Spontaneous Music by Performer-Composers from The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts

A trio of performer-composers from The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts will present an evening of improvisatory music at the San Francisco Center for New Music on Saturday, December 6, 2014, 8 PM. Michael Jon Fink, Ulrich Krieger, and David Rosenboom, with Joshua Carro and Derek Stein, will explore timbral possibilities and systems of evolution and transformation through both scored and spontaneous music. This performance celebrates a new affiliation joining San Francisco’s Center for New Music with CalArts in our mutual mission to provide supportive homes and platforms for experimentation and new forms emerging in music and its allied arts. We are delighted to add fuel to each other’s efforts and offer links connecting our communities.
Ulrich Krieger will present a portion of his work RAW, which combines elaborate sound production techniques from the world of contemporary classical music with the aggression of German free improvisation. Accompanied on drums by Joshua Carro, the duo explores the uncharted territories between ambient noise, drone music, extreme metal, avant-doom, glitch electronica, improvisation, and extended playing techniques. The evening will continue with the self-described power trio Spectral Dawn Spirits, comprising Michael Jon Fink, electric guitar; Derek Stein, electric bass; and Joshua Carro, drums/percussion. Influenced by various types of American vernacular music, the members of Spectral Dawn Spirits create post-psychedelic instrumental music ranging from sustained ambience to pulsing dynamism. David Rosenboom (electronics, algorithmic instruments, piano) will present The Right Measure of Opposites, which originated in a twelve-part, concert-length work for piano. This piece illuminates ways in which the work’s musical DNA—expressed in the contours of melody, rhythm, timbre, and dynamics—might be transformed via real-time, algorithmic procedures residing in the performer’s instrument. These means of transformation are extended further via electronic sounds, and the interpretation of the score is opened to enable free interactions with these sounds. As a result, continuously transforming musical contours intertwine in a system of counterpoint that links musical shapes up and down a holarchy of forms, from tiny details in individual sounds to larger shapes in the complete performance. The evening will come to a conclusion with a group improvisation with all of the performers.