Robert Gerard Pietrusko | John Mallia – Non-Event At Home: Program 28
ROBERT GERARD PIETRUSKO + JOHN MALLIA
Non-Event At Home: Program 28
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
ROBERT GERARD PIETRUSKO
a/v premiere | YouTube
YouTube Link
30 minute performance with subsequent real-time video mix using custom software.
premiere: 8pm
Cadence pt.1 15'43"
Pershing Red Skies 07'39"
Cadence pt.2 05'38"
«Cadence» (2020) explores the foundational role of cadence in tonal music. The piece unpacks a five note piano cadence—synchronically and diachronically—in microtonal detail. Part two returns to the cadence at a vastly different time scale and explodes its timbre through non-linear wave-shaping.
«Pershing Red Skies» (2019) is an extrapolation on a piano motif recorded in the Winter of 2019. The piece was inspired by the atmosphere of Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, about the end of the Soviet system and the contradictions felt by the Soviet citizens.
JOHN MALLIA
(audio/Bandcamp)
Vestige: Study for illapse (2020)
In this study, a noise-veiled chord progression with slowly oscillating trills is grafted onto the upper harmonic structure of a ‘hidden’ chorale melody that lies below the lower limit of audible frequency. The majority of recorded sounds utilized in Vestige were produced by bowing string instruments (guitars, mandolin, banjo, phonoharp, and e-bowed dulcimer). Noise and artifacts resulting from bowing with unstable materials pervades the composition. Sustained tones from the reeds of a pump organ are also present. All recordings were made by the composer and carefully re-tuned to match the construct of the hidden model.
About the artists
ROBERT GERARD PIETRUSKO is a designer and composer based in Somerville, MA. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris and has been exhibited in more than 15 countries at venues such as MoMA, Akademie der Künste, Palais de Tokyo, and the Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2019, Pietrusko was the Wilder Green Architecture Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Previous residencies include UPIC/CCMIX (2000), EMPAC (2011), and ZKM (2011). His most recent album «Six Microphones» was released on LINE imprint in 2019. Pietrusko is currently an associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University, and a visiting faculty member at the Strelka Institute in Moscow.
Robert requests that you show your support by donating to the Artists for Humanity Boston
JOHN MALLIA is a composer and educator living in Dedham, Massachusetts. His compositional process is informed by spatial constructs and concepts, and a fascination with presence, ritual, and the thresholds standing between states of existence or awareness. John directs the Robert Ceely Electronic Music Studio at the New England Conservatory where he is a member of the Composition faculty. He also teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
John requests that you show your support by donating to Autism Speaks.
