sfSound Summer Festival

Posted by on May 20, 2016 in Past Performances | 0 comments

JULY 8 – 10, 2016
Gray Area Grand Theater
2665 Mission Street
San Francisco

sfSound presents sfSoundFestival: a three-concert celebration of 20th and 21st century music covering a wide range of graphical notation performed by some of the best interpreters of such music in the Bay Area. Unlike most music in the classical tradition, works with extended notational elements often require performers to decide aspects of the music usually left to the composer.

This year the festival pays tribute to Pierre Boulez, who passed away in January, with two large works for soloists – one for violin with electronics and one for clarinet with chamber orchestra. Both pieces include aleatoric elements where the performers select certain aspects of the music to play from an array of given choices.

From the American experimental tradition, we feature two composers from the New York School: rarely heard box-notation works for large ensemble by Morton Feldman and graphical and modular pieces by Earle Brown.  Also included are compositions that continue (and pre-date) the American and European traditions from the 1950s to the present day with influences from Jazz, Electronic Music, Indie-Pop, Modern Art, and Psychoacoustics: pieces by Kyle Bruckmann, John Cage, Matt Ingalls, Pauline Oliveros, and improvisations by sfSoundGroup.

Joshua Kosman’s preview in San Francisco Chronicle

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