Opera World Premiere
Anthony Braxton's ambitious multimedia opera project Trillium has been in the making since the 1990’s. The American experimental musician and unique improviser explores in it themes of metaphysics, mysticism, and human consciousness. The world premiere of a part of Trillium X will be performed by the PMP Orchestra with Braxton's active participation. His longtime friend, composer, and trombonist Roland Dahinden will conduct. Don't miss the opportunity to experience this unique poetic opera, which in Braxton’s own words, takes place in "four exploratory dream spaces" with a "imaginatively conceived narrative logic."
Prof. Timo Hoyer – Lecture | 4 pm
Prof. Timo Hoyer, the author of the book "Anthony Braxton – Creative Music", will be presenting Anthony Braxton and his work, while also explaining the aesthetic principles behind his large-scale opera project, Trillium X, during his lecture at the DOX Center starting at 4 pm. The lecture is free for ticket holders and will be accompanied by musical samples. The program will be conducted in English.
Anthony Braxton (*1945)
The Chicago-born composer and multi-instrumentalist, is recognized as one of the most important musicians, educators, and creative thinkers of the past 50 years. He is highly esteemed in the experimental music community for the revolutionary quality of his work and for the mentorship and inspiration he has provided to generations of younger musicians. His work, both as a saxophonist and a composer, has broken new conceptual and technical ground in the trans-African and trans-European (a.k.a. “jazz” and “American Experimental”) musical traditions in North America as defined by master improvisers such as Warne Marsh, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and he and his own peers in the historic Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM, founded in Chicago in the late '60s); and by composers such as Charles Ives, Harry Partch, and John Cage. He has further worked his own extensions of instrumental technique, timbre, meter and rhythm, voicing and ensemble make-up, harmony and melody, and improvisation and notation into a personal synthesis of those traditions with 20th-century European art music as defined by Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Varese and others.
From his early work as a pioneering solo performer in the late 1960s through to his eclectic experiments on Arista Records in the 1970s, his landmark quartet of the 1980s, and more recent endeavors, such as his cycle of Trillium operas and the day-long, installation-based Sonic Genome Project, his vast body of work is unparalleled. His small ensembles of the 1970s through to the present day are considered among the most innovative groups of their respective eras, while his Creative Orchestra Music has brought together the varying streams of American jazz orchestras, marching bands, and experimental practices with the traditions of European concert music in a wholly individual compositional voice. His continuing and evolving current systems of the past 15 years, including Ghost Trance Music, Diamond Curtain Wall Music, Falling River Music, Echo Echo Mirror House Music, and ZIM Music, have served as the artistic incubators for some of the most exciting artists of the current generation. Braxton’s many awards include a 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1994 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a 2014 NEA Jazz Master Award, and honorary doctorates from Université de Liège (Belgium), New England Conservatory (USA) and the 2020 United States Artists Fellowship.