Pieces for Recorded Percussion (Il faut attendre)" (2008).

Greg Stuart, water percussion/bass drums/sine waves

III.) A Cloud drifting over the Plain (to Bruce Conner, Robert Barry and Allen Ginsberg) (about 30 minutes)

Short
There are up to forty distinct sounds involving water dripping.
Single drops of water (or some other liquid) perhaps from an eye-dropper, falling on different surfaces (drums, tiles, metal bowls, containers, etc.).
At least one third of the containers should contain liquid already.
The raindrop chart at the end of the score lists 40 parts, with parts listed from left to right and count numbers being read from top to bottom. Each part has a distinct number of drops. The distance (in counts) following each drop is given on the chart. All the rates start and end at 20 counts, speed up and then slow down over the course of their duration.
Once all the parts are recorded, the longest is used as the total duration of the piece. The other parts are placed randomly within the duration of the longest part.

Long
A brush, a towel (and/or) branch with leaves rubbed across a large bass drum (gentle rushing sound). Two sustained sounds, of around 20 counts, one for every raindrop parts used (in a specific panning location)—randomly placed over the duration created by the whole duration of the section.

A Cloud drifting over the Plain

Live performance of Christian Wolff's Burdocks (1970-71).

University of South Carolina Experimental Music Workshop
Greg Stuart, director
11/16/16
701 Center for Contemporary Art
Columbia, SC

Christian Wolff - Burdocks

Michael Pisaro
When I Hear Light (2017) for vibraphone and electronics

Greg Stuart, vibraphone

Live Recording (quality headphones/speakers recommended)
World Premiere Performance
Monday Evening Concerts
March 6, 2017
Zipper Concert Hall
Los Angeles, California
http://www.mondayeveningconcerts.org/march-6-2017---michael-pisaro--guillaume-de-machaut.html

Program notes:
A visit to the cathedral in Reims is a stroke of good fortune. For one thing, its size guarantees that one will never see the whole exterior at once. For a first time visitor, each new face of the building as one walks around it, seems like a fresh creation not imaginable from the previous orientation. Inside the silence is crowded with echo (more reflection than source) and the light and the stone are shaded with saturated hues from both ends of the spectrum. 
	
For the musician the place is still haunted by Guillaume de Machaut, who was canon there beginning in 1338. Perhaps doubly so in my case, as Machaut took part in the one visitation I can claim have experienced in my life. One day in 1986, while learning the rondeau “Quant j’ay l’espart” for a class at Northwestern University, I felt a slight alteration of the light, as if a spontaneous gathering of a microscopically thin layer of grey fog had entered the room. It was not a religious, perhaps not even a mystical, experience, but something physical, as if a shift in the space had allowed another atmosphere to leak in through the cracks. I suddenly felt that to enter the world of Machaut one had to see one’s own world at a minimally different angle; as if hidden dimensions had preserved the past in their folds. 
	
When I hear light (November 2016 – January 2017) is also a rondeau, in four parts. The guiding question for me was whether the vibraphone could become a voice, its silver sound both reflecting colors of various frequencies in the spectrum (sine tones) and absorbing a sustained grey breathing emanating from speakers, whose hidden sounds produce a kind of friction that rubs against the vibrations that creep from the instrument. [M.P.]

When I Hear Light

percussionist. university of south carolina.

Greg Stuart

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