Teodora Stepančić & Assaf Gidron: Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation by Michael Pisaro
Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation is an hour-long composition by Michael Pisaro, written for three musicians playing live and pre-recorded piano, percussion, sine waves, tape machines, various objects and found sounds, and comprised of fourteen interdependently moving layers of musical material. This multifaceted work creates a world within a world, a semblance of a naturally occurring environment within a performance space, in which both aesthetic and emotive sound qualities are elegantly balanced, glacially moving through time.
Stepancic, Lorenz, Gidron are a trio of musicians, composers and friends. Teodora met Martin in Switzerland during a composition residency in Winterthur, and they started performing as a duo together on piano and turntables, releasing an album on Martin’s Dumpf Editions label. Later, Teodora met Assaf in the Hague where they were both studying composition, and have since been curating and organizing concerts together around the world, and performing as a duo on casio organ and sine tones. The three of them came together in 2015 to perform Michael Pisaro’s Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation in Berlin and to record it for Dumpf editions in Zurich, and since have been working together on projects of shared interest. They explore music at the fringes of experimental music, performing mostly works of living composers who are part of a growing international community that developed around the Wandelweiser collective, and is committed to open, generous and decentralized sharing and exploration of ideas. They are active in experimental music scenes, Martin in Berlin and Switzerland, Teodora and Assaf in New York, where among other projects they run the Piano+ concert series at Spectrum NYC, and have worked with countless ensembles and concert venues around the world.
Teodora Stepančić is composer, pianist and curator. In recent years, Teodora has been collecting works for the piano and different ensemble formations that speak in the voice of the outsider, a hushed voice, that does not try to draw attention to itself, that stresses generosity, attentiveness, intimacy, spirit and focus. She is interested finding different ways of presenting, performing and creating music and tries to create an atmosphere that invites for intimate listening and experience, a space for sharing sounds, ideas and music. Teodora curates, organizes and performs concerts in Europe, USA, Middle East and Argentina. She is currently presenting second season of Piano+ concert series at Spectrum, Brooklyn. In her compositions Teodora explores different ways of incorporating theatrical and visual elements into music performance, cyclical and game-based musical forms, and developing works in close collaboration with individual performers.
Assaf Gidron is a composer and musician based in Brooklyn and originally from Tel Aviv. Assaf composes electronic and instrumental music, often using fixed processes to combine harmonic, melodic and temporal material to produce evolving gradations of musical affect. Together with Teodora Stepancic, Assaf is half of the curator/performer duo Stepancic.Gidron. He is an active as performer and improviser, playing cello, guitar and electronics, and member of the NYC-area based LCollective, a group devoted to organizing intimate permeable events playing rarely performed and new works. assafgidron.com
Jasna Veličković (Serbia/Netherlands) is a composer and performer based in Amsterdam. Her recent works focus on sound extension of traditional instruments. Her music material often derives from existing music pieces shadowing or looking awry to the original. Most recently she is building a new performing setup Velicon made out of permanent magnets and coils. This project is a new installment of her ongoing artistic research whose aim is the creation of tools that facilitate playing on instruments or objects using the transformative acoustic possibilities of electromagnetic field. jasnavelickovic.com
Indexical’s Santa Cruz concert series is made possible through generous support by Arts Council Santa Cruz.
Jasna Veličković:
Shadow Study 4a
Shadow Study #4a builds on Frederic Chopin’s Prelude Op.28 No.4 E Minor. The listeners’ attention shifts from the melody and accompaniment of Chopin’s Prelude to the resonant sounds of the instrument being played. Two performers excite the piano strings by placing coils which transmit the recording of the Chopin’s Prelude over them. In this way, the harmonic development of the prelude is extended to the acoustic phenomena of the vibrated strings, opening up almost infinite possibilities as to how the Shadow Study #4 could sound. Seen as a “print” of Chopin’s Prelude the piano acts as a tool, assuming the function of a loudspeaker, or on a meta-level, becoming a “post piano”. In the end, the sound heard is a shadow of an existing music piece. The Prelude itself is used as a ready-made, yet through the process of performance, one sound reality produces another one anew. Duration 7-14’
Documentation available via Jasna Veličković.
Jasna Veličković (Serbia/Netherlands) is a composer and performer based in Amsterdam. Her recent works focus on sound extension of traditional instruments. Her music material often derives from existing music pieces shadowing or looking awry to the original. Most recently she is building a new performing setup Velicon made out of permanent magnets and coils. This project is a new installment of her ongoing artistic research whose aim is the creation of tools that facilitate playing on instruments or objects using the transformative acoustic possibilities of electromagnetic field.
Teodora Stepančić:
another trio
Teodora Stepančić is composer, pianist and curator. In recent years, Teodora has been collecting works for the piano and different ensemble formations that speak in the voice of the outsider, a hushed voice, that does not try to draw attention to itself, that stresses generosity, attentiveness, intimacy, spirit and focus. She is interested finding different ways of presenting, performing and creating music and tries to create an atmosphere that invites for intimate listening and experience, a space for sharing sounds, ideas and music. Teodora curates, organizes and performs concerts in Europe, USA, Middle East and Argentina. She is currently presenting second season of Piano+ concert series at Spectrum, Brooklyn. In her compositions Teodora explores different ways of incorporating theatrical and visual elements into music performance, cyclical and game-based musical forms, and developing works in close collaboration with individual performers.
Michael Pisaro:
Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation
Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation is an hour long composition written for three musicians playing live and pre-recorded piano, percussion, sine waves, tape machines, various objects and found sounds, and comprised of fourteen interdependently moving layers of musical material. This multifaceted work creates a world within a world, a semblance of a naturally occurring environment within a performance space, in which both aesthetic and emotive sound qualities are elegantly balanced, glacially moving through time.
Michael Pisaro was born in Buffalo in 1961. He is a composer and guitarist, and a member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble. He has composed over 80 works for a great variety of instrumental combinations, including several pieces for variable instrumentation. A particularly large category of his works is solo works, notably a series of 36 pieces (grouped into 6 longer works) for the three-year, 156-concert series organized by Carlo Inderhees at the Zionskirche in Berlin-Mitte from 1997-1999. Another solo piece, pi (1-2594), was performed in installments by the composer on 15 selected days in February, 1999, in Evanston, Illinois, and in Düsseldorf in 2000-2001.
His work is frequently performed in the U.S. and in Europe, in music festivals and in many smaller venues. It has been selected twice by the ISCM jury for performance at World Music Days festivals (Copenhagen,1996; Manchester, 1998) and has also been part of festivals in Hong Kong (ICMC, 1998), Vienna (Wien Modern,1997), Aspen (1991) and Chicago (New Music Chicago, 1990, 1991). He has had extended composer residencies in Germany (Künstlerhof Schreyahn), Switzerland (Forumclaque/Baden), Israel (Miskenot Sha'ananmim), Greece (EarTalk) and in the U.S. (Birch Creek Music Festival/ Wisconsin). Concert length portraits of his music have been given in Munich, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Vienna, Brussels, Curitiba (Brazil), Berlin, Chicago, Düsseldorf, Zürich, Cologne, Aarau and elsewhere.
Most of his music of the last several years is published by Timescaper Music (Germany). Two CDs of his work have been released by Edition Wandelweiser Records. He has performed many of his own works and those of close associates Antoine Beuger, Kunsu Shim, Jürg Frey and Manfred Werder, and works from the experimental tradition, especially John Cage, Christian Wolff, Robert Ashley and George Brecht.
Before joining the composition faculty at CalArts, he taught music composition and theory at Northwestern University from 1986 to 2000.
Teodora Stepančić & Assaf Gidron: Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation by Michael Pisaro
Program
| Jasna Veličković | Shadow Study 4a |
| Teodora Stepančić | another trio |
| Michael Pisaro | Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation |