Performance: Selected Solos and Duets with Mills Center for Contemporary Music
November 10, 2017, 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Hamon Education Tower—9th Floor, Piazzoni Murals Room, Wilsey Court
We welcome internationally renowned musicians from the legendary Mills Center for Contemporary Music (CCM), recently celebrating its 50th anniversary, for a rare evening of sound installations and specially performances in various locations throughout the building. Maggi Payne will provide electroacoustic ambient "atmospheres" throughout the evening to accompany the views from the Hamon Observation Tower, conspiring with the weather and changes in light.
John Bischoff creates an environment in the Piazzoni Murals Room that plays in real-time with repetition and interval--short musical sequences from a few seconds in the past are reconstituted in the present moment and intersected by performer actions, resulting in sudden pitch deflections, volume shifts, and on/off gating effects across musical streams.
Chris Brown and
William Winant perform Brown’s The Thorn (“Be the thorn” –Patti Smith) on percussion and “gazamba” (electroacoustic prepared piano), improvising within pulsing microtonal modes and rhythms generated live by SuperCollider computer codes.
James Fei and
Fred Frith will combine analog synthesis and electric guitar in a responsive improvisation.
For more than 50 years, the CCM has played a revolutionary role in music performance, composition, and pedagogy. Across its activities it foregrounds interdisciplinary collaboration, hands-on engineering, and aesthetic risk, evidence of its founding as part of 1960s San Francisco counterculture. From its home at Mills College in Oakland, CCM and its associated faculty and alumni have had an outsize influence on the musical vanguard, from tonight’s performers to previously associated musicians such as Robert Ashley, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, and Laurie Anderson.
Ticket Information
Programs and museum admission are free and open to the public during this event. Come onsite the day-of to redeem a free ticket to see Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire. Admission into the permanent collection is free with no ticket required.
Contact Information
Public Programs
publicprograms@famsf.org
(415) 750-7694