Comprovisation Concert
Etienne Rolin, – Bansuri Flute, Basset Horn, Glissotar
with invited guests
Daniel Fishkin & Cleek Schrey, The Daxophone Consort
September 16, 2023 at 7:30 pm
Artistic Directors
Linda Marcel and Etienne Rolin
Composers
Etienne Rolin, France / United States
Linda Marcel, United States
Sandro Montalto, Italy
Philippe Laval, France
Brian Abbott, Canada
Amaëlle Broussard, France
Malcolm Singer, United Kingdom
Efe Yuksel, Turkey
Jean Patrick Besingrand, France / United States
Jean Michel Rivet, France
PROGRAM
Etienne Rolin Worldwinds* Bansuri flute and
electronics 6’
Linda Marcel Merging Bansuri flute and electronics 7’
Etienne Rolin Erolgraphic Trio Bansuri flute and
Daxophone Consort 3’
Etienne Rolin Midtown Medley * Basset horn 6’
Etienne Rolin Erolgrahic Trio 2 Basset horn and
Daxophone Consort 4’
Brian Abbott Big Crunch glissotar solo 2’
Amaëlle Broussard 14th street loop* 3’
Philippe Laval Let me Breazzz Pleazz glissotar solo
3’30”
Malcolm Singer Time for More Questions for glissotar
and electronics 3’
Sandro Montalto Blue Stone* glissotar solo 5’30”
Etienne Rolin Erolgraphic 3 glissotar and Daxophone
Consort 3’
Jean Patrick
Besingrand Frenzy, Half Tone/Fulton * 3’
Efe Yuksel Soar for Glissotar solo 4’
Jean Michel Rivet Variations pour une porte et un délire*
glissotar and electronics 5'
Etienne Rolin Variants for Varèse glissotar and
electronics 5’
* World premiere
Biographies
Brian Abbott is a Toronto based composer, improvisor, and guitarist. He writes music influenced by a multitude of styles such as, contemporary classical, free improvisation, punk, minimalism, microtonality, and various world music. He holds an MA in Music Composition from York University. In 2014 he organized a 14-hour performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations” for a 20-piece ensemble. He has written for solo instruments, improvisors, chamber ensembles, big bands, electronics, jazz groups, and rock bands and had compositions premiered in Toronto, Kitchener, Guelph, Montreal, Boston, New York, Portugal, and Budapest. Recently he has been writing microtonal music using Just Intonation. He also creates “compositions in the moment” using the sound painting conducting language. Abbott is also an active guitarist in the Toronto music scene. In early 2023 his album, A Loose Grip on Reality, an album of microtonal music purposely unplayable by human beings, was released on Redshift Records.
Jean-Patrick Besingrand’s music plays on tone colors and explores different conceptions of temporality and silence.
His music has been performed by ensembles such as Court-Circuit, Dal Niente, Mivos Quartet, JACK Quartet, Linéa, Platypus, Mise-En, Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, Moscow Contemporary Ensemble, and by soloists such as Pierre Dutrieu, Carla Rees, Geoffrey Deibel and Yumi Suehiro among others.
Currently Jean-Patrick is a PhD candidate in composition at The Graduate Center, CUNY under Professor Jason Eckardt.He serves as Co-Artistic Director and co-founder of Composers’ Collective Tesselate.
https://jeanpatrickbesingrand.com/
Amaëlle Broussard was born in France in 1977 and lives in Bordeaux. Her encounters and experience as a saxophonist, sound painter and performer directed her to study composition and electronic music with Jean-Louis Agobet.
Daniel Fishkin’sears are ringing. He has performed as a soloist on modular synthesizer with the American Symphony Orchestra, developed sound installations in abandoned concert halls, and played innumerable basement punk shows. Daniel’s lifework investigating the aesthetics of hearing damage has received international press (Nature Journal, 2014); as an ally in the search for a cure, he has been awarded the title of “tinnitus ambassador” by the Deutsche Tinnitus-Stiftung. He is the only luthier that studied with the daxophone’s inventor, Hans Reichel; Daniel’s instruments are now played by musicians all over the world. Daniel received his MA in Music Composition from Wesleyan University, and has taught at Bard College and the Cooper Union. He is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Virginia.
The Daxophone Consort(or simply, The Consort) is Daniel Fishkin, Cleek Schrey, and Ron Shalom. You, perhaps, already know that the daxophone is a thin wooden strip played with a bow, which was created by the German improviser/inventor Hans Reichel in 1987. The instrument’s sound, somewhere between a cello and badger, ranges from furtive gurgles and delicate whistles to wild screams. The Consort develops realizations of historical experimental music and baroque motets, commissions new daxophone pieces from living composers, and generates new pieces based on shared improvisational grammar.
Linda Marcel’s compositions have been performed internationally in: New York City, Moscow, Russia, Rome, Milan, numerous places in Italy, Potsdam and Hamburg Germany, Oxford England, Malaga and Seville Spain, Bordeaux, and Paris France. As a music professional who completed her doctorate in music from Columbia University, she is dedicated to the process of performing arts collaborations world-wide. She is an active adjunct faculty member at the University of Rome -Tor Vergata, Italy. Additionally, Linda is the director of International Arts Educators Forum, (IAEF) a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of contemporary music, multimedia and dance. IAEF has supported many performances in New York, Rome, and France. She is the Director of Development for the New York Composers Circle, and a member of the New York Women Composers. Her works support digital media, dance, electronic and acoustic music performance.
Sandro Montalto, was born in 1978. He has written a lot of music for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, orchestra, band and choir. Much of his music has been performed in Italy, Europe and the United States, some of it has also been published and recorded on CD. He has also made orchestrations and elaborations of works by great authors (for example the
entire "Pictures at an Exhibition" for brass band) and has written essays on musicology. He is also a writer and author of many books of poetry, prose, theatre, aphorisms and literary criticism, director of cultural magazines, contributor to newspapers and magazines.
Etienne Rolin (1952), A French American composer performer and visual artist has put together a program reflecting his love of instrumental research for woodwinds. His wide aesthetic range evokes Hindustani jazz and contemporary idioms including electronics.
He his honored by this chance to present a repertoire of world premieres by an international group of composers. The program reveals the New York début for the glissotar a keyless hybrid Hungarian woodwind invented by Dani Vaczi who was a recent winner of the Guthman Musical Instrument prize for new instruments.
Cleek Schreyis a fiddler, improviser, and composer from Virginia. He plays traditional music from Appalachia and Ireland and makes experimental work using composition, film, and field recordings. His work is preoccupied with the physical phenomena of vibrating strings and the histories and aesthetics of recording technologies. He collaborates with experimental composers such as David Behrman and Alvin Lucier and the downtown improviser Shelley Hirsch. Solo appearances include the Big Ears Festival (Knoxville), SuperSense Festival of the Ecstatic, Australia and the Kilkenny Arts Festival, Ireland.
Efe Yüksel(1999) is a composer, performer and electronic musician from İzmir/Turkey, currently based in London. His music has been performed by the Ligeti Quartet, EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble, Plus-Minus ensemble, violinist Mira Benjamin, clarinetist Heather Roche, pianist
Ben Smith and Guildhall sessions orchestra, among others. His compositional practice involves exploring the physical capabilities and limits of instruments and voices via close collaborations with performers and combining acoustic instruments with live electronic processing to create cyborg-like sonorities. Aside from composing, he is also active as an electronic musician and melodica/bass melodica player.
Program Notes
14th Street Loop by Amaëlle Broussard, was inspired by her souvenirs from a trip to New York. The music alternates between horizontality and verticality of lines and blocks of sound. The glissotar with its extreme dynamic range and rich timbre takes the listener on this acoustic promenade.
Big Crunch, composed by Brian Abbott, is an exercise in aleatoric microtonality, the glissotar, being the perfect instrument for such a technique. A melodic pattern is repeated over and over while the hands slowly shift into new positions. The effect is one of stasis but also slow change. Due to the instrumentalist relying on slowly moving hand spacing, instead of listening for the “correct” pitches, some unpredictable sonorities result. Microtones that don’t exist in any system can be stumbled upon and used. This is a technique the composer has also used on longer works for strings to startling and beautiful effect.
Blue Stone, composed by Sandro Montalto, and dedicated to the inventor Dániel Váczi, was written with the intention of take full advantage of the unique assets of the tool but also enhance his voice by skirting both the territories of ethnic music and those those of contemporary music, and also looking at those of the blues.
Frenzy, by Jean-Patrick Besingrand, was written in Capitol Heights in the beginning of the month of November 2020. The piece is inspired by the result of the 2020 US presidential election and the political turmoil after the announcement of the results. The piece is frenetic and develops violent gestures inspired by the insanity of the 45th American president’s Twitter feed.
Half-tone/Fulton is the second part of a diptych of pieces inspired by the political turmoil provoked by the announcement of the results of the 2020 US presidential election. The piece develops some of the gestures from the first piece. Nevertheless, these gestures are incomplete and distorted, like an attempt to twist the facts and create an alternative narrative. It is inspired by the insanity of the 45th American president's social media feeds.
Merging for flute and electronics by Linda Marcel premiered at the Accademia Filarmonica Romana on 29 June 2023. The collaborations on theme and Lisa Naugle’s dance choreography developed a work that asks for and allows for a floating freedom in time. The negligeable rhythms create a concept of merged fluid motion in time. The flutist performs a wind-scape of pitch and breath with many extended techniques that urges a forward motion without less attachment to perceivable melodies or meter.
Süzül (Soar) by Efe Yüksel
"In this piece, I tried to explore the expressive capabilities of the glissotar and its continuous pitch nature - conceptualizing it almost like a violin with a single string being played frantically."
The title in original is in Turkish.
The Glissotar
Join us for an event featuring the
unique, new instrument called the
glissotar. You can learn about this
award winning instrument at:
The daxophone
The Daxophone
Daniel Fishkin
Daniel Fishkin
The daxophone, invented by Hans Reichel, is an electric wooden experimental musical instrument of the friction idiophones category.
