John Zorn's Stone Commissioning Series presents: Zeena Parkins with Jeff Kolar
6pm doors • 7pm show
About
New Music. New Jazz. Curated by John Zorn.
The John Zorn Commissioning Series celebrates Zorn’s revolutionary venue, The Stone, a non-profit venue that was “dedicated to the experimental and avant-garde” and served as a vital spot for new music in Manhattan’s Alphabet City for over a decade. Held on the last Wednesday of every month, National Sawdust honors the spirit of the Stone, hosting the world premiere of new works.
This month’s concert features the composer, multi-instrumentalist, and harp player Zeena Parkins. Parkins will structure her evening around two large–scale works: Captiva, which pairs live harp with live electronic processing in a system of generative tensions, and SCALE, a new work co-written with electronic composer Jeff Kolar that explores nature at its most disruptive and its most utopic.
Parkins is celebrating the fall release of Captiva on Good Child Records.
Tickets
The Artists
Zeena Parkins is an electro-acoustic composer, improviser and pioneer of contemporary harp practice and performance. Parkins re-imagines both the acoustic harp and an evolution of her original electric ones, through the use of expanded playing techniques, preparations, and custom designed processing. Within a shifting constellation of improvised/composed/gesture/touch/space/sound/noise/music, Parkins is engaged in translations of sonicity often within multi-channel environments: architectural, emotional, topographical, and social.
Commissions include: Whitney Museum, Tate Modern, Montalvo Arts Center, Sharjah Art Foundation, NeXtWorks Ensemble, Either/Or Ensemble/Ensemble Son, Donaueschinger Musiktage, SWR German radio, Bang on a Can Spit Orchestra, Eclipse Quartet, iLand, Thin Man Dance, Human Future Dance Corps and Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
Awards include: Doris Duke Artist Award, 3 Bessies for her groundbreaking work with dance, DAAD Fellowship, Multi-Arts Production Fund, Shifting Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYFA Fellowship, The Jerome Foundation, Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention.
Residencies include: Atlantic Center for the Arts Master Artist-in-Residence, Herb Alpert/Ucross Prize, Rauschenberg Fellowship Residency, Civitella Ranieri/Umbertide, Montalvo, Oxford University/The Ruskin School.
Performances/recordings include: Bjork, Ikue Mori, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Christian Marclay, Butch Morris, Elliott Sharp, William Winant, Nate Wooley, Nels Cline, Bobby Previte, Mick Barr, Mary Halvorson, Brian Chase, Leila Bourdreuil, Yuka C. Honda, Okkyung Lee, Matmos, Yoko Ono, Yasunao Tone, Pauline Oliveros, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Lee Renaldo, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Myra Melford, and Miya Masaoka.
Parkins is Distinguished Visiting Artist at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Jeff Kolar (b. Chicago, Illinois, US) is an independent sound and media artist, composer, radio producer, and curator working in Chicago, United States. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform established in 2010. His work, described as “speaker-shredding” (Half Letter Press), “wonderfully strange” (John Corbett), and “characteristically curious” (Marc Weidenbaum), activates sound in unconventional, temporary, and ephemeral ways using appropriation and remix as a critical practice. His solo and collaborative projects, installations, and public performances often investigate the mundane sonic nuances of everyday electronic devices.
He has performed and exhibited widely across the United States, and at international venues and festivals such as the New Museum (New York, US), Museum of Arts and Design (New York, US), Moogfest (Durham, North Carolina, US), The Kitchen (New York, US), CTM Festival for Adventurous Music (Berlin, Germany), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, Illinois, US), Kino Šiška (Ljubljana, Slovenia), ORF RadioKulturhaus (Vienna, Austria), Radio Revolten International Radio Art Festival (Halle, Germany), Megapolis Audio Festival (New York, USA), LAK Festival of Nordic Sound Art (København, Denmark), among others.
