Commemorating the 100th anniversary of celebrated choreographer Merce Cunningham’s birth, as well as his long and prolific partnership with California composer John CAGE, we feature the brilliantly unconventional Concert for Piano and Orchestra, a work composed by Cage and adapted for Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s use in a performance of Cunningham’s Antic Meet. Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival founder and director Antoine HUNTER joins us in performance with a riveting original choreography to complement the piece. Composers Gloria JUSTEN, David COLL, Henry COWELL, and Anna CLYNE round out the program in an exploration of auditory, visual, and dance elements.
In keeping with our mission of encouraging and mentoring the next generation of contemporary music musicians, San Francisco Conservatory of Music students join us as part of SFCMP’s education and professional development programs.
Program
*Gloria Justen, "Flowing-Turning Dance from Sonaquifer Suite" (2015) [5’]
Hannah Addario-Berry, solo cello
*David Coll, "Caldera" (2016) [8’] (WCP)
Jeff Anderle, bass clarinet; Haruka Fujii, marimba
*Henry Cowell, "Mosaic Quartet (String Quartet No. 3)" (1935) [c. 16’]
Roy Malan, Susan Freier, violins; Meena Bhasin, viola; Stephen Harrison, cello
Anna Clyne, "Steelworks" (2006) [15’]
Tod Brody, flute/piccolo; Jeff Anderle, bass clarinet; Haruka Fujii, percussion
John Cage, "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" (1958) [c. 20-25’]
Antoine Hunter, dancer.
Kate Campbell, solo piano; Tod Brody, piccolo/flute/alto flute; **Liam Jeremy Chua, flute; Peter Josheff, clarinet; **Ivan Ferguson, clarinet; Shawn Jones, bassoon; **Shelby Capozzoli, bassoon; Brad Hogarth, trumpet; Hrabba Atladottir, violin; Roy Malan, violin; Meena Bhasin, viola; Hannah Addario-Berry, cello; **Abigail Monroe, cello; Richard Worn, double bass
**SFCM students
Key:
*California composer, (C) SFCMP Commission World Premiere (WP),
US Premiere (USP), West Coast Premiere (WCP)
Notes
For much of their creative lives, the relationship between Merce Cunningham and John Cage, along with a cadre of like-minded composer-performers, defined a new approach to the synergy of music and movement. Rooted in concepts of chance and independence of elements, their numerous projects and experiments changed the way that kinetic interplay could be conceived in both musical and physical terms. The accompaniment for a Cunningham dance piece entitled Antic Meet, Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra was among the first pieces of music to be imagined along the lines of completely flexible instrumentation and ordering of materials: in it, the conductor functions as a kind of chronometer, while the performers determine the pace and order at which to execute a series of preordained musical gestures, each comprising more than 80 different styles of playing. The relation of the piano to the rest of the ensemble reframes the traditional concept of a concerto, while the work in general challenges concepts of simultaneity and organization. Along the same lines, Henry Cowell’s earlier Mosaic Quartet offers a degree of structural freedom in which the players must determine the order of the work’s numerous brief movements - literally a series of moveable parts in the overall design. Bay Area residents Gloria Justen’s Sonaquifer and David Coll’s Caldera render the physical makeup of the instruments at hand moveable and changeable, using preparations and scordatura technique to alter their sonic properties to unique musical ends. Finally, Anna Clyne’s Steelworks fuses samples of recorded text from interviews with employees at Brooklyn’s Flame Cut Steel - an industrial engine for the chemical and physical alteration of substances - with a film created to interact with and respond to the various physical and acoustical shifts in the music. Circling back to the efforts of Cage and Cunningham, the piece has choreographic roots in its adaption for performance by the company BalletX, as inspired by the music’s inherent kinetic nature.
Read more about the Cage/Cunningham story via The Washington Post
About Antoine Hunter
A Bay Area native, Antoine Hunter is an award-winning internationally known African-American Deaf choreographer, dancer, instructor, speaker and Deaf advocate who has performed throughout the Bay Area and the world including Europe, Africa, Russia, and South America. Recently, Hunter has taught workshops at Harvard Dance, spoke for TedX and UCDavisSF, and has lectured at Duke University and Stanford. He has been the keynote speaker for WAC Educator Conference, Kennedy Center’s VSA 2017 Intersection conference on Arts and Special Education, and for the National State Assembly for the Arts. He has been featured on the front cover of Cal Art's The Pool, Deaf Life, in Dance Spirit, Dance Teacher, Dance Magazine and in articles published by Oakland North, 48Hills, CNN's Great Big Story, Splinter and KQED Arts. He is former president of Bay Area Black Deaf Advocates and Director-at-Large for Northern California Association of the Deaf. Mr Hunter actively supports DeafHope, an organization whose mission is to end domestic and sexual violence in Deaf communities through empowerment and education. He teaches dance and ASL in both Hearing and Deaf communities and is the founder/artistic director of Urban Jazz Dance Company and has been producing the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival since 2013 which has been awarded an Isadora Duncan (Izzie) Award in 2018. His projects have been awarded funding by CA$H Theater Bay Area, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, California Arts Council and SF Arts Commission. Mr Hunter is on the board of directors of Dance/USA and has received the 2019 national Dance/USA fellowship award and the 2018 inaugural Jeanette Lomujo Bremond Award for Humanity in the Arts by Hālau Ku Ua Tuahine.