ensemble offspring

ensemble offspring

for further information on Ensemble Offspring contact Damien Ricketson (02) 9519 6661 [email protected] or visit our website www.newmusicnetwork.com/ensoffspring

This concert is presented in association with the New Music Network THE IMAGINARY OPERA PROJECT with financial assistance from the State and Federal governments via the 2nd November '03 Australia Council for the Arts and the NSW Ministry for the Arts. Ensemble Offspring in association with the Mark Seabrook resides in East New Music Network present and has been painting for over 10 years. He has no formal art training, but completed a Bachelor of Arts degree with Honours in Art THE IMAGINARY OPERA PROJECT History at La Trobe University in 1996. As a result, his eclectic work often contains allusions to art history, as well as social commentary and references to popular PROGRAM culture. He works as a graphic designer. (SEE: www.alphalink.com.au/~seabrook) 5.40pm - installation Mark Knoop has performed as pianist, accordionist and conductor with groups such Tidal Vectors Nicole Ellis as Ensemble Modern, ELISION, Ensemble James McGrath Plus-Minus, Birmingham and Melbourne Barton Staggs Symphony Orchestras, and is the co-artistic director of Libra Ensemble. He is currently 6pm - concert undertaking a recording for the METIER label of Chris Dench's "Phase Portraits" cycle and Moist - Excitation Justine Cooper will give the first complete performance in Barton Staggs Melbourne in November.

Instruments 1 Morton Feldman Adam Yee () was educated at the White Call James McGrath Victorian College for the Arts. He is the music director at Beth Rivkah Ladies College in Melbourne and is nearing the completion of - interval - his fourth opera, Cannibal Pearce.

The Cattle Raid of Cooley Matthew Shlomowitz or The Show Alison Carruth Scott Wilson Mark Seabrook Allye Sinclair Michael Rich

PRE-CONCERT INSTALLATION

Tidal Vectors

PERFORMERS Image Nicole Ellis & James McGrath

Sound Design Barton Staggs conductor Mark Knoop & Production / piccolo Michael Sitsky Tidal Vectors is a video animation of oboe / cor anglais Adam Yee the dynamic shape and motion of Ben Marks Sydney Harbour composed from scientific data of depth soundings violin / Thomas Talmacs and tidal flow vectors. The audio for Tidal Vectors is musique concréte Geoffrey Gartner drawn from two sources – archival percussion Jeremy Barnett material including shipping atmospheres and hydrophone percussion Bree van Reyk recordings made inside the body of a piano / keyboard / celeste Katarina Kroslakova right whale and waterphone sounds (including cymbals, crotales and gongs) created and recorded in the studio specifically for the project. Tidal Vectors was originally MUSIC WORKSHOP - SYDNEY CONSERVATORIUM presented as a 3D installation at the Museum of Sydney as part of the This project is supported by the New South Wales Ministry visual arts program of the 2000 and Australia Council for the Arts Olympic Arts Festival. The Cattle Raid of Cooley or The Show

IMAGINARY OPERAS IN THREE ACTS ensemble offspring

Music & Concept Matthew Shlomowitz Ensemble Offspring is a vibrant Text Allison Carruth collective of musicians dedicated to the performance of new music. Digital Art Scott Wilson Brought together in 1995 by Image Mark Seabrook, Allye Sinclair composers Damien Ricketson and & Michael Rich Matthew Shlomowitz, the group has established itself as one of Sydney's Conductor Mark Knoop freshest exponents of original and Solo oboe Adam Yee challenging music. Ensemble Offspring is committed to presenting new music, in particular unearthing the Two stories are told over the course of this voice of Australian artists. This work is work through text, image and music. "The given an international context by Cattle Raid of Cooley" is an Irish myth (from placing it side by side with the the Ulster Cycle) and "The Show" is an outstanding works of established original story written to parallel the myth. composers.

Ensemble Offspring has produced

Matthew Shlomowitz lives in Stoke Newington in close to 50 projects involving a diverse London where he composes and teaches local children range of instruments from piano. His principal teachers were Bozidar Kos at the conventional chamber groupings to Sydney Conservatorium, Michael Finnissy, and Brian electro-acoustic work through to exotic Ferneyhough at Stanford University where he received a self-built instrumental ensembles and doctorate. He co-directed Ensemble Offspring from embraced a wide variety of repertoire 1995-1998 and co-founded Ensemble Plus-Minus from wild indeterminacy though to (London/Brussels) in 2003. meticulous complexity. The ensemble has worked directly with composers Alison Carruth grew up in Colorado and now lives in San Francisco pursuing a doctorate in English at such as Gilbert Amy, , Stanford University. Her academic interests include Michael Finnissy, Elena Kats Chernin, Modernism, narrative, film adaptation and comedy. Michael Smetanin and Martin Wesley- Additionally, she is presently working on a collection of Smith and performers such as the short stories, which she hopes to adapt to stage or film. Libra Ensemble, Halcyon Ensemble, pianist Roger Woodward and harpist Scott Wilson grew up in Regina, Canada. He holds a Marshall McGuire. They have been Bachelor of Music from McGill University (majoring in widely broadcast in Australia as well trumpet and computer music), worked as a technical as Poland and The Netherlands and collaborator with new media artists at the Banff Center have performed at the Sydney Spring for the Arts (1996-98), and is presently a PhD student at Festival of New Music (1995-98), 1997 the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University. He is a core Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, member of a group of artists developing the movement 2000 Totally Huge New Music based art installation "Trajets" that has been mounted in Festival, Sydney Opera House Studio Canada, England, France, and will begin a tour of Spain and collaborated with Dutch, French in 2004. and Finnish cultural bodies. Recent projects have included ‘Partch’s Michael Rich, at age 16, began training as a Gas Bastard’ an experimental evening of Station Attendant in the United States of America. Not microtonality and self-built long afterwards he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corp. He instruments, an electro-acoustic went AWOL after being stationed in the Philippine’s and concert at the Sydney Opera House hopped a ferry to Japan where he formed a conceptual portraying the work of Kaija Saariaho art rock band. Currently living in San Francisco, Michael works in different forms of digital media including and a program featuring the French performance, film, video, photography and sound. (SEE: Spectralists. Ensemble Offspring most www.genericana.com) recently toured London, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Krakow as guests of the Allye Sinclair has been cartooning/drawing for her prestigious Warsaw Autumn own entertainment and for various local projects in International Festival of Contemporary Adelaide over the last six years, including illustrations for Music where they were described by the Aldgate Valley Co-op cook-book, Twelve Lullabies (a local press as "technically superb and song book), Belly (a birthing journal) and in newspapers of striking musicality". On Dit and Rip it Up. She is also a composer, cellist, mother and lover of wild places. Moist - Excitation Instruments 1 White Call

Image Justine Cooper Image James McGrath Music Barton Staggs Music Morton Feldman

Written in 1975, Instruments 1 is Moist and Excitation are two the first in a trilogy of ensemble video animations created works including Why Patterns? using light microscopy. and Between Categories, which Blood, phlegm, pus, cervical are characterised by sparse mucus and tears – fluids with oscillating instrumental lines. emotive associations – have Feldman describes the work in been transformed from their terms of breathing: "Listening to biological origins into images the instruments and trying to evocative of interstellar clock what I feel their own geographies. timbral rhythm would be. That’s essentially what the whole series of these three pieces were concerned with – breathing, Justine Cooper is an rhythm as breathing". White Call interdisciplinary artist whose work is (premiered this evening) is a held at the Metropolitan Museum of digital animation to parallel the Art (New York), the Powerhouse music. McGrath describes the Museum (Sydney), The Queensland work as a study of the "folds, Art Gallery and Center for the Moving Image. She is visual falling and fog" he sees in director for TULP: The Body Public, Feldman. an upcoming theatre installation for the Sydney and Festivals Morton Feldman (1926-87) is often (2004), and is currently working on a connected with post-war American new series of photographs based on avant-garde composers John Cage, the stored collections of the Earle Brown and David Tudor, and the American Museum of Natural New York Expressionist painters Mark History. Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and especially Philip Guston. Although he shared the European modernist hostility towards art that relied on past Barton Staggs studied modes of expression, he developed a composition at the University of music very different from his European Sydney with Peter Sculthorpe and at counterparts in that it eschewed the Royal Northern College of Music systems. Rather, Feldman favoured (Manchester). His music has been intuitive abstract gestures set over long performed by Ensemble 24, Tamara flat planes of time where the tactile Anna Cislowska, Simon Docking, the qualities of sound itself and given Elektra String Quartet, the BBC primacy of moment and not subjugated Philharmonic under James to logic. MacMillan and the New Ensemble under Clark Rundell. His work was studied the 16th and featured in the 1998 Sound and James McGrath 17th century masters at the studio Contemporary Music Series at Next school of Patrick Betaudier in Paris. Prior Wave in 1998 and the Barossa to graduating as an architect, he worked Music Festival in 2001. as a studio assistant to Arthur Boyd and subsequently lectured in design and communications at New South Wales University. Now based in Brooklyn, his works have been exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Toronto and Sydney and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. (See: www.james- mcgrath.com)