Ready to fly to Prague next week at Žižkov Atrium for LUXURY OF MIND = FLUXUS.
On the 28th November at 19.30
Anna Clementi (Germany, voice), Deborah Walker (Italy, cello), Luciano Chessa (Italy, Dan Bau, violin, organ), Werner Durand (Germany, wind instruments), Miroslav Beinhauer (Czechia, piano), Petr Bakla (Czechia, piano), Petr Ferenc (Czechia, spoken word) and me
will be ready to perform a quite unusual happening/concert with music by
John Cage, Milan Knizák, Henning Christiansen, Philip Corner, George Maciunas, Geoffrey Hendricks, Yoko Ono, Giuseppe Chiari, Terry Riley, Eric Andersen, Dieter Schnebel, Bengt af Klintberg, Mieko Shiomi, Ovvind Fahlström, Sten Hanson, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young.
I bet it will be fun!
All started from an idea by Petr Studený and Opening Performance Orchestra in Prague, that led to the release of Stolen Symphony, the first volume of Fluxus&NeoFluxus collection, and now, brand new, to the second and final part, Keep together (Sub Rosa label, 2024). As the previous one, it’s a limited edition (400 copies) of double LP or double CD, with a very rich booklet with many texts and essays about Fluxus. But differently from the first, which is sold out, there are still copies available! I played a La Monte Young-inspired piece, and re-released music by Philip Corner and Giancarlo Cardini (also in Neuma Records and Da Vinci Classics). Very happy to be part of this second edition with all the musicians I will soon meet in Prague and many others.
Some photos of the evening – almost three hours of music and performance! – and the rehearsals. Thanks to Petr Studený for the pics.
In a few weeks I’ll be in Berlin again with two concerts, on the 6th of August and on the 20th of August. The first recital, Open Cage, will be dedicated to John Cage‘s music for toy piano, prepared piano, string piano and “regular” piano. The second program, Fluxus Cardboards, will feature music by Fluxus artists and composers Corner, Shiomi, La Monte Young, Higgins, and Cardini. Both recitals are included in a concert series parallel to the exhibition “Holy Fluxus”, held from July 13th to September 8th at St. Matthews Church in Berlin. The exhibit is organized by Archivio Conz and presents to the public part of the wide collection of Francesco Conz, now available in Berlin thanks to a huge cataloguing work. Quoting from Archivio Conz press review, “Francesco Conz (1935–2010) was an obsessive Italian collector, patron, curator, friend of artists, and “producer as artist sui generis” (Thomas Marquard). In 1972, after meeting Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, and Joe Jones in Berlin, his interests focused on Lettrism, Concrete Poetry, Viennese Actionism, Fluxus, music, and literature. Over the course of many decades, he created a unique worldwide network of artists. His tireless activities as a publisher of over 560 art editions (Edizioni Conz) in the northern Italian city of Asolo, and later in Verona, contributed significantly to the development of Fluxus in Italy and worldwide. Since 2016, the Archivio Conz, with its approximately 5,000 objects by more than 200 artists, has been housed in Berlin and is now being presented to the public in its entirety for the first time after eight years of cataloging and digitization.”
I am very pleased to be part of the event together with many friends and musicians; in fact, the exhibit will host a free concert every Tuesday, and you can check the full programme here. Below some information about the two recitals (and some images later, as usual).
Open Cage, on August 6th, is a listening journey around the sound of the piano. It includes music by John Cage for toy, prepared and regular piano, hosting a piece for “string piano” composed by Tan Dun in honour of John Cage. The young Chinese composer found a supporter in Cage, who spoke very positively of him during the interviews and conversations of the last years. It’s a music programme I’ve played many times, always with a lot of pleasure, looking forward to the surprise of the new sounds of preparation of Sonatas&Interludes (you never know, when preparing a piano, what will come out at the end). A little treat: this time I will play a toy piano from Conz collection, signed by Fluxus artist Larry Miller.
Fluxus Cardboards, on August 20th, includes plenty of Fluxus music and of course plenty of handmade musical cardboards. It’s not the first time that I spend some hours with scissors, glue, paper and cutter, as far as it seems that these fragments of score, once thrown into the air after being played, are irresistible souvenirs for the audience… Composer Mieko Shiomi wrote to me very pleased at the idea that some of her music is now in different homes around the world, so I keep cutting and pasting in good spirits. Beside Mieko Shiomi’s, the programme will feature music by Philip Corner, Giancarlo Cardini, Dick Higgins and inspired by La Monte Young. Cardboards, mallets, brushes, balls and other sonorous objects will be in my baggage – stimulating inquires at airport security check as usual. A stair will host as a special guest Anna Clementi, who kindly agreed to lend her beautiful voice for the opening piece.
↓Photos by @giuliabaresi – Courtesy of Archivio Conz, Berlin. Open Cage, 6th August
↓Photos by Giorgia Palmisano – Courtesy of Archivio Conz, Berlin. Fluxus Cardboards, 20th August
After last October concert for Festival Aperto in Reggio Emilia, here we go with an other show with Philip Corner’s piano music. On Saturday, June 1st, at Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Casa Cavazzini in Udine at 6.30 pm we will play together a choice from his 70 years repertoire for solo piano and piano four-hands. As a precious counterpoint, some original music papers by Corner from Caterina Gualco / Unimedia Modern collection, curated by Cristina Burelli. The concert is organized by Civici Musei Udine, in collaboration with Salotto Musicale Fvg. Needless to say I’m very happy and looking forward to the privilege of sharing again the stage (and the piano) with Philip!
MaerzMusik collaborative project “Contemplations into the Radical Others”, dedicated to composer Lucia Dlugoszewski, was not only a precious occasion to listen to and perform her music. It gave us the opportunity to share the extensive research done so far, and gather together with people equally motivated. The Library spaces hosted several theoretical interventions in the form of talks, gently led by musicologist Monika Zyla and warmly open to the public. After the official presentation of the project, as an introduction to ensemble Musik Fabrik’s concert at Radyal System on the 20th, I’ve been included in the conversation “Ensemble Perspectives on Performing Dlugoszewski’s Music” with hornist Christine Chapman and conductor Lilianna Krych on the 21st March at Berliner Festspiele.
Saturday 23rd was the day of the performative lecture “Problem as Possibility: Dialoguing with Dlugoszewski’s Scores” with musicologist Kate Doyle, PhD.
From MaerzMusik Library booklet.
Kate is a very sharp and creative mind with whom I had the pleasure to collaborate from the very beginning in my research on Dlugoszewski. Our time spent in conversation and reflection was and still is a constant opportunity to deepen my knowledge, on the composer’s ouvre and in general. For MaerzMusik Symposium we decided to use our article published in Contemporary Music Review as a starting point for a further dialogue where we could collect the new elements emerged so far. The form of dialogue characterizes our exchange and is particularly fitted to an approach to Dlugoszewski’s work. We did this “in performance”, orchestrating a form with structure and openness, as the composer’s piano works often do. While preparing our intervention, we notated our ideas in a visual form, and Dlugoszewski’s visual maps and notes often came to our mind. Here you can see an extract, published in MaerzMusik Zine as a presentation:
Doyle-Toniutti lecture presentation for MaerzMusik Zine
Once more, our research on Dlugoszewski, instead of giving us certainty of answers, brought us directly into the experience of processes. Which is much more fun.
Here are some nice pictures taken under the impressive graphic reproducing Lucia Dlugoszewski’s dynamic scale map (take a look at this). You can see curator and researcher Dustin Hurt, Hawkins archive curator and long standing company member Louis Kavouras and musicologist Kate Doyle. Thanks for the pics to Ly Thien Co Friedrich, our guardian angel of production.
Dancer and choreographer Erick Hawkins and composer Lucia Dlugoszewski met in 1952, soon after the foundation of Hawkins own dance company. Hawkins danced before – first male dancer – in the company of Martha Graham. Hawkins explains in his writings the importance of music – live music – in au pair connection with dance and its “free-flow” movement. I already read all this and was excited to experience it with my hands and eyes working with dancer and choreographer Katherine Duke, former assistant of Lucia Dlugoszewski and actual director of the Hawkins Dance Company in New York. In fact Dlugoszewski, composer in residence of the Dance Company, took over the direction and even choreographic duties after Hawkins’s death in 1994. But, as long-standing Hawkins company dancer and Hawkins archive curator Louis Kavouras pointed out during our stay in Berlin, she was choreographing all the time even before. This was an interesting statement especially in relation with all the materials I saw at the Library of Congress. Maybe Dlugoszewki’s mind set was “in tune” with movement as much as with sound…
During rehearsals. This is one of the statements quoted by Dlugoszewski’s writings, a nice “cadeau” by MaerzMusik Festival.
This hypothesis became stronger while rehearsing with the (amazing) dancers selected for the project, Juan Corres, Laia Vancells Pi, Marco Rizzi,Kristina Berger. Kristina was also performing the solo dance “Fountain in the Middle of the Room” with the music of the first two movement of Exacerbated Subtlety Concert for timbre-piano by Dlugoszewski. Here is what Katherine Duke writes about it:
“A Fountain in the Middle of the Room” was for me an intense journey with Lucia who is both the choreographer and the composer of the piece. She had wanted to premiere the solo in 1999 along with her beautiful new dance “Radical Ardent”, a huge work with eleven dancers organised in duets. […] She resumed working on “Fountain” to premiere it in April of 2000 with her epic work “Motherwell Amor”. Unfortunately, we lost Lucia on opening night; she had passed away in her apartment still working on the upcoming performance. The company and musicians performed “Motherwell Amor” that evening; “A Fountain in the Middle of the Room” was not performed as she was the sole musician. Lucia and I had a performance date set for the following month to perform the solo. Needless to say, I was devastated, thrown into wrenching times but forced myself to work on arranging the solo which I premiered on 26 May 2000 in silence and dedicated it to her. As opportunities to perform the solo continued to arise, I searched Lucia’s music to find something that felt connected. Finally, two of the four parts of her “Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why does a Woman Love a Man?)” seemed a match. […] For this dance, Lucia and I discussed a revolution of subtlety, the high risk of elegance and a torn non-linear wild elegance of space throughout the delicacy of construction. Lucia daringly embodied that delicate mystical ‘something’ of seeing and hearing for the first time which the haiku poets practice without respite.”
Rehearsing Fountain in the Middle of the Room, Kristina Berger dancer, choreography and music by Lucia Dlugoszewski, Exacerbated Subtlety Concert I and II. Pics by Louis Kavouras
Cantilever (1963) has a different energy, sunny, joyful and sparkling. Dlugoszewski sets the music so that she could keep constant eye-contact with the dancers, and literally follow them “step by step”. Louis Kavouras confirmed this, also telling us that she often corrected dancers in the studio, as she knew the choreography better than them! The rehearsals confirmed my first impression transcribing the piece (see Part I): there is an intimate connection between sound and movement, big or minimal, and a love for small precious details that Dlugoszewski and Hawkins clearly shared. It’s not something flashy, dramatic or showy; the adjectives that come to my mind now that I try to describe it are “simple, beautiful, elegant, subtle”… some of the favourite words used by Dlugoszewski. Looking at the dancers literally embodying these concepts, under the guide of Katherine, left me a huge impression.
…revolution is in perception rather than conception…
As for the rest of the program, including four piano solo pieces, that’s what I wrote in the booklet:
“[…] Henry Cowell and Alan Hovhaness both received commissions by Erick Hawkins Dance Company, although not for piano solo works. They were both connected to an important figure in Dlugoszewski’s formative early years in New York – though quite cumbersome in the later years: John Cage. Cowell pioneered the exploration of new sound production both on the keyboard and on the inside of the piano, and transmitted his explorative attitude to Cage, one of his students. I can’t think about prepared piano, or even timbre piano, without considering the mysterious sounds and never-before-seen gestures of Cowell’s “The Banshee” (1925). And the outrageous (for the time) clusters of “The Tides of Manaunaun” (1912) opened the field to among other things some of Dlugoszewski’s favourite techniques in “Cantilever”. “Spring Music with Wind” (1973) by Eleanor Hovda is a solo piano piece for extended techniques. Subtle and delicate, connected strongly with breath, gesture and voice, it goes in search of new sounds with lightness. Quoting conductor Jeannine Wagar, “The title, ‘Spring Music with Wind’, suggests the flow of energy and its non-quantifiable shape”, a concept that Hovda often underlines and closely links to the timbre of sound. In this piece she prescribes the use of friction mallets and a curved glass bottle.” Alan Hovhaness’s “Shalimar op. 177” (1950, rev. 1951) belongs to his “Armenian period”. As the son of an Armenian immigrant, he became increas- ingly attracted to Armenian and Eastern music after an academic training. In his own words, “Shalimar” was composed in Kashmir “after visiting the Mogul gardens and many beautiful mountains in the Himalayan regions. The foun- tains no longer gush forth their music and beauty in the Shalimar gardens, but the memory of their sound and visual wonder among the great Chenar trees, with steep, rugged mountains rising in the background, was in my imagination and I summed up the lost scenes during the days of Mogul grandeur. The form of the Suite, with its interludes for borders, suggests that carpet-like design of Mogul gardens.”
This year’s MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin involved me both as a performer and as a researcher. I came home full of impressions, new knowledge and human encounters, a wealth of inputs that I am slowly metabolizing.
This was the second year of a collaborative project, “Contemplations into the Radical Others”, dedicated to composer Lucia Dlugoszewski and strongly desired by Maerz Musik artistic director Kamila Metwaly. While the previous year I had the chance to present my previous work in performance – my research on Dlugoszewski begins in 2017 – this year I had the opportunity to go further.
In October 23 my research trip in Washington DC, USA, at the Library of Congress, had been illuminating in several aspects. The Dlugoszewski/Hawkins archive is huge and I gave priority to searching for materials related to two pieces, Exacerbated Subtlety Concert and Cantilever. At the time of my recording (Subtle Matters, Neuma Records, 2021) I spent a long time in transcribing Exacerbated Subtlety Concert from a recording by Dlugoszewski. No score was available, infact. This was my first encounter with the timbre-piano Dlugoszewski invented in the Fifties. Since then, and the last time after checking the Library of Congress documentation, I reworked the transcription 4 times, trying to get closer to the original idea and way of performance. This unusual path to discover the piece and the instrument, first through the sound, then through notation, has been an incomparable way to access the composer’s creative process. And fruitful, also: besides the performances and recording, it started a wonderful collaboration with scholar Kate Doyle, PhD, a musicologist who’s also a creator in her own field. I will speak about this in the second part.
Old style transcription of Cantilever: pencils work pretty well…
Cantilever (1963) is a piano solo piece expanded in an ensemble version in 1968. It was written for a choreography by Erick Hawkins, and performed many times both in the piano solo version or in ensemble. I expected to find plenty of material at the Library of Congress. The fact is that Dlugoszewski, when it is the case of timbre-piano or piano parts, didn’t spend time in writing a regular score. She was the performer, and the music was stored in her head and hands. So I transcribed the piece listening to three different recordings, two of them from early on and one of a performance from 1999. This, too, was an interesting work that put on the table a lot of questions and made me clearer about her compositional process and the very practical issues related in connecting with dance.
The coreographer and dancer Erick Hawkins was a strong advocate of live music on stage; while collaborating closely with Dlugoszewski, he also commissioned from early on a number of works to other composers. Among them, Cowell and Hovhaness. I chose some solo piano pieces by Henry Cowell and Alan Hovhaness that seemed to me related to Dlugoszeski’s ones, to movement and dance. Eleanor Hovda‘s solo piano piece was a beautiful discover, very connected with the rest of the programme. Using extended techniques, she creates her unique world of lightness and amazement, with sounds produced by friction mallets, breath, voice sound, and a bottle. Researching about her, I found out that Hovda and Dlugoszewski met and write eachother regularly. The younger Hovda writes in a letter to Lucia “how often I give thank to you for your influence on my life and art.”
So, the music program seemed ready. Now it should meet with movement. Because, yes, this was an other exciting opportunity to explore at MaerzMusik: the connection between Dlugoszewski’s music to the other art always present in her life, dance.
Some discovers from the web, “old” and new. Happy to start the new year being included in critic João Esteves da Silva’s favourite albums of 2023 with John Cage’s Sonatas&Interludes for prepared piano (Neuma Records, 2023).
And, again from the year just passed, here is an interview by critic Guido Michelone for Doppio Jazz. Guido attended my lecture-concert on extended piano techniques in July, for festival UdineJazz, and then asked me an interview. Of course I dare not claim any say in jazz, I’m just partecipating as a “curious of sounds”, as the title says!
This Saturday, 9th December, the new release of John Cage’s Sonatas&Interludes for prepared piano (Neuma Records, 2023) will be presented in Trieste, Italy, h. 19.00 at Revoltella Museum, invited by Trieste Prima Festival. The conversation around Cage will be accompanied by the young pianists of Piano City Pordenone; a dialogue between Cage’s music for prepared piano and works by Ligeti, Kurtàg e Dohnányi. From the booklet of the festival: “Will we also find the suggestions inherent in Sonatas & Interludes in Kurtagian hommages and Ligeti’s piano pages? Or will it be the seemingly most distant piece, Dohnányi’s Nocturne, that is most in tune with the Cagean dimension?“…
Starting today at Aberdeen, Scotland a residency with Colin Riley, Sabina Covarrubias and Kristijonas Dirsé working on Ludic Inventionsproject. Live electronics, film and video live together with piano performance, to be premiered at Sound Festival on Friday 27th October, 20.30 Lemon Tree Theatre in Aberdeen. Very much looking forward!
Looking forward an intense week of research just starting today at Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (USA). After many years I will finally be able to see and read some of Lucia Dlugoszewski‘s scores. This in-depht study will be very important for further develop my knowledge of the composer’s aesthetic and repertoire, and will also lead to the next performance for 2024 MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin. Grateful for this fantastic opportunity!
Below some pics of the week’s highlights
Finally trying Dlugoszewski’s original timbre-piano objects!!
with Dr Libby Smigel, the Dance curator at Library of Congress, Music Division
Very first three boxes of Dlugoszewski’s papers… how excited!
