Performance Archive

The Emancipation of Re:Sonance – Five Austrian Masters Revisited

Peter Evans & The Wet Ink Ensemble | Ablinger

January 31, 2012 @ 7:30 PM

Austrian Cultural Forum New York
11 East 52nd Street
New York, NY 10022

 
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This concert will feature pieces both by and inspired by innovative Austrian composer Peter Ablinger. Trumpeter/composer Peter Evans will be joined by members of both the Wet Ink Ensemble and the Manhattan New Music Project in notated and improvised works which explore several specific compositions by Ablinger, as well as music which has shaped his compositional voice. The artists will perform Verkündigung (for tenor sax, piano and flute) and Voices and Piano, and in doing so contextualize them within a larger view of music’s potential as articulated through Ablinger’s work: a rediscovery of the listening experience itself and the explosion of potential in sound and noise.

This concert is part of a new series presented by the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Manhattan New Music Project: “The Emancipation of Re:Sonance – Five Austrian Masters Revisited”, which focuses on five of Austria’s most famous composers and the re-interpretation, re-imagination, and re-arrangement of some of their greatest works. The title of the series plays on Arnold Schönberg’s concept of the “Emancipation of Dissonance”.

Other events in the series will include performances by Fieldwork, Gene Pritsker and the International Street Cannibals, Sarah Weaver, and Franz Hackl.

About the Artists:
Peter Evans holds a degree in classical trumpet from Oberlin Conservatory. Evans is a frequent solo performer, and also plays with chamber orchestras, as well as free improvised settings, with a focus on electro-acoustic music, jazz and composition. He leads several groups, is a member of the International Contemporary Music Ensemble and Mostly Other People do the Killing, and collaborates with a wide variety of creative musicians in the US and Europe.

Founded in 1998, Wet Ink has presented over 80 concerts featuring a wide range of artists, both established and emerging. Now entering their 12th season, Wet Ink have a reputation for exceptionally committed performances and for programming that is consistently diverse, fresh, and exciting. Their repertoire ranges from scores of rigorous notational complexity to indeterminate and improvisational music, from the American experimental tradition to the contemporary European avant-garde, and from acoustic to amplified to electronic works and works for homemade instruments.

Peter Ablinger (b. 1959 in Austria) completed his studies in composition with Gösta Neuwirth and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati in Graz and Vienna. He has lived in Berlin since 1982, where he has initiated and conducted numerous festivals and concerts. In 1993 he was a visiting professor at the University of Music, Graz. Ablinger has been a been guest conductor with ‘Klangforum Wien’, ‘United Berlin’ and the ‘Insel Musik Ensemble’, and worked as a freelance musician since 1990.

Peter Ablinger is one of few artists today who uses noise without any kind of symbolism – not as a signifier for chaos, energy, entropy, disorder, or uproar; not for opposing something, or being disobedient or destructive. As in all these cases of music deliberately involving noise, noise is the case, but for Ablinger it is noise alone. Peter Ablinger has also come a long way in questioning the nature of sound, time, and space (the components usually thought central to music), and his findings have jeopardized and made dubious conventions usually thought irrefutable. These insights pertain to repetition and monotony, reduction and redundancy, density and entropy.

For more information on Peter Ablinger, please visit http://ablinger.mur.at/.

Reservations:
Admission is free, but tickets are extremely limited! Click here to RSVP.