September 8, 2020 at 1pm CT
THE ARROW OF TIME a stream from Amsterdam curated by Reinier van Houdt
Featuring works by Anne La Berge, Jordan Dykstra, and Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman.
Is music destined to be an extension of the contingent universe we think we live in, where everything seems open and matter finite? Or are there small arrows of time flowing only in one direction, from order to randomness, from past to future, pointing towards an infinitely slow entropy? As little signs of expanding consciousness?
We encourage you to listen for these in the pieces of this stream:
Anne La Berge (US/NL): Just Before The Rain (2017) (for ensemble and electronics) 8 min
Jordan Dykstra (US): The Arrow Of Time (2019) (for piano, siren and tape) 22 min
Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman (RW/BE): Organo (2018) (for voice and two bass clarinets) 30 min
Program Notes:
Anne La Berge's Just Before The Rain is a modern day Amsterdam reflection on the poem "Just Before a Thunder Shower'' by James Wright, who was inspired by the Chinese poet Li Po. "James Wright believed that the tenderness for places and living creatures in Chinese poetry could save us from the
corruptions in modern day life. I too believe that the sensibilities we practice by taking time to listen and reflect keep us awake and make us wiser"
The electronic soundscape was created using the Kyma System and are variations of filtered noise and sine tones on pitches that wander in and out of a gently modulating just intonation.
Just Before The Rain is dedicated to David Dunn.
Jordan Dykstra's The Arrow Of Time is a kind of companion piece to Walter Marchetti's Per La Mano Sinistra. Where in Marchetti's piece the pianist holds an umbrella in the left hand, here in Dykstra's piece the pianist cranks a siren with his right hand; where in Marchetti's music death and decay is bypassed by absurdity, Dykstra's Arrow Of Time seems to point towards a future past the anthropocene. Evolving from mere unpitched almost pulsing noise to clear sounding siren pitches the piece comes to a long standstill halfway where the clock is ticking, a drone is pulsing and field recordings go by. Then in the 'wildernis'-finale with howling sirens the piece seems to go into a maximum entropy evaporating towards the end.
Aurelie Nyirabikali Lierman's ORGANO was developed with her eponymous trio. It is a composition that has slowly evolved out of the personal improvisation praxis of the three trio members. The possibility of three arrows pointing to something irreversible.
Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman was born in Rwanda but grew up in Belgium from the age of two. She’s an independent radio producer, vocalist and composer trying new directions by fusing radio art, vocal art and composition. Her main focus is her personal field recordings: a large collection of unique sounds and soundscapes from rural and urban contemporary East‐Africa. Sound‐bit by sound‐bit she’s transforming and sculpting them into something she would call “Afrique Concrète”. Lierman’s work has been broadcasted, exhibited and performed throughout Europe, Israel, Morocco, South Africa, Tanzania, Australia, Canada and USA. Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman was awarded a DAAD Fellowship in 2020 and a Sally & Don Lucas Fellowship in 2015. She won the Sonic Art prize in Rome, the Monophonic 1st Prize in Brussels 2014 for her radiowork Anosmia about the Rwandan genocide and the Berlin CTM RadioLab award in 2018, Lierman released two albums with the British cult-group Nurse With Wound.
Jordan Dykstra is a Brooklyn-based violist and composer exploring the performer-composer-listener relationship through the incorporation of conceptual, graphic, and text-based elements. Aside from performing and recording with individuals and bands — including Dirty Projectors, Valet, Atlas Sound, and A Winged Victory for the Sullen — he worked at Marriage Records and Publishing House. He studied with Daníel Bjarnason, Michael Pisaro, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, as well as Alvin Lucier and astrophysicist Seth Redfield — his thesis explored connections between microtonality and the cosmic distance ladder. His compositions for film have been heard at Cannes, Sundance, TriBeCa, TIFF, and the IFFR. His performance highlights include MOCA (CA), Harpa (Iceland), Musikfestval Bern (Switzerland), Ftarri (Tokyo), CHAFF (Brussels), Echo Bücher (Berlin), Syros Institute (Greece), Yale Union (OR), Big Ears Festival (TN), and the RISD Museum (RI). Recordings of his music (solo and collaborative) have been issued by Domino, Milan, Marriage, Mexican Summer, K, Gilgongo, and Dykstra’s own cottage industry label Editions Verde.
Anne La Berge is an American/Dutch composer whose passion for the extremes in both composed and improvised music has led her to storytelling and sound art as her sources of musical inspiration. Her music gathers the elements on which her reputation is based: ferocious and far-reaching virtuosity, microtonal textures and melodies, and her unique array of percussive flute techniques, all combined with interactive electronic processing and text.
She performs regularly as a soloist, with the ensemble MAZE and with her husband David Dramm. She is a founding artist of Splendor Amsterdam, a bath house turned into a cultural mecca, and together Steve Heather and Cor Fuhler, she founded Kraakgeluiden, a improvisation series based in Amsterdam, exploring combinations of acoustic and electronic instruments using real-time interactive performance systems. La Berge’s own music has evolved in parallel, and the flute has become only one element in a sound world that includes computer samples, the use of spoken text and electronic processing.
"La Berge is a precursor of some of the important things contemporary composition has now come to mean" The Wire
Reinier van Houdt is a musician/composer who developed a fascination for matters that escape notation: sound, timing, space, physicality, memory, noise, environment - points beyond composition, interpretation and improvisation. He has built himself an unusual repertoire that consistently resulted from personal quests; from collaborations, from research in archives, from the composing and staging of music-performances, from unorthodox studies of classical music, and from endless tape recordings he made since the eighties. Aside from his own music he premiered music by Robert Ashley, Maria de Alvear, Alvin Curran, Kaikhosru Sorabji, Nomi Epstein, Francisco López, Christian Marclay, Charlemagne Palestine, Okkyung Lee, Yannis Kyriakides, Jerry Hunt, Michael Pisaro, Walter Marchetti, Jürg Frey. He has also worked with Annea Lockwood, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Luc Ferrari, Peter Ablinger. Reinier van Houdt plays in David Tibet's legendary outsider collective Current 93. He is also one of the forces behind the experimental music outfit MAZE. He won an award at Ars Electronica Linz 2012 with Francisco López, the Prix Europe 2015 with Berlin's Andcompany&Co and the first prize at Videoex 2019 with 'concrète' film maker Takashi Makino.