William Winant Percussion Group and Blood Moon

The Mills College Music Department and the Center for Contemporary Music present Mills Music Now 2015-2016

William Winant Percussion Group and Blood Moon

The William Winant Percussion Group premieres new works composed for them on a program including improvised music by Blood Moon.

Saturday, February 6, 2016
8:00 pm
Littlefield Concert Hall

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For detailed information, please visit the Music Now webpage:
http://musicnow.mills.edu

Free to Mills students, faculty, and staff

$15 general/$10 seniors, non-Mills students, and Mills alums
Tickets may be purchased at the door, or online at:
https://www.boxofficetickets.com/bot/wa/search
(Mills Alums may purchase the student tickets at Box Office Tickets.) 


Wheelchair accessible
Free parking on campus
 


Mills College

Music Department

5000 MacArthur Blvd

Oakland, CA 94613
 


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Program:

blood moon:
02.06.16.a,b,c

Nava Dunkelman and Robert Lopez:
Calder Hannan – Orchid Drift Gaps (2015)
Kristina Warren – Choose (2014)
Rachel Devorah Trapp – overmorrow : no attack in progress (2015)

William Winant Percussion Group:
Matthew Burtner – The Speed of Sound in an Ice Rain (2015)
Christopher Luna – Vortex (2015)
Sophia Shen – Rite of the Elves (2015)

Program notes:

Matthew Burtner – The Speed of Sound in an Ice Rain (2015)
This piece is about listening to an ice rain and imagining the speed of sound changing. I recorded the sound of the ice rain in five channels, listening to it crackle on surfaces. While listening, I wondered how that precipitation affects the speed of sound: does sound speed up in the more dense ice-filled air? Is the sound of precipitation then faster than it would be on a dry, hot day? Does the ice in the air scatter and dampen the sound? This piece invites us to hear that experience as music.

Christopher Luna – Vortex (2015)
This piece is derived from one of several recordings that I made while driving across the United States from Oakland, CA to Charlottesville, VA. The title, Vortex, references a new age idiosyncrasy in Sedona, AZ: the belief that there are zones of energy (vortexes) in specific points of the area. These zones attract tourists eager to practice (or perform) some spiritual activity. Not quite inspired by the animated demonstrations of enlightenment amidst the magnificent landscape, I kept exploring the area until I found Sedona's unique airport –mainly used for helicopters and small private airplanes. It is set on the top of a small mountain that lies in the middle of the area's canyon's diameter. I recorded the takeoff of a helicopter, from its ignition to its flight, succeeded by the approach and landing of another helicopter. The choreography of these machines in such a setting was accompanied by fascinating noises. If there was any vortex in that valley, this was it for me. The red valley, the flying objects, their rhythmic, timbral and dynamic richness were adapted to be played specifically by the William Winant Percussion Group.

Calder Hannan – Orchid Drift Gaps (2015)
This is a piece in three sections. In the first, two thematic ideas drift across each other. In the second, gaps appear in repeated ideas. The third is a game for the performers that explores in an abstract sense the ideas of drifts and gaps as they relate to rhythm.

Rachel Devorah Trapp – overmorrow : no attack in progress (2015)
overmorrow : no attack in progress (2015) is a sonification of the 257 fatal shootings of civilians by American on-duty police officers in 2015 where The Washington Post reported no attack was in progress or the threat level was undetermined at the time of the shooting.

Each minute of the piece represents one month of the year, and incidents are heard within the minute in proportion to the date on which the incident occurred.
The player on the left is sonifying the fatal shooting deaths of civilians reported to be White. The player on the right is sonifying the fatal shooting deaths of civilians reported to be Black, Hispanic, Asian, Other, or Unknown.

Incidents in which the civilian was armed with a gun at the time that they were shot are heard on the drums, incidents in which the civilian was armed with a knife, a vehicle, another weapon, or a toy gun is heard on the wood instruments and incidents in which the civilian was unarmed or their armament was undetermined are heard on the metal instruments.

All data used is from The Washington Post National Police Shootings Database: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/

Kristina Warren – Choose (2014)
Choose was originally composed for percussion quartet in 2014 and appears here as a duo. In this piece, the players think interrelatedly about local and architectural time scales. The percussionists work with two kinds of rhythmic notation - traditional, and a strip of changing color as proportional notation - and create loops from fragments of read rhythms. Superimposed over this largely free approach to rhythm, each player occasionally chooses how to inflect their looped rhythms, for instance by assuming the rhythmic character of the other player's material. Ultimately, Choose is a structure for guided improvisation and can vary greatly from one run-through to the next. I am grateful to Rachel Devorah Trapp for her diligent programming work, and to Robert Lopez and Nava Dunkelman for their brilliant realization of the piece.

Performers:

William Winant
William Winant (b. 1953) is a multi-faceted percussion artist, who has performed with some of the most innovative and creative musicians of our time, including John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Anthony Braxton, James Tenney, Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, Joan LaBarbara, Yo-Yo Ma, Mark Morris, Mike Patton, Takehisa Kosugi, Christian Wolff and many others. Composers who have written for him include John Cage, Lou Harrison, John Zorn, Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, David Rosenboom, Larry Polansky, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, Terry Riley, Fred Frith, and Wadada Leo Smith. He is principal percussionist with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and has been featured as a guest artist with many important groups, including Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Berkeley Symphony, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Oingo Boingo, Kronos Quartet, Sonic Youth, Mr. Bungle and in numerous projects with New York composer, John Zorn. He appears regularly on festivals worldwide and can be heard on many recording labels. He teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Mills College and the University of California at Berkeley. From 1984 to 1992 he was Artist in Residence at Mills College with the critically acclaimed Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, which premiered and recorded many new works for violin, piano and percussion. Also at Mills College in the 1980s, he and colleagues, David Rosenboom and Anthony Braxton, formed the innovative performer-composer group, Challenge, which performed widely and released several recordings. Winant and Rosenboom were also core members of the Maple Sugar performance art collective in Toronto in the late 1970s, when they also worked at York University. Website: http://williamwinant.com

William Winant Percussion Group
William Winant, director
Tim DeCillis
Jordon Glenn
Daniel Steffey
Nava Dunkelman
Erin O' Leary
Yesnia Checca
Imogen Teasley-Vlautin

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blood moon
blood moon is an improvised music ensemble consisting of Matthew Burtner on soprano saxophone, Rachel Devorah Trapp on horn, Ryan Maguire on pedal steel guitar, and Kevin Davis on cello. The project serves as a forum for research into the possibilities for real-time composition and experimentation with the outer limits of instrumental technique. Due to their unusual instrumentation and varied backgrounds as performers and composers, the group is able to draw on a number of diverse stylistic and instrumental traditions, allowing for a kaleidoscopic array of musical textures to spontaneously emerge during performance.

"Spontaneously conjured, with only the help of knowing each other as performers, scholars and conceptual confidants, the newly constituted quartet Blood Moon shoots at a kind of visionary music. Its roots might be in confounding, academic ideas, but the egalitarian notion propelling the music forward is supremely approachable." -Dave Cantor, Daily Progress

bloodmoonofvirginia.org


Composers:

Matthew Burtner is an Alaskan-born composer and sound artist specializing in concert chamber music and interactive new media. His work explores ecoacoustics, embodiment, and extended polymetric and noise-based systems. First Prize Winner of the Musica Nova International Electroacoustic Music Competition (Czech Republic), a 2011 IDEA Award Winner, and a recipient of the Howard Brown Foundation Fellowship, Burtner’s music has also received honors and awards from Bourges (France), Gaudeamus (Netherlands), Darmstadt (Germany) and The Russolo (Italy) international competitions. He is Professor of Composition and Computer Technologies (CCT) in the Department of Music at the University of Virginia.

Calder Hannan is an undergraduate music student at the University of Virginia. He plays guitar and is interested in exploring the intersection of metal music and contemporary concert music, both in analysis and composition.

Christopher Luna-Mega’s music is rooted in the sounds of natural and urban environments, using elements of traditional notation, spectral analysis, indeterminacy, conducted improvisation and field recordings as means of production. As a platform for exploration of such aspects, he founded The Luna Ensemble in 2013, dedicated to premiering new music composed by members of the ensemble and by commissioned composers in t