Standing Wave & Barking Sphinx
in collaboration with Random Elements:
A Celebration of Iannis Xenakis presents
STANDING WAVE & TALKING PICTURES
in
XENAKINESIS!
Sunday, October 23, 8pm
Scotiabank Dance Centre, 677 Davie Street (at Granville)
$20.00 general / $15.00 students & seniors
Tickets: www.ticketstonight.ca or by phone 604.684.2787 or at the door
For more info: www.standingwave.ca, www.barkingsphinx.com or phone 604.683.8240
Christie Reside, flute ♦ A-K Coope, clarinet ♦ Rebecca Whitling, violin
Peggy Lee, cello ♦ Allen Stiles, piano ♦ Vern Griffiths, percussion
Ron Samworth, guitar ♦ Dylan van der Schyff, drums
Special Guests: Reg Quiring, viola and John Korsrud, trumpet
On Sunday, October 23, Standing Wave, Vancouver’s leading contemporary chamber ensemble, and Talking Pictures, Vancouver’s cutting edge improvising ensemble, join forces for an evening of extreme music creation. The program will feature Iannis Xenakis’ classic chamber works Ikhoor, and Plekto, bookended by improvisatory explorations as well as premieres of new works by John Korsrud and Peggy Lee for the combined Talking Pictures and Standing Wave ensemble.
Ten years have passed since the death of Iannis Xenakis, (1922-2001) the Romanian-born, Greek composer who was arguably the most influential iconoclast of 20th Century Western music. During his lifetime Xenakis was an architect, a mathematician, a scholar of philosophy, Greek Classicism, atomic physics, and computer science, and a political exile, all of which informed his work as a composer.
Xenakinesis! is Standing Wave’s tribute to this musical revolutionary. Three works of Xenakis on the program, the unremittingly intense Ikhoor (1978), the gamelan-inspired Oophaa, and Plekto (1993), with its gestures jabbing out from a dense core of sound, exemplify what the Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote about Xenakis’ music in his 1981 essay “The Prophet of Insensibility”: “…a mass of sound which does not rise from the human heart, but which approaches us from the outside, like raindrops or the voice of wind.”
Taking Xenakis’ music and ideas as a point of departure, internationally acclaimed Vancouverites John Korsrud and Peggy Lee will compose works for the combined forces of Standing Wave and Talking Pictures which we will premiere on this concert. Improvised creations of members of both ensembles will round out the concert.
“Once again, Standing Wave presented a varied and stimulating program,
played as ever, with lashings of intelligence and heart.”
– The Georgia Straight
