Charles Curtis: Rara Avis
Graphic by Alec Mapes-Frances.
Blank Forms
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Cellist Charles Curtis performs a double program, built around works by California composers Tashi Wada and Carolyn Chen. In both pieces, written specifically for Curtis by two of his close collaborators, composer and performer alike estrange audience perception by playing with extremes of pitch and pacing.
[See also: Charles Curtis: Landslide.]
Carolyn Chen’s Rara Avis (2015) elaborates upon the anonymous song “Woodycock” (ca. 1600). The original 17th-century composition spins a delicate web of ornamental variations around its simple sing-song melody, culminating in a relentless oscillation between the F-natural of D-minor and the F-sharp of D-major. By the song’s end, these two values come into immediate proximity, leaving listeners with a sense of irresolution. Chen’s Rara Avis, meanwhile, expands, elaborates, and develops the tune’s internal ambivalence. It is as if the differential of one half-step were now conceived as a search for any note, among all available, any modal step or chordal placeholder, to ground, however fleetingly, what is in the end a groundless swirl of cadences, phrases, gestures, dissonances and silences. The writing is intricate, ingeniously mapping mostly double-stops across the range of the cello, at times verging into rigorous two-voice polyphony.
Complementing Chen's work is Tashi Wada’s Landslide (2013-23), which originated from a recording of Curtis playing the cello in his garden in San Diego. Wada later manipulated the tape such that a single A is subjected to a gradual four-octave pitch sweep; in his live performances, Curtis plays the same sweep in near-unison. As he plays, Curtis superimposes his physical present on his digital past, introducing a dizzying entropy as acoustical anomalies amplify or cancel one another out.
CHARLES CURTIS is one of the premiere avant-garde cellists of the modern era. Trained at Juilliard, Curtis was also a pupil both of vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and composer La Monte Young, and he is one of the few musicians to have mastered Young’s rigorous practice of just intonation. He has performed modern classical, minimalist, and chamber music compositions all around the world, and numerous major composers—including Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, Christian Wolff, Alison Knowles and Tashi Wada—have written works specifically for him. A longtime contributor to Blank Forms, Curtis performed La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Just Charles & Cello in the Romantic Chord in 2023, marking the twentieth anniversary of the composition. In 2019, he performed in Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean tour, a series of non-transferable solo and ensemble pieces composed by Radigue for individual instrumentalists. Currently, Curtis is a Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego, a member of Blank Forms’s curatorial advisory board, and a co-editor of Blank Forms’ forthcoming tenth and final anthology, Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue.
CAROLYN CHEN is a composer and performance artist based in Los Angeles. A lifelong scholar, Chen completed her BA in music and MA in modern thought at Stanford University, and her PhD in music at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught from 2011-2014. For over a decade, her studies of the guqin, the Chinese seven-string zither traditionally played for private meditation in nature, have informed her thinking on listening in social spaces. Her resulting body of work challenges habitual listening patterns by reconfiguring everyday sounds with a blend of traditional instrumentation, text, light, image, and movement.
TASHI WADA is a Los Angeles-based composer and performer whose works explore harmonic overtones, resonance, and dissonance through precise tuning and a gradual change in pitch. Grounded in a belief that “music should be as direct as possible,” his compositions use apparently simple structures to generate rich and unanticipated perceptual effects. Between recording and performing with his creative and life partner, Julia Holter, and running his record label Saltern, Wada has carved a unique path as a minimalist and microtonal composer, drawing on the influence of his father, the Fluxus artist Yoshi Wada, his studies with James Tenney at CalArts, and beyond. But his most recent album, What Is Not Strange? (RVNG, 2024), borrows from narrative-inflected pop as he processes the recent death of his father, mentor, and collaborator alongside the birth of his daughter.
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