19 November 2005 12am - 12am
Mercer Union presents:
Music Series, Programme #1
Linda Catlin Smith plays Rudolf Komorous’ Anatomy of Melancholy
Saturday 19 November, 2005, 9PM
Mercer Union, A Centre for Contemporary Art
37 Lisgar Street, Toronto
(west of Dovercourt, south of Queen)
Free
Toronto based composer, Linda Catlin Smith, will DJ her own 2-hour version of Rudolf Komorous’ Anatomy of Melancholy. It is made up of many hours of weird and wonderful musical segments of various lengths originally compiled by Komorous in 1974 on 4 track, half track, and quarter track reel-to-reel tapes (now re-mastered onto CDs). It is performed as a multi-speaker sound installation in which the musical segments are variously collaged and montaged according to a plan arrived at by the disc jockey. The listener is encouraged to move through and around the installation, free to enter or leave the performance as she/he wishes.
Linda Catlin Smith is a composer and performer based in Toronto. She studied composition and theory with Allen Shawn in NY, and with composers Rudolf Komorous, Martin Bartlett, John Celona, Michael Longton and Jo Kondo at the University of Victoria in British Columbia; and attended lectures of Morton Feldman, by invitation, in Buffalo, NY. She was Artistic Director of Arraymusic from 1988 – 1993. She is a member of the performance collective, URGE. She has given lectures at many universities in Canada, and has taught composition privately and at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her works have been performed nationally/internationally by ensembles/ soloists including: Arraymusic, Ensemble Kore, Ergo, Continuum, Vancouver New Music, CBC Vancouver Orchestra, Tapestry New Opera, Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Penderecki Quartet, the Bozzini Quartet, the Modern Quartet, the Fibonacci Trio, Les Coucous Bénévoles, Elissa Poole, Barbara Pritchard, Eve Egoyan, Stephen Clarke, Anthony de Mare, Colin Tilney, Richard Sacks, Joseph Petric, and Robert W. Stevenson. Memory Forms, a CD completely devoted to her music, has been released by Artifact Music.
Composer Rudolf Komorous was born in Prague 1931. He studied bassoon at the Prague Conservatory of Music from 1946-52, and then studied both bassoon and composition at the Academy of Musical Arts in Prague from 1952-59. During this time he co-founded Smidra, an avant-garde artists’ collective that grew out of, but significantly differed from Czech surrealism. From 1959-61, he taught bassoon and chamber music at the Central Conservatory in Beijing. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1961 and co-founded Musica Viva Pragensis, an ensemble that specialised in the performance of experimental music. Komorous immigrated to Canada in 1969. He lectured in the United States in 1970-71 (at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota on John Cage’s recommendation) then moved to Victoria, British Columbia and began teaching at the University of Victoria in 1971. From 1989-94, he served as Director of the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Komorous’ music has been performed internationally by numerous ensembles and soloists including: Agon; Arraymusic; the Dream Ensemble; the Esprit Orchestra; Fifth Species; Kore; the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra; the Modern Quartet; The Netherlands Radio Orchestra; New Music Concerts; Quatour Bozzini; the SWF-Sinfonieorchester; the Toronto Symphony Orchestra; the Turning Point Ensemble; the Vancouver Chamber Choir; the Vancouver New Music Ensemble; the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra; the Victoria Symphony Orchestra; the Windsor Symphony Orchestra; pianists Cornelius Cardew, Eve Egoyan and Frederic Rzewski; guitarist Norbert Kraft; and, baroque flautist Elissa Poole.
This is the first of a ten-part music series that is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts Music in Alternative Spaces Programme. Visit www.mercerunion.org for a full calendar.
Mercer Union, A Centre for Contemporary Art
37 Lisgar Street, Toronto ON M6J 3T3
416 536 1519 info@mercerunion.org www.mercerunion.org
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