$15
Audio / Video
Gallery
About This Event
Minimum Age:
All AgesDoors Open:
6:30 PMShow Time:
7:30 PMDescription:
This is a first come, first serve seated event. Seating is limited and not guaranteed; please arrive early.
Program:
Iannis Xenakis: Kottos 1977 for cello
Luciano Berio: Sequenza III for voice
Duo improvisations to sonnets by Brooklyn poet Christian Hawkey
In Translation is a magic combination of three strong voices: Christian Hawkey's whimsical yet deeply intimate word worlds; Frances-Marie Uitti's luxurious cello sonorities and bold improvisational palette; and Lisa Bielawa's emotional responsiveness to both text and timbre along with a composer's impulse towards architectural thinking.
In Translation finds Uitti, Bielawa, and Hawkey challenging one another, reaching towards each other's discrete languages to break new ground. Based on their early experiments together, this debut public performance is likely to be an audacious, rigorous, inventive and urgent undertaking. To give the audience a sense of the technical “ingredients” at each performer's disposal (and to loosen up), Bielawa and Uitti will each perform a solo work from the forefront of virtuoso music written for their respective instruments: Berio's Sequenza for voice and Xenakis’ Kottos from 1977 for solo cello.
After these solo turns, Bielawa and Uitti will leave the room out of earshot while Hawkey reads recent work he has written expressly for this evening’s performance. When Bielawa and Uitti return, Hawkey will hand the new poems over to them, and the half hour of improvisation will begin. The words will be already familiar to the audience, but interpreted on the spot by Bielawa and Uitti.
Uitti and Bielawa met in 2008 at the Jazz and Improvised Music Salzburg festival, where they were both on the faculty. Uitti, an accomplished improviser and a pioneer in two-bow cello technique, inspired Bielawa, who (though a seasoned and accomplished vocalist of new, experimental and virtuosic repertoire as well as an active and prolific composer) has not explored interactive improvisation before in performance. The two began to experiment in the privacy of Bielawa's studio at the American Academy in Rome, using recent poems by poet Christian Hawkey, whose work became known to Bielawa in 2006 when they were both named Creative Capital grantees.
Program:
Iannis Xenakis: Kottos 1977 for cello
Luciano Berio: Sequenza III for voice
Duo improvisations to sonnets by Brooklyn poet Christian Hawkey
In Translation is a magic combination of three strong voices: Christian Hawkey's whimsical yet deeply intimate word worlds; Frances-Marie Uitti's luxurious cello sonorities and bold improvisational palette; and Lisa Bielawa's emotional responsiveness to both text and timbre along with a composer's impulse towards architectural thinking.
In Translation finds Uitti, Bielawa, and Hawkey challenging one another, reaching towards each other's discrete languages to break new ground. Based on their early experiments together, this debut public performance is likely to be an audacious, rigorous, inventive and urgent undertaking. To give the audience a sense of the technical “ingredients” at each performer's disposal (and to loosen up), Bielawa and Uitti will each perform a solo work from the forefront of virtuoso music written for their respective instruments: Berio's Sequenza for voice and Xenakis’ Kottos from 1977 for solo cello.
After these solo turns, Bielawa and Uitti will leave the room out of earshot while Hawkey reads recent work he has written expressly for this evening’s performance. When Bielawa and Uitti return, Hawkey will hand the new poems over to them, and the half hour of improvisation will begin. The words will be already familiar to the audience, but interpreted on the spot by Bielawa and Uitti.
Uitti and Bielawa met in 2008 at the Jazz and Improvised Music Salzburg festival, where they were both on the faculty. Uitti, an accomplished improviser and a pioneer in two-bow cello technique, inspired Bielawa, who (though a seasoned and accomplished vocalist of new, experimental and virtuosic repertoire as well as an active and prolific composer) has not explored interactive improvisation before in performance. The two began to experiment in the privacy of Bielawa's studio at the American Academy in Rome, using recent poems by poet Christian Hawkey, whose work became known to Bielawa in 2006 when they were both named Creative Capital grantees.
Artists
In Translation : A bold new collaboration by cellist Frances-Marie Uitti
Frances-Marie Uitti, composer/performer, pioneered a revolutionary dimension to the cello by transforming it for the first time into a polyphonic instrument capable of sustained chordal (two, three, and four-part) and intricate multivoiced writing. Using two bows in one hand, this invention permits contemporaneous cross accents, multiple timbres, contrasting four-voiced dynamics, simultaneous legato/articulated playing, that her previous work with a curved bow couldn't attain.
György Kurtág, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Louis Andriessen, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Barrett, Sylvano Bussoti are among those who have used this technique in their works dedicated to her. Collaborating significantly over years with radicals, other dedicators: Dick Raaijmakers, John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi, she has also worked closely with Iannis Xenakis, Elliott Carter, Brian Ferneyhough and countless composers from the new generation.
Frances-Marie Uitti tours as soloist extensively throughout the world having played for audiences from New York City to Mongolia and appears regularly in such festivals as the Biennale Di Venezia, Strasbourg Festival, Gulbenkian Festival Ars Musica, Holland Festival and for radios and televisions in Europe, Japan, and the United States. She premeired cello concerti dedicated to her By Per Norgaard, Jonathan Harvey, Giacinto Scelsi, William Jeths, Peter Nelson with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Her compositons can be heard on ECM records, Wergo, Mode, HatArt, CRI, Cryptogrammophone, JdKrecords, Seraphin, Etcetera, and BVHaast.
As a pedagogue, Frances-Marie Uitti has given lectures and master classes at practically all the major European conservatories (Royal Conservatory in Copenhagen, Royal Conservatorium Den Haag, Sweelinck Conservatory Amsterdam, Royal Conservatory Brussels, Santa Cecilia Roma, Hochschule fur Musik in Koln, Hochschule Basle etc) and Guest Professor at Rotterdam Conservatory. In 1997 and 2006 she was awarded a Regents Lectureship at the University of California San Diego and Berkeley. In 2002-2003 she was invited as Guest Professor at Oberlin Conservatory teaching classical cello repertory and at The Juilliard School of Music, Yale University, Northwestern University in 2003. She held a Fromm Foundation residency at Harvard University in 2003-2004.
Ms. Uitti has had a longterm interest in designing and developing new systems to enhance the voice of the cello. Among these inventions are a resonator for Scelsi's music, a resonator that brings out subharmonics and difference beats, a ergonomic midi interface that triggers computation from the cello, a sensor system for her 6 string electric cello, and most recently in collaboration with CNMAT University of California a stringless cello that can steer sound, image and light while retaining the characteristic nuance of a string instrument. In addition, she has re-designed and constructed nine different prototype bows for her two-bow technique.
György Kurtág, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Louis Andriessen, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Barrett, Sylvano Bussoti are among those who have used this technique in their works dedicated to her. Collaborating significantly over years with radicals, other dedicators: Dick Raaijmakers, John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi, she has also worked closely with Iannis Xenakis, Elliott Carter, Brian Ferneyhough and countless composers from the new generation.
Frances-Marie Uitti tours as soloist extensively throughout the world having played for audiences from New York City to Mongolia and appears regularly in such festivals as the Biennale Di Venezia, Strasbourg Festival, Gulbenkian Festival Ars Musica, Holland Festival and for radios and televisions in Europe, Japan, and the United States. She premeired cello concerti dedicated to her By Per Norgaard, Jonathan Harvey, Giacinto Scelsi, William Jeths, Peter Nelson with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Her compositons can be heard on ECM records, Wergo, Mode, HatArt, CRI, Cryptogrammophone, JdKrecords, Seraphin, Etcetera, and BVHaast.
As a pedagogue, Frances-Marie Uitti has given lectures and master classes at practically all the major European conservatories (Royal Conservatory in Copenhagen, Royal Conservatorium Den Haag, Sweelinck Conservatory Amsterdam, Royal Conservatory Brussels, Santa Cecilia Roma, Hochschule fur Musik in Koln, Hochschule Basle etc) and Guest Professor at Rotterdam Conservatory. In 1997 and 2006 she was awarded a Regents Lectureship at the University of California San Diego and Berkeley. In 2002-2003 she was invited as Guest Professor at Oberlin Conservatory teaching classical cello repertory and at The Juilliard School of Music, Yale University, Northwestern University in 2003. She held a Fromm Foundation residency at Harvard University in 2003-2004.
Ms. Uitti has had a longterm interest in designing and developing new systems to enhance the voice of the cello. Among these inventions are a resonator for Scelsi's music, a resonator that brings out subharmonics and difference beats, a ergonomic midi interface that triggers computation from the cello, a sensor system for her 6 string electric cello, and most recently in collaboration with CNMAT University of California a stringless cello that can steer sound, image and light while retaining the characteristic nuance of a string instrument. In addition, she has re-designed and constructed nine different prototype bows for her two-bow technique.
Lisa Bielawa
Born in San Francisco into a musical family, Lisa Bielawa played the violin and piano, sang, and wrote music from early childhood. She moved to New York two weeks after receiving her B.A. in Literature in 1990 from Yale University, and became an active participant in New York musical life. She began touring with the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1992, and in 1997 co-founded the MATA Festival, which celebrates the work of young composers. She is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition.
Bielawa often takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Gramophone reports, “Bielawa is gaining gale force as a composer, churning out impeccably groomed works that at once evoke the layered precision of Vermeer and the conscious recklessness of Jackson Pollock,” and The New York Times describes her music as, “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart.”
Recent highlights include performances of Bielawa’s chamber music in New York at the Weill Recital Hall, City Winery, Merkin Concert Hall and Trinity Church. Her music is also frequently performed at concert venues in Paris, Italy, the UK and Rome. World premieres of Emerald Waltz, Graffiti dell’amante, Portrait-Elegy, The Project of Collecting Clouds, Chance Encounter, and In medias res have been performed in cities across the United States.
Bielawa’s discography includes Chance Encounter (Orange Mountain Music); In medias res (BMOP/sound), A Handful of World (Tzadik 8039), The Trojan Women on a disc entitledFirst Takes (TROY941), Hildegurls: Electric Ordo Virtutum (Innova), a 1998 re-envisioning of 12th-century German abbess Hildegard von Bingen’s musical drama The Order of the Virtues, and The Trojan Women in a version for string quartet performed by the Miami on The NYFA Collection (Innova). Another album, The Lay of the Love, will be the inaugural disc of Premiere Commission Recordings.
In addition to a 2009 Rome Prize, Bielawa has received fellowships and awards from the Alpert-Ucross Foundation, Creative Capital, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joyce Dutka Arts Foundation, ASCAP, and the Fondation Royaumont in France. In 2007-2008, Lisa Bielawa was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow.
An enthusiastic advocate for the field, Bielawa now serves on the board of the MATA Festival. In addition, she has served on the board of the American Music Center and taught composition through the New York Youth Symphony Making Score program. In addition to her work as a vocalist with the Philip Glass Ensemble, she tours and records with John Zorn and has premiered and recorded works by numerous other composer colleagues. For more information, please visit www.lisabielawa.net.For more information, visit www.lisabielawa.net.
Bielawa often takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Gramophone reports, “Bielawa is gaining gale force as a composer, churning out impeccably groomed works that at once evoke the layered precision of Vermeer and the conscious recklessness of Jackson Pollock,” and The New York Times describes her music as, “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart.”
Recent highlights include performances of Bielawa’s chamber music in New York at the Weill Recital Hall, City Winery, Merkin Concert Hall and Trinity Church. Her music is also frequently performed at concert venues in Paris, Italy, the UK and Rome. World premieres of Emerald Waltz, Graffiti dell’amante, Portrait-Elegy, The Project of Collecting Clouds, Chance Encounter, and In medias res have been performed in cities across the United States.
Bielawa’s discography includes Chance Encounter (Orange Mountain Music); In medias res (BMOP/sound), A Handful of World (Tzadik 8039), The Trojan Women on a disc entitledFirst Takes (TROY941), Hildegurls: Electric Ordo Virtutum (Innova), a 1998 re-envisioning of 12th-century German abbess Hildegard von Bingen’s musical drama The Order of the Virtues, and The Trojan Women in a version for string quartet performed by the Miami on The NYFA Collection (Innova). Another album, The Lay of the Love, will be the inaugural disc of Premiere Commission Recordings.
In addition to a 2009 Rome Prize, Bielawa has received fellowships and awards from the Alpert-Ucross Foundation, Creative Capital, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joyce Dutka Arts Foundation, ASCAP, and the Fondation Royaumont in France. In 2007-2008, Lisa Bielawa was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow.
An enthusiastic advocate for the field, Bielawa now serves on the board of the MATA Festival. In addition, she has served on the board of the American Music Center and taught composition through the New York Youth Symphony Making Score program. In addition to her work as a vocalist with the Philip Glass Ensemble, she tours and records with John Zorn and has premiered and recorded works by numerous other composer colleagues. For more information, please visit www.lisabielawa.net.For more information, visit www.lisabielawa.net.
music of Iannis Xenakis, Luciano Berio, and improvised settings of sonnets by Christian Hawkey