* EMF and MUSICWORKS*
Present
* BIRDCAGE & HPSCHD*
* AN EVENING OF JOHN CAGE Featuring JOEL CHADABE *
A Rare Opportunity to Hear Some of the Wildest Compositions of the 20th
Century *Wednesday, June 11th, 2008* at ONTARIO COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN
UNIVERSITY
On Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 as of 7PM, *Musicworks
Magazine*<
http://www.musicworks.ca/>and the
*Electronic Music Foundation (EMF)* present *BIRDCAGE & HPSCHD *at the OCAD
Auditorium downtown Toronto. The evening features original Cage
collaborators *Joel Chadabe, (sound), David Eisenman (visuals) and Donald
Gillies. Musicians include Eve Egoyan, Marc Couroux, Casey Sokol, Tania
Gill, Gregory Oh, Gayle Young, George Boski, William Blakeney, Robert
Wheeler (Pere Ubu), Bob Doidge, Amy King and more*. The complete
presentation will last for 4 hours, but visitors are invited to come and go
at will, something Cage, no doubt, would have approved of.
*This concert is produced with the assistance of the Electronic Music
Foundation in New York to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Musicworks
Magazine, and serves as a fundraiser for Musicworks<
http://www.musicworks.ca/>,
Canadas only experimental music and sound art publication.*
World-renowned composer John Cage (1912-1992) composed BirdCage in 1971,
working with Joel Chadabe, the founder and president of the Electronic Music
Foundation. Cage's composition consisted of 12 half-hour tapes with three
tracts of recorded sounds: the chirping of birds in aviaries, the
electronically treated sounds of Cage reading words from Henry David
Thoreau's "Walden," and fragments of found sounds and ambient street noise.
In "performing" the piece, Cage operated a matrix mixer to select from the
various tapes at random. Joel Chadabe has prepared a ''spatialized, new
realization" of the work for a digital age in which a computer software
program continually, and randomly, selects from the recorded materials.
HPSCHD, by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, is arguably the wildest
composition of the 20th century. Big, brash, exuberant, raucous, a
performance involves hours of ongoing high-level intensity. The sound is a
mixture of seven amplified harpsichords playing computer-generated
variations of Mozart and other composers along with 51 computer-generated
tapes playing what could be off-tuned trumpets sounding some musical charge.
The thousands of swirling images, overlaid and mixed, of abstract shapes and
colors and of space imagery from slides and films borrowed from NASA, create
a chaotic riot of shifting form and color. Visitors can peruse a small
gallery of the historic Fluxus posters and artwork created for the debut
performance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May, 1969.
This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see one of the most important
compositions of the 20th Century performed in its entirety. The harpsichords
used in the performance are copies of original instruments; they are
provided by Claviers Baroques Upper Canada Harpsichords.
* BIRDCAGE & HPSCHD
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
OCAD Auditorium/ ONTARIO COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN UNIVERSITY
100 McCaul Street
7:00 8:00 p.m. BirdCage;
8:00 - 11:00 p.m. HPSCHD
Admission is $20 at the door.*
http://www.musicworks.ca
For more information about the event, contact:
Gayle Young, Musicworks magazine
E-mail: sound@musicworks.ca
Phone: 416 977-3546.
For interviews, contact Joel Chadabe at joel@emf.org
or David Eisenman at eisenman@mathware.com
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