shut up and listen! 2024
Freitag, 11. Oktober 2024 @ echoraum, 20:30
Alvin Curran: For Cornelius
Klavier solo
mit Martyna Zakrzewska (Klavier)
For Cornelius
If Cornelius Cardew were alive today, would he have attained his alchemical goal of transforming the essence of European art music into accessible and exciting new musical icons for the masses? Could Beethoven be usefully transmuted into an avant-garde stealth bomber, would Schumann be worth the cost of recycling, and could the rest of European art music be composed efficiently (or had music already come to an end with Thelonius Monk, Billie Holiday and Fats Waller)? Cardew died tragically in an auto accident in 1981 and left us to grapple with these still timely and unanswered questions. […] For Cornelius (Jan. 1982) composed, as it were in one shot, on hearing of Cardew’s death is in retrospect my attempt to codify the essence of the artistic and cultural contradictions that I was living […] and as Cardew’s life abounded in humorous and serious contradictions, and as I thought of myself as a maker of musical objects (not unlike the assemblages of Joseph Cornell) whose single components could come from anywhere and coexist in the same structure; so with fairly unmediated and spontaneous composing, a music came about which now seems to be my answer to the whole binary form problem–I embraced it. I love waltzes (and have composed many for theater and film musics)…It was natural for me, therefore, to express my grief in this antique, exquisitely bourgeois musical form. Most listeners say they hear some vague reference to Satie, but a recent criticism in The New York Times referred to Faure–whose music I don’t even know. But John Cage loved it (the whole piece); it made him a lifetime „fan.“
[http://www.alvincurran.com/writings/ForCorneliusnotes.html]
Alvin Curran
Born in 1938 in Providence (US). Lives in Rome. “Democratic, irreverent and traditionally experimental, Curran travels in a computerized covered wagon between the Golden Gate and the Tiber and makes music for all occasions with any sonic phenomenon – a volatile mix of lyricism and chaos, structure and indeterminacy, foghorns, violins and fiddleheads. He is dedicated to restoring the dignity of the non commercial music profession as part of a personal search for future social, political and spiritual forms.” This is an apt description of American composer, performer, improviser, sound artist and writer Alvin Curran (b. December 13, 1938), whose work is present throughout this Son Biennial through installations and his collaborations with Eric Baudelaire and Maxime Guitton. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and lives and works in Rome, Italy. He is co-founder, with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, of Musica Elettronica Viva, and a former student of Elliott Carter. Curran’s music often makes use of electronics and sounds found in the environment. He was professor of music at Mills College in California until 2006, and now teaches privately in Rome and sporadically in various institutions. Curran’s music embraces all the contradictions of musical creation (composed/improvised, tonal/atonal, maximal/minimal…) in a serene dialectical encounter. His 200-plus works use recorded/sampled natural sounds, piano, synthesizers, computers, violin, percussion, shofar, French horns, accordion, and choir. Whether in the intimate form of his celebrated solo performances, pure chamber music, experimental radio works or large-scale sitespecific sound environments and installations, all these works forge a highly personal language out of all languages, thanks to thorough research and recombinant invention.
Martyna Zakrzewska
Martyna Zakrzewska ist Pianistin, Solistin und Kammermusikerin, spezialisiert auf zeitgenössische Musik. Absolventin der Musikakademie in Krakau. 2014 immatrikulierte sie sich für den Studiengang Neue Klaviermusik an der Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln in der Klasse von Pierre-Laurent Aimard und David Smeyers, 2017 schloss sie dieses Studium ab. 2021 promovierte sie mit Auszeichnung. Während ihres Studiums in Köln sammelte sie auch Dirigier- und Improvisationserfahrungen unter der Leitung von Paul Alvares. 2013–2015 Mitglied des European Workshop for Contemporary Music, mit dem sie während der Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt und im Rahmen des Festivals „Warschauer Herbst“ auftrat. In Köln und Berlin Zusammenarbeit mit dem Ensemble der Musikfabrik.