Colin Martin and Friends

SF composer and pianist Colin Martin premieres a Piano Sonata, Cello Sonata, and song cycle/chamber opera alongside his friends and colleagues, cellist Abigail Monroe and soprano Winnie Nieh.  More...

Christina Braun and Tom Nunn perform “Deep States,” a set of 8 pieces for dancer and original experimental instruments. Each dance features a particular state of consciousness or circumstance and instrument: “Germinal State” with Skatchplate, “Blue State” with Too Bluesy Blue (EPB), “Communal State” with Giant Skatchwheel (hand-turned), “Dreamstate” with Crustacean, “Natural State” with Skatchart and tape, “Industrial State” with Giant Skatchwheel (motorized), “Emerging State” with City Park (a Chaseplate) using driftwood, Lukie Tubes and bows, and “Gestate” with Skatchplate.

Christina Braun is a lifelong dancer and prolific choreographer. Tom Nunn is Christina’s long term improvisational art mentor. Christina's solo dance works with composer David Samas have been recently presented by Safehouse Arts, the LAB, the Oakland Museum of California and the Asian Art Museum. As SF Butoh LAB, Christina has produced Butoh dance symposia, performances, and workshops.

Tom Nunn has designed, built and performed with experimental musical instruments since 1975, always with a focus on recycled/re-purposed materials, to create a unique voice in improvised music. His years of work with Christina Braun have brought a rich visual and dramatic focus to his music. He has participated in several festivals such as the High Zero Festival in Baltimore, Sound Symposium in Newfoundland, and AK07 in New Zealand.
Christina and Tom have performed together in Bay Area festivals since 2012. This is their second evening length collaboration.  More...

Refracted Pathways: Dirt and Copper with Rebeca Bollinger

Dirt and Copper will be joined by artist Rebeca Bollinger for an evening of interdisciplinary works exploring the liminal spaces between sonic, textual, and visual modes of interpretation. Each piece is a sonic process generated / refracted in the visual field.  More...

C4NM 7th Birthday Bash

The Center for New Music is celebrating 7 years of serving the new music community from its home at 55 Taylor Street. This party is our 1000th event at C4NM! Join us in celebrating 7 years of creating space for new music to thrive. Drinks and hors d’oeuvres provided complimentary. Free to all C4NM members & supporters, all are invited with at $5 suggested donation.  More...

Fay Victor and Myra Melford

Brooklyn, NY based sound artist/composer Fay Victor, honing a unique vision for the vocalist’s role in jazz and improvised music, is joined in duo performance and conversation by “stalwart of the new-jazz movement” pianist/composer Myra Melford, from across the Bay, in Berkeley. Co-presented with The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, as the first double-program in its Fall 2019 In Common Writers Series, supported by the Walter & Elise Haas Fund.

Pushing the vocal envelope forward regarding repertoire, improvisation, and composition, Fay Victor encompasses a distinctive vocalizing, language, and performing approach with the foundation of the jazz vocal idiom, invoking an “everything is everything” aesthetic that brings in references that span the globe. Victor sees the vocal instrument in itself as full of possibilities of sound exploration, the voice a direct and powerful conduit for language and messages in an improvising context. All of these ideas aim to push the vocal envelope to forge greater expressive possibilities. In Victor’s nine critically acclaimed albums as a leader one can hear the through line of expansive expression leading up to her most recent release, Wet Robots (ESP Disk, 2018) with her SoundNoiseFUNK project. Victor’s performed with luminaries such as Dr. Randy Weston, Gary Bartz, Misha Mengelberg, Archie Shepp, Nicole Mitchell, Myra Melford, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Billy Martin, and Tyshawn Sorey.

The pianist, composer, bandleader and educator Myra Melford has spent the last three decades making brilliant original music that is equally challenging and engaging. Culling inspiration from a wide range of sources including Cecil Taylor, the blues and boogie-woogie of her native Chicago, the poetry of Rumi, the AACM, and yoga, she’s explored an array of formats, among them ruminative solo-piano recitals, deeply interactive combos and ambitious multidisciplinary programs. Melford’s most recent release, The Other Side of Air (Firehouse 12), by her quintet Snowy Egret, is an extraordinary document of her unique creative language—a seamless, shifting blend of composition and improvisation, and a probing of the space shared between dynamic small-group jazz and contemporary chamber music. Since debuting on record as a bandleader in 1990, she’s built a discography of more than 20 albums as a leader or co-leader, and has collaborated with such luminaries as Dave Douglas, Marty Ehrlich, Liberty Ellman, Erik Friedlander, Ben Goldberg, Joseph Jarman, Leroy Jenkins, Ron Miles, Nicole Mitchell, Tyshawn Sorey, Chris Speed, Stomu Takeishi, Cuong Vu, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

Fay Victor is in the Bay Area as an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts.  More...

Burton Greene: Solo Piano; + Dunkelman/Ackley/Fluke-Mogul Trio

Burton Greene will present a set of solo piano works and improvisations. Nava Dunkelman, percussion; gabby fluke-mogul, violin; and Bruce Ackley, saxophones, will play duets in an opening set, and then join Greene for a quartet.  More...

Slow Wave: New Music for Viola, Clarinet, and Piano

San Francisco-based New Music trio, Slow Wave, presents an exciting program featuring premieres by San Francisco composers Julie Barwick and Brett Austin Eastman, a recent work by Israeli composer Aviya Kopelman, and a 20th-century work by English composer, Gordon Jacob.  More...

Site: Yizkor, Andrew Conklin and Maya Ciarrocchi

Site: Yizkor, an interactive work for sound and video developed by the Bronx, NY interdisciplinary artist Maya Ciarrocchi and the Stockton, CA composer Andrew Conklin, explores the physical and emotional documentation of loss through the lens of Jewish Yizkor books. This presentation of the project at Center for New Music will include a new piece for live musicians in an immersive projected and sonic environment, followed by a workshop where audience members are invited to create their own Yizkor pages as a way to mourn and commemorate lost people and places.  More...

The Chromelodia Project: Chris Brown-Theresa Wong-Kyle Bruckmann

The Chromelodia Project is a concert of music by Chris Brown written in Harry Partch's 43-tone just intonation. Performers are Chris Brown, keyboard and electronics; Theresa Wong, cello and voice; and Kyle Bruckmann, oboe. The Chromelodia Project is funded by InterMusic SF’s Musical Grant Program, www.InterMusicSF.org.  More...

FACE OF A STRANGER (1977), a restored feature film by San Francisco filmmaker and musician David Michalak. Tonight’s premiere will feature a new score by the internationally acclaimed pianist, Thollem McDonas. Selected Film-Frame prints will be on view in the lobby and the show will open with a short set by Rova’s Bruce Ackley.

While famed director Nichols Ray worked on his "experimental" film with students at SUNY COLLEGE in Binghamtom, N.Y., local upstart David Michalak worked on his own feature, paying tribute to shadowy German expressionism, silent movies and the serials of the 1920s.

Not a word is spoken in this tale of a kind-hearted man who turns to cruelty when his lover dies an unexpected tragic death. His sanity is challenged further when he meets a woman bearing a strong resemblance to his deceased partner. Expression and gesture covey the story. Michalak shot the film on location at a restored turn of the century house, a rock quarry (The Devil's Punch Bowl) and in the lush forests of upstate New York with his film company Eye-Full Films.

James Russell Lowell’s review from the premiere at Roberson Museum in 1977 is, in part, quoted here, calling the film “remarkable....poetic and hypnotic...”

“David Michalak’s folkloric opus transports his audience into a world shared by UFA expressionists of the silent era yet it possesses a wonderful, uncanny immediacy – both poetic and hypnotic.”   
 
The film is full of nightmares, dreams and visions of a love lost and features glowing performances by Billie-Marie as both the haughty Otillia and servant Anna.
                       
“What a revelation it is to see an actress who truly, innately, comprehends the visual relevance of cinema!  She endows her face - her every gesture - with emblematic meaning, conveying an almost unearthly quality. Michalak’s camera, script and direction allow us to see her (Anna) as the ultimate trusting soul; accepting one fate after another, finding empathy only in a dancing dream-clown, who all-too-briefly enchants her.”

The films also stars: David Gardner as Gunnar, Gerald Michalak as Jarl and Michael Butler as Hynek who dances.  More...

The program includes, Shinobue solo (traditional or new music), Piano solo (new music by Hyo-Shin Na), Koto solo (new music by Hyo-shin Na), Japanese/Korean folk songs Koto and Shinbone and Koto and Piano duo

The Wooden Fish Ensemble presents concerts of music and musicians from a variety of cultural and national backgrounds working together in a collaborative way. The Ensemble has presented concerts of traditional music from Asia and new music by a diverse group of composers that includes John Cage, Christian Wolff, Frederic Rzewski, Morton Feldman, Hyo-shin Na, Boudewijn Buckinx and Walter Zimmermann. They have given numerous world premieres.  More...