Department of Music Concert and Event Listing

CAMERA LUCIDA

Concert 1 : Bridge, Bartok, Shostakovich
Frank Bridge, Piano Quartet
Bela Bartok, Contrasts for violin, clarinet and piano
Dmitri Shostakovich, Piano Quintet

Professor Helen Rees will present her documentary film, Playing the Flute in Shanghai: the Musical Life of Dai Shuhong, in the Focus on Integrative Studies seminar (MUS 205). 

PLAYING THE FLUTE IN SHANGHAI: THE MUSICAL LIFE OF DAI SHUHONG

Dai Shuhong (b.1937) is one of Shanghai's most renowned performers and teachers of China's traditional bamboo flutes, the transverse dizi and endblown xiao. Plucked in 1956 from life as a factory worker to join the first ever Chinese traditional instrument class at the prestigious Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Dai subsequently taught at the Conservatory for almost fifty years. As a young performer, he made his mark as dizi accompanist to Tibetan megastar propaganda singer Caidan Zhuoma (Tseten Drolma). Since the 1980s, he has specialized in a rather different genre, the esoteric art of qin-xiao performance. Partnering with several of China's foremost qin zither performers, including his legendary mentor Zhang Ziqian (1899–1991), he creates delicate xiao lines to complement the elegant pieces of the qin repertoire, many of which date back centuries. Dai's recordings with Zhang and others stand as landmarks of this style.

Shot over 2016–2017 in Shanghai and incorporating historical photographs and video footage, this documentary focuses not just on Dai's artistry and pedagogical skill, but also on his firsthand experience of the seismic upheavals in Chinese musical life since the 1950s. He witnessed the Soviet-inspired institutionalization of local folk music, the modernization of traditional instruments, the creation of a new civil servant class of professional performers, and, more recently, the nostalgic revival of attenuated traditions such as the qin zither. Possessed of a prodigious memory, Dai is a natural raconteur who engagingly recounts how such national trends played out in one individual's everyday life.

From the outset, this film has been a collaborative endeavor, with Dai and other participants helping plan the shoots and critiquing the results during the editing process. It was selected for screening in August 2019 at the Shanghai Grand Theater as part of the First Festival of Chinese-language Ethnographic Films on Music.

BIO

Helen Rees, director of Playing the Flute in Shanghai, is a professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA, where she is also director of the World Music Center. As a recipient of a British Council scholarship to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in the late 1980s, she studied Chinese flutes with Dai Shuhong for two years. Frequent trips back to Shanghai since then have resulted in an extensive oral history, which is the basis for a forthcoming biography that will complement the film. Her other research interests lie in ritual musics of southwest China, and in East Asian intangible cultural heritage protection policies. She also performs professionally on recorders and Chinese flutes.

Conrad Prebys Music Center, Experimental Theater - 7PM
*FREE*
Come kick off the first Grad Forum of the year with an evening of performances by music department grads!

- Program -

Tiange Zhou performing her own "Finger Work" for electronics and projection

Kathryn Schulmeister, Alexandria Smith, and Madison Greenstone performing an untitled trio

Anqi Liu performing a modular synthesizer improvisation

Barbara Byers, Celeste Oram, Alexandria Smith, and Joseph Bourdeau Performing "Appalachian Hell / Bag of Bones" by Barbara Byers

Madison Greenstone performing "Telegrams" by Michelle Lou

Grad Forums provide an outlet for Department of Music graduate students to present individual and collaborative works on their own terms.  From theatrically-oriented conceptions to virtuosic instrumental solos, this Grad Forum highlights the artistic diversity that coexists at UC San Diego.

A concert of music by Lydia Winsor Brindamour, performed by James Beauton, Erik Carlson, Sean Dowgray, Madison Greenstone, Michael Jones, Rebecca Lloyd-Jones, Michael Matsuno and Kathryn Schulmeister.

6.30pm- installation (audience can come and go freely)
7pm- concert (no late seating)

Conrad Prebys Music Center, Experimental Theater
FREE

ENS EKT

Tuesday, October 22 at 8:00 p.m.
UC San Diego's Conrad Prebys Music Center
Experimental Theater

The ENS EKT trio features the experimental musical inventions of Paul Stapleton (Californian born, Belfast-based) in dialogue with the circular breathed multi-phonics and harmonic textures of David Bud (English born, Berlin-based) and the resonant gestural and spectrally focused playing of Mad Pulse Maybe (Danish born, Berlin-based). The group explores emergent timbral, dynamic and social musical structures through improvisation.

Paul Stapleton is an improviser and sound artist originally from Southern California. He designs and performs with a variety of modular metallic sound sculptures, custom made electronics and found objects in settings ranging from Echtzeitmusik venues in Berlin to the annual NIME conference. Paul is currently Professor of Music at SARC in Belfast, where he teaches and supervises research in new musical instrument design, music performance, sound design and critical improvisation studies. Paul is also currently the co-director of Sonorities Festival Belfast. He has received critical acclaim for several artistic projects and for his sound design and composition work as part of the immersive audio theatre piece Reassembled, Slightly Askew.

Mad Pulse Maybe is a prolific bass player, composer and PhD-researcher in sonic arts. His work with extended instrument techniques and adaptive electro-acoustic performance systems is documented on several releases and through sound installations. He is a frequent collaborator with dancers, has created music for film and theatre and exhibited audio-generated sculpture. He has toured extensively in Europe, the US, Japan and Australia and has performed with Evan Parker, Audrey Chen, Lotte Anker, Tony Malaby and many others.

David Bud is a saxophonist, author and researcher from London, England based in Berlin, Germany. He has performed on baritone and alto with hundreds of musicians in small and large groups, collaborations have included Pauline Oliveros, Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill, Steve Noble, Mark Dresser, Tristan Honsinger, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Audrey Chen, Mark Sanders and many others. His work in improvisation has led to collaborating beyond music with dancers, visual artists, mixed media, built instruments, site specific performance and more. His research interest is in creative processes.

Visitor Parking information:
http://transportation.ucsd.edu/parking/visitor/index.html

Grad Forums provide an outlet for Department of Music graduate students to present individual and collaborative works on their own terms.  From theatrically-oriented conceptions to virtuosic instrumental solos, this Grad Forum highlights the artistic diversity that coexists at UC San Diego.

Morton Feldman, Crippled Symmetry

Performers:
Alex Ishov (flute)
Michael Jones (percussion)
Shaoai Ashley Zhang (piano)

The Penderecki Piano Trio was created by three of the most dedicated and outstanding Polish musicians of our time. The promisingly gifted pianist Konrad Skolarski, the breathtaking virtuoso Jaros?aw Nadrzycki , and the sensational cellist Karol Marianowski are all acclaimed artists in their country and abroad. They are laureates of many international music competitions, each with a long history of performances all over Europe, North and South America, as well as Asia.

As soloists or as chamber musicians (two of the musicians were recently at the core of the Meccore String Quartet), each member of the trio has performed in distinguished concert halls, such as Wigmore Hall (London), Frick Collection (New York), Pollack Hall (Montreal), as well as with leading orchestras such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Simón Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela.

Program
Claude Debussy: Premier trio in G Major; J. Haydn: Piano Trio in G Major Hob. XV/25 “Gypsy”; P. ?ukaszewski – Piano trio;

Since 2014, the Semana Internacional de Improvisación has gathered cutting-edge artists from both sides of the border, and beyond, in the Mexican city of Ensenada. This showcase will officially light the spark for next year's edition of the festival, to be held in March of 2020. Featured in this concert is trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Iván Trujillo, presenting the debut of his 8-piece Ensemble. Trujillo will be joined by Ensenada-based improvising visual artist Esther Gámez and by flutist and UC San Diego Faculty member Wilfrido Terrazas as special guests. The combo will present a spicy mix of original compositions and creative music classics, with a Baja California flavor. Furthermore, and in correspondence with the Semana's cross-border spirit, the Ensemble will also be joined by a handful of UC San Diego Grad students to create site-specific large ensemble improvisations at UC San Diego's Conrad Prebys Music Center.   

Iván Trujillo Ensemble

Iván Trujillo - Trumpet & Electronics 
Martha Rolón - Clarinet
Katherine Hernández - Saxophone
Lesly Sandoval - French Horn 
Kevin Urzua - Trombone
Kalid García - Electric Guitar 
Gabriel Nava - Electric Bass 
Javier Gómez - Drums

Special Guests 
Wilfrido Terrazas - Flutes & Whistles 
Esther Gámez - Live Art  

Grad Forums provide an outlet for Department of Music graduate students to present individual and collaborative works on their own terms.  From theatrically-oriented conceptions to virtuosic instrumental solos, this Grad Forum highlights the artistic diversity that coexists at UC San Diego.

The New York Times calls red fish blue fish a "dynamic percussion ensemble from the University of California." Founded 20 years ago by Steven Schick, the San Diego-based ensemble performs, records, and premieres works from the last 85 years of western percussion's rich history. The group works regularly with living composers from every continent. Recent projects include the world premiere of Roger Reynolds' Sanctuary and the American premiere of James Dillon's epic Nine Rivers cycle with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). In the Summer of 2011 red fish blue fish collaborated with George Crumb, Dawn Upshaw and Peter Sellars to premiere the staged version of The Winds of Destiny. Eighth Blackbird invited red fish blue fish to join them in performances of works by American icons John Cage and Steve Reich at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The New York Times called their "riveting" John Cage performance the "highlight" of the program. Recordings of the percussion chamber music of Iannis Xenakis and Roger Reynolds on Mode Records have been praised by critics around the world. Recordings released in the 2012-13 season included the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Giacinto Scelsi and rare works of Iannis Xenakis.

In 2012 red fish blue fish presented four concerts of percussion music alongside Percussion Group Cincinnati at the John Cage Centennial Festival in Washington, D.C., where they performed highlights from Cage's collection of percussion works.

RFBF has had a huge impact on new music percussion performances, recordings and education. Successful RFBF/UC San Diego Department of Music alums include Ross Karre, now with ICE; Aiyun Huang, who heads the percussion department at McGill University; Morris Palter, an assistant professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he is also the artistic director of the 64.8 percussion group; and Justin DeHart, who is a member of the Chapman University faculty and of the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet.

Cellist Michael Nicolas and pianist Aleck Karis will perform Sergei Rachmaninoff's magnificent Sonata in G minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 19 (1901) along with the Cello Sonata in C, Op. 65, by the English composer Benjamin Britten. 
 

Éliane Radigue (b. 1932) is a pioneering French composer of undulating continuous music marked by patient, virtually imperceptible transformations that purposefully unfold to reveal the intangible, radiant contents of minimal sound—its partials, harmonics, subharmonics and inherent distortions. As a student and assistant to musique concrète pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Radigue mastered tape splicing techniques, but preferred the creation of fluid, delicately balanced feedback works to the spasmodic dissonance of her teachers’ music. Finding peers among minimalist composers in America, Radigue began working with synthesis in 1970, eventually discovering the ARP 2500 synthesizer, which she would use exclusively for her celebrated electronic works to come. With remarkable restraint, Radigue spent years on each piece, painstakingly assembling series of subtle, pulsating ARP recordings to be later mixed meticulously into hourlong suites of precise, perpetual mutation, including masterpieces Trilogie de la mort and Adnos I-III. In 2001, Radigue adapted an early feedback work to live performance on electric bass, Elemental II, and in 2004, with the encouragement of ongoing collaborator Charles Curtis, she permanently abandoned electronics for acoustic composition, beginning with Naldjorlak for solo cello, composed for Curtis. As within each individual work, Radigue has maintained an obstinate focus throughout the flow of her career, her dedication to the materiality of sound earning her numerous accolades and ensuring her place as one of the most important composers of our time.

Occam Ocean is an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces composed by Radigue for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. The “knights of the Occam,” as Radigue refers to the performers participating in the project, are therefore musicians who have developed individualistic, creative approaches to their instruments; and the resulting compositions are not transferable to other performers on that instrument. Citing the ocean as a calming antidote to the overwhelming nature of our vibratory wave-filled surroundings, Radigue has named the tributary components of her Occam series with the image of fluid water in mind. Solo pieces are Occams, duo pieces Rivers, and larger ensemble pieces Deltas. The process of combining or over-laying the solos as small ensemble pieces, with only minor adjustments in the solos themselves, recalls Radigue’s procedure in the early feedback works made as sound installations, in which individual feedback loops are to combined freely in slight non-synchronization such that combinations of loops rarely or never repeat. With the extreme simplicity of Occam’s razor, continuous pieces that are iridescent on their own achieve a new radiance of interacting pulsation in their River and Delta configurations. The Occam series began in 2011 with a solo for harpist Rhodri Davies and has continued steadily to the present, counting now well over fifty individual solos and ensemble pieces.

Each night of Occam Ocean at Pace Gallery will feature different combinations of performances in Occam, River, and Delta configurations by Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, Charles Curtis, Rhodri Davies, and Robin Hayward.

Dafne Vicente-Sandoval is a bassoon player who explores sound through improvisation, contemporary music performance and sound installations. Her instrumental approach is centered on the fragility of sound and its emergence within a given space by testing the threshold between instability and control. Her long-term collaborations with a handful of composers engaged in music that demands a high degree of critical interpretation have led to the creation of a significant catalogue of solo pieces including compositions by Klaus Lang, Jakob Ullmann, and Éliane Radigue.

Acknowledged internationally as a performer of new and experimental music, cellist Charles Curtis has been associated with minimalist pioneer La Monte Young and Marina Zazeela since 1987, their intimate working relationship having yielded retroactive recalibrations of pieces like Young’s 1958 Trio for Strings. Curtis is also the first performer to collaborate with Éliane Radigue on a work for an unamplified, acoustic instrument without electronic support or accompaniment. This work, Naldjorlak, composed in 2004 and premiered in December 2005, is an hour-long, exhaustive enquiry into the inherent resonating properties of the cello.

Rhodri Davies is an improvising harpist who confronts traditional concepts of the harp through his use of preparations, detuned, bowed, and e-bowed strings. One of the most prominent members of the London reductionist school of improvised music, new pieces for solo harp have been composed for him by Philip Corner and Yasunao Tone, in addition to Éliane Radigue.

Robin Hayward is a tuba player and composer who has introduced radical playing techniques to brass instruments, initially through the discovery of the ‘noise-valve’ and later through the development of the first fully microtonal tuba in 2009. In 2012 he invented the Hayward Tuning Vine, partly out of a desire to visualise the harmonic space implicit within the microtonal tuba, and began working on a solo tuba piece with Éliane Radigue, which became Occam XI. Other composer collaborations include Christian Wolff and Alvin Lucier.

Occam Ocean is part of Éliane Radigue: Intermediate States, a retrospective curated by Lawrence Kumpf and Charles Curtis and developed in collaboration with Éliane Radigue for Blank Forms in New York. The retrospective seeks to present Radigue’s practice in a richly contextualized, holistic manner to draw out important connections between her early and late periods of work, examining the breadth of her practice and juxtaposing her compositions with new interpretations and experimental re-stagings by contemporary composers. The retrospective will continue with more programs into 2020.

Éliane Radigue: Intermediate States has been made possible with generous support from Pace Gallery, Wales Arts International, the Goethe-Institut, and through the New Music Fund, a program of FACE Foundation, with generous funding from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, Florence Gould Foundation, Fondation CHANEL, French Ministry of Culture, Institut français-Paris, and SACEM (Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique). 

IDEAS: Time Unfolded, with Johannes Reginier and Nakul Tiruviluamala

Date: December 5th, 2019  to December 5th, 2019
Time: 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Location: Atkinson Hall Theater/VRoom , UC San Diego
Host: Shahrokh Yadegari, professor, Department of Music

DESCRIPTION/ABSTRACT:

Time Unfolded is an interdisciplinary and immersive multi-media work, combining highresolution video, dance and live electronics.

Time Unfolded is an exploration of the movements of a dancer, filmed in 4.6K and high frame rate and decomposed instant after instant, following and extending the techniques of chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, and accompanied by an immersive 8-channel live electronics performance. Through the interplay of sounds and images, time unfolds and shapes emerge from the succession of the instants.

SPEAKER BIO:

Johannes Regnier (UC San Diego Music) In a career that spans more than a decade, Johannes Regnier has been active as a composer and sound engineer and has conducted several projects in the field of electronic music. He studied mathematics at the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, sound engineering at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière in Paris and sound art at the University of the Arts in Berlin. Regnier is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in computer music at UC San Diego under the supervision of Miller Puckette.

Nakul Tiruviluamala (UC San Diego Music) Nakul Tiruviluamala has a deep passion for music that began when he started studying piano at the age of four. He is a keyboardist, composer, singer, conductor, sound artist, and multiinstrumentalist. He received his bachelor’s of music in classical piano performance at UC Irvine. Afterwards, he earned both a master’s in music composition as well as an artist diploma in jazz piano performance at San Diego State University. He is currently pursuing a PhD at UC San Diego in computer music.

Verónica Santiago Moniello - Verónica is a Venezuelan-Italian choreographer and dancer currently based in the south of California and Mexico. She holds an M.F.A. Master of Fine Arts in the Theatre & Dance Program at UCSD, the University of California, San Diego (U.S.) and a B.A. in Dance Making by the Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen (Germany), where she worked on Pina Bausch’s “Le Sacre Du Printemps” répertoire. Her practice is inspired by the relationships between human movement and unstable surfaces, the connection between the body, its organs and naturals elements, notions of memory and the idea of birth, antagonist subjects of resistance, utopian bodies, and dreams. Her projects have been presented in Mexico, Venezuela, Belize, Germany, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Spain and the U.S. Currently she is teaching Movement Laboratory for undergraduates at the Dance Program at UCSD in San Diego- California,U.S. Recently she has been choreographing “Women at War” (dir. Rebecca Johannsen,) at California State University San Marcos. Also Anna Moench’s “Mothers at Play” (dir. Bea Basso) at the Potiker Theatre in La Jolla. San Diego- California, U.S. She also has choreographed “Amor es más Laberinto” (dir. Raquel Araujo,) co-produced between the National Theater Company of Mexico and La Rendija theater company in MeridaYucatan. She has directed “Before the Horses Crash into the Ground, and then the Ground,” as part of her ongoing research “The Body that has Been Possessed” awarded by the Tinker Fellowship, CILAS (Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies) and The Friends of California, and is co-creator of “DosLados;” a collaboration between Habitual and La Mecedora, that re-imagines new ways of shortening and folding the territory between, Rosarito, Tijuana and San Diego through dance. She has performed in the dance video piece “Until it Lives in the Muscle” (dir. Andrea Canepa) at the Bauhaus School (Dessau, Germany.) Also she has presented her solo “implicitself” at “Series of Performances” program hosted by Movement Research (NYC, U.S.) Since 2015 she has been guiding dance workshops and masters classes at “La Rendija” theater company at the same time collaborating with the dance company Tumakat as directors assistant for Vania Duran in Mérida, Yucatán (México.) 

MORE INFORMATION:

A reception will be held at 6 p.m.

This event is free and open to the public.

RSVP requested to galleryinfo@calit2.net