Miller Theatre at Columbia University 2015-16 | 27th Season Opening Night Run Time Error Simon Steen-Andersen JACK Quartet Thursday, September 17, 8:00 p.m. From the Executive Director This September we begin Miller Theatre’s 2015-16 season with three incredible collaborations. Tonight you’ll see Danish composer and performer Simon Steen- Andersen join with one of our favorite ensembles, the JACK Quartet, on a very special project. Run Time Error, the video work that opens and closes this evening, invites us to broaden our sense of both sonic and spatial musical possibility, and it does so in a very personal way: by turning the theatre itself into an instrument. Throughout this new season, Miller Theatre will present performances that bring contemporary classical music out of the formal settings of a concert hall, and Steen-Andersen’s work makes for an exhilarating kick-off. Run Time Error is one of several new works created start-to-finish at Miller this month. As part of an annual collaboration with Deborah Cullen, director and chief curator of Columbia’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, this is our third time co- commissioning a visual artist to use our lobby as their canvas. This season, Scherezade Garcia has transformed the space with an amazing new work, inviting anyone who steps inside our doors to activate their imagination. Our largest artistic residency is just about to begin: Morningside Lights! A week of free arts workshops for participants of all ages begins this Saturday, and culminates in a magnificent illuminated procession through Morningside Park on September 26. Miller Theatre and the Arts Initiative first partnered with Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles of the Processional Arts Workshop four years ago, and it has been an honor to see this beloved tradition grow. Each year, the passion of Alex and Sophia and the joy of a hands- on creative process bring together an amazing community for Morningside Lights. Whether you join us to create lanterns from day one or see them for the first time as they light up the park on the final night, I’m sure you’ll feel that there’s something magical at work. While Miller Theatre has made a name for itself as a leading presenter of new music, our mission is to support and share the work of all kinds of contemporary artists. It is a thrill to start off the new season with three amazing projects that wholeheartedly embrace that goal. Thank you for joining us! I hope to see you again soon. Melissa Smey Executive Director Miller Theatre at Columbia University 2015-16 | 27th Season Opening Night Thursday, September 17, 8:00 p.m. Run Time Error Simon Steen-Andersen, composer and performer JACK Quartet Simon Steen-Andersen (b. 1976) Run Time Error at Miller Theatre featuring JACK Quartet, version 1 (2015) world premiere, Miller Theatre commission Study for String Instrument No. 1 (2007) Obstruction Study No. 1 (2012) United States premiere Study for String Instrument No. 2 (2009) Half a Bit of Nothing Integrated (2007-15) New York premiere Obstruction Study No. 2 (2012) United States premiere String Quartet No. 2 (2012) New York premiere Obstruction Study No. 3 (2012) United States premiere Study for String Instrument No. 3 (2011) New York premiere Run Time Error, version 2 (2015) This program runs approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes, with no intermission. Presented with the friendly support of with additional support from the Consulate General of Denmark Please note that photography and the use of recording devices are not permitted. Remember to turn off all cellular phones and pagers before tonight’s performance begins. Miller Theatre is ADA accessible. Large print programs are available upon request. For more information or to arrange accommodations, please call 212-854-7799. About the Program Dynamic, driven, clear in its sights while taking in information from all over the place, the work of Simon Steen-Andersen has been one of music’s boldest entrants this century. It is music that refuses to be just music, music that focuses the eyes as well as the ears – on how it is played, the body language, the grip on fiber or metal, the action, the intensity, and precision of that action. It is music made for performance, in real time, within a certain space, but often open to elsewheres of time and space, by means of quotation, reference, recording, and film. Steen-Andersen (b. 1976) studied in his native Denmark with Karl Aage Rasmussen, and also with Matthias Spahlinger in Freiburg and Gabriel Valverde in Buenos Aires. By the time he completed his studies in Copenhagen with Hans Abrahamsen and Bent Sørensen, in 2006, he already had a strong output behind him, including the remarkable rerendered (2003), which has a pianist at the keyboard joined by two assistants working on the strings and body of the instrument, with the possibility also of a fourth performer, to conduct. The assistants assist, of course, in making complex amalgams of noise, pitch, and harmonics, but they also alter. The pianist is beset, too, by the requirement to play extremely quietly, with amplification bringing forward a music of shuffling and zigzaging brilliance, chiming repetition, and gradual decay. Steen- Andersen further suggests the performance be monitored by a camera over the piano and projected on to a screen above. Thus estranging the means, and engaging technology – amplification and projection – to reconnect, this piece gave Steen-Andersen a productive direction to pursue. He also began gaining important commissions, notably from the Ensemble Modern (Chambered Music, for twelve instruments and sampler, 2007) and ensemble recherche (Nothing Integrated, for extremely amplified clarinet, percussion, cello, and live video, 2007). In 2008, he joined the faculty at the music academy in Århus, where he had begun his training a decade before. Among his recent pieces is a piano concerto (with sampler and video) written for last year’s Donaueschingen Festival, and Black Box Music, a multimedia work recently performed at the Southbank Centre by the London Sinfonietta. This and many other works can be found online via YouTube or on his own site. Run Time Error: version 1 (2015) The composer here becomes solo performer; the building, his instrument. Two normal categories of human agents and hardware are thus collapsed into singletons: one musician, one environment-instrument, which the composer-performer runs through, creating sounds as he goes using only objects found on site, while making an audio- visual recording. For Steen-Andersen, the site-specific nature of the piece is key. Each time it is performed – first in Brussels in 2009, then many times elsewhere in Europe – it grows and changes. For this evening’s performance, featuring a new version created here at Miller Theatre, he is joined by the four musicians of the JACK Quartet, who will be encountered again in the rest of the program. All this – the running and the sounding and the video-recording – will all have happened in advance to make two streams to be played back on a split screen. These streams relate to one another on the model of a two-part invention. One stream may follow the other after a delay, copy it in slow motion, or reverse it, exemplifying the classical techniques of imitation, augmentation, and retrogradation, but with material that is thoroughly non-classical and, too, chosen to make these techniques unusually apparent, since they operate on the visual plane as well as the aural. The remixing happens live, via two joysticks manipulated by the composer. Performance art meets venerable form. Study for String Instrument No. 1 (2007) “Movement of the sound or sound of the movement?” Steen-Andersen begins his note on this piece, the first of three Studies for String Instrument, with a question raised by almost any of his compositions. Run Time Error is music-making made vividly visual; his Second String Quartet creates a new demeanor of performance as much as a new, unsuspected galaxy of sounds. He goes on: “One simple ‘sample’ is repeated over and over, and is slowly broken down into its individual elements in a process of autonomizing the movements themselves. The piece is notated only as movements (and can therefore be played on any string instrument and maybe even on other instruments), and it is just as much a choreography for the player as it is a sounding piece for the instrument. A choreographic game – or even a kind of dance, accompanying itself.” In a further correspondence with Run Time Error, the first study evolves into a kind of two-part invention – the two hands mimicking each other – with parts in this first study being played by the bowing arm and by the left hand sliding up and down the strings. Quickly combining at first to make continuous glissando waves, these actions become dislocated from one another, and other actions intervene. The piece may be played as a solo or by several musicians simultaneously, as it is this evening. Obstruction Study No. 1 (2012) For the 2012 festival of new chamber music in Witten, in north-west Germany, Steen- Andersen worked with the JACK not only on his Second String Quartet but also on three video recordings, his Obstruction Studies. These change the nature of string- quartet performance differently from how the Second Quartet does, and to a degree more drastically. That work, for all its strangeness, is an original composition, a positive achievement, whereas the Obstruction Studies are deliberately made as defective versions of found music, which they, indeed, obstruct. In each of them, the musicians are discommoded; in the case of this first piece by having the ends of their bows restrained by rubber bands and weights that will interfere with muscular control.