Wayward Music Series: Seth Parker Woods, cello
$5-$15 donation
Alvin Singleton — Argoru II
George Lewis — Not Alone
Pierre Alexandre Tremblay — asinglewordisnotenough 3 [invariant]
Edward Hamel – Gray Neon Life (Seattle premiere)
Pierre Alexandre Tremblay – asinglewordisnotenough 3 (invariant) (Seattle premiere)
Alvin Singleton – Argoru II (Seattle premiere)
George Lewis – Not Alone (Seattle premiere)
Company is a state of being here, in a program which speaks in worlds. In Edward Hamel’s Gray Neon Life the cellist is his own companion, uttering words which are not so much spoken over the music as sprayed on and under it, made both surface and core: adornment and essence. This double figure – cellist and voice in one – is Seth Parker Woods, and the piece in both concept and execution is a vehicle for his co-creative input, ranging from the precise choice of pitch material to the derivation of the texted component from the SAMO© tag of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s and Al Diaz’s New York street art, of which Woods is an aficionado. What Hamel and the rest of the composers featured tonight make from it is a sort of manifesto for city life and city art, summoned into existence by a harmonic double stop which, recurring as a fourfold refrain, finally offers a tentative way out … or on.
On, at first, into a hall of mirrors. The three remaining works on this programme – two of them, like Gray Neon Life, written for Woods – surround the cello with spatial silence and electronically produced sounds, and in the first two, by Alvin Singleton and George Lewis, these sounds are derived in real time from the cello’s own material. In Pierre Alexandre Tremblay’s asinglewordisnotenough3 (invariant), the sound sources are more diverse, and yet the work’s worlds are again conjured forth by this lone yet multiple figure. Here he is at the center of it all: muse and master of ceremonies, devising it all for company. — John Fallas/SPW
Presented by Nonsequitur.
About Wayward Music Series
Each month, Nonsequitur and a community of like-minded organizations and artists present 10 concerts of adventurous and experimental music in the gorgeous Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center: contemporary/post-classical composition, free improvisation and the outer limits of jazz, electronic/electroacoustic music, new instruments, phonography, sound art, and other innovative musics.
https://www.waywardmusic.org/