Paula Cooper Gallery 534 West 21 Street, New York

Thursday, December 20 at 8pm

S.E.M. Ensemble: Petr Kotik, Director - Gayla Morgan, Soprano - Steven Fox, Tenor, Narration

• Petr Kotik Spheres & Attraction (Text by R. Buckminister Fuller) 2005
• J.S.Bach Recitativo & Aria (“Er hat uns allen wohl getan”) 1729
• Petr Kotik String Quartet (premiere) 2007
• Alex Mincek Nucleus II (premiere) 2007
• Galina Ustwolskaja Symphony No. 5 “Amen” 1990

The S.E.M. Ensemble
is dedicated to the performance and advancement of new music, with a focus on works that can best be described as post-Cagean. Since its inception in 1970, SEM has collaborated with composers who have also often performed with the group. In 1992, the Ensemble expanded into The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble with a debut concert in Carnegie Hall, “Tribute to John Cage,” premiering the complete Atlas Eclipticalis with an 86-piece orchestra, Kotik conducting, and David Tudor at the piano. Since then, the SEM Orchestra has toured Europe five times and performed in Japan. SEM holds yearly concerts in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery and other venues such as Merkin Concert Hall, Lincoln Center, and Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall.

Since 1976, S.E.M. Ensemble has performed concerts at Paula Cooper Gallery. Guests, who performed with SEM at Paula Cooper included John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, David Tudor, Maryanne Amacher, Jackson Mac Low, Alvin Lucier, Christian Wolff, to name just a few.

The Czech born composer, conductor and flutist Petr Kotik has resided in the United States since 1969. In 1970 he founded the S.E.M. Ensemble, which expanded into The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble In 1992. Kotik has received numerous composition grants and commissions including from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the prestigious composition award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. In 2003 Kotik was a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) resident in Berlin. His recent compositions include Variations for 3 Orchestras, premiered at MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin and at the Plains at Gordium, and For 6 Percussionists, premiered at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. Spheres & Attraction is for two voices, string quartet and percussion, and uses a text by R. Buckminster Fuller, an excerpt from his 1980 commencement speech at the School of Architecture and Environmental Studies of the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Alex Mincek is a New York-based composer and performer. His music is often characterized by elements of noise and dynamic thresholds and explores varying ways in which repetition affects our sense of time, memory and perception of difference. Mincek’s music has been programmed by festivals such as the Royaumont Voix Nouvelles and Musiques Demesurees festivals in France, the Darmstadt and Magdeburg music festivals in Germany, the Ostrava Days festivals (2001, 2003, 2005) in the Czech Republic and the World Music Institute’s Interpretations series in New York City. As composer and performer, Mincek has collaborated with groups including the Ensemble Cairn, The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, the Janacek Philharmonic, the Second Instrumental Unit, Red Light, TACTUS, the Vega String Quartet and the Scarborough Trio. Mincek’s music has also been recognized through commissions and grants from the New Mendelssohn Chamber Orchestra Leipzig, Ensemble XXI (France), MATA, Meet The Composer, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, Due East and Present Music. He currently composes for and serves as the saxophonist, bass clarinetist and music director of the Wet Ink Ensemble, a group dedicated to experimental contemporary music, which he founded in 1998. Nucleus II, for flute, tenor saxophone, tuba and drum set, is an expansion and continuation of an earlier work, Nucleus, for saxophone and drum set. Like the piece it is based on, Nucleus II, uses various types of repetitive structures as a schizophrenic basis to explore and link dialectics between difference/repetition, banality/novelty, reduction/proliferation, and freedom/confinement.

The St. Petersburg based Russian composer Galina Ustwolskaya (1919-2006) was, until Gorbachev’s perestroika in the late 1980s, an entirely neglected and unknown composer except to a few close associates and friends. Ustwolskaya made herself noticed in the 1930s when, as a student of Dimitri Shostakovich, she refused to conform to the official sponsored esthetics. The works are characterized by their unique sound and driven by her artistic courage and unconcealed religious beliefs. For that, performances of her compositions were often banned. Symphony No. 5 “Amen” has a unique instrumentation: oboe, trumpet, tuba and percussion plus a narrator reading the Lord’s Prayer. Like many other pieces, Ustwolskaya’s Symphony No. 5 is distinguished by imposing and expansive gestures.

Gayla Morgan, soprano, began her music career as a classical violinist and later pursued western/folk singing and fiddling as well as musical theater (Dreamhouse. Justine’s Red; Regional: Grapes of Wrath, among them). She has premiered contemporary art songs (Eleanor Cory, Mark Grant and Ilse Gilbert) and appeared on the Sound of New Music Series at St. Marks-in-the-Bowery. She has also soloed with NY Virtuoso Singers, Amor Artis, and the Hunter College Choir; and was one of the six members of The Western Wind Vocal Ensemble for five years.

A graduate of London’s Royal Academy of Music, tenor Steven Fox performs with Pomerium, New York Virtuoso Singers, AmorArtis and the choirs of St. Thomas Church, Trinity Church, Wall Street and St. Ignatius Loyola. Fox is also the conductor and founder of Musica Antiqua St. Petersburg, Russia’s first period-instrument orchestra, and is the newly appointed Artistic Director of Clarion Music Society in New York. With Musica Antiqua St. Petersburg, he has revived the works of many of Russia’s finest 18th-century composers, such as Dmitri Bortniansky, Maxim Berezvosky, and Evstigney Fomin, and performed them worldwide.

For reservations and ticket information please call: 718-488-7659

For more information visit: semensemble.org

This Concert is possible thanks to support from the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York State Council on the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, National Endowment for the Arts, The Amphion Foundation, Phaedrus Foundation and individual contributions. Special thanks to the Brooklyn Borough President, Marty Markowitz, for his support.