Dog Star Orchestra 19th Festival
June 23-26
Automata is thrilled to be the primary site of The Dog Star Festival #19.
The Dog Star Orchestra is an ensemble and a once-a-year festival of experimental music, started in 2005 by Michael Pisaro as a way of playing recent experimental music by young composers and classic pieces from the experimental tradition. Described as “messily exceptional” by the Los Angeles Times, Dog Star events happen throughout the Los Angeles area and often feature offbeat performances in out-of-the-way places, alongside more traditional concert settings. It is one of the main presenters fostering and documenting the strong local experimental music scene, as well as presenting work that would otherwise not be heard in the US.
The festival has also featured the US premieres of many works by the international Wandelweiser collective and presented seminal pieces from the American origins of the experimental school (Cage, Wolff, Feldman, Lucier, Oliveros, Tenney and so on). Initially curated by Pisaro alone, the summer festival grew from six concerts to up to 15 concerts in 2015. Beginning in 2011 the festival began to employ multiple curators drawn from people who had participated in previous years. In most years upwards of 60 musicians participate as composers and performers. The local following for the series has also grown substantially over the twelve years of its existence.
Program:
Friday, June 23rd
Inside the House
8pm
“Inside the House” is Dog Star’s community-wide celebration of being back after three years of dormancy. This joyfully raucous concert features a text score for guitar solo, a viola improviser, a piece celebrating 18th century Gabrieleño woman Toypurina, a piece for a collection of household appliances, and a piece for soprano and television.
Performances and Composition by:
Madison Brookshire, Michael Pisaro, Nicki Chen, April Dawn Guthrie, Kenny Cotich and Jack Herscowitz
Saturday, June 24th
Songs for Two
5pm
DesoDuo presents their realization of Kevin Good’s “Songs of Two”. A series of eleven modular open scores for two performers. This version is realized on a single shared vibraphone to further emphasize how the performers move through the piece in relation to one another.
Performances and Compositions by:
Deso Duo, Katie Eikam and Kevin Good
Lead or Follow
8pm
James Klopfleisch presents a reading of a poem accompanied by a string duo, serving as a “benediction” for the evening’s music.
Sivan Silver-Swartz presents the premiere of Untitled 10, a piece for two trumpets and two violas. Over the course of 45 minutes, the four instruments participate in a constant contrapuntal exchange, aligning and mis-aligning with each other, both rhythmically and harmonically. The violas are re-tuned and the trumpet valves are adjusted, creating a web of tones in just intonation, harmonies familiar and unfamiliar.
Performances and Compositions by:
James Klopfleisch, Sivan Silver-Swartz, Nigel Deane, Ethan Marks, Alejandra Moreno and Nev Wendell
Sunday, June 25
Ladder Spectra
5pm
Eric Heep
How to be a Bat
7pm
Richard An opens the concert with The Melodicas in My Life, performed by House on Fire, a trio of Richard, Wells Leng, and Andrew Anderson, LA-based pianists and musical jacks of all trades. Not one, not two, but three melodicas are outfitted with bagpipe bladder-like systems and accompanied with electronics.
How to Be a Bat comprises a series of audience-participation experiments practicing skills of listening to location. This workshop contextualizes the Koan Quartet’s performance of Moveable Feast, inspired by Ed Yong’s description in An Immense World of bat echolocation as a means of mapping and navigating the environment through continually updated snapshots, one call at a time.
Performances and Compositions by:
House on Fire, Carolyn Chen and the Koan Quartet
Monday, June 26
8pm
Nigel Deane presents Wilted Leaves for string ensemble, a reflection on grief that takes inspiration from such natural phenomena as wind through trees or the formation of flying birds.
Laura Cetilia presents nestled in the static for cello and small bluetooth speaker array
John Eagle presents (stream:streams), performed by Laura Cetilia, for solo cello and quadraphonic speaks as well as Untitled (tuning series) for violin and cello and two speakers performed by and Emily Call and Laura Cetilia
Performances and Compositions by:
Laura Cetilia, John Eagle, Nigel Deane and Emily Call