November 6th & 7th at 8:00 p.m.
Tickets: $10- $20 sliding scale (available at the door)
November 6th at 8:00 p.m.
Space, Pulse, Pattern, Presence
In true Fidget style, this program aims to shift our sights toward a future for experimentalism where the possibilities are broad and deep. The works on view in this program can all be looked at through the lens of four themes: space, pulse, pattern, and presence.
Fidget welcomes Philadelphia’s premiere curator of improvisational music, Flandrew Fleisenberg, as a guest curator for this program. Flandrew brings two out-of-town music improvisers, Bromp Treb (Massachusetts) and ID M Theft Able (Maine) whose weird and wild sounds push the envelope of experimental performance. The evening will also feature performances by Fidget’s Artists in Residence, Michael McDermott & Zornitsa Stoyanova (Here[begin] Dance), and the first showing of a new project by Fidget.
Bromp Treb will be coaxing dead ideas into the light, using small bits of food and poorly drawn diagrams for bait. ID M Theft Able performs within and without the realms of noise, avant-improvisation, sound poetry, and performance using voice, found objects, electronics, and whatever else is available. Dark Matter is a multi-tiered experience of dance, surround sound, live music, film, objects, light, and smart phone media.
November 7th at 8:00 p.m.
John Cage / Morton Feldman / John Adams
Maximal/Minimal Piano
Please join us on Saturday November 7 for a very special evening featuring performances by three young new pianists, each known for their precision and intensity of performance style. The works you’ll hear span four decades of experimentalism in piano music, yet share an approach to the instrument which is perhaps most perceptible in these pieces’ commonality of mood and feeling.
Melinda Faylor tackles the monolithic, rippling, minimalist arch of John Adams‘s 1977 work Phrygian Gates. Her performance will be accompanied by a responsive video projection created with the use of MAX and Jitter. Melinda holds a Masters from the Manhattan School of Music (2005) and a BM from the Oberlin Conservatory (2002). An enthusiastic performer of new music, she has performed with the TACTUS, Delancey, Lunatics at Large, Tenth Intervention, Ensemble 212 and Mimesis Ensembles, and has performed solo and chamber music at numerous venues in New York.
Guam-born pianist Michael Tan will perform three early works by John Cage: In a Landscape, A Room, and Dream. Cage composed these works in the 1940s, during a period of his compositional output when he hadn’t yet separated himself from music as emotional expression or representation of affect. These three piano works reveal Cage’s personality at the time as wistfully romantic. Tan specializes in modern and contemporary music, and has performed extensively as a soloist and chamber musician both in the US and abroad.
Adam Tendler will perform Palais de Mari by Morton Feldman. London critic Frances Wilson described Tendler’s performance of Palais de Mari as “a concentrated listening experience… meditative, intense and beautifully poised,” and his skill as a pianist has been heralded by the Los Angeles Times (“exuberantly expressive”) and the New Yorker (“intrepid… outstanding”). Feldman’s work of this kind is notoriously difficult to memorize, and Adam’s mastery of it was no small feat: see one page of his coded memory “map” of the score, pictured above. Read more about Adam’s journey with this project in this excellent article.