Interpretations presents an evening with: Ted Mook: pansonority/luminance, The Music of Ezra Sims and Daniel Rothman.
Cellist Ted Mook has gathered his friends for an evening of glowing microtonal music. Ezra Sims, the panchromatic classicist composer celebrates his 80th birthday with the String Quartet # 5 and the masterful Clarinet Quintet. Daniel Rothman, a composer of lambent sonorities, presents his String Quartet and a work written for solo cello, For Ted. Both composers explore unprecedented nuance of timbre, tone and form in the service of expression. Featuring: Ted Mook, cello; Sean Carney, violin; Christian Hebel, violin; Liu Wen Ting, viola; Gilad Harel, clarinet. For reservations, call 212-219-8242. For more information on the Interpretations series, call 212-627-0990 or visit: www.interpretations.info www.roulette.org Ted Mook Theodore (Ted) Mook has been an active proponent of new music, particularly microtonal music since 1980. After graduating from the Boston University School of Music, he became a member of Dinosaur Annex (Boston) and performed with several other ensembles in the Boston area. He maintained his interest in contemporary music after moving to New York in 1983, and has performed with Speculum Musicae, the New York New Music Ensemble, Continuum, Newband and many other groups. He has premiered works by some of today's most prestigious composers, among them Chen Yi, John Zorn, Daniel Rothman, Lee Hyla, Ezra Sims, David Lang, and Ralph Shapey, and gave the World Premiere of one of Roger Session's last works, the Duo for Violin and Cello. Since the mid-1990s, Mr. Mook has developed a parallel career in computers, where he has worked in IT & programming for corporate clients, developed fonts for microtonal compositions, developed websites and worked as a music copyist and arranger. Daniel Rothman Daniel Rothman’s musical and visual preoccupations wander beyond the concert hall into eccentric spaces and timescales both smaller and larger than life, such as the miniature The Dandelion Clock (with Andrea Loselle, Ted Mook, and Daniel Tiffany), the immense Sense Absence (with Paul Tzanetopoulos and the Quatuor Bozzini), the pedestrian The Garden Party (with Zebra), or the virtual Cézanne’s Doubt (with Elliot Anderson, Jim Campbell, Tom Buckner, Kent Clelland, Ted Mook, David Smeyers, and Wadada Leo Smith). Among these, Yes, Philip, Androids Dream Electric Sheep makes contingent its acoustic life form, with a music incarnated through acoustic feedback tapping the ecology of biofeedback as a clarinet-organism manifests its environment: an aria for the man-machine. His music is frequently heard in the US and Europe. He has received grants from, among others, the Argosy Contemporary Music Fund, the Fondation d’Art de La Napoule, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Ezra Sims Born in 1928, far off the musical reservation in Birmingham, Alabama, he showed intellectual and musical precociousness as a youngster and progressed through piano, string bass, choral singer, composer, Yale student, Mills student (with Darius Milhaud), New Yorker, Guggenheim Fellow in Japan, inventor of a 72-note per octave non-symmetrical notation system, resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, co-founder of Dinosaur Annex (a Boston based new music ensemble) and still is writing music. In the 60s, driven by his ear to write down notes that were not reproducible on the piano, he developed a tonal system of 17 irregularly spaced notes, fully transposable, resulting in a 72 note sub-division of the octave. Taking it one step beyond the flattened system of Harry Partch (based on a root-ratio), Ezra’s system evolved a harmonic language allowing for closely related and fully chromatic modulations. These vast tonal resources are tamed by a somewhat conservative, almost Brahmsian romanticism, and the resulting music is clear and expressive. * * * * * * * The Interpretations series, now in its twentieth season, is a New York-based concert series focusing on the relationship between contemporary composers and their interpreters. Sometimes the interpreters are the composers themselves; more often, the series features performers who specialize in the interpretation of new music. Since its inception in 1989, Interpretations has featured leading figures in contemporary music and multimedia, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Robert Ashley, Anthony Braxton, Thomas Buckner, FLUX Quartet, Annea Lockwood, and Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Ursula Oppens, and Morton Subotnick.