Four years ago, I started a weekly series on this blog titled Wandelwatching, devoted to news and essays about composers of the Wandelweiser Group, a loosely knit global collective inspired by post-Cagean ideas concerning sound, space, silence, place, contemplativeness, and collaboration, among other things. If you're just catching up with the term and its adherents, the best starting point remains the essay simply titled "Wandelweiser," published in 2009 by Michael Pisaro, a composer in the group.
Honestly, I'm wincing now at the sheer earnest stiffness of those initial posts from 2014. In starting anew, I don't plan to be overly formal at all. The idea now is pretty simple: While performances of Wandelweiser compositions have grown more common, you still don't see much coverage of such events in the mainstream media. So, here I am to help spread the news.
There are (to the best of my knowledge) two concerts that include at least one Wandelweiser composition happening this week in New York City. Both are eminently recommendable.
Talea Ensemble: "Imagined Time"
Dec. 12 at 7pm
The Flea, 20 Thomas St.; theflea.org
First, on Wednesday, Dec. 12 – yes, I mean this evening, members of the Talea Ensemble present an hour-long program titled "Imagined Time," part of a new intimate series called "Inside Out" that Talea is presenting at the Flea Theater. The present program is made up of pieces concerned with notions of musical time, and includes ô monde sur deux tiges, a 2011 duet for viola and cello by Antoine Beuger, alongside pieces by Victoria Cheah, Iancu Dumitrescu, and Alex Mincek.
Convergences III: Jen Shyu + Seth Parker Woods
Dec. 13 at 8pm
Areté Venue & Gallery, 67 West St #103, Brooklyn; aretegallery.com
Convergences, a truly impressive-looking cross-disciplinary series curated by pianist-composer Eric Wubbels and saxophonist-composer Anna Webber, presents a double bill of soloists working in very different forms, but with a similar focus and intensity. Jen Shyu, an improvising vocalist whose musical rituals dig deeply into Asian musical and cultural traditions, offers a preview of a work-in-progress, provisionally titled Zero Grasses.
The set of interest to Wandelwatchers is that of cellist Seth Parker Woods, a superb instrumentalist with patience, discipline, and tenacity well suited to works that challenge through expansive stillness and slowness, and infinitesimal gradations of tone. Here, in addition to pieces by Giacinto Scelsi, Oliver Thurley, Nathalie Joachim, and Monty Adkins, Woods plays the world premiere of Music of Unknown Gardens, newly composed for him by Jürg Frey.
Listen here to get a sense of what Woods can do.
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