New Music, New Subjects: The Situation of a Creole

Pauline Oliveros, Joëlle Léandre and George Lewis performed live on 17 July 2014 at NoD, Prague, as part of the 2014 vs. Interpretation Festival. PROGRAM NOTES George Lewis / Pauline Oliveros / Joëlle Léandre Play as you go Pauline Oliveros: V-Accordion Joëlle Léandre: Contrabass George Lewis: Laptop and trombone ARTIST BIOS Pauline Oliveros Pauline Oliveros is a senior figure in contemporary American music. Her career spans fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. Recently awarded the John Cage award for 2012 from the Foundation ofContemporary Arts, Oliveros is Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian is about opening her own and others' sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Since the 1960's she has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. PaulineOliveros is the founder of "Deep Listening," which she describes as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Joëlle Léandre French double bass player, improviser and composer, Joëlle Léandre is one of the dominant figures of the new European music. Trained in orchestral as well as contemporary music, she has played with l’Itinéraire, 2e2m and Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain. Joëlle Léandre has also worked with Merce Cunningham and with John Cage, who has composed especially for her – as have Scelsi, Fénelon, Hersant, Lacy, Campana, Jolas, Clementi and about 40 composers. She has written extensively for dance and theater, and has staged a number of multidisciplinary performances. She got the DAAD at Berlin, and is welcomed as artist resident at Villa Kujiyama (Kyoto). In 2002, 2004 and 2006, she is Visiting Professor at Mills college, Oakland, CA, Chaire Darius Milhaud, for improvisation and composition. Her work has put her under the lights of the most prestigious stages of Europe, the Americas and Asia. From 1981 to 2009, Joëlle Léandre has about 150 recordings to her credit. George E. Lewis George E. Lewisis the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in theArts in 1999, a United States Artists 2011 USA Walker Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. His residencies include IRCAM (Paris), STEIM (Amsterdam), and Alberta's Banff Centre for the Arts. Lewis has been an NEA Fellow, was hosted as Visiting Artist by the ArtInstitute of Chicago, and curated the music program of New York's The Kitchen Center. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work as composer, improvisor, performer and interpreter explores electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated and improvisative forms, and is documented on more than 140 recordings. About the vs. Interpretation Festival: One of the Agosto Foundation’s most important contributions to the local and international music scene, vs. Interpretation is an ongoing, transdisciplinary project promoting innovative improvised artistic projects and research. Beginning with a festival and symposium in Summer 2014, vs. Interpretation has created a field for inquiry and experimentation for artists, scholars, and interested individuals across all disciplines and experience levels. In June 2015, the Agosto Foundation released its first volume of writings inspired by the project, vs. Interpretation: An Anthology on Improvisation. For more information refer to agosto-foundation.org/-vs-Interpretation- To purchase the festival-inspired book, vs. Interpretation An Anthology on Improvisation, visit eshop.agosto-foundation.org/ or view the 2016 program at vsinterpretation.org

George Lewis, Professor of American Music at Columbia University, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (2008), and the co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). His creative work is documented on more than 150 recordings, as presented by the London Philharmonia Orchestra, Mivos Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Spektral Quartet, Talea Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, and others. His opera Afterword (2015) was most recently performed at the Ojai Festival, with additional performances in the USA and Europe.

View fullsize

Describing his GIDEST presentation, George writes: “Sir Donald Francis Tovey’s 1949 essay, 'The Main Stream of Music,' posited an end to the history of music. "At the present day,” Tovey lamented, “all musicians feel more or less at sea,” foreshadowing theorist Leonard Meyer’s 1967 notion of 'fluctuating stasis,' an absence of stable canon that Tovey, at least, evidently hoped would be a temporary condition. However, by 2004, experimentalist Alvin Curran’s buoyant 1994 prediction of a New Common Practice “freed of all rules, stylistic conventions, codes, and even ethics” appeared to musicologist Benjamin Piekut in 2004 to amount to no common practice whatsoever—and this is to say nothing of the vast changes in both musical practices and audiences occasioned by immigration, the World Wide Web, and globalization. Now that we’ve been in the new century for a while, we can see that Sir Donald’s eschatological interregnum has been actually rather welcome to many—though by no means all. But will the metaphor of limbo suffice, or have some more purposive tropes or features appeared that already mark the musical condition of the new century’s musical experimentalism?”