S.E.M. Ensemble to Present SOUND & WORDS at Willow Place Auditorium
Free program will feature countertenor Padraic Costello and tenor Nathan Fletcher at Willow Place Auditorium in Brooklyn.
The S.E.M. Ensemble is set to present SOUND & WORDS, an evening of music by Petr Kotik paired with literary texts, at Willow Place Auditorium in Brooklyn. The program will include MANY MANY WOMEN, set to text by Gertrude Stein, alongside the English-language premiere of CONCEPT AND GRAVITATION, drawing on writings by Margaret Mead, Petr Hruška, and R. Buckminster Fuller. Admission to the performance will be free.
The event will take place Wednesday, August 26 at 6:00pm at Willow Place Auditorium, 26 Willow Place, Brooklyn.
The Texts
Gertrude Stein: “She is forgetting anything. This is not a disturbing thing, this is not a distressing thing, this is not an important thing. She is forgetting anything and she is remembering that thing, she is remembering that she is forgetting anything.”
Margaret Mead: “They are like the immigrants who came as pioneers to a new land, lacking all knowledge of what demands the new conditions of life would make upon them. Those who came later could take their peer groups as models. But among the first comers, the young adults had as models only their own tentative adaptations and innovations. Their past, the culture that had shaped their understanding – their thoughts, their feelings, and their conceptions of the world – was no sure guide to the present. And the elders among them, bound to the past, could provide no models for the future.
Today, everyone born and bred, say after nineteen eighty, is such an immigrant, in time – as his forebears were in space – struggling to grapple with the unfamiliar conditions of life in a new era. Like all immigrants and pioneers, these immigrants in time are the bearers of older cultures. The difference today is that they represent all the cultures of the world. And all of them, whether they are sophisticated French intellectuals or members of a remote New Guinea tribe, land-bound peasants in Haiti or nuclear physicists, they have certain characteristics in common.”
Petr Hruška:
Good to know:
For a knife, you get fruit.
For a doorbell, you get ginger,
For a piece of copper wire, a bowl of cloves,
For a red hat, you get a furious bull.
For a fishing rod, there is a basket of yams,
Which,
Toward the evening,
Two women will bring.
In the morning, they'll take it back.
Even,
For a small string, you'll get six hens
For a pair of scissors, seven.
For a comb, a fish,
For a sheet of paper –
No writings on it,
you'll see a dance.
For shooting at the stars
Is night.
(English translation by Petr Kotik)
R. Buckminster Fuller: “The artist is right all the time. Nature is conceptual. This is the difference between visibility and invisibility. The invisible does not mean nonconceptual. Conceptuality is independent of visibility or invisibility. You can have conceptuality, or an understanding of the principles, independent of size, which makes it possible to conceive of events as they occur at great magnitudes or small as atoms. Conceptuality operates experimentally, independent of size. Size alone can come to zero, not conceptuality.
The scientific word for the integral of all the special case realizations of gravity is love.
Love is the integral of gravity and radiation. Energy as either radiation or matter is the sum frequency, local-in-Universe, aberrational palpitation of comprehensive gravity embracement. Energy manifests itself as the palpitating, gravity- tolerated, aberrational pulsings-through of the plurality of exact centers of pure principles. This plurality of principles, being inherently different one from the other, have ever-varying interdomain proximities that produce varying push-pulls of the plurality of generalized principles influencing the locally-tuned-in event, which proximity variations depend on which set of principles are most informationally relevant in comprehending both the local and cosmic significance of any given local experience event.”
About the Performers
Since its inception in 1970, the S.E.M. Ensemble has been following the direction in music that was started by the composers of the New York School, who departed definitively from post-romanticism and its imitators. Not following a particular agenda, SEM presents music that is authentic in its expression and which does not pander to the conservative tastes of mainstream audiences. No other American ensemble presents programs that come close to what S.E.M. Ensemble performs.
S.E.M. Ensemble performances are possible thanks to the support of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, as well as individual donations: Noni Pratt, Thomas Buckner, Stephen Deutsch, Rotraut Moquay, Daniel Costello, Beth Greenberg and James Wright, Catherine Bandet, Victoria Newhouse, Steven Holl, Renée Levine Packer, and an anonymous donor. Many thanks to the following supporters: Dexter Dine, Bruno Ferrandis, Stephanie Griffin, Lawrence Kim, Mary Elizabeth Pratt, Ben Richter, and Gary VanderPutten.
The S.E.M. Ensemble would also like to thank past major supporters in memoriam – Virginia Dwan, John Cage, Herman Gersten, Sheldon Berlow, and Robert Rauschenberg.
S.E.M. Ensemble Board of Directors: Noni Pratt, Lucas Cooper, Renáta Spisarová, Samuel Boston, Thomas Buckner, Dexter Dine, Petr Kotik, and Renée Levine.
The performance will bring together Petr Kotik on flute and direction with countertenor Padraic Costello, tenor Nathan Fletcher, trumpeter Sam Jones, and trombonist William Lang, continuing the S.E.M. Ensemble's ongoing presentation of works pairing spoken text with contemporary composition.
Photo Credit: Blaise Tobia
Photo Credit: Blaise Tobia
