EVENTS

ARCHIVE

 2018/19 SEASON

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SOUTHLAND ENSEMBLE x DOG STAR 15

LAND IMAGES
Friday June 14th, 8pm  Automata Arts

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A concert of text and graphic scores that directly engage with nature and earthly environments. Featuring the following compositions:

 

Kathryn Koopman - For the Beauty of the Earth 
Jack Langdon - Land Images 
Heather Lockie - 4 Dryads 
Christian Wolff - selections from Prose Collection - 

                 Sticks, Stones, Groundspace or Large Groundspace

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This concert is presented alongside the Dog Star Orchestra’s 15th annual festival of experimental music. We are thrilled to have many members of the Dog Star Orchestra join us for our performance of Wolff's iconic prose scores. 

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www.dogstarorchestra.com

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LA PHIL NOON TO MIDNIGHT 2019

ANTHONY BRAXTON : GHOST TRANCE MUSIC
Saturday June 1st, 10:15pm  BP HALL

 

Composition No. 23A

Composition No. 40

Composition No. 228

Composition No. 245

 

with special guests:

Joshua Gerowitz

Andrew Munsey

Stephanie Richards

William Roper

David Tranchina

Argenta Walther

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Southland Ensemble is thrilled to share a continued exploration of selections from Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music (first interpreted by the ensemble in 2017) as a part of this year’s Noon to Midnight. Conceived as a music that develops ritualistically over time, Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music uses a mixture of traditional and graphic notation interspersed with improvisation. Ghost Trance Music as a whole consists of individual numbered compositions that can be layered or performed individually. For this performance we will be using Composition No. 228 as a ‘foundation’ on which the other compositions are layered and built upon.

 

Anthony Braxton is recognized as one of the most important musicians, educators, and creative thinkers of the past 50 years, highly esteemed in the creative music community for the revolutionary quality of his work and for the mentorship and inspiration he has provided to generations of younger musicians. Drawing upon a disparate mix of influences from John Coltrane to Karlheinz Stockhausen to Native American music, Braxton has created a unique musical system that celebrates the concept of global creativity and our shared humanity. His work examines core principles of improvisation, structural navigation and ritual engagement—innovation, spirituality and intellectual investigation.

 

www.tricentricfoundation.org

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BALLAD OF THE STAR-EATER:MUSIC
THE MUSIC OF JOHANNA BEYER

Saturday April 6th, 8pm

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Southland Ensemble presents a concert honoring the work of pioneering turn-of-the-century composer Johanna Beyer:

String Quartet IV
String Quartet #2
Have Faith
Movement for Double Bass and Piano
Music of the Spheres
Movement for String Quartet
Ballad of the Star-Eater
Percussion Op. 14
The Federal Music Project

with special guests:
Stephanie Aston, Argenta Walther & Brian Walsh

Johanna Beyer (1888-1944) was a German-American composer and pianist. She died of Lou Gehrig's disease and the majority of her work would have been forgotten were it not for the endeavors of composers and performers, notably Frog Peak, who brought her music back to life, as it were, through research and volunteer score copying.

Many of Beyer's works were never performed in her lifetime. Several of these works, including String Quartet IV and Movement for String Quartet are possible premieres, as there is little documentation of the performance of her work.

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NEW EXPERIMENTAL WORKS
Saturday February 9th, 8pm
Southland Ensemble presents a concert premiering experimental compositions generated by our first ever Call for Scores. 

 

Erika Bell : Saint-Girons
Christine Burke : AT A STEADY CONSISTENT RATE
Jorge Delgado Leyva : Dialogos
Nicole DeMaio : Book of Hours
John Eagle : Something about my Punctuation
Nomi Epstein : all are above us 
Ben Zucker : Neither/N/Nor/N

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FLUXUS : LIGHT
Saturday November 10th, 8pm

 

Southland Ensemble opens our sixth season with our annual fluxus event, featuring George Brecht’s Candle Piece for Radios among other classic event scores. Including pieces by Robert Bozzi (1966), George Brecht (1959), Henning Christiansen (1964), Ken Friedman (1965), Alison Knowles (1965), Takehisa Kosugi, Larry Miller (1970), Yoko Ono (1955), Tomas Schmit and Robert Watts (1970). 

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 2017/18 SEASON

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BYZANTINE RITES

6-2-2018 AUTOMATA ARTS, LOS ANGELES

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“Southland Ensemble concludes its 2017/18 season with the premiere of a new work by LA-based composer Laura Steenberge:

Byzantine Rites is a new collection of pieces in which chant-inspired musical textures accompany actions performed with household objects. The title speaks in part to the borrowing of fragments of medieval Byzantine chants to form the musical materials, and in part to the use of Byzantine to refer to unnecessarily complicated procedures.

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Joined by special guest Cody Putman.

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RUTH CRAWFORD / RUTH CRAWFORD SEEGER

4-7-2018 AUTOMATA ARTS, LOS ANGELES

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Southland Ensemble presents the music of Ruth Crawford, the forward-thinking and ultra-modern composer and that of Ruth Crawford Seeger, the American folk music specialist and renowned children’s music educator. From her iconic, forward-thinking and ultra-modern String Quartet composed in 1931, to her collection and harmonic arrangement of hundreds of American children’s folk songs, Ruth Crawford Seeger was truly an American pioneer and inimitable creative force. 

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The program features the following compositions: 

String Quartet, Diaphonic Suite No. 1, Diaphonic Suite No. 4 and Three Songs (special arrangement by Jonathan Stehney). In addition, members of Southland Ensemble and special guests have arranged several folk songs contained in her collections Animal Folk Songs for Children and American Folk Songs for Children. 

with special guests:

Jessica Basta, Natalie Brejcha, Daniel Corral, Dustin Donahue, April Guthrie, David Perryman, Kathryn Pisaro, Joanna Wallfisch and Argenta Walther

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WADADA LEO SMITH

1-26-2018 AUTOMATA ARTS, LOS ANGELES

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“Ankhrasmation is a musical language as opposed to a musical notation system. […] The first part, Ankh, comes from the Egyptian cross. Ras comes from the Ethiopian head, meaning the leader. And Mas comes from mother.” WLS

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Exploring WLS's notational style, Ankhrasmation, come experience our realization of his beautiful scores Pacifica and page 9 of Kosmic Music.

We will be joined for this performance by special guests Casey Butler, Corey Fogel, Josh Gerowitz, and Dave Tranchina.

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FLUXUS : CONSTRUCTION

12-9-2017 AUTOMATA ARTS, LOS ANGELES

 

flux: to affect, or bring to a certain state by subjecting to, or treating with, a flux. "Fluxed into another world"

 

"humorous, monostructure, insignificant, unpretentious, unprofessional (anyone can do it)" - George Maciunas

 

a piano, hammer, nails, violins, radios, overtones and orange paint.

 

Southland Ensemble performs a conglomeration of event scores by Yoko Ono, György Ligeti, George Maciunas, Allison Knowles, Robert Bozzi, Philip Corner, Tomas Schmit and more.

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WERDER/FREY

10-29-2017 AUTOMATA ARTS, LOS ANGELES

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für sich, klar und sachlick. einfach. /  to itself, clear and objective. simple.

-Manfred Werder,  stück 1998

 

String Quartet No. 3 – Jürg Frey

stück 1998 – Manfred Werder

60 Pieces of Sound – Jürg Frey

 

The music is silent, but not absent. It is not speechless, and it also does not move with virtuosity bordering on silence. The music gets its vitality and its radiance, not from gesture and figuration, but in quiet presence – everything is there: colours, sensations, shadows, durations. 

-Jürg Frey

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 2016/17 SEASON

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anthony braxton
GHOST TRANCE MUSIC
4-28-2017 ArtShare LA
Southland Ensemble presents an evening of Anthony Braxton's Ghost Trance Music. Written between 1995 - 2006, Braxton created over 100 of these compositions that serve as pathways between different notation systems and musical idioms. 

Composition No. 228
Composition No. 245
Composition No. 358

with special guests:
Corey Fogel, Chris Foss, Andrew Munsey, Leah Paul, Kathy Pisaro, Stephanie Richards, Dave Tranchina & Argenta Walther

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JACKSON MAC LOW

1-28-17 AUTOMATA ARTS, LOS ANGELES

Southland Ensemble presents the chance poetry of Jackson Mac Low. Mac Low’s dedication to systems of composition - which included chance, indeterminacy, and simultaneous performance - allowed him to create works of extreme openness. His poems represent a moment in poetry where truths of authorship were called into question and the very boundaries of music and poetry were pulled taut.

54th Light Poem: For Ian Tyson
the 5th biblical poem
Is That Wool Hat My Hat?
Young Turtle Asymmetries
Asymmetries
 

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MAURICIO KAGEL: REPERTOIRE

11-18-16 The Command Center

Southland Ensemble presents selections from Repertoire (1967-70), a collection of event scores by German-Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel. One of his most radical, anti-institutional works, Repertoire is a farcical deconstruction of object, sound, theatre and music all at once.
 

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John Cage 1975-77
10-23-16 Human Resources LA 
Telephones and Birds (not Birds, but Water)
Child of Tree
Branches
Cheap Imitation for violin solo
 

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