Collide Contemporary Music Series: Ensemble AMF

Friday, September 9, 2016; 8:00 pm

Cost: $10, $5 for students, Free with UCF ID

Location: UCF Rehearsal Hall, Auditorium (116)

4000 Central Florida Blvd., Orlando, FL 32816
www.music.ucf.edu

407-823-1500

A double bill season opener for the Collide Contemporary Music Series featuring San Fransisco based duo The Living Earth Show and Orlando's own Ensemble AMF.

About The Living Earth Show:

Called “a vanguard effort of new chamber music” by the San Francisco Examiner, “transcendent” by the Charleston City Paper, and “a fully distorted perpetual motion of awesome” by I Care If You Listen, The Living Earth Show, comprised of electric guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson, commissions, curates, organizes, and promotes the most compelling young composers through challenging them to realize their most ambitious creative visions. Memorizing every work it performs, The Living Earth Show thrives on pushing the boundaries of technical and artistic possibility in its presentation of commissioned electro-acoustic chamber music.

Sooge Sohrab, by Iranian-American composer Sahba Aminikia, uses an autobiographic fable about the composer’s experiences in Iran. In true exploratory spirit, the piece calls for quarter-tone guitar. To achieve the dissonance of the quarter tone (half of a semitone, or the interval between each fret of a tuned guitar) Andrews will use a guitar with an extra fret between every fret.

Croatian composer Jurha Koges will be represented with 69 Piglets, for prerecorded sound, narration, and duo. Similarly, the peppy-sounding Family Sing-along and Game Night, by Montreal-based composer Nicole Lizée, features nursery rhymes and spoken bits. The JUNO-nominated composer has written works “for orchestra and solo turntablist featuring DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting,” her website notes. “It really just takes you all over the place,” Andrews says, describing the piece as whimsical. “She is the preeminent writer for turntable.”

Twenty-seven year-old Mexican-born composer Luis Escareño takes a more direct approach to narrative form with his multi-media piece Bluets. Based on a book by Maggie Nelson, Bluets is accompanied by a short film also made by Escareño. “It is about desire, longing, and detachment,” Andrews says. “I wanna end the program with it because I think it’s very affecting.”

About Ensemble AMF:

The five virtuoso musicians of Ensemble AMF present Frederic Rzewski’s intense and dark post-minimalist masterwork Coming Together, with a text drawn from the Attica prison riot organizer Sam Melville. Featuring a special guest appearance by actor and Creative City Project mastermind Cole NeSmith. Also on the program is Julius Eastman’s Stay On It and Bill Ryan’s Blurred.

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