San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presents "Zone 1: crisscrossing vectors"

Aug. 3, 2011 - PRLog -- SFCMP presents the following event:

CALENDAR LISTING:
WHO: San Francisco Contemporary Music Players
WHAT: Zone 1: crisscrossing vectors
    Steven Schick conducts. Special guests: John Luther Adams, Josh Levine.
WHEN: Monday, October 3, 2011, 8:00 p.m. - Pre-concert talk at 7:15 p.m.
WHERE: Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, San Francisco
PRICES: Season subscriptions: $130 general, $108 seniors, $45 students
    Single tickets on sale September 1: $30 general, $25 seniors, $10 students
TICKETS: www.cityboxoffice.com, 415-392-4400
INFO: www.sfcmp.org, 415-278-9566

PROGRAM:
Josh Levine, Transparency (Part I) (2004, rev. 2010, 6 min.)
   Daniel Kennedy, percussion
Edgard Varèse, Octandre (1923, 8 min.)
John Luther Adams, Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (1991-95, 65 min.)

The concert will build in size and scope, beginning with a short bass drum solo, followed by an octet written by one of the 20th Century’s acclaimed innovators, and culminating in a rarely performed hour-long work.

Josh Levine’s Transparency (Part I) takes its name from a line in a poem by Octavio Paz: Mortalidad es transparencia (“Mortality is transparency”). This solo piece, for bass drum, triangles, and sandpaper, will be performed by ensemble percussionist Daniel Kennedy. Levine completed his Ph.D. in composition at the University of California, San Diego, and he is currently a faculty member at the Oberlin Conservatory.

Eight musicians of the ensemble will perform Octandre by music-technology pioneer Edgard Varèse. This eight-minute work for flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, French horn, trumpet, trombone, and contrabass was composed just after his arrival in the U.S. The 2011-12 concert season, entitled Zones of Intensity, is inspired by Varèse’s concept of the music of the future as he described it in his 1936 essay “The Liberation of Sound.”

The concert concludes with Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing by John Luther Adams, which is based on a 14th-century mystical text and explores the essence of sublime contemplation that unites many of the world’s religious cultures, from Sufi to Native American. Adams, whom the New Yorker’s Alex Ross has called “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century,” composes music described by Village Voice critic and composer Kyle Gann as "beautiful, shimmering, vast, luminous, ecstatic".

Steven Schick was recently lauded as a “brilliant” conductor by Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times. He has spent the last thirty years championing contemporary music as a conductor, performer, and teacher.  As a percussionist, he has commissioned and premiered more than one hundred new works by composers as varied as Brian Ferneyhough, David Lang, and Iannis Xenakis, and he serves as Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.  He is the Music Director and conductor of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, the founder and Artistic Director of the percussion group red fish blue fish, and a frequent guest conductor of New York’s International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).  In 2011 Steven Schick was named Artistic Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.  In this role, Schick will act as conductor and chief artistic administrator, providing vision and leadership for the ensemble.

This concert is underwritten in part by the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation.

Funded in part through Meet The Composer’s MetLife Creative Connections Program.

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players concert season is funded in part by: San Francisco Hotel Tax/Grants for the Arts Program; National Endowment for the Arts; Aaron Copland Fund for Music; Mervyn Brenner Foundation; Alice M. Ditson Fund at Columbia University; Fromm Music Foundation; Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation; Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation; William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; Istituto Italiano di Cultura; Ross McKee Foundation; Bernard Osher Foundation; Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council; Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco; The San Francisco Foundation; Wells Fargo Foundation; and many individual donors.

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The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, an ensemble of highly skilled musicians, has performed, commissioned and recorded innovative new music of exceptional interest since 1971.