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Articles by Giacomo Fiore
SF Tape Music Festival Serves Up a Kaleidoscope of Electronic Music
“I like to describe this as IMAX for the ears,” quipped San Francisco Tape Music Festival co-organizer Matt Ingalls at the beginning of Saturday evening’s first program. “We can stretch the sonic image from a gigantic canvas to a narrowly focused tiny screen in the front.” As is customary for this long-running and frankly essential Bay Area event, the audience was ushered into darkness in the cold yet cozy confines of the Victoria Theatre, an ad-hoc installation of loudspeakers encircling us.
Other Minds Gets Into the Nitty-Gritty of History and Harmony
There may have been a hint of trepidation in Other Minds Executive and Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian’s voice on Friday night as he characterized the third program of this year’s festival as a split bill between music of Armenian origin and a 70th-birthday celebration for composer Carl Stone. And though the program’s halves were indeed starkly different, this kind of inebriating eclecticism fully embodies the Other Minds ethos.
Exploring an Alternative Sonic World in One Afternoon
When Edward Schocker was a student at Mills College in the late 1990s, composer Lou Harrison first introduced him to just intonation — a system of tuning that favors whole-number ratios between pitches, which some musicians prefer over equal-temperament tuning, the default standard today.
Electric Ideas and Novel Concepts at the Other Minds Festival
As his customary gesture of welcome, director Charles Amirkhanian invited all participating composers to the stage of Chinatown’s Great Star Theater for an introductory round of applause to kick off the 26th edition of the Other Minds Festival on Thursday, Oct. 13.
In Her Latest Work, Pamela Z Is Fully Present
The Paul Dresher studio in West Oakland is a literal workshop — a place where ideas are bent, assembled, and refined into shape, just like the many generations of invented instruments in the next room over. Ensembles, composers, makers, and choreographers all share the space, and after the dust has been swept away, the chairs arranged into rows, and the curtains lowered to transform the setup into a hall, the work can finally be shared with an audience. On Saturday night, Sept.
Memories Mixed With Surprises at SF Electronic Music Festival
“Nostalgia has a way of catching you by surprise,” muses Luciano Chessa during our interview in Cole Valley. As someone who’s constantly following his own work and making new homes on the regular, he would know. For the past two years, Chessa has been based in Berlin while spending extended periods of time in residencies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Take the Tim Brady Challenge With Actions Speak Louder
“The electric guitar is an abomination,” admonished Andrés Segovia in a 1965 Time magazine article about the instrument’s rise in popularity in the wake of the Beatles. Yet this quintessentially American invention, developed in the 1930s to allow plucked strings to be heard in the increasingly loud swing ensembles of the time, turned out to be a cultural touchstone of the 20th century.
Lukas Ligeti Creates a New-Music Holocaust Memorial
Lukas Ligeti That Which Has Remained ... That Which Will Emerge is an ambitious and arresting studio recording, capturing a 2015 installation by composer Lukas Ligeti for his residency at the Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. The work encompasses interviews with several participants about Jewish life in Poland and is dedicated to the memory of Holocaust survivor Henryk Prajs, whose voice is featured prominently throughout.
Alvin Lucier: Navigations, by Quatuor Bozzini
CQB 2128_NUM FR «Ce n’est pas assez de simplement jouer les bonnes notes au bon moment et de la bonne manière; il faut aussi avoir la bonne conscience. Cela place l’interprète dans un rôle d’explorateur de l’intérieur pour produire, et lui demande de rester tranquille pour être actif.» — Pauline Oliveros Ces mots de Pauline Oliveros nous parlent de l’influence fondamentale qu’a eu Alvin Lucier sur le développement des musiques nouvelles et de leur interprétation.
Three Titans of New Music Make Sparks Fly at the Chapel
Terry Riley, Laurie Anderson, and John Zorn — three towering figures in U.S. experimentalism — don’t immediately spark an association among them. Before their latest two-night, four-shows residency of a sort at the Chapel on Valencia Street. they had collaborated exactly once, coming together on the occasion of Zorn’s 65th-birthday celebrations at the same venue in September 2018.
Two Artists: One Mind
The conceit of San Francisco Fresh Festival’s Exchange Series is to spark interdisciplinary collaboration between movement, visual, and sound artists in an experimental setting. After a mere five hours of rehearsal, electroacoustic maven Pamela Z and French-born dancer Christine Bonansea delivered a suite of solos, duets, and improvisation that was virtuosic, enthralling, and profoundly touching.
Sonic Magic at the S.F. Tape Music Festival
There’s something magical about listening to spatialized electronic music in the dark. Time behaves a little unpredictably — long pieces don’t seem quite as strenuous, while short ones occupy a much greater span than anticipated. Deprived of visual distractions, my mind often made up its own, with sounds and movement taking up colorful shapes behind my closed eyes, evocative narratives and atmosphere arising even from the most austere and abstract selections.
A Relentless Spirit of Inquiry and Innovation Sparks Thingamajigs
The Bay Area has seen generation after generation of musical innovators expand the boundaries of theory and practice through experimentation, collaboration, and a tendency to figure things out for themselves. Maybe it’s due to the area’s cultural diversity, with its commingling of musical languages and further distance from the European establishment. Maybe it’s just another aspect of the pioneer spirit, drawing those on “the wayward trail” toward a place where new work can be done, and shared.
Lou Harrison: Explorations in Just Intonation and Temperaments on the Keyboard
Lou Harrison (1917-2003) was one of the most influential American composers of the twentieth century and a creator of complex, yet elegant and beautiful music.
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