ENSEMBLES

Ensemble Modelo62

Gemma Tripiana Muñoz, flute – Enric Sans i Morera, bass clarinet – Justin Christensen & Chloe Abott, trumpets – Vasilis Stefanopoulos, double bass – Ezequiel Menalled, eguitar & conductor

Through a combination of ambitious and innovative programming and a high level of virtuosity, the Dutch-based Ensemble Modelo62 has earned its international reputation in experimental music today.

One of the goals the ensemble is to form close collaborations with composers, to develop new work and talent, and placing an emphasis on combining the commissioning of young upcoming composers with those from more established generations.

Modelo62 has toured through Mexico, Argentina, Norway, United Kingdom, and Germany. This has included festivals such as at the Centre of Experimentation of Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Music (Darmstadt, Germany), Festival Tour Scene (Stavanger, Norway), Toonzetters (Amsterdam), Dag in de Branding (Den Haag), November Music (Den Bosch), and the Gaudeamus Muziekweek (Utrecht).

Modelo62 has also been ensemble in residence in Ghent at the Orpheus Institute where they recorded their first CD, Multiple Paths.Their second CD, Modelo Moves has been released by Attacca, with works from their first tour to Argentina. Other releases on CD include Clarence Barlow Musica Algorithmic on World Edition and most recently Claudio F. Baroni’s Motum, on Unsounds.

Ensemble Scordatura

Elisabeth Smalt, viola – Alfrun Schmid, voice – Reinier van Houdt, keyboards

Since its inception in 2006, the ensemble has presented exploratory music by contemporary composers and sound artists that look toward new tuning systems and micro-tonality as a way of expanding the harmonic vocabulary of music. The basic sound world of female voice, viola and MIDI keyboard is expanded depending on musical context. Their concerts feature classics from the worlds of microtonal and spectral music along with new commissions, sometimes crossing over into multimedia works.

Scordatura has performed all over the world; Sonorities Festival in Belfast, Roulette in New York, Logos Foundation in Ghent, Dag in De Branding in The Hague, Ergodos Festival in Dublin, Microfest in Los Angeles and Amsterdam, BEAM Festival in London, Blurred Edges in Hamburg, Café Oto and Colourscape Festival in London, James Joyce Festival in Amsterdam and the Arena Festival in Riga.

Scordatura has premiered new commissions from Christopher Fox, Yannis Kyriakides, Anne La Berge, Anton Lukoszevieze, Ned McGowan, Scott McLaughlin, Kate Moore, Harald Muenz, Marc Sabat, Lisa Illean, Chris Rainier, Chris Smalt, Miranda Driessen, Anna Mikhailova, Aart Strootman, Santa Ratniece, Evija Skuke, Merijn Bisschops, Guy de Bièvre, and many more.

The ensemble has many releases to its name including music by Phill Niblock on DVD by Mode Records New York, and a portrait of music by Christopher Fox by Divine Art/Métier (2011). Melodies, a consistent work by Frank Denyer, will appear this year on Another Timbre.

COMPOSERS, SOLOISTS, VISUAL ARTIST

Peter Ablinger

Peter Ablinger was born in Schwanenstadt, Austria in 1959. He began studying graphic arts and was enthused by free jazz, but completed his studies in composition with Gösta Neuwirth and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati in Graz and Vienna. Since 1982 he has lived in Berlin, where he has initiated and conducted numerous festivals and concerts. In 1988 he founded the Ensemble Zwischentöne. He has been guest conductor of ‘Klangforum Wien’, ‘United Berlin’ and the ‘Insel Musik Ensemble’. Since 1990 Peter Ablinger has worked as a freelance musician. 2012 he became a member of the Academy of Arts Berlin. In 2012-2017 he was research professor at the University of Huddersfield.

For decades, Peter Ablinger’s work has been forcing open fault lines in the topography of the audible. His vast output of scores, electronic pieces, installations, and conceptual works consistently finds ways-funny, pointed, disturbing-to put the ear’s organization of reality in doubt. Is that a voice, and what is a voice? When is something newly or no longer music? Noise? Information? In Ablinger’s cunning scramble of sonic categories, listening loses its lay of the land. Concepts come unmoored from sounds, and the land changes shape.

Seth Brodsky

Claudio F Baroni

Claudio F. Baroni is an active composer specializing in experimental music. His work can be described as a systematic investigation of the timbral qualities, strength, and nature of sound. Baroni scrupulously avoids making specific aesthetic or cultural references in his composition, where he creates a closed sound universe with his vision and physicality.

Since 2001 he has worked on numerous commissions for ensembles and projects, such as Slagwerk Den Haag, Maze Ensemble, Modelo62, Asko Kamerkoor, The Barton Workshop, Piano Circus, Opera Nova Ensemble, Champ d’Action, Ensemble Integrales, Prometeo string quartet, among others. He has also collaborated on many multimedia projects with artists from different disciplines including Adi Hollander, Reinaldo Laddaga, Joost Rekveld, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Praneet Soi, and Ana Piterbarg.

Baroni is based in Amsterdam, and his music is published on Unsounds (Amsterdam).

Dario Calderone

Dario Calderone studied double bass with Massimo Giorgi, Franco Petracchi and has been one of the few pupils of Stefano Scodanibbio. He is advocating new music since almost 20 years, having performed hundreds of new compositions for solo, chamber music and ensemble in the major festivals of the world. His most interesting solo projects involve a rendering of the famous Voyage that never ends of Stefano Scodanibbio, Giorgio Netti’s composition UR, 2 riti per contrabbasso, and many compositions written for him by composers such as Peter Ablinger, Peter Adriaansz, Claudio Baroni, Silvia Borzelli, Bernhard Lang, Yannis Kyriakides and Helena Tulve. From 2009 to 2019 has been the bass player of the Nieuw Ensemble in Amsterdam. He is member of Nieuw Amsterdams Peil, Trio Feedback, and of MAZE. He has recorded a number of albums for different labels, among which Kairos, HatHut Records, Unsounds, Attacca Records, Moving Furnitures, Stradivarius and Wergo.

He has given masterclasses regularly at the Impuls Academy in Graz, The Luzern Festival Academy, and the Conservatory of Amsterdam.

Dario Calderone plays on a Chanot from the beginning of XIX century and on a new 5 string bass by Kanzian&Traunsteiner master Luthiers in Vienna.

Hélène Breschand

International soloist and composer Hélène Breschand is an emblematic figure of the experimental and contemporary harp.

‘‘The music of Hélène Breschand is of great meditative strength and encapsulates a musical richness that makes forget the specificity of its instrument, achieving a singular universality.” This description, from the french magazine Mouvement, recounts her ability to harmonize silences and resonances with mastery and relevance that, combined with a rare inventiveness, give the instrument an astonishing dimension.

Julian Cowley added in The Wire: ‘‘Hélène Breschand demonstrating her readiness to deconstruct her instrument’s identity… if you still regard the harp
as an anachronism, just experience the scope and power of Breschand’s Le Goût du Sel.”

Breschand belongs to a generation of musicians sensitive to trans-disciplinarity. Interested in multiple forms of art, in the course of her career she collaborated with classical musicians (Luciano Berio, Bernard Cavanna) and contemporary composers (Eliane Radigue, David Toop, Elliott Sharp, Reinhold Friedl, Franck Vigroux, Wilfried Wendling).

Adi Hollander

Adi Hollander creates site-specific installations as places of exchange, in the form of objects and sculptures that can be experienced simultaneously as interiors and exteriors.

The source of this interest comes from Hollander’s fascination with the concept of time in the domain of architecture, as well as with the question of how form and structure allow spectators to actively develop the environments they are part of.

Her projects are an attempt to embody a certain complexity of sensory experience, as an alternate form of knowledge about the senses and how we ‘read’ the world around us. An aspect of inquiry or doubt is introduced to leave the process of questioning open, and to allow for more questions to enter.

Adi Hollander is Co-founder of the Amsterdam-based artist initiative Public Space With a Roof active since 2003, she holds a MS degree in Art, Culture and Technology from the MIT. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums in the Netherlands and internationally.

Reinier van Houdt

Reinier van Houdt started working with tape recorders, radio’s, objects and various string-instruments at a young age. He studied piano at the Liszt-Akademie in Budapest & the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. He developed a fascination for matters that escape notation: sound, timing, space, physicality, memory, noise, environment – points beyond composition, interpretation and improvisation.

His unusual repertoire is the result of personal quests; from collaborations with composers & musicians, archive research, the composing and staging of music-performances, the unorthodox studies of classical music, and from endless tape recordings that he has made since the eighties.

Aside from his own music he has premiered music by Robert Ashley, Alvin Curran, Kaikhosru Sorabji, Francisco López, Christian Marclay, Charlemagne Palestine, Yannis Kyriakides, Maria de Alvear, Jerry Hunt, Michael Pisaro, Walter Marchetti, Jürg Frey, Nomi Epstein. He has also worked with Annea Lockwood, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Luc Ferrari, Peter Ablinger. 

Reinier van Houdt plays in David Tibet’s Current 93, where he worked Nick Cave, John Zorn, Anohni, Jack Barnett. He is also one of the moving forces behind the experimental music collective MAZE.

He performed in such diverse venues as The Roulette & the Issue Project Room in New York, REDCAT & the Wulf in Los Angeles, Mills College Oakland, Non Event Boston, Colegio Ildefonso Mexico City, Café Oto & Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, Tramway Glasgow, DOM in Moscow, Kuryokhin Center in St Petersburg, Setagaya Gallery Tokyo, Empty Gallery Hong Kong, Paradiso Amsterdam, Apollohuis Eindhoven, the New Library in Alexandria Egypt, Trafo Budapest, Nuits Nomadiques in Paris, Brut in Wien, HAU and Volksbühne in Berlin, Klangraum Düsseldorf. Appearances in festivals CTM Berlin, Meltdown London, Angelica Bologna, Holland Festival, Warsaw Autumn, Incubate Tilburg, UNSOUND Poland, Primavera Barcelona, November Music Den Bosch, and many others.

He won an award at Ars Electronica Linz 2012 with Francisco López, the Prix Europe 2015 with the And company & Co and the first prize at Videoex 2019 with film maker Takashi Makino.

Alvin Lucier

Composer (1931 / 2021)

Alvin Lucier was born in Nashua, New Hampshire where was educated in Nashua parochial and public schools, The Portsmouth Abbey School, and then Yale and Brandeis, and spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship. From 1962 to 1969 he taught at Brandeis where he conducted the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus which devoted much of its time to the performance of new music. From 1970 he taught at Wesleyan University.

Alvin Lucier has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers’ physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. His recent works include a series of sound installations and works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra in which, by means of close tunings with pure tones, sound waves are caused to spin through space.

Lucier performed, lectured and exhibited his sound installations extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia. He has visited Japan twice. In 1988 he appeared on the Abiko Festival in Tokyo and installed Music on a Long Thin Wire in Kyoto and in 1992 he performed in Kawasaki, Yamaguchi and Yokohama with Pianist Aki Takahashi. In 1990-91 he was a guest of the DAAD Kunstler Program in Berlin. In January 1992, he performed in Dehli, Madras, and Bombay, and during the summer of that year was guest composer at the Time of Music Festival in Vitaasari, Finland. His own book, Chambers, written in collaboration with Douglas Simon, was published by the Wesleyan University Press. In addition, several of his works are available on Cramps (Italy), Disques Montaigne, Elektra/Nonesuch, Source, Mainstream, CBS Odyssey, and Lovely Music Records.

In October 1994, Wesleyan University honored Lucier with a five-day festival, Alvin Lucier: Collaborations, for which he composed twelve new works, including Theme, based on a poem by John Ashbery and Skin, Meat, Bone, a collaborative theater work with Robert Wilson.

Annea Lockwood

New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood (b. 1939) brings vibrant energy, ceaseless curiosity, and a profound sense of openness to her music. Lockwood’s lifelong fascination with the visceral effects of sound in our environments and through our bodies—the way sounds unfold and their myriad “life spans”—serves as the focal point for works ranging from concert music to performance art to multimedia installations.

In recent years Lockwood and her music have received widespread attention, including a Columbia University Miller Theatre Composer Portrait concert, a feature article in The New York Times, a SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award, a documentary film by director Sam Green, and most recently, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her recent collaborative works Into the Vanishing Point with the ensemble Yarn/Wire and Becoming Air with avant-garde trumpeter Nate Wooley were released on Black Truffle Records to great acclaim. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals such as Lucerne Festival, Tectonics Athens Festival, Signale Graz, Counterflows International Festival of Music and Art, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and many others.

Lockwood has received commissions from numerous ensembles and solo performers, including Bang On A Can, baritone Thomas Buckner, pianists Sarah Cahill, Lois Svard, and Jennifer Hymer, the Holon Scratch Orchestra, Essential Music, Yarn/Wire, and Issue Project Room.

Her music is recorded on the Lovely, XI, Mutable, Pogus, EM Records (Japan), Rattle Records, Recital, Harmonia Mundi, CRI, Superior Viaduct, Black Truffle, New World, Gruenrekorder, and Moving Furniture Records. Hearing Studies, co-authored with Ruth Anderson, was published by Open Space in 2021.

Ezequiel Menalled

Ezequiel Menalled is a versatile conductor and composer. In 2003 he founded Ensemble Modelo62, a group devoted to the promotion, creation and interpretation of the newest music written; and he has been its artistic director and conductor ever since. He is guest teacher at the Composition Department and Sonology Institute of the Royal Conservatoire The Hague (NL).

Arthur Nicolas-Nauche

Arthur Nicolas-Nauche (1994) started learning organ in Britanny (France) with Loïc Georgeault and, later on at the Conservatory of Rennes in the class of Damien Simon. After having obtained the Prize at the Conservatory of Rennes, he pursued studying organ, conducting and improvisation at several Parisian conservatories with teachers such as Olivier Latry, Jean-Baptiste Robin, Éric Lebrun, Olivier Houette, Pierre Pincemaille, Mark Korovitch and Olivier Kaspar.

Feeling at ease with repertoire of any musical period, Arthur Nicolas-Nauche takes particular interest in the music of 19th and 20th century as well as in improvisation.

Convinced by the idea that the organ should be closer to the public, he has realized lot of projects of chamber music with organ, as well as many projects with contemporary dance (Genres & Ma.Ni Co., Joseph Aka Co.). This way, his recitals led him to perform both in France and abroad in Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia, Portugal…

Passionate about research, he is currently working on a thesis about composers Marcel Dupré & Rolande Falcinelli. He has published a memoir about the future of the organ called L’Orgue ; promesse d’avenir ou disparition probable ?! (The Organ; promise of the future or probable disappearance ?!), as well as articles for music journals.

Currently, he is professor of musical theory at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Départemental de Montreuil.

Phill Niblock

Phill Niblock (b. 1933, USA) is an artist whose fifty-year career spans minimalist and experimental music, film and photography. Since 1985, he has served as director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a branch in Ghent, and curator of the foundation’s record label XI. Known for his thick, loud drones of music, Niblock’s signature sound is filled with microtones of instrumental timbres that generate many other tones in the performance space. In 2013, his diverse artistic career was the subject of a retrospective realised in partnership between Circuit (Contemporary Art Centre Lausanne) and Musée de l’Elysée. The following year Niblock was honoured with the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award.

Eliane Radigue

From her childhood in Paris, Éliane Radigue will preserve the memory of a secret introduction to music by an understanding piano teacher. Then the harp, singing and composition are added to the piano. But it was only through contact with Concrete Music with Pierre Schaeffer and later with Pierre Henry that Éliane Radigue found her true path.

In more than 50 years there are three different periods, each of which will always mark a break, but each in its own way stands for an inspired exploration of thresholds, of spaces that expand in intervals, and for a dialogue between listening experience and inner experience, between personal history and sensual memory.

The first period (1968-1971) was that of the work on feedbacks and reinjections, an embryonic phase already characterized by extreme precision and work on thresholds and threatened balances.

The second period, spanning thirty years (1971-2001), is characterized by a fruitful production of electronic compositions that inextricably combine her music with the unique beats of her ARP 2500 synthesizer. This period is also marked by the development of long forms with subtle variations that disappear and resound between the history carried by the music and the time necessary for its unfolding.

The third and still ongoing period is that of her mainly acoustic works, which are produced in close collaboration with like-minded musicians from all over the world, giving an additional dimension of relationship to music created up to then alone.

In the course of her life, Éliane Radigue has produced a researching, demanding and inspiring work that today influences a whole new generation of musicians.

Carol Robinson

To say that Carol Robinson is a Franco-American composer and clarinetist is perhaps too restrictive to describe the eclecticism of her experience and passion. In fact, she seems interested in everything having to do with sound. She is not someone who likes the middle ground, preferring the edges, the extremes. Her music is situated in those places of tenderness and rage, gentleness and power that come from experience and mastery. Trained as a classical clarinetist, she graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory before continuing her study of contemporary music in Paris thanks to a H.H. Woolley grant. Whether playing repertoire or experimental material, she performs in major venues and festivals the world over (Festival d’Automne à Paris, MaerzMuzik, Archipel, RomaEuropa, Wien Modern, Huddersfield, Geometry of Now, Angelica, Crossing the Line…), and works closely with musicians from a wide stylistic spectrum. A fervent improviser, she prefers the most open musical situations and regularly collaborates with photographers, visual artists and videographers.

In parallel, it was through writing music theater pieces that she began composing seriously. She started with small ensembles, and rapidly received commissions for larger works. Recent compositions include: Mr Barbe bleue a chamber opera for baroque ensemble produced by the Opéra de Reims (commission – French Ministry of Culture), Forest Gazing for birbyne and string quartet (commission – Radio France), Georg for bass clarinet, electric guitar and live electronics (premiere CCAM – Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy)

Long fascinated by the extended possibilities of live and fixed electronic music, Carol has written numerous pieces for acoustic instruments and electronics. Her exploration and use of aleatory procedures is distinctive.

Stefano Scodanibbio

Contrabass soloist and composer (1956 / 2012)

In the 1980s and 1990s Scodanibbio’s name has been prominently linked to the renaissance of the double bass, playing in the major festivals throughout the world dozens of works written especially for him by such composers as Bussotti, Donatoni, Estrada, Ferneyhough, Frith, Globokar, Sciarrino, Xenakis.

Stefano Scodanibbio has created new techniques extending the colours and range of the double bass thought impossible on this instrument. He collaborated for a long time with Luigi Nono and with Giacinto Scelsi. He regularly played in Duo with Rohan de Saram and with Markus Stockhausen. Of particular importance is his collaboration with Terry Riley and with Edoardo Sanguineti. He founded the Rassegna di Nuova Musica, New Music Festival in 1983, held every year in Macerata, Italy.

Active as a composer his catalogue consists of more than 50 works principally written for strings and he was chosen four times for the ISCM, International Society of Contemporary Music (Oslo 1990, Mexico City 1993, Hong Kong 2002, Stuttgart 2006).

In June 2004 he premiered the Sequenza XIVb by Luciano Berio in his own version for contrabass, from the original for cello. His Music Theatre work Il cielo sulla terra has been premiered in Stuttgart (June 2006) and Tolentino , Italy (July 2006) and was performed again in Mexico City in the fall of 2008. He has recorded for Montaigne Auvidis, col legno, Mode, New Albion, Dischi di Angelica, Ricordi, Stradivarius, Wergo. Active in theatre and dance, he has worked with authors, choreographers and dancers including Rodrigo García, Virgilio Sieni, Hervé Diasnas and Patricia Kuypers.

From the 1990’s, Stefano Scodanibbio has taught Master Classes and Seminars at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, University of California Berkeley, Stanford University, Oberlin Conservatory, Musikhochschule Stuttgart, Conservatoire de Paris, Conservatorio di Milano, Darmstadt Ferienkurse and more.

James Tenney

Composer, music theorist and performer (1934 / 2006)

James Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado, where he received his early training as a pianist and composer. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College (B.A. 1958), and the University of Illinois (M.A. 1961). His teachers and mentors included Eduard Steuermann, Chou Wen-Chung, Lionel Nowak, Carl Ruggles, Lejaren Hiller, Kenneth Gaburo, Edgard Varèse, Harry Partch, and John Cage.

A performer as well as a composer and theorist, he was co-founder and conductor of the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble in New York City (1963-70). He was a pioneer in the field of electronic and computer music, working with Max Mathews and others at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the early 1960s to develop programs for computer sound-generation and composition. He wrote works for a variety of media, both instrumental and electronic, many of them using alternative tuning systems.

He is the author of several articles on musical acoustics, computer music, and musical form and perception, as well as two books: META + HODOS: A Phenomenology of 20th-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form (1961; Frog Peak, 1988) and A History of ‘Consonance’ and ‘Dissonance’ (Excelsior, 1988). A teacher since 1966, he was Distinguished Research Professor at York University (Toronto), where he taught for twenty-four years, and last held the Roy E. Disney Family Chair in Musical Composition at the California Institute of the Arts.

His music is published and distributed by Sonic Art Editions (Baltimore), Frog Peak (Lebanon, New Hampshire), and the Canadian Music Centre, and has been recorded on the Artifact, col legno, CRI, Hat[now]ART, Koch International, Mode, Musicworks, New World, Nexus, oodiscs, Soundprints, SYR, and Toshiba EMI labels.

Samuel Vreizen

Samuel Vriezen (1973) is a poet, composer, editor, and poetry blogger, heir to the avant-garde, with an international focus. His debut collection 4 sentences (2008) and the essay Netwerk in eclipse (2016) were published by Wereldbibliotheek.