Music for Birdwatching:
USUFRUCT (Polly Moller +
Tim Walters)
Doug Carroll + Original Field Recordings
Wendy Reid w/ Lulu the African Grey Parrot
+ Pet the Tiger (
David Samas, Kevin Corcoran)
performing “the 6th Extinction” w/ Butoh (Christina Braun)
Fri March 18, 8 PM
Turquoise Yantra Grotto
32 Turquoise Way SF
$10-15
Join us for a special evening celebrating our avian neighbors, friends and companions, in a vane that fosters rescued parrots alongside quail, songbirds, and colorful exotic/endangered doves which will lend their voices to the performances. All 4 performers are bird lovers and draw inspiration and material from their birdie buddies who perform alongside us, either virtually or in full feather.
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BIOS:
USUFRUCT is:
Polly Moller is a composer, performer, and improviser based in Oakland, California, USA. Equally at home in the worlds of free improvisation, composition, and rock, she is a member of Usufruct, Ghost in the House and Reconnaissance Fly. Her compositions and flute choir arrangements are available from ALRY Publications.
Tim Walters performs live computer music (mostly with Usufruct), and plays bass guitar (mostly with Reconnaissance Fly). He has also performed and recorded with Circular Firing Squad, Shalmaneser, and Recardiacs Fly. His visual art can be spotted at KALEID Gallery in San José. He has seen the fnords
International cellist and composer,
Doug Carroll expands into new sound domains with the use of electronic processing and creative thought. Carroll's compositions for electronic cello and tape feature the spontaneity and drama of a live performance combined with the richness and diversity of the taped material. His solo improvisations have received international acclaim for their stark originality and musical sensitivity. Additionally, he has composed for a variety of multimedia events, including modern dance, theatre, film, and video, as well as collaborations with visual artists. He studied composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Lou Harrison, and Anthony Braxton. He has an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College and a BA in Music from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Other studies include the Darmstadt International Course for New Music and the Royal Conservatory at the Hauge, Netherlands.
Tree Piece #55 “lulu variations” is an environment in which live performers, being birds and humans, interact with their digital counterparts, attempting to create a sonically ambiguous landscape.The human performers play from a score of spatially notated timbral motives to be sounded freely within determined time frames. The various musical elements move independently coming together from time to time as a result of the inherent similarities of their timbral natures. This unforced relationship which exists between them is characteristic of the Tree Pieces as it exemplifies the inter-connection of all things in nature. All sonic elements, being birds, buchla lightning, muted violin and trumpet, are presented equally in real time as digitally. An ideal performance is achieved when ambiguity is created between the real-time and digital elements as well as bird and instrument sounds, thus allowing for an ‘intra” as well as an “inter-” dimensionality of the sonic relationships.
Wendy Reid's Tree Pieces is an on-going set of musical processes which attempt to reflect nature’s manner of operations. Because the pattern or order of nature functions as a single process without division, contrary to the state of control in which there exists a duality (-one element commanding and the other obeying), control in the compositional process is removed by varying degrees from piece to piece. The processes are contextual in nature thus allowing the performers to act according to the unpredictable conditions and variables which arise from within the musical continuity. In this way, the compositions attempt to reflect the inter-connection of all things (including ourselves) in nature. In performance,an attempt is made at a spontaneous unforced and unblocked growing of sound and silence in which emphasis is placed on formation rather than pre-established form, as in the building and shaping of cell-like units in living processes. This approach ‘formation as process’ parallels that of the artist Paul Klee whose writings have influenced my work. Klee believed that ‘communication with nature remains the most essential condition’ for the artist by the simple fact that he himself is part of nature.
Wendy Reid received degrees from Mills College (M.A.), USC School of Performing Arts (B.M.), and attended Stanford University, Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Between 1975-77, she was a private pupil of Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Les .Ecoles D’Art Americaines at Fontainbleau. Composers she has studied under include Terry Riley, Robert Ashley, Halsey Stevens, James Hopkins and film composer David Raksin. She is the recipient of awards and grants including Meet the Composer/California, Meet the Composer/New York, Subito grants, an ASMC and the Paul Merrit Henry Prize. Her works have been performed and broadcast throughout the United States, Europe and Asia by the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Kronos Quartet, the New MusicWorks Ensemble, the San Francisco String Quartet, the Ruffled Feathers Treeo, Brassiosaurus, the Tree Ensemble, Charles Amirkhanian (Other Minds), William Banovetz, Krys Bobrowski, Don Buchla, Tom Dambly,Joel Davel, Phillip Gelb, Mark Goldstein, Ron Heglin, George Lewis, Larry Polansky, Gino Robair, David Rosenboom, Nathan Rubin, Sung Il Lee, George Tingley, Toyoshi Tomita, William Winant and others. Reid produced the new music series New Music With Birds, Frogs and Other Creatures sponsored by the Natural Sciences Department of the Oakland Museum and the San Francisco Art Institute, and currently teaches music composition at Mills College and violin/ensemble/composition at Holy Names University PMD.
The 6th Extinction explores the plight of avian dinosaurs at the climax of the Anthropocine. Through witnessing the callus horrors of speciesism (the objectification of non-human persons pejoratively referred to as animals) and enacting their ritual death and release, we honor the innocent lives of our sentient neighbors and stand against the assumptions that this condition is normal- the relentless war against Nature must stop for we have become the serpent which devours itself.
Composed by
David SamasLifelong dancer Christina Braun's choreography with collaborating composers has been presented regularly since 2002. Her core teachers in the Butoh form are local treasures Hiroko and Koichi Tamano. As SF Butoh LAB and with BUTOH San Francisco, she has produced Butoh Dance symposia, performances, workshops, and festivals.
David Samas is a composer, cosmologist, poet, painter, performer, philosopher, farmer and father of 4. He has a BFA from the SF Art Institute in conceptual art and studied poetics at the New College of California. As a young man he performed with the SF Boys Chorus, the SF Opera and the SF Symphony with which he won a GRAMMY for the “best classical recording” of 1994. He has performed at the Exploritorium, Grace Cathedral, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Cal Shakes, and Center for New Music where he also curates the Window Gallery for Invented Instruments. In his free time he is artistic director of the Turquoise Yantra Grotto, a house concert series for free improv, ethno-modernism and invented instruments. He gives back to his communities through teaching workshops and curating events with and for school kids through Thingamajigs in Oakland, CA, with which he served as festival director in 2015. He also makes sacred geometry amulets, is an excellent cook, and self publishes small editions of hand bound art books.
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Now in our 5th season, the Turquoise Yantra Grotto is a house concert series for avant improvisers and invented instrumentalists with a focus on ethno-modernism and extended techniques. We hold a monthly event which is part concert and part social club, near Twin Peaks in San Francisco. The Turquoise Yantra Grotto is home to many unique invented instruments including the Zen Industrial Gamelan (or grand metalliphone), the Gamelan Piano, and several sonic paintings, as well as instruments by Bart Hopkin, Tom Nunn,
David Samas, Dan Gottwald, Peter Whitehead, Bryan Day, Susan Rawcliffe and many others. The 4 pianos in the house are each uniquely tuned for a variety of repertoire showcased in our solo piano series.
Cost: 10-15