Chamber Music

RAGE Thormbones is a low-frequency duo whose work exists at the intersections of “fuck around” and “find out”. Both members, Weston from Vermont and Mattie from Los Angeles, are classically trained trombonists but jumped that ship awhile ago and thankfully found each other in 2014.

Two clever, judgmental narrators. A landscape of shifting, sliding tones and sounds. The hidden language of emojis. Departure Duo is excited to perform a program of recent commissions showcasing the wide range of sonic possibilities for soprano and double bass.

Adrianne Munden-Dixon, violin, and Carrie Frey, viola, team up for a double-solo tour. Frequent collaborators in era-spanning quartet Desdemona and in the New York experimental scene, the two will premiere new pieces for solo violin and solo viola by a pool of close collaborators from around the US., as well as sister works written by each of the performers for each other.

andPlay’s “Translucent Harmonies” allows listeners to deeply immerse themselves in sound, silence, and resonance. This hour-long program includes Prisma Interius VIII by Catherine Lamb (USA) and Vid stenmuren blir tanken blomma by Kristofer Svensson (Sweden), both composed in just intonation. The rare experience to hear a full program in just intonation invites one to listen in a very detailed way to the “sensation of tone.” This shifts the concept of intonation, which is often unnoticed by the listener, to the foreground, where it becomes a focal point to explore the most simple, yet nuanced, relationships in sound.

Amadeus Julian Regucera and Splinter Reeds bring to you a new piece, commissioned by the ensemble prior to COVID-19, and reimagined as an audio-visual installation for Radius Gallery and Indexical in Santa Cruz. The work – Absence in relief (audio and visual studies in intimacy) – is part of a series developed in close collaboration with performers, engendering conversations about consent and trust, complicity and gaze, and power and dynamics in performance.

Composer/bassist James Ilgenfritz (NYC) leads an evening of solo and duo works, with a program stradding the worlds of composition and free improvisation, including an improvising duo with Bay Area oboist Kyle Bruckmann. His program includes his own work, fellow New Yorkers Lucie Vitkova and Miya Masaoka, Anthony Donofrio, and Watsonville-based composer Jeffrey Treviño.

Portato Portato’s 2018-19 program explores the expansion of granular experiential impressions and phenomena through texture and orchestration. Working with local and active composers drawing inspiration from the natural world, ceremony, and algorithm, the ensemble presents premieres of new works featuring delicate and playful performative media. Special guest: Stephanie Neumann, conductor

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.

Sarah Hennies’ “Contralto” is a one-hour work for video, strings, and percussion that exists in between the spaces of experimental music and documentary. The piece features a cast of transgender women speaking, singing, and performing vocal exercises accompanied by a dense and varied musical score that includes a variety of conventional and “non-musical” approaches to sound-making.

Microtonal tuba and bass duo Reidemeister Move perform a program of long tones in natural harmonies for low instruments, including Arcanum 17 by Christopher Williams & Charlie Morrow and Borromean Rings by Robin Hayward.