Play as you go
George Lewis / Pauline Oliveros / Joëlle Léandre
vs. Interpretation 2014 full concert
Joëlle Léandre: Contrabass
George Lewis: Laptop and trombone
Artist Bios Pauline Oliveros is a senior figure in contemporary American music. Her career spans fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the ‘50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. Recently awarded the John Cage award for 2012 from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Oliveros is Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. Pauline Oliveros’ life as a composer, performer and humanitarian is about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Since the 1960s she has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. Pauline Oliveros is the founder of “Deep Listening,” which she describes as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Joëlle Léandre is a French double bass player, improviser and composer, and one of the dominant figures of the new European music. Trained in orchestral as well as contemporary music, she has played with l’Itinéraire, 2e2m and Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain. Joëlle Léandre has also worked with Merce Cunningham and with John Cage, who has composed especially for her – as have Scelsi, Fénelon, Hersant, Lacy, Campana, Jolas, Clementi and about 40 composers. She has written extensively for dance and theater, and has staged a number of multidisciplinary performances. She got the DAAD at Berlin, and is welcomed as artist resident at Villa Kujiyama (Kyoto). In 2002, 2004 and 2006, she is Visiting Professor at Mills college, Oakland, CA, Chaire Darius Milhaud, for improvisation and composition. Her work has put her under the lights of the most prestigious stages of Europe, the Americas and Asia. From 1981 to 2009, Joëlle Léandre has about 150 recordings to her credit. George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in theArts in 1999, a United States Artists 2011 USA Walker Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. His residencies include IRCAM (Paris), STEIM (Amsterdam), and Alberta’s Banff Centre for the Arts. Lewis has been an NEA Fellow, was hosted as Visiting Artist by the ArtInstitute of Chicago, and curated the music program of New York’s The Kitchen Center. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work as composer, improvisor, performer and interpreter explores electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated and improvisative forms, and is documented on more than 140 recordings.
About the vs. Interpretation Festival: One of the Agosto Foundation’s most important contributions to the local and international music scene, vs. Interpretation is an ongoing, transdisciplinary project promoting innovative improvised artistic projects and research. Beginning with a festival and symposium in Summer 2014, vs. Interpretation has created a field for inquiry and experimentation for artists, scholars, and interested individuals across all disciplines and experience levels. In June 2015, the Agosto Foundation released its first volume of writings inspired by the project, vs. Interpretation: An Anthology on Improvisation. To purchase the festival-inspired book, vs. Interpretation: An Anthology on Improvisation, visit our online shop.