Friday, October 16, 2009 at 7PM, ICE and Miller Theatre are co-hosting a panel discussion, focusing on Xenakis as an interdisciplinary innovator.
Steve Schick will perform Psappha, and then a diverse and distinguished panel will discuss the music.
Meet the panel:
David Lang is the recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music for the little march girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices, directed by Paul Hillier.
One of America’s most performed and honored composers, his recent works include writing on water for the London Sinfonietta, with libretto and visuals by English filmmaker Peter Greenaway; the difficulty of crossing a field—a fully staged opera for the Kronos Quartet; loud love songs, a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, and the oratorio Shelter, with co-composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, at the New Wave Festival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, stage by Ridge Theater and featuring the Norwegian vocal ensemble Trio Mediaeval. The commercial recording of the little match girl passion will be released this spring on Harmonia Mundi, coupled with a cappella choral works sung by Ars Nova Copenhage.
Lang is also co-founder and co-artistic director of New York City’s legendary music festival, Bang on a Can.
Mark Wigley is the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. An accomplished scholar and design teacher, Wigley has written extensively on the theory and practice of architecture and is the author of Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1998); White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995); and The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (1993). He co-edited The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationalist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (2001). Wigley has served as curator for widely attended exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and Witte de With Museum, Rotterdam. He received both his bachelor of architecture (1979) and his Ph.D. (1987) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. For the past 30 years he has championed contemporary percussion music as a performer and teacher, by commissioning and premiering more than 10 new works for percussion. Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) and a consulting artist in percussion at the Manhattan School of Music. In 2008, Schick received the “Distinguished Teaching Award” from UCSD. He was the percussionist of the Bang on a Can All-Stars of New York City from 1992-2002, and from 2000 to 2004 served as artistic director of the Centre International de Percussion de Genève in Geneva, Switzerland. Schick is founder and artistic director of the percussion group “red fish blue fish” and in 2007 assumed the post of music director and conductor of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus. Steven Schick’s book on solo percussion music, The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2006, and a 3-CD set of the complete percussion music of Iannis Xenakis, made in collaboration with red fish blue fish, was issued by Mode Records later that year. In 2009, along with red fish blue fish, Schick will release DVDs of the early percussion music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Roger Reynold’s Sanctuary. Recently Schick has worked with composer Paul Dresher and writer/director Rinde Eckert to make an evening-length solo theater work called Schick Machine. Schick has founded and is artistic director of Roots and Rhizomes, an annual summer course on contemporary percussion music held at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Sharon Kanach has lived in France for the past 30 years. The American musician originally went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger but her path diverted drastically when she encountered Iannis Xenakis, with whom she collaborated closely for nearly 20 years of his life. She was especially involved with his extensive writings. First, she translated Arts/Sciences: Alloys, followed by a new, revised, and enlarged edition of his seminal Formalized Music, both published by Pendragon Press.
In 2006, Editions Parenthèses brought out Xenakis’ Musique de l’Architecture in French, which Kanach co-authored. (It was released in English by Pendragon Press as Music and Architecture, 2008). She is collaborating with Makis Solomos and Benoît Gibson on a Critical Edition of the composer’s writings and unpublished papers in nine volumes, a lifetime endeavor. As general editor of the “Xenakis Series” at Pendragon Press, Kanach is compiling a new volume, Performing Xenakis (scheduled for release in January 2010), comprised of 30 essays from Xenakis champions from 14 different countries.
Since June 2007, Kanach has been acting vice-president and artistic director of the newly reestablished Centre Iannis Xenakis (formerly CCMIX and Ateliers UPIC when it was created by Xenakis in 1985) in Paris. In addition, Sharon Kanach oversees the publication of Xenakis’ scores at Editions Salabert-Universal Music Publishing, and actively collaborates with Mode Records, New York in compiling Xenakis’ complete œuvre on CDs and/or DVDs.
Most recently, Kanach and Carey Lovelace curated the first museum exhibition of Xenakis’ papers, Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary, compiled from his personal archives on deposit at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, for The Drawing Center in downtown New York City. The exhibit will open on Jan. 14, 2010 and will later travel to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and then to the LA MOCA/Pacific Design Center.
In recognition of the Miller Theatre’s stunning success last season with its production of Xenakis’ Oresteïa directed by Luca Veggetti, plus the enthusiasm manifested for the public programming events resulting from The Drawing Center’s exhibition, it was decided to create a not-for-profit entity entitled “Xenakis Project of the Americas” to be based in New York City.
Under the prestigious auspices of the Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center, Kanach and her board are organizing an official launch on January 19, 2010 at the Elebash Recital Hall at the Graduate Center. This will be a “triple gala” comprising the inauguration of the Xenakis Project of the Americas, the official publication date of Performing Xenakis, and a concert by several of the contributors to this volume, including International Contemporary Ensemble member David Schotzko.
Dr. Lara Pellegrinelli is an arts journalist and scholar. She received her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Harvard University in 2005, focusing her research on jazz studies. Following a visiting professorship in the music department at the University of Richmond from 2005-07, she embarked on an around-the-world voyage, teaching for the University of Virginia’s Semester at Sea program. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Village Voice, and Time Out New York. She currently contributes to National Public Radio.
