Mosswood Sound Series
3630 Telegraph Ave enter 2nd door on 37th St Oakland
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Chris Brown
THE MOSSWOOD IMPROVISERS GROUP

Chris Brown performs a set of 20th Century Solo Piano Pieces

Arnold Schönberg - Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, op.19 (1911, 5 minutes)
Morton Feldman — Last Pieces (1959, 10 minutes)
Thelonious Monk - Monk’s Mood (1947, 4 minutes)
Henry Cowell - The Hero Sun (1912, 4 minutes)
Ruth Crawford Seeger — Piano Study in Mixed Accents (1930, 1.5 minutes)
Chris Brown - Sparks (1976, 8 minutes)

This piano set of short acoustic piano pieces asserts sonic connections between 20th century composers whose music is not normally associated with each other’s. Rather than emphasizing their differences in compositional style, it proposes links based on the intention of listening to the sound of the piano just for itself. I’m especially drawn to the opportunity to play this music on a Bösendorfer piano, since 20th century music was never permitted to be played on the Bösendorfer at UC Santa Cruz where I got my B.A., and it was strictly reserved for repertoire classical repertoire through the Romantic era. But Bösendorfer was always Cecil Taylor’s piano of choice, so it will be interesting to see how it responds to Feldman, Cowell, Crawford Seeger, and Brown! --C.B.

THE MOSSWOOD IMPROVISERS GROUP performs R MURRAY SCHAFER'S graphic score, "minimusic" (1968) and a group improvisation.

M U S I C I A N S
Tim Perkis, electronics
Danishta Rivero, voice
Eric Glick Rieman, keyboards
Kjell Nordeson, percussion
Matt Ingalls, clarinets
John Ingle, saxophone
Sarah Grace Graves, voice
Tom Djll, trumpet
Ben Davis, cello
Kevin CK Lo, violin/flute
Kevin Corcoran, percussion


Chris Brown, pianist, began his piano studies in 1958 in Manila, Philippines with Jan Deats, then studied in the early 1960s in Chicago with Claire Oppenheim, and from 1965-8 with Robert McDowell at the Chicago Musical College. In 1969-70 he received a scholarship for piano studies at the Hochschule für Music in Berlin. He attended the University of California/Santa Cruz from 1970 where he studied piano with Sylvia Jenkins and won the Santa Cruz County Young Artist Award that culminated in a performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto with the Santa Cruz Symphony.

On the side, he got interested in music of the New York School, performing music by Cage, Feldman, and Wolff, and he was introduced byGordon Mumma to electroacoustic music in performing Cage’s multiple-piano, open form piece Winter Music. After finding Henry Cowell’s tone-cluster scores in the UCSC library he began performing Cowell’s music leading to a performance in 1974 at the Menlo Park Bicentennial Celebration of their native son Cowell’s intensely dissonant Tiger, which SF Chronicle music critic Alfred Frankenstein described as “Chris Brown made the typical Cowell thunder reverberate, with rolling motion from elbow to wrist over the keyboard.” At the same time he began exploring improvised music and jazz under the influence ofCecil Taylor’s pianism. His performances of Cowell’s most radical tone-cluster works at Hertz Hall in 1997 appeared on the CD New Music: Piano Compositions by Henry Cowell, New Albion Records . As a composer his own music became increasingly concerned with electronic and computer music, and his compositions and performances for piano solo and electronics between 1990 and 2020 are recorded on the double-CD Retrospectacles (f’oc’sle Records). His solo suite for piano in just intonation Six Primes (2014) is also available on New World records.

Cost: $10-$25 sliding scale

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