The Rotunda will play host to two events that are part of Cage: Beyond Silence, which runs October 26, 2012 - January 20, 2013 at a variety of venues in Philadelphia.
The two events at The Rotunda are:
Sun., Dec. 9
VARIATIONS & MIXES
Featuring: C Spencer Yeh & Nate Wooley, Bonnie Jones & Maria Chavez, Christopher Colucci
With vastly open and indeterminate scores and happenings, Variations I – VIII (1958 – 1967) is a series of compositions that foreshadows both Song Books and the Fluxus movement performance pieces. Sometimes scored as broadly as “for any number of players and any sound producing means,” Variation IV also includes 0’00”, Cage’s second version of 4’33”. See below for artist bios. *
Fri., Jan. 11
A FILM WITHOUT SUBJECT: ONE11 AND 103
Film by John Cage
8:00 pm
Admission to both of these events is FREE
* C. Spencer Yeh was born in Taipei, Taiwan, studied film at Northwestern University in Chicago IL, repped Cincinnati OH for many years, and is now based in Brooklyn NY. Originally introduced and developed in the context of music, Yeh’s work in recent years have become increasingly interdisciplinary, especially incorporating his background in film and video. As an improviser, Yeh is focused on developing a personal vocabulary using violin, voice, and electronics. In more compositional and organizational modes, Yeh works with all aspects physically, visually, conceptually, and aurally available. He is concerned not only with the sensual, but the gestural as well. Recognized for his musical projects Burning Star Core and CS Yeh, as well as many other individual and collaborative activities, Yeh has performed and presented work internationally in a wide spectrum of venues and situations.
Nate Wooley was born in 1974 in Clatskanie, Oregon, a town of 2,000 people in the timber country of the Pacific Northwestern corner of the U.S. He began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of 13. In the past three years, Wooley has been gathering international acclaim for his idiosyncratic trumpet language. Time Out New York has called him “an iconoclastic trumpeter”, and Downbeat’s Jazz Musician of the Year, Dave Douglas has said, “Nate Wooley is one of the most interesting and unusual trumpet players living today, and that is without hyperbole”. His work has been featured at the SWR JazzNow stage at Donaueschingen, the WRO Media Arts Biennial in Poland, Kongsberg and Copenhagen Jazz Festivals, and the New York New Darmstadt Festivals. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room and just completed a residency at London’s Café Oto.
Bonnie Jones is a Korean-American writer, improvising musician, and performer working primarily with electronic music and text. Born in 1977 in South Korea she was raised by dairy farmers in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, MD. Bonnie creates improvised and composed text-sound performances that explore the fluidity and function of electronic noise (field recordings, circuit bending) and text (poetry, found, spoken, visual). She is interested in how people perceive, “read” and interact with these sounds and texts given our current technological moment. Bonnie has presented her work in the US, Europe, and Asia and collaborates frequently with writers and musicians including Ric Royer, Carla Harryman, Andy Hayleck, Joe Foster, Andrea Neumann, Liz Tonne, and Chris Cogburn. She received her MFA at the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.
The sound installations and live turntable performances of Maria Chavez focus on the paradox of time and the present moment, with many influences stemming from improvisation in contemporary art. She was awarded the Jerome Foundation's Emerging Artist Grant by New York’s Roulette Intermedium and she became a recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship by The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust. Maria was an artist in residence with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Clocktower and the DIA:Beacon Museum. She has worked with Christian Marclay and the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC as part of Christian Marclay: FESTIVAL and has shared the stage with renowned artists such as: Pauline Oliveros; Thurston Moore; Lydia Lunch; Phill Niblock and Otomo Yoshihide. She has recently been appointed Assistant Director of REVERSE, a contemporary artspace located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. REVERSE is a multidisciplinary workspace and art gallery with an emphasis on new and experimental forms of expression. This September, 2012, Maria presented her first book object entitled, Of Technique: Chance Procedures on Turntable. The book is now available for purchase at Printed Matter.
Christopher Colucci makes sound and music as a theater artist, composer and guitarist. In 2011, Christopher received a fourth Barrymore award for Outstanding Original Music and Sound Design for In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Wilma Theater). This past summer Christopher attended the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space on a professional development trip sponsored by the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative. Recent productions include: Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (Wilma) and Mr. Hart and Mr. Brown (People's Light).
Cage: Beyond Silence is a major festival celebrating the music of John Cage. Taking place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and venues across the city, events will unfold in three parts. The first, Move from Zero (October 26 - November 4, 2012) will provide an introduction to John Cage's music, focusing on seminal works from his early career, such as Sonatas and Interludes (1946 - 48) and Music of Changes (1951), 4'33" (1952), and will explore a variety of other stylistic periods through his solo repertoire. Parts two and three-subtitled The Year Begins to be Ripe (November 30 - December 12, 2012) and At Least We Have Begun (January 11 - 20, 2013) respectively-will juxtapose two of Cage's "magnum opuses," the mid-career polystylistic Song Books (Solos for Voice3-92) (1970) and the late-career meditative series of compositions titled Number Pieces (1987 - 1992). Several works will be given multiple performances,underlining the important role of the interpreter in realizing Cage's scores and emphasizing the ephemeral and changing nature of these indeterminate works.
This festival will be presented in conjunction with the Philadelphia Museum of Art's major exhibition Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp.