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Event
Jozef van Wissem: New Music for Early Instruments
This October, ISSUE Project Room will present Dutch lutanist Josef van Wissem in a two-day residency including collaborations with Jim Jarmusch, Susan Alcorn, Richard Bishop, Gregg Kowalsky, Paul Metzger, Loren Connors, and Heresy of the Free Spirit (Che Chen and Robbie Lee).
New Music For Early Instruments sees van Wissem collaborating with several American artists, all adding essential elements to an ongoing dialogue between the music of our time and early music, when there were fewer written compositions and no recordings. Van Wissem has written that:
"In order to update the instrument, to make it mature and give it the recognition it deserves one needs to put it in an entirely different and contemporary context. Early instruments can be processed on laptop in many different ways, field recordings can be added, lute tablature can be performed backwards, baroque themes can be repeated without end the freeing of these constraints seems endless. The idea behind New Music for Early Instruments is to drag the lute out of the museum, out of the safe hands of a small group of specialists and give it back to the people. The lute used to be omnipresent before it disappeared: in all layers of society, at court, in bars, in rich and poor families. It traveled well on horseback, so Italian, French, lowland, and German styles were mixed. So why hide it now?"
Jozef van Wissem builds music with the sonorities of his unusual instrument: a 24-string Baroque lute. Much of the work of van Wissem is based on the application of mirror images to lute composition. The work is idiomatic to lute tablature around 1600. Through study in New York City with Patrick O'Brien, he discovered that beginning in the Middle Ages, one of the variations on the cantus firmus (the given melody) is the backwards performance of the melody. As a result, he used this on his first group of compositions, released as the CD Retrograde. On A Classical Deconstruction (Persephone 002), van Wissem wrote out mirror images of hundreds of classical lute pieces, copying them out from the bottom right to the top left corner. To these inversions he added new themes, accents and rhythms. He then applied the "cut up" technique of writer William S. Burroughs and cut, shifted, mixed and pasted the parts together to create new works.One critic has compared van Wissem's work to that of German painter Georg Baselitz, who painted upside down. More recently his lute compositions consist of trance-inducing layered palindromes.
Van Wissem is renowned for his ability to appropriate the Renaissance and Baroque lute in the context of contemporary experimental music. By cutting and pasting classical pieces, reversing melodies, and adding electronics and processed field recordings, he is able to bridge the language of 17th century music with that of the 21st century without compromising the timbre and resonance of traditional lute playing techniques.
Susan Alcorn started out playing guitar at th...
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LocationISSUE Project Room
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: No |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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