Gareth Davis (Merzbow, Christian Marclay), Roland Dahinden (Miles Davis, Anthony Braxton), Robin Rimbaud (Scanner), Agathe Max (Rhys Chatham), Pau Solas Masafrets, Arthur Klaasens, John Eckhardt, Daniel Havel and Martin Švec make contact with the minimalist scores of In C and Composition 1960 #7 in a site-specific arrangement. Listeners will be able to move and lounge, think and spontaneously perceive. Prague Music Performance thus loosely follows up on its successful project with Stockhausen's Aus den Sieben Tagen last year.
Jazz, Indian ragas, psychedelic drugs, Webernian serialism, Japanese gagaku, Cage-esque approach to silence and coincidence all influenced the work of La Monte Young and Terry Riley.
They first met in the late 1950s. Both cultivated music full of repetitions and long static structures. Later it came to be called minimalism and Young, with the help of music publicists, claimed to be its father. At a time when the most avant-garde, complex compositions were being produced in Europe, Terry Riley made do with thirty-three fragments in C major and Young with one perfect fifth. A radical simplicity that both provokes and comforts to this day.
The concert is organized by PMP and Ivan Moravec Academy.
Gareth Davis - bass clarinet
Davis's broad and generally unanchored musical tastes have allowed him to participate in recordings, projects and performances that include contemporary classical music, free improvisation, orchestral music, rock, noise, and electronica. He has worked with composers such as Jonathan Harvey, Toshio Hosokawa, and Bernhard Lang, whose works he has also premiered. Gareth has performed with various ensembles and performers (Arditti Quartet, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart), improvisers (Elliott Sharp, Frances-Marie Uitti), and electronic artists (Merzbow, Robin Rimbaud). He has also contributed to multimedia works by artists such as Christian Marclay and Peter Greenaway.
Roland Dahinden - alphorn and trombone
The Swiss trombonist and composer, originally from Zug, studied at the Musikhochschule in Graz with Erich Kleinschuster and Georg Friedrich Haas, and also at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole in Florence with Vinko Globokar. Roland specializes mainly in contemporary music, improvisation, and jazz. He has played almost all over the world and has collaborated with important musicians such as Anthony Braxton, Miles Davis, Pièrre Favre, George Gruntz, and Quincy Jones, and composers such as Peter Ablinger, Maria de Alvear, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, and Christian Wolff.
Robin Rimbaud | Scanner - electronica
Scanner is a British artist Robin Rimbaud. His work traverses the experimental realm between sound and space, bridging an astonishing range of genres. Since 1991 he has worked extensively in sound art, creating concerts, installations and recordings, and to date has created music for 75 contemporary dance productions, including works for the Royal Ballet of London and Merce Cunningham. He is dedicated to collaborating with cutting-edge artists, having worked with Bryan Ferry, Wayne MacGregor, Michael Nyman, Steve McQueen, Laurie Anderson and Hussein Chalayan, among others.
Agathe Max - violin
Agathe is originally from France but now lives in the UK. She plays electric violin combined with electronica and analogue stomp boxes. Her musical collaborators include Rhys Chatham, Carla Bozulich, Farewell Poetry, and Animal Hospital, while she has also worked on dance projects including Carolyn Carlson Company and Jo Marsalo, and on music for film, theater, and various installations.
Pau Sola Masafrets - violoncello
Pau Masafrets plays both improvised and composed music with a sense of freedom and responsibility for himself, for the music, and for his fellow players. He says that his body, which is in space, is the expressive material with which he performs, and he uses the cello as an instrument in itself. Masafrets also embarks on composing and improvising. Masafrets is involved in projects combining free improvisation, contemporary jazz, contemporary classical music, musical theater, and performances such as the AMOK orchestra, SonCe, Geography Umane, and Ell Sol.
John Eckhardt - bass guitar
A player who has worked with Helmut Lachenmann, Pierre Boulez, the Klangforum Wien and musikfabrik. In recent years, he has also focused on his own work, trying to respond artistically to the challenges of our society related to the climate crisis. John has contributed to over 30 recordings, including Iannis Xenakis' masterpiece "Theraps" (Mode Rec.) and three internationally acclaimed solo recordings. These are united by an interest in low frequency and spectral immersion, spatial depth and themes of repetition and evolutionary process.
Arthur Klaasens - hoboe
As a player, arranger and programmer, Arthur Klaassens is always looking for unusual angles on the repertoire of traditional and experimental music. He studied oboe at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and has cultivated his technique and broader musical outlook with, for example, Lucas Macias Navarra and Alexey Ogrintchouk. Klaasens is the first Dutch owner of a lupophone, a new type of bass oboe developed by Guntram Wolf. His debut CD Ratio was released in 2021 on the Dutch label 7MNTN Records. His album "Couleur Locale" was also released on the same label and features him as a member of the unique Cortado Wind Trio consisting of flute, alto oboe and bass clarinet.
Daniel Havel - flute
Daniel Havel studied flute at the Brno Conservatory and then with Radomír Pivoda at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Since 2007 he has been a member of the orchestra of the National Theatre in Prague and in 2012 he was a solo flutist of the Czech Philharmonic. He is a member of the Ostrava Banda and Prague Modern, ensembles focused on contemporary music, and regularly collaborates with orchestras such as the Prague Symphony Orchestra FOK, PKF - Prague Philharmonia, Czech Philharmonic, Prague Chamber Orchestra and others. He has performed with the Ostrava Band at Carnegie Hall (NY), Lincoln Center (NY), the Academy of Arts in Berlin, the Vredenburg Music Center in Utrecht and the Prague Spring Festival. As a soloist, he regularly participates in performances and premieres of works by contemporary Czech composers (Miloslav Kabeláč, Jan Hanuš, Diego Soifer, Dai Fujikura) and collaborates with the French bassoonist and conductor Pascal Gallois.
Martin Švec - percussions
Martin Švec is a graduate of the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno, where he is also currently enrolled in a doctoral programme focusing on electronic percussion instruments, which he also teaches. He is a member of the orchestra of the National Theatre in Brno and the EnsembleSpectrum in Bratislava. As a soloist he has appeared with the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra Olomouc and the Prague Philharmonic in works by Daniel Šimek, and as an orchestral player he has performed with the Brno Philharmonic, Slovak Philharmonic, Ensemble Opera Diversa, Ostrava New Orchestra and Berg Orchestra, among others.
Barbora Jágrová - light design
After completing her bachelor's degree at JAMU, she began to study lighting design in the studio of Pavla Beranová and Vladimír Burian, which gave her the opportunity to participate in projects and learn from many personalities of contemporary art from the Czech Republic and abroad. Currently, she works mostly in the Czech Republic, where she focuses on concert and festival lighting. She primarily works on lighting design for performance, classical dance and opera.