Philadelphia
Sound Forum
Home
Concerts
About
Booking/Contact
Blog
Resources
Media/Documentation

join our mailing list:



<--back to concert schedule

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

Download program notes here [pdf]

"
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.