Saturday
September 17, 2011 @ Rose Recital Hall Rose
Recital Hall, 3340 Walnut Street,
Fisher-Bennett Hall, Room 419 (fourth floor),
Philadelphia, PA, $7-10, 8:00pm. (map) Preceded by a conversation
with Greg Stuart at 7pm
Greg
Stuart performs the music of Michael Pisaro
"A transparent gate (with 10 panels)," for
percussion and 8-channel sound
"It’s carefully plotted but feels
wide open; it’s hard to tell whether this is
about control or the opposite."
- Ben
Ratliff, New York Times
Philadelphia Sound Forum is pleased to present
only the second ever concert performance of
Michael Pisaro's full "A transparent gate (with
10 panels)," for live percussion and 8 channels
of recorded sound. Percussionist Greg
Stuart, a close collaborator for whom Pisaro
composed the work, will perform.
Michael Pisaro has been a quietly influential
and significant composer in the United States
and Europe, building a large body of work that
approaches silence, sine tones, field
recordings, percussion, and the large world
between pitched sounds and noise. A 2006
grantee of the prestigious Foundation
for Contemporary Arts grant, his work with
Stuart has recently been featured in the New York Times
and the Wire
magazine. Greg Stuart has been an
interpreter and muse for Pisaro for many years,
memorably described in the Chicago Reader as
"to the composer what David
Tudor was to Cage."
Writes Pisaro:
"A transparent gate (with 10 panels) is a series
of portable landscapes (or sound reliefs) for
Greg Stuart. Imagine a large door, which instead
of carved panels (like those made for the
Florence Baptistery by Lorenzo Ghiberti and
Andrea Pisano) has near transparent out-facing
windows of various colors and designs (perhaps
translucent versions of Ellsworth Kelly's series
of reliefs). These windows allow a view to the
landscape behind them. But they set certain
features of that landscape in relief by
overlaying patterns made from elemental sounds.
Each panel is ten minutes in duration, which
includes a border of thirty seconds of silence
on either side (creating silences of one minute
between internal sections). Individual panels
combine different collections of live percussion
playing with slightly altered recorded versions
of the same instruments emanating from an array
of eight miniature speakers."
The performance will be preceded by a
conversation with Stuart at 7pm, discussing his
collaboration with Pisaro, percussion technique,
non-standard musical notation, multi-channel
sound, and the piece to be performed.