(SOLD OUT)
Nov 30, 2023
6:30 (doors), 7:00 (performance)
Éliane Radigue: Occam X + Occam River
Blank Forms
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Featuring OCCAM X for trumpet, followed by the premiere of a new OCCAM River for trumpet and percussion
Nate Wooley and Enrico M. will perform a selection of rarely-performed works by Éliane Radigue. Radigue, one of the pioneers of continuous sound in concert music, retired from electronic music in 2001 and began creating collaborative works with instrumentalists. Since then, she has produced more than seventy works ranging from solos and string quartets to works for orchestra. She began creating “OCCAM Ocean”—the series comprising most of this prolific output—in 2011.
Wooley and M. are each long-standing champions of the French composer’s music. Enrico M., one of the final additions to Radigue’s rotating band of chevaliers—the French word for “knights,” and her word for solo collaborators—is one of the most fervent and in-demand performers of her music, collaborating with Wooley and others on larger pieces in Europe during celebrations of the composer’s ninetieth birthday last year. Wooley has been performing Radigue’s music for a decade, particularly OCCAM X for trumpet and OCCAM RIVER III for trumpet and birbynė with Carol Robinson. Since 2014, he has performed Radigue’s music dozens of times, most recently curating a concert of her music at the Big Ears Festival in Tennessee. He is also the author and editor of a 2021 issue of his journal, Sound American, devoted to the chevaliers and featuring ten interviews with some of Radigue’s closest partners in the making of “OCCAM Ocean.”
At 7 pm, Wooley will perform OCCAM X for trumpet, the first performance in New York in two years, followed by the premiere of a new OCCAM River for percussion and trumpet played by the duo.
Éliane Radigue (b. 1932) is a pioneering French composer of undulating continuous music marked by patient, virtually imperceptible transformations, which purposively unfold to reveal the intangible, radiant contents of minimal sound—its partials, harmonics, subharmonics, and inherent distortions. As a student and assistant to musique concrète pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the 1950s and ’60s, Radigue mastered tape splicing techniques, but preferred the creation of fluid, delicately balanced feedback works to the spasmodic dissonance of her teachers’ music. Finding peers among minimalist composers in America, Radigue began working with synthesis in 1970, eventually discovering the ARP 2500 synthesizer, which she would use exclusively for her celebrated electronic works to come. With remarkable restraint, Radigue spent years on each piece, painstakingly assembling many series of subtle, pulsating ARP recordings to be later mixed meticulously into hour-long suites of precise, perpetual mutation. In 2001, Radigue adapted Elemental II, an early feedback work, for live performance on electric bass, and in 2004, with the encouragement of her collaborator Charles Curtis, she permanently abandoned electronics for acoustic composition, beginning with Naldjorlak I, for solo cello, composed for Curtis. As within each individual work, Radigue has maintained an obstinate focus throughout the flow of her career, her dedication to the materiality of sound earning her numerous accolades and ensuring her place as one of the most important composers of our time.
Enrico M. is an Italian percussionist and sound researcher active in the fields of experimental music, sound intervention, and performance; his practice explores the relations between sound, space, and body, and the vitality of materials and the morphology of surfaces, with particular attention to percussive acts and modes of listening. Since 2007, Enrico M. has presented his works on tours across Europe, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, the UK, North America, and Russia, participating in festivals and special events in venues such as Pirelli Hangar, Bicocca, Milan; Berghain, Berlin; and the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro.
Nate Wooley is considered one of the leading lights of the American movement to redefine the physical boundaries of the horn. He made his debut as soloist with the New York Philharmonic in the opening series of their 2019 season and has earned international acclaim for his idiosyncratic trumpet language. Wooley has performed with and played music by Anthony Braxton, Annea Lockwood, Evan Parker, Radigue, Ken Vandermark, and Yoshi Wada. He has premiered works for trumpet by Martin Arnold, Ash Fure, Sarah Hennies, Eva-Maria Houben, Lockwood, Michael Pisaro, Wadada Leo Smith, and Christian Wolff. He is a 2022 New York State Council on the Arts / New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and is the 2023 composer-in-residence at Mills College in Oakland, California.