Pianist Adam Tendler has led a colorful career, from a 50-state grassroots recital tour of American piano music (88x50), to realizing the feat of performing modern works from memory, like John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, and here for this event, Feldman’s Palais de Mari. A professor of Sound and Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute, Robert Snyder is the author of Music and Memory (MIT Press). A pianist and composer, Andy Costello is the founder and executive director of the Morton Feldman Chamber Players.
Andy Costello will begin the event with a performance of Trivia Surreal (2013) by Keith Kusterer.
The Morton Feldman Chamber Players, in partnership with Experimental Sound Studio, and with support from the Amphion Foundation, are hosting this free event.
The discussion portion of the event warmly welcomes audience participation.
Saturday, October 22
Doors at 7:30 / Music at 8pm
FREE ADMISSION
About the performers & panelists
Andy Costello is “a precise, engaged, welcoming performer unafraid of deep ambiguities” (Chicago Reader) … “a thoughtful and adventurous artist” (Boston Musical Intelligencer) … “completely unique to the Montreal scene and perhaps the world over” (Innovations en Concert). He has previously served as a visiting artist for the composition department at The Boston Conservatory (2013-2014 academic year), and as a guest artist at Time Forms / Formes Temporelles (2013), Columbia College Chicago (2012-2013), Laboratoire de Musique Contemporaine de Montréal (2012), and Scotia Chamber Music Festival (2011). Andy is currently on the piano faculty of New Music School in Chicago. In Spring 2014, Andy founded the Morton Feldman Chamber Players (MFCP), a non-profit organization devoted to programming the solo and chamber works of Morton Feldman in the United States and Canada.
Bob Snyder was born in Kalamazoo Michigan in 1946. For high school, he attended the Interlochen Arts Academy, where he played bass clarinet in the national touring orchestra. In college, while still an undergraduate he had an electronic music composition selected for performance in the International Gaudeamus Foundation composition competition in the Netherlands. In the 1970’s and 80s, he produced a number of video compositions with electronic music, which were presented in two Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1981 & ‘83), and acquired for permanent collections by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New York Public library, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. More recently (2005, 2013), he has had electronic music compositions installed in the Lincoln park conservatory in Chicago. He has published a book with the MIT press, Music and Memory, (which has also been published in Japanese) and written the chapter on memory for several editions of the Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology.
Adam Tendler has been called "an exuberantly expressive pianist" who "vividly displayed his enthusiasm for every phrase" by The Los Angeles Times, an “intrepid ... outstanding ... maverick pianist” by The New Yorker, a "modern-music evangelist" by Time Out New York, and a pianist who "has managed to get behind and underneath the notes, living inside the music and making poetic sense of it all," by The Baltimore Sun, which continued, "if they gave medals for musical bravery, dexterity and perseverance, Adam Tendler would earn them all." New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini reported that Tendler played an outdoor performance of John Cage's music "captivatingly," and that "the wondrously subdued sounds silenced many, who listened closely even as street bustle and chirping birds blended in." London critic Frances Wilson described Tendler's memorized performance of Morton Feldman's Palais de Mari at St. John’s Smith Square as "a concentrated listening experience...meditative, intense and beautifully poised." Tendler has performed solo recitals in all fifty United States, including engagements at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, National Sawdust, Le Poisson Rouge, Columbia University, Bard College, Princeton University, New York University, Bennington College, Kenyon College, Boston Conservatory, San Francisco Conservatory, Portland State University (Oregon), University of Nebraska, Indiana University, University of Alaska and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, Peabody Conservatory as well as artistic landmarks like Rothko Chapel, The Maverick Concert Hall, Joe’s Pub, The Fisher Center at Bard College, Stonewall Inn, The Rubin Museum, and James Turrell's Skypace in Sarasota Florida, its first musical performer. The music publisher C.F. Peters, recently featured Tendler performing and speaking about John Cage's in their premiere app, TiDo, making Tendler the first artist to record Cage's music for a digital score-reading platform. Tendler’s own memoir, 88x50, about his grassroots fifty-state recital tour, was a 2014 Kirkus Indie Book of the Month and Lambda Literary Award Nominee. 2015 saw the release of his premiere recording of Edward T. Cone’s 21 Little Preludes for piano on the Ebb & Flow label. Tendler lives in New York City and serves on the faculty of Third Street Music School Settlement, the country’s first community music school.