Art of Music and Ideas
CZECH-AMERICAN-CZECH
Ostravská banda
with members of the S.E.M. Ensemble
Petr Kotik, Jiří Rožeň, Conductors
April 19th (preview), 20th and 21st
Petr Kotik (conducting) with Roscoe Mitchell and Ostravská banda in rehearsal, 2017
Wednesday, April 19 at 7 pm
Willow Place Auditorium
26 Willow Place, Brooklyn Heights
Preview of selected compositions from April 20 th and 21st programs.
Thursday, April 20 at 7 pm
Buchwald Theater
at the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts
2920 Campus Road, Brooklyn College
Philip Glass Two Pages (1968)
Jan Rychlík African Cycle (1961)
Frederic Rzewski Les Moutons de Panurge (1969)
Intermission
Phill Niblock Petr’s Charm (2021)
Jana Vörösová Oratio Phillipica (2021)
Roscoe Mitchell Nonaah (1977/2023)
The following composers will be present:
Roscoe Mitchell, František Chaloupka, Phill Niblock
Friday, April 21 at 7 pm
The Grand Ballroom
Bohemian National Hall, 321 East 73rd Street, New York
František Chaloupka The Witch Waltzers (2023)
Petr Bakla Elsewhere (2017)
Rudolf Komorous Olympia (1964)
Pauline Oliveros Meditation for Orchestra (1997)
Christian Wolff Trust (2012)
Intermission
Improvisation: Roscoe Mitchell, Thomas Buckner and Guests
Pavel Zemek Novák Quartet No. 3 (1998)
Petr Kotik Nine + 1 (2012)
The following composers will be present:
Petr Kotik, Petr Bakla, Christian Wolff, Roscoe Mitchell, Jana Vörösová
* * *
When Luigi Nono arrived in Prague In autumn of 1960, he gave Petr Kotik transcripts of Darmstadt lectures. That year, most of them were by John Cage. His ideas about music, his esthetics and thoughts about the arts inspired a group of composers in Prague who were associated with Kotik. This influence was not unlike the one Cage had a decade earlier on a number of important American artists and musicians. In Prague, it started a change in orientation from Darmstadt to American music. Although later, the American influence spread gradually throughout Europe, Prague was the first place where it had an important impact. It is interesting to note that the Czech Republic was then a country behind the Iron Curtain. The two New York concerts with music from Prague and New York (going back more than sixty years) will demonstrate an independence from the post-Webern Darmstadt style in new music, that was prevailing at that time both here in the U.S. and in Europe. Combining the Czech and American compositions will demonstrate a proximity of ideas and sensibilities, which originated here in the U.S. When John Cage visited Prague in 1964 and listened to music by Rudolf Komorous and Petr Kotik, he told them:
"What you are doing in Prague is extraordinary, I have never encountered anything like it".
Produced by the Ostrava Center for New Music, these performances have been funded by the Recovery Plan at the Czech Ministry of Culture, the City of Ostrava and privately by Veronika and Libor Winkler.
S.E.M. Ensemble’s 2022-23 season has been made possible with the generous support of the New York State Council on the Arts in partnership with Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, The Amphion Foundation, The Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, and private donors: Stephen J. Deutsch, Virginia Dwan, Martina Forman, Philip Foster, Allegra Fuller Snyder, Beth Greenberg and Jim Wright, Charlotta Kotik, Raymond Learsy, Julian Lethbridge, Rotraut Moquay, and Noni Pratt. Special thanks to Brooklyn District 33 Councilman Lincoln Restler.
Special thanks for the support of Brooklyn College and the Czech Center New York.
For more information:
Ostravská banda (newmusicostrava.cz/en/ostravska-banda/orchestra)
S.E.M. Ensemble (semensemble.org)
Conductor Jiří Rožeň (https://www.jirirozen.com/)
Information about Petr Kotik can be found on both, the Ostravská banda and SEM websites.
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Wednesday, February 15th @ 8pm
S.E.M. Ensemble Presents
Readings of New Compositions by Emerging Composers
Works by Lydia Brindamour, Jordan Dykstra, Jakub Polaczyk, Teodora Stepančić, and Jiaqi Wang
Willow Place Auditorium
26 Willow Place Brooklyn, NY 11201
Teodora Stepančić Coleman's Piece
Jiaqi Wang Stories of the Six Realms of Samsara
Jakub Polaczyk Withers
Jordan Dykstra Circadian Hymns in Ovid, New York
Free Admission, please RSVP here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/emerging-composers-workshop-concert-tickets-536282203507?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=escb
SEM continues its collaboration with the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
in concert by
The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble
Petr Kotik, Conductor
with soloists
Thurman Barker, drums
Nicolas Hay, baritone
Saturday, October 15th
7pm at DiMenna Center for Classical Music
(450 W 37th St, New York, NY 10018)
Petr Kotik and Roscoe Mitchell at Ostrava Days 2017
PROGRAM:
Amina Claudine Myers Interiors
George Lewis Mangle of Practice
Adegoke Steve Colson Counterpoints I & II
Leonard E Jones Quintets 1 and 1_2
Muhal Richard Abrams Trio
Henry Threadgill Poems for Voice (1&3)
Thurman Barker Mr. Speed-Str
Petr Kotik and The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble began collaborating with AACM composers in 1995, when Muhal Richard Abrams invited Petr and his ensemble to work together on a series of AACM orchestra concerts at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on West 64th Street, Manhattan. Between 1995 and 1997, Petr Kotik conducted orchestra compositions by Amina Claudine Myers, Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis, Wadada Leo Smith, Joseph Jarman, Henry Threadgill, and Muhal R. Abrams. SEM’s collaboration with AACM continues to this day, and has included large-scale European performances and recording.
INTERPRETATIONS CONCERTS SERIES
presents
S.E.M. ENSEMBLE
In the complete, six-hour performance of
Petr Kotik’s Many Many Women
Text by Gertrude Stein
Staging and Projection by Jo Fabian
Thursday, September 29, 6pm - 12am
@ Roulette Intermedium
509 Atlantic Avenue / at 3rd Ave
Brooklyn Downtown (one block from BAM)
Tickets available here: https://roulette.org/event/interpretations-peter-kotik-80th-birthday-celebration/
Audience members are free to come and go for the entire duration of the performance
Sopranos: Zen Wu, Ana Caseiro
Countertenor, Tenor: Padraic Costello, Nathan Fletcher
Bass-Baritone, Bass: James Gregory, Nicholas Hay
Flutes: Petr Kotik, Roberta Michel
Trumpets: Sam Jones, Max Morel
Trombones: Will Lang, Jen Baker
Percussionists: Chris Nappi, Juan Herrera,
Sam Lazzara, Russell Greenberg
Can't make the concert on the 29th? Come to the preview on September 23rd from 5pm - 11pm,
located at Willow Place Auditorium (26 Willow Place, Brooklyn 11201)
To open the 33rd season of Interpretations Concert Series, the S.E.M. Ensemble will perform Petr Kotik's six-hour-long, magnum opus Many Many Women (MMW) (1975-78), set to Gertrude Stein's 86-page novella of the same title. After its NYC premiere at The Whitney Museum of American Art and Paula Cooper Gallery in 1979, Richard Kostelanetz called the piece “continually austere and yet engaging”— a classic of underground music in the 1970s. The upcoming concert follows the first staged performance of MMW, produced at the New Opera Festival NODO in Ostrava, Czech Republic this past June. Featuring Berlin director Jo Fabian’s staging and projections, the Roulette production will also include a simultaneous performance of Kotik’s Drums for percussion (1977-80). MMW hasn’t been performed in its entirety in NYC since 2013.
It was the invitation to perform the piece at NODO, that inspired the creation of the staged opera version. NODO festival explores new approaches to opera and this year, it included operas that turned away from the romantic notion of an opera as drama. These new operas could be described as “variable situation spectacles,” such as the monumental Prometeo by Luigi Nono (two conductors, four orchestras, choir, vocal and instrumental soloists, percussion, narrators and extended electronics). – Petr Kotik
MMW will be performed as an opera – a spectacle without a plot or a story. The score consists of 173 sections across 378 pages. The sections are distributed among all the performers, who shape the piece during the performance, improvising their entrances and creating a musical flow of unpredictable configurations. Despite its open form, MMW is traditionally and exactly notated. The twelve musicians – six singers and six instruments – will perform continuously for six hours.
Tickets Available Here: https://roulette.org/event/interpretations-peter-kotik-80th-birthday-celebration/ Audience members are free to come and go at will for the entire duration of the performance.
Interpretations Concert Series is produced by Mutable Music. This year's Interpretations series will include major works by Wadada Leo Smith, Tyshawn Sorey, Michael Byron, and Alexandra Gardner, among others.
More about Many Many Women:
In MMW, the audience follows a flow of musical events that have no clear beginning or ending. It is a “situation” instead of “dramatic story.” This notion was eloquently described by Morton Feldman in his comments on Samuel Beckett's libretto to the opera Neither:
"…there's something peculiar about the text. I can't catch it. Finally, I see that every line is really the same thought said in another way. And yet the continuity acts as if something else is happening. Nothing else is happening. What you're doing, in an almost Proustian way, is getting deeper and deeper saturated into the thought."
Kotik began composing for voice in 1971, as a result of his close collaboration with the composer and singer Julius Eastman. From the first piece he composed for Eastman, Kotik was using the writings of Gertrude Stein. Many Many Women is the culmination of the series of Stein-related works.
Kotik's hands, the iron-clad rhythms that drive words and music have weight but are not heavy – they are deliberate and move horizontally with a regularity. – George Grella, 2021
...consistently strong and distinctive, Many Many Women is a 20th century masterpiece. – Christian Wolff, 2022
Many Many Women is an enormously demanding composition... dedication, stamina and concentration of the performers is astounding. The music has an ingenuous effect on the listener...Like watching a river, a sea surf, a fire or the swaying of treetops... – Jan Borek, Harmonie magazine, Prague, July, 2022
About the Artists:
Although as a composer, Petr Kotik is regarded as self-taught, he undertook rigorous musical training, studying the flute at the Prague Conservatory and taking private composition lessons with Jan Rychlík, followed by composition studies at the Akademie für Musik in Vienna. Rychlík has been a source of inspiration and admiration for Kotik throughout his life (similar to Philip Glass's admiration for Nadia Boulanger). Rychlík's work and ideas were far ahead of his time. In the late 1950s, he began to work with phase music based on African drumming, similar to Steve Reich's compositions more than a decade later. Rychlík's early beginnings as a jazz player as well as his scholarly research into music practice led him to understand and appreciate the significance of improvisation, almost half a century before it became part of the avant-garde. It is possible that the unconventional openness of Rychlík, together with the writings of Cage, which Kotik discovered at the age of eighteen, may have influenced the composer's way of thinking at this very early stage.
Born in Berlin (East) in 1960, Jo Fabian is an author, director, stage designer, and choreographer. He is the founder and artistic director of the theatre group known today as DEPARTMENT/fabian.dept. Since 1987, Jo Fabian has created more than 40 stage productions for theaters throughout Germany. In 1989 he worked closely with the Bauhaus in Dessau and founded the independent project group ›example dept.‹ that worked under his direction for six years. His unusual theater of images suspends the borderlines between theater, dance, performance, concerts and installation and typically combines polished artificial aesthetics with precision and subtle irony.
SEM is dedicated to the performance and advancement of new music, with a focus on current compositions. Since its inception in 1970, SEM has collaborated with composers who have also often performed with the group. They have included Earle Brown, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Morton Fedman, Alvin Singleton, Leroy Jenkins, Pauline Oliveros, Elliott Sharp, Jackson Mac Low, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, David Tudor and Christian Wolff, among others.
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