Éliane Radigue: Music for percussion and trumpet
Éliane Radigue: Music for percussion and trumpet
Featuring performances of Occam X (for solo trumpet) and Occam XXVI (for bowed cymbals) plus the Boston premiere of a new Occam River duo.
Performed by Enrico Malatesta and Nate Wooley
Friday, December 1, 2023 at 8pm
The Foundry
STEAM set performance space
101 Rogers Street
Cambridge, Mass
Music at 8pm
Admission: $18 / $12 for members and students (suggested donation)
Non-Event is pleased to present a rare Boston concert of music by the celebrated French composer Éliane Radigue by two champions of her music.
Enrico Malatesta is the only performer of Radigue’s piece for solo percussion, the spectrally wild Occam XXVI for bowed cymbals. Although one of the last of Radigue’s chevaliers, as she calls those who have collaborated on her solo music, Enrico has been one of the most fervent and in-demand performers of her music, collaborating with Nate Wooley and others on larger pieces in Europe during celebrations of Radigue’s ninetieth birthday year. Enrico’s performance in Cambridge will be the second US performance of Occam XXVI.
Nate Wooley has been performing Radigue’s music for a decade. Since 2014, he has performed her music dozens of times, most recently curating a concert of her music at the Big Ears Festival in Tennessee. He is also the author and editor of an issue of his journal, Sound American, devoted to Éliane Radigue, which came out in 2021 and featured ten interviews with some of Radigue’s closest partners in the making of Occam Ocean. He will perform Occam X for trumpet.
Together, the duo will premiere a new Occam River for percussion and trumpet.
About the artists
Éliane Radigue (b. 1932) is a pioneering French composer of undulating continuous music marked by patient, virtually imperceptible transformations that purposefully unfold to reveal the intangible, radiant contents of minimal sound — its partials, harmonics, subharmonics and inherent distortions. As a student of, and assistant to musique concrète pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the 1950s and 1960s, Radigue mastered tape splicing techniques, but preferred the creation of fluid, delicately balanced feedback works to the spasmodic dissonance of her teachers’ music. Finding peers among minimalist composers in America, Radigue began working with synthesis in 1970, eventually discovering the ARP 2500 synthesizer, which she would use exclusively for her celebrated electronic works to come. In 2004 she abandoned electronics for acoustic composition.
Occam Ocean is an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces composed by Radigue for individual instrumentalists in which each performer's personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. The “knights of the Occam,” as Radigue refers to the performers participating in the project, are therefore musicians who have developed individualistic, creative approaches to their instruments; and the resulting compositions are not transferable to other performers on that instrument. Citing the ocean as a calming antidote to the overwhelming nature of our vibratory wave-filled surroundings, Radigue has named the tributary components of her Occam series with the image of fluid water in mind. Solo pieces are Occams, duo pieces Rivers, and larger ensemble pieces Deltas.
Enrico Malatesta is an Italian percussionist and sound researcher active in the field of experimental music, sound intervention and performance; his practice explores the relations between sound, space and body, the vitality of materials and the morphology of surfaces, with particular attention to the percussive acts and the modes of listening. Since 2007 Enrico has been presenting his works with tours all over Europe, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, UK, North America and Russia, participating in festivals and special events in venues such as Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milano, Berghain in Berlin, and MAM in Rio de Janeiro.
Nate Wooley made his debut as soloist with the New York Philharmonic at the opening series of their 2019 season. Considered one of the leading lights of the American movement to redefine the physical boundaries of the horn, Wooley has been gathering international acclaim for his idiosyncratic trumpet language. He has performed with and played music by Anthony Braxton, Eliane Radigue, Annea Lockwood, Ken Vandermark, Evan Parker, and Yoshi Wada. He has premiered works for trumpet by Christian Wolff, Michael Pisaro, Annea Lockwood, Ash Fure, Wadada Leo Smith, Sarah Hennies, Martin Arnold, and Eva-Maria Houben. He is a 2022 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow and is the 2023 composer-in-residence at Mills College in Oakland, California.
