Manfred Werder: 20160 and 20170
Swiss composer Manfred Werder, with musicians Mustafa Walker and Andrew C. Smith, will engage in performances of his ongoing works 20160 and 20170. Werder’s project gathers language in the form of quotations, found nouns, and other elements, as he transcribes fragments onto a 10cm by 22m scroll with a pocket typewriter. Werder’s work is an extraction of language from its environment, and a practice of wandering through this language as he realizes it in performance.
Werder’s work defies all conventional expectations of a musical score. 20170 is a collection of quotations in Spanish and English from literature, philosophy, other people, private correspondence, and it comes with no specific instructions for its realization. Werder himself has a particular performance practice that grows out of music, but “realizations” of his work extend from lecture-performances to gallery showings of his scores to seemingly unrelated activities rooted in observation of the environment. There is no “right” or “wrong” realization of a piece, but rather Werder’s scores are an interpretive framework for his performance practice. Instead of thinking of these scores as instructions, we might think of them as epigraphs to a performance that is indeterminate.
“In Greek philosophy, what does it really mean, practice in terms of poesis? Poesis would be producing, and practice would be, in a certain way, performing.” (Werder, in conversation)
It’s sometimes difficult to find a “way in” to music like Manfred Werder’s, which carries with it a performance practice and history that is perhaps “hidden” from the listener. I recommend adventurous listeners take a moment to read my introduction to Language as a Wilderness, and an excerpt of my new interview with Manfred Werder, which we just posted on Medium.
About Language as a Wilderness
This event is part of the series Language as a Wilderness, co-presented by Indexical and Radius Gallery at the Tannery Arts Center in Santa Cruz.
Language as a Wilderness is a five-week series of experimental music dealing with language extracted from its natural environment. It is co-presented by Indexical and Radius Gallery at the Tannery Arts Center in Santa Cruz, from Jan. 12 through Feb. 9. For more upcoming performances, visit indexical.org/events.
Manfred Werder
Composer, performer, curator, lives in situ. Manfred Werder focuses on possibilities of rendering the practices regarding composition and field. His recent scores have featured either found sentences from poetry and philosophy, or found words from whatever sources. His performances, both indoors and outdoors, aim at letting appear the world’s natural abundance. Earlier works include stück 1998, a 4000 page score whose nonrecurring and intermittent performative realization has been ongoing since December 1997.
This event was funded in part by Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
Indexical’s Santa Cruz concert series is made possible through generous support by Arts Council Santa Cruz.
Manfred Werder:
20160
Manfred Werder is a composer, conceptual artist, and member of the Wandelweiser Group, a collective of musicians dedicated to exploring the limits of silence in music. Werder often uses “found sentences” or “found words” as the basis for both scores and performances, situating the performance a place in time and space, and framing it with quotation from other authors. For the past few years, Werder has been writing pieces exclusively on typewriter and sending them to performers by mail; no digital version exists.
For this event, Werder will be joined by frequent Wandelweiser interpreters Teodora Stepancic and Assaf Gidron in a performance of his ongoing work 20160, a 10cm x 22m roll of paper which Werder continually writes on while actualizing the score. The score exists as an ongoing document of all prior versions.
Manfred Werder:
20170
Andrew C. Smith is a composer and keyboardist living in Santa Cruz, California. His music often involves just intonation tunings, repetition, and language at the threshold of making sense. In addition to his work with language, he uses computers in his everyday artistic practice, often using electronic means to manipulate sound and text, using the results of these manipulations in his work.
He has been producing concerts and recordings since 2011, and is currently the Executive Director of Indexical, a nonprofit organization based in Santa Cruz, California. He has previously produced events at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center (Alice Tully Hall), Bohemian National Hall, and other venues as Managing Director of the S.E.M. Ensemble (Brooklyn, NY), and has worked for the Seattle Symphony (Seattle, WA) and Issue Project Room (Brooklyn, NY).
His music has been performed by sfSound, String Noise, Guidonian Hand Trombone Quartet, Séverine Ballon, Ostravaská banda, and S.E.M. Ensemble. He studied English and music composition at Willamette University and Trinity College Dublin.