Crippled Symmetry (What Would Morton Feldman Do?): This Weekend at Soundlab... Keir Neuringer

Thursday, September 10

This Weekend at Soundlab... Keir Neuringer

Saturday, September 12, 9pm--Music Is Art Afterparty Pre-Party feat. KEIR NEURINGER and an ensemble that includes members of Buffalo experimental groups TENTET/OCTET and NOVELIST

For this performance, NYC-based artist, composer and musician Keir Neuringer will collaborate with Buffalo based art/improv groups Tentet/Octet and Novelist on a piece in which the assembled musicians perform a response to computer-generated scores projected on the wall behind the stage. Neuringer writes, "An audio waveform acts as the score and backdrop of Dodging Bullets. Performers are given a set of gestures they can choose from in order to interact with and complete the score, confronting it in real-time. As they perform, they ‘learn’ the piece and make choices based on how they perceive each of the other performers’ musical decisions. Dodging Bullets is what people do, figuratively and literally, all the time. I constructed a piece that reflects that, but allows the players to learn how to react over time, how to improvise a collective response that sounds, perhaps, less like dodging and more like firing back."

Born in New York in 1976, Keir Neuringer is a composer and performer (saxophone, voice, electronics). His output ranges from pulse-based electronic music, through free jazz and experimental electroacoustic improvisation, to music for theater and notated compositions for contemporary chamber ensembles. He also writes texts and makes videos and installations critical of the destructive behavior of the dominant culture. In 1999 he moved to Europe and spent ten years, during which time he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Adacemy of Music in Krakow, a master's degree graduate of The Hague's interdisciplinary ArtScience Institute, and curator of the audiovisual program at contemporary art platform. It was in these ten years that he cultivated a personal and intensely physical approach to solo saxophone performance that honors, builds upon, and eschews diverse music-making traditions. Keir Neuringer collaborates with a wide and undefined network of musicians, including Rafal Mazur, Ensemble Klang, Joel Ryan, DJ Sniff, Carlos Iturralde and Matt Bauder. He has performed and exhibited works in the US, Mexico, Israel, Turkey, South Africa and throughout Europe. He moved to New York in January 2009.

"...a cleverly programmed synthesis of sound and vision…we witnessed Neuringer move – very quickly at times – from absurdly long circular breathing tones to abrupt shifts in register and high and low skronks, leaving him looking thoroughly exhausted by the piece’s end."-classicalsource.com

http://keirneuringer.com/info.html http://www.myspace.com/tentetoctet http://www.myspace.com/novelist

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Who is Morton Feldman? (And Why Should I Care)?

A towering figure in 20th-century New Music, Morton Feldman radically re-imagined the possibilities of musical form through an approach to sound correlated with abstract painting. In 1973, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor of Music at the University at Buffalo, a title he retained until his death in 1987. Feldman's tenure is emblematic of a renaissance period of progressive creative activity that brought Buffalo's cultural affiliations international acclaim.

What Would Morton Feldman Do? situates its speculations on multiple levels, firstly imagining the artist as an angry young man contemplating his social calendar. But WWMFD also addresses a larger crisis of relevance facing experimental culture in the 21st century. WWMFD builds on the city's radical legacy, but views history as a challenge to the present - what are you going to do NOW? WWMFD imagines its avant-classical hero wandering the crumbling streets in search of the new and the now, not through escapist longings for another era's modernisms but in concert with the cause of action necessitated by absence.

In this regard, WWMFD begins where Basta! Or Too Much! (We Will Always Know Ourselves), an avant-pop zine published locally from 1997-2001, left the page for the "stage." Collecting de facto proposals for civic reinvention utilizing the fractured experiments of Buffalo's postmodernist cultural community as blueprints, Basta! concerned itself not with art dialogue per se, but with changing what it means to grow up in a shrinking city. From these proposals (which tended to embrace rather than resist post-industrial existential crises) emerged a series of large scale multi-media events (Murder the Word) and ultimately, the performance program at Big Orbit Gallery. Big Orbit's "Soundlab" series, for which the venue of the same name was founded, was conceived of as a multi-faceted, continuously evolving "workshop" for the exploration of contemporary post-cultural incentives. Coming full circle, WWMFD hopes to re-contextualize Soundlab's explorations, and to include other relevant local sound and performance activities in its critical orbit.

Crippled Symmetry (What Would Morton Feldman Do?)

Choose Your Own Adventure

Thursday, September 10

This Weekend at Soundlab... Keir Neuringer

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