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Home , American Music Hall, David Shire

STEVE HOROWITZ AND THE CODE ENSEMBLE

JANUARY 29, 2010 | 8:30 PM JANUARY 30, 2010 | 8:30 PM

presented by REDCAT Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater California Institute of the Arts STEVE HOROWITZ AND THE CODE ENSEMBLE JANUARY 29, 30, 2010 | 8:30PM PROGRAM Pa Kua (String Quartet #2) (1999) Steve Horowitz The CalArts Quartet: Mona Tian, Nic Salas, violins; Alessandra Barrett, viola; Greg Byers, cello Invasion from the Chicken Planet (1991, Los Angeles premiere) Music: Steve Horowitz Video: Zig Gron Directed by: Alyson Schacherer Featuring Alyson Schacherer and the Cal Arts Players: Leila Ghaznavi, Narendra Gala, Justin Montalvo Special Guest Narrator: John Schneider The Code Ensemble NYC: Andy Barbera, guitar; Red Wierenga, keyboards; Michael Evans, drums, percussion, theremin; Devin Maxwell, conductor/percussion The CalArts Code Players: Lauren Davis, Chelsea Raskin, sopranos; Chase Morgan, tuba; Max Gualtieri, guitar; Michael Gold, keyboards; Matt Cook, percussion; Leonard Lee, violin; Nathan Phelps, bass Sound Design: Ryan Ainsworth and Stane Hubert; Lighting Design: Adam Frank; Stage/Production Manager: Danielle Korman Intermission Floaters (1989) Randy Hostetler For string quartet and video score Palm Quart (1988) Randy Hostetler with Francesca Talenti For string quartet and video score of palm trees in Los Angeles The Re-Taking of Pelham 123 (2005, Los Angeles premiere) Music by Steve Horowitz (based on the original 1974 score to the filmThe Taking of Pelham 123 by David Shire) Film: Jane Brill Sampling: Chris Romero Special Guest Soloist: Vinny Golia The Code Ensemble NYC: Andy Barbera, guitar; Red Wierenga, keyboards; Michael Evans, drums, percussion, theremin; Steve Horowitz, bass; Chris Romero, samplist, laptop; Devin Maxwell, conductor/percussion The CalArts Code Players: Lauren Davis, Chelsea Raskin, sopranos; Gregory Zilboorg, trum- pet, Chase Morgan, tuba; Max Gualtieri, guitar; Michael Gold, keyboards; Matt Cook, per- cussion; Mona Tian, Nic Salas, violin; Alessandra Barrett, viola; Greg Byers, cello, Nathan Phelps, bass Sound Design: Ryan Ainsworth and Stane Hubert; Lighting Design: Adam Frank; Stage/Production Manager: Danielle Korman PROGRAM NOTES Pa Kua (String Quartet #2, 1999) Steve Horowitz Pa Kua is the eight complementary pairs of opposites usually placed in a circle, the circumference of which symbolizes time and space. Each trigram of the Pa Kua represents a force in nature and there are four yin and four yang powers giving balance and harmony to the universe. The broken lines are yin and the unbroken lines yang.

Floaters (1989) Randy Hostetler Palm Quart (1988) Randy Hostetler with Francesca Talenti

James Randolph “Randy” Hostetler, July 28, 1963–Feb. 1, 1996

Randy was a great friend and monster talent; I miss him every day…—Steve Horowitz

“I thought he was one of the most talented people I have ever met, and someone who was bound to make an indelible mark on the culture of our country sooner or later. Certainly he was a key figure in the world of struggling Los Angeles artists. With him surely a part of our hopes for a renewal of the arts in America has vanished. We must carry on.” —Frederic Rzewski

During his brief career Randy Hostetler accomplished a great deal. His catalogue includes over forty works in a wide range of media—instrumental solo and chamber works, vocal music, film music, tape music, intermedia works, ex- perimental film and video, visual art and performance art. His Living Rom Series provided an outlet for experimental composer, artists and performers in Los Angeles, often attracting participants from as far away as the Bay Area and Las Vegas. —Arthur Jarvinen

The Re-Taking of Pelham 123 (2005, Los Angeles premiere)

“What most struck me about Steve’s music is that if I were hired to score this picture today instead of 1974, I would hope that my score would come out sounding the way that Steve’s does.” —David Shire, composer

BIOGRAPHIES Andy Barbera is a graduate of California Institute of the Arts (BFA 1991 and MFA 1996 Guitar Performance). A player of electric, acoustic and nylon-stringed guitars, he enjoys a diverse musicmaking life as an improviser, collaborator, and studio guitarist in NYC. He has performed with a variety of artists including Miroslav Tadic, Peter Epstein, Ralph Alessi, Mike Cohen (kirtan), Scot Ray, and others. His current projects include a trio with bassist Sam Minaie and drummer Qasim Naqvi.

Jane Brill is a filmmaker and freelance film editor in . Her work includesControl , which won the award for best experimental film at the Athens International Film Festival in Ohio and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Bicycle Path, which had its broadcast premiere on Reel NY on PBS; and The Re-Taking of Pelham 123, which premiered at the New York Video Festival. She has also worked on a number of independent documentaries, including Strong Man which won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at Slamdance, and The Ten Commandments: Tyler’s Choice, which screened at the IFC Center in New York. As a producer, she has worked on documentaries for UNICEF and promotional advertising for a variety of cable networks including Showtime and The Movie Channel. Brill’s editing work includes feature-length and magazine-format documentaries for CBS, PBS, ABC, Logo and MTV, and commercials for Lifetime, the Sundance Channel and “Saturday Night Live.” She also enjoyed editing “Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in Quebec,” a performance video by Robert Smigel for “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.” Brill studied painting and video at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts before graduating from California Institute of the Arts in 1988 with a degree in film/video.

Michael Evans is an improvising drummer/percussionist/thereminist/composer whose work investigates and embraces the collision of sound and theatrics. As well as being a drumset player, his work with unusual sound sources includes found objects, homemade instruments, the theremin and various digital and homemade analog electronics. His work with the theremin varies the quality of its sound through set-up and technique. On the theremin he has performed with dancers and in group settings playing experimental, jazz, rock, ersatz lounge and chamber music. In 2000, he was photographed playing a Moog ether wave theremin for the front of Bob Moog’s Briar catalog. He has performed in multiple performances of the NYC Theremin Society’s Issue Project Room concerts during 2005, 2006 and 2007. He has studied movement/sparring/drumming with Professor Milford Graves, drum technique with Joe Morello, tabla with Misha Masud, kanjira with Ganesh Kumar and Haitian/Afro-Cuban hand drumming with John Amira. He has studied musicianship with Helen Hobbs Jordan, composition with Richard Cameron Wolf, and Blue Gene Tyranny and the theremin with Pamelia Kurstin.http://www.michaelevanssounds.com/

The films and videos ofZig Gron are captivating, funny and alive. His work has been screened at various venues, large and small, from Germany to Australia, including the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, the Dallas Video Festival (where his one-man tour-de-force video Mono Playhouse played to SRO crowds), the Chicago International Film and Video Festival (Certificate of Merit Award), the Chicago Underground Film Festival (where he won 2nd place for best feature), the Charlotte Film and Video Festival (Jurors’ Award), the Montreal International Festival of New Film and Video, and numerous galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Zig received his Masters degree in Film/Video from CalArts and works as an independent music editor on feature films in Los Angeles. Zig Gron is “disciplined in technical expertise and psychotic in imaginative gymnastics.” —George Kuchar

Steve Horowitz is a creator of odd but highly accessible sounds, and a diverse and prolific musician. Steve’s 30-year career integrates his experiences as a bandleader with his explorations as a multi-faceted composer. Horowitz has a large catalog of music for traditional and unusual ensembles such as: string quartet, woodwind quartet, orchestra, Disklavier, solo contrabass flute, and of course the large electroacoustic chamber ensemble you will experience here tonight. Horowitz studied at the California Institute of the Arts with Mel Powell, Morton Subotnick, Michael Jon Fink and Stephen “Lucky” Mosko. He lectures at various schools including New York University, California Institute of the Arts, and Berklee College of Music in Boston and has received performance underwriting as well as commissions from: Meet the Composer Fund (1992 at the Lab SF, and 2005 at the Kitchen NYC); Amsterdam Fund for the Arts NL (2000 for ensemble tour); Fund for the Interactive Sound Arts Netherlands (1997, Graphic scores Mousetrap Quartet); Gravy Train Dance (1984 Choreographer Jo Ann Nerenberg); The Alternate Currents Ensemble (1994 Ribbon of Extremes); Music at the Anthology (MATA, executive producer Phillip Glass 2003 Vertical Field Horizontal Field for string orchestra and performed by SONYC, featuring soloist Joel Wizansky on piano); and The Astoria Symphony (Mix Re-Mix, world premiere). Touring projects in the US and the Netherlands have helped to form Horowitz’s unique perspective and voice. Horowitz and his music have appeared at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, The Bimhuis in Amsterdam, and The Miller Theater and The Kitchen in NYC. He frequently collaborates with other artists—joining forces with an eclectic variety of musicians such as electric guitar wizards Elliott Sharp and Henry Kaiser, saxophone greats Lenny Pickett and Ralph Carney, The Clubfoot Orchestra, Glen Spearman, acoustic bassist Tatsu Aoki, and the Balkan music ensemble Zhaba. A culmination of years of investigation, The Code Ensemble explores Horowitz’s persistent musical themes: the intertwining of electric and acoustic instruments, new forms, extended techniques, interactivity, music for picture, theater and live performance. Drawing on a finely honed sense of humor, Horowitz looks deeply into the sociological filter and re-examines pop culture’s presentation of “truth” as entertainment. Founded in 1992, The Code has developed a cutting-edge repertory with instrumentation that combines traditional acoustic and contemporary elec- tronic instruments. In addition to his work in chamber and concert music, Horowitz writes music for dance, film, television, cartoons, and interactive media (video games). Steve wrote the score to the award-winning filmSuper Size Me and served as music supervisor and lead composer for the television show I Bet You Will (MTV). Horowitz’s audio expertise was honored in 1996 with a Grammy award for his engineering work on the compact disc “True Life Blues, the Songs of Bill Monroe”, winner of the Best Bluegrass album 1996, and in 2003 with a Webby for his work with Nickelodeon Digital. Horowitz has been featured in Bass Player magazine (May, 2007) and the books The Art of Digital Music and The Guerilla Guide to the Music Business. Steve can be found working and touring with his various projects, and has released 15 compact discs to date. His latest album “Stations of the Breath” for solo piano, was released this month. For more info and music clips please see http://www.thecodeinternational.com/

Randy Hostetler (1963–1996) was a composer, pianist and performance artist. Over fifty scores for chamber orchestra, solo and combined instruments, chorus, film, tape, found objects and ambient sounds are known to exist. After graduation in l985 from Yale (where Hostetler received the music prize at graduation for his chamber orchestra work Big Mac) the composer attended CalArts, receiving an MFA in Music in 1989. Among Hostetler’s memorable concerts at CalArts was his third year concert that included his cajoling other CalArts music students into rolling his friend’s Honda on to the stage in ROD in the middle of the night so that the concert could begin the next day with him inside of it “playing” the car in an original composition for wipers, horn and squeaky door. Hostetler established and curated the Living Room Series, a bi-monthly concert of new music in Los Angeles from 1989–1993 that included the first Los Angeles live performance of Erik Satie’sVexations , an event that lasted twenty- four hours and included more than two dozen performers, most of them CalArts faculty and alumni. Hostetler’s text work for overlapping voices, Happily Ever After, which was released on CD by Frog Peak in 1999, has been widely acclaimed as one of the best electronic works of the 20th century. The composer Paul Lansky wrote that “It was unlike anything I had ever heard and it immediately changed my view of what music is and can be.” Deep, an improvisational work for wind instruments and tape of a sleeping person’s snoring sounds, was performed by the California Ear Unit in Denmark and rebroadcast on Danish Public Radio in 1997. At New York’s l998 MATA festival, the Talujon Quartet and members of the Philip Glass Ensemble headlined a performance of Hostetler’s chamber orchestra work, P[L]ACES, that was largely composed while he was a student at CalArts. Randy’s iconic piece for piano and billiard ball, 8, was written at CalArts for Mel Powell. It requires the pianist to play the piano and juggle a billiard ball at the same time. It was performed by New York pianist Jenny Lin at Le Poisson Rouge earlier this month and will receive its Canadian premiere with Ms. Lin at the Winnipeg Symphony Festival of New Music next month. Zig Gron’s remastered video of Hostetler’s performance, as well as that of Ms. Lin’s, can be viewed on youtube.com and at the website established by Hostetler’s friends following his death, www.livingroommusic.org.

Devin Maxwell is a percussionist and composer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Performance and Composition from the California Institute of the Arts as well as a Bachelor of Music in Percussion Performance from the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music. He has studied percussion with Allen Otte, Rusty Burge, and James Culley and has studied composition with Michael Pisaro and Morton Subotnick.

Christopher Romero is a musician, filmmaker, and practitioner of the interactive technological arts. As a musician he has played guitar, clarinet, string bass, electronic percussion and drums, as well as the various instruments of the Balinese Gong Kebyar Gamelan Ensemble. He has performed with The Brickmen, Pellet, Buddhabelly and The Code International. Mr. Romero studied gamelan with Gusti Aji Sukerta, Nyoman Windha, Ketut Partha, Wayan Sujana, Wayan Loceng, Pak Dig, Nyoman Saptanyana and Hindustani music with Ali Akbar Khan. He has performed with Gamelan Sekar Jaya and Gamelan Dharma Swara in New York for whom he is also President. He has worked in theater with his parents, Elias and Berenice Romero, with Wayan Wija and Lee Breuer in the Mabou Mines production The Mahab- haranta, and with Ron Jenkins in Caliban Remembers; The Tempest. In 2007 he put together Wayang Jataka, a retelling of ancient Buddhist stories with I Gusti Sudarta (Dalang), Andy McGraw (music), Semi Ryu (interactive puppets) which was performed at the University of Richmond with the 8th Blackbird Ensemble. Currently he is working on an animated retelling of the story Sudamala for Gamelan Dharma Swara’s upcoming tour to Bali in 2010.

Alyson Schacherer (Director, Female 1) is thrilled that Invasion From the Chicken Planet lives on! She co-produced and was in the stage show at The Barrow Group in NYC, and can be heard in the original recording on Fluff-Tone Re- cords. Other Off- and Off-Off- credits include: Short Stuff 5 (TBG), No Act (Living Image Arts), Darktime in Skipland (the Brick). She’s the narrator for the Aly & AJ audiobook series, the voice of Daphne and Velma for Mattel’s Scooby Doo toys and the voice of Barbie for the Fairytopia Party Game. Other credits include regional theatre, numerous commercials and many independent films. Up next: www.iloveyouproject.net. Eternal gratitude to Marshall. http://www.alysonschacherer.com/ David Shire, an Academy Award and two-time Grammy winner and multiple Tony and Emmy nominee, has composed prolifically for the theatre, films, television and recordings. On Broadway, he and lyricist Richard Maltby wrote the scores for the musicals (Tony nominations for Best Score and Musical) and Big (Tony nomination for Best Score). His off-Broadway scores, also written with Maltby, include Starting Here, Starting Now (Grammy nomination), (Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical and Score), Urban Blight at the Theater Club, and the off-Broadway musical The Sap of Life. He also wrote the incidental scores for As You Like It (NY Shakespeare Festival), Peter Ustinov’s The Unknown Soldier and His Wife (), Donald Margulis’ The Loman Family Picnic (MTC), Schmulnick’s Waltz and Visiting Mr. Green. Maltby and Shire’s current project, the musical Take Flight, with book by John Weidman, has been workshopped at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, presented in concert versions in Russia and Australia, and produced in London, at the , and in Japan in 2007. It will have its first American full production at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in the spring of 2010. With librettist Gene Scheer, Shire recently completed a one-act opera, A Stream of Voices, commissioned by the Colorado Children’s Chorale, and premiered in last spring. Shire is currently working on a new musical with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. Shire’s many feature film scores include Norma Rae (Academy Award for Best Song, lyrics by ), Francis Coppola’s , All the President’s Men, The Taking of Pelham 123, Short Circuit, 2010, Farewell, My Lovely, The Hindenberg, Return to Oz and , which his earned him two Grammy Awards. He most recently scored David Fincher’s Zodiac and Peter Hyams’ Beyond A Reasonable Doubt. His numerous television scores have garnered five Emmy nominations and include Glenn Close’sSarah Plain and Tall, ’s Rear Window, Raid on Entebbe, ’s The Women of Brewster Place, The Kennedys of Massachusetts, Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, and Neil Simon’s Jake’s Women and Broadway Bound. He also composed the theme song, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman, for the long-running NBC series Alice. Mr. Shire and his wife, actress Didi Conn, have just completed the pilot for the new children’s animated musical television series Didi Lightful that they have developed and co-produced. His songs, with lyrics by, among others, Richard Maltby, Norman Gimbel, Marilyn and Alan Bergman, Carol Connors, or himself, have been recorded by (who has recorded five of them, including “Starting Here, Starting Now,” which was the opening number of her recent world tour concert), Maureen McGovern, Melissa Manchester, , Julie Andrews, John Pizzarelli, Liz Callaway, Lynne Wintersteller, Nancy Lamont, Vanessa Williams, Glenn Campbell, Johnny Mathis, Kiri Te Kanawa, Kathy Lee Gifford, Robert Goulet and Michael Crawford, among many others. “I’ll Never Say Goodbye”, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman, was nominated for an Academy Award the same year as “” was nominated and won an Oscar. His “With You I’m Born Again” (lyrics by Carol Connors) was an international Motown hit for and Syreeta, and he and co-wrote “In Our Hands,” the theme song for the United Nations World Summit for Children. Mr. Shire is a Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude graduate of Yale, serves on the executive council of the Dramatists Guild of America and is a trustee of the Rockland Conservatory of Music. His eldest son, screenwriter Matthew Shire, lives in Los Angeles; and he, his wife and their teenage son Daniel make their home in the Hudson Valley.http://david- shiremusic.com/ Red Wierenga is a pianist, respectronicist, improviser and composer currently based in New York City. He performs with the Respect Sextet and The Wierenga Manœuvre, and with a variety of other groups as a sideman. As a musician Wierenga is primarily concerned with the interstices of electronic and acoustic sound, composition and extemporization, and free jazz and free improvisation. He works to interface acoustic instruments with electronics and builds physical devices for the control of computerized sound, producing new instruments and meta-instruments. He designs both his self-termed “respectronics” and his compositions to be particularly conducive to improvisation. His software creations have been used in performances by musicians including Keith Rowe and Jim Black. Wierenga received his Bachelor of Music from the Eastman School of Music, where his teachers included Harold Danko and Ralph Alessi. During his time at Eastman, Wierenga appeared as soloist with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Eastman School Studio Orchestra and Ossia. He also performed in duo and small group settings with Dave Holland, Wycliffe Gordon, Ben Monder and others. While at Eastman, Wierenga researched several lesser-known historical jazz pianists, including Richard Twardzik and Herbie Nichols, transcribing, arranging and performing their music. After graduating from Eastman in 2002, Wierenga served as on-air host on Jazz 90.1, Rochester’s jazz radio station, while maintaining an active performance schedule, playing as a soloist and with the Respect Sextet, the Dave Rivello Ensemble, the Red Wierenga Unit, and others. http://www.redwierenga.com/. “Amazing!” —Emanuel Ax

FUNDERS Funded in part with generous support from the American Music Center, Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (NoMAA), JPMorgan Chase Foundation, Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ), George Mason and Pamela Wilson, the Randy Hostetler Living Room Music Fund, and Meet the Composer’s MetLife Creative Connections program. Leadership support for Meet the Composer’s MetLife Creative Connections program is gerously provided by MetLife Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Amphion Foundation, Argosy Foundation contemporary Music Fund, BMI Foundation, Inc., Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, Jerome Foundation, mediaThe foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and Virgil Thomson Foundation, Ltd.

SUPER SPECIAL THANKS Zona Hostetler, Lauren Pratt, Keesje Fischer, Seth Barrish & Lee Brock @ The Barrow Group Theater, Alix Steel, Miroslav Tadi, Joe the Artist, Miranda Hardy, Jonah Tobias, Adriaan van der Plas, Tony Geballe, Shem Guibbory, William Lessard, Daniel Schweiger, George Mason & Pamela Wilson, Joe Carroll @ The Manhattan Producers Alliance, Michelle Ito & Heather Noonan @ Big Fish Media