Current Free Practices in Music and Poetry
Saturday March 25, 2006
Time: **10am - 5pm

This event is made possible by an FAS Humanities Council grant. Grant applicant and event organizer: Associate Profesor Elizabeth Hoffman, Music FAS, with grant application and event imagining assistance from Music graduate student Michael Gallope and many other people not listed here.

Barrett Watten is one of the founding poets and editors of the Language School of poetry and one of its central theorists. He is the author of Total Syntax (1985) and The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003). Recent collections of his literary work include Frame (1971-1990). He teaches at Wayne State University in Michigan.

George Hartley teaches courses on language poetry and critical theory in the Department of English, Ohio University. He is the author of Textual Politics and the Language Poets, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; and The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime, Duke University Press, 2003.

Dana Reason's research focuses on women improvisors of the late-twentieth century. Major performances have included critically acclaimed concerts at the San Francisco Jazz Festival, the Guelph Jazz Festival in Guelph, New York City's Knitting Factory, the Banff Arts Festival in Alberta, Los Angeles' Festival in Pink, Frau Musica Nova in Cologne, and Place Gabriel in Paris. She has appeared on National Pubic Radio, Radio Canada, and The CBC. She can also be heard on 10 other recordings and in Peter Kowald's video, "Off the Road."

Mark Applebaum is active as a jazz pianist and builder of electro-acoustic instruments from found objects for use as compositional and improvisational tools. Commissions include those from Betty Freeman, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, the Vienna Modern Festival, Zeitgeist, MANUFACTURE (Tokyo), and the Jerome Foundation. Applebaum teaches composition and theory at Stanford University.

Alvin Curran's awards include NEA, DAAD, NPR and Ars Acoustica International. He is presently the Milhaud Professor of Music Composition at Mills College in Oakland, California. He began composing at Brown University under Ron Nelson and completed his studies at Yale with Elliott Carter in 1963. Following a year with Carter in Berlin he moved to Rome - his adopted home. With Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum in 1966 Curran co-founded the radical collective Musica Elettronica Viva - a group renowned for inciting free music as well as musical uprisings. The 80s involved large-scale environmental works on lakes, rivers, in ports, quarries, caverns and public buildings. Using the radio as a geographical music instrument Curran created concerts with musicians spread all over Europe in "1985 - A Piece for Peace" and in the Holocaust commemoration "Crystal Psalms" in 1988. "Erat Verbum," a WDR commission took this concept even further.

George Lewis, Edwin H. Case Professor of Music, Columbia University George Lewis is an active composer, improvisor, performer and computer/installation artist who has explored electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated forms. His artistic work is documented in over 120 recordings and has been awarded by a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, 1999 Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts, and numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His oral history is archived in Yale University's collection of "Major Figures in American Music," and his published articles on music, experimental video, visual art, and cultural studies have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes.

Daan Vandewalle, pianist and improviser, is new music specialist, with a strong focus on 20th century American piano music. He studied at the Conservatory of Ghent, Belgium with Claude Coppens and at Mills College, California with Alvin Curran. He specialises in contemporary American piano literature and has given concerts and lectures devoted to American music throughout the world. He is a fellow of the Belgian-American Educational Foundation and teaches piano at the royal conservatory of Ghent, Belgium. Vandewalle's programming is unusual both on a technical and an intellectual level; and his repertoire includes rarely heard works such as Clarence Barlowe's Cogluotobusisletmesi and Boudewijn Buckinx's 22-hour long cycle of 1001 sonatas for violin and piano. His recording of Curran's Inner Cities was recently released on the LongDistance label.

Paula Matthusen is a doctoral candidate at New York University, Department of Music, currently doing research on a Fulbright grant at the UdK in Berlin, with project supervision by Dr. Martin Supper. She has received commissions from such groups as the Frankfurt Ballet. Her doctoral research centers on decentralized performance paradigms and emergent musical structures.

Jason Stanyek, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at NYU, has research interests that include Brazilian music, improvisation, diasporic performance, interculturalism and global hip hop. Prior to arriving at NYU, Dr. Stanyek was an Assistant Professor at the University of Richmond and a Fellow at the University of California Humanities Research Institute where he was a member of an interdisciplinary research group called Global Intentions: Improvisation in the Contemporary Performing Arts. He received a Ph.D. (Critical Studies and Experimental Practices) and an M.A. (Composition) from the University of California, San Diego where he pursued his studies under the guidance of George E. Lewis. His most recent publication, "Transmissions of an Interculture: Pan-African Jazz and Intercultural Improvisation," appeared in the volume The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation and Communities in Dialogue (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). He is a member of the advisory board of Critical Studies in Improvisation, a new peer-reviewed journal published out of the University of Guelph. He is also active as an improviser and has released two CDs as a guitarist with the quartet O'Keefe, Stanyek, Walton, Whitehead (on the Circumvention and Nine Winds labels).

Miya Masaoka, musician, composer, performance artist, has created works for koto, laser interfaces, laptop and video and written scores for ensembles, chamber orchestras and mixed choirs. In her performance pieces she has investigated the sound and movement of insects, as well as the physiological responses of plants, the human brain, and her own body. Within these varied contexts of sound, music and nature, her performance work emphasizes the interactive, live nature of improvisation, and reflects an individual, contemporary expression of Japanese gagaku aural gesturalism.

Erik Ulman is currently a Lecturer in Music at Stanford University. He studied composition at the University of California, San Diego, working principally with Brian Ferneyhough, as well as with Helmut Lachenmann at the Stuttgart Musikhochschule on a DAAD grant. He has taught music at UCSD and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His music has been performed in concerts and festivals across the U.S., Europe, and Australia; the Arditti Quartet performed his Third String Quartet in Boswil, Switzerland and at the Bern Biennale in October 2005. Ulman has published essays on music, film, and literature in such journals as Perspectives of New Music and Senses of Cinema, as well as in the book Sound as Sense; he is also a violinist, playing with sfSound and the Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble, and is currently guest director of [sic], the Stanford Improvising Collective. In June 2004 Ulman and Marcia Scott organized the first Poto Festival, a gathering of artists in various media, in Grass Valley, California.Information about Poto may be found at potoinc.org.

Scott Currie is a doctoral candidate at New York University whose ethnographic research focuses on collective associations of improvising musicians on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in Berlin’s former Eastern sector. He has served as associate director of the Vision Festival as well as founder and president of the Sound Vision Orchestra in New York, and worked as a member of the Berlin Free Improvisation Initiative. He is also an improvising saxophonist who has studied under J. D. Parran, Wolfgang Fuchs, and Ken McIntyre, and performed with artists including Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Alan Silva, Willi Kellers, Harri Sjöström, and Michael Griener.