June 17, Sunday

Dillon Gallery

5:00pm – Debussy III: Messiaen Enveloped “Carte Blanche” to Visual Artist-in-Residence Makoto Fujimura

CMF 2012 Visual Artist-in-Residence Makoto Fujimura curates a collaborative visual arts program at Chelsea’s Dillon Gallery enveloping a Steinway grand piano with pure, traditional, and no longer produced Japanese silk and projecting images of birds, oceans, and trees through it, while pianist Molly Morkoski performs Preludes by Olivier Messiaen and Debussy’s “Reflet dans l’eau”. The wave images are from Kamakura, where Fujimura spent considerable time in childhood watching and drawing.  The Fujimura-Messiaen collaboration is in part a meditation into the tragic nature of our lives and is preceded on this program by a cello sonata by Claude Debussy, who wrote the piece in 1915 as World War I was raging and as he was suffering from the cancer that would eventually kill him.  It is a concise work filled with irony and is one of the great masterpieces of the cello repertoire.

PROGRAM

Sonata for Cello & Piano (1915)…...........................……….……Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
I. Prologue: Lent, sostenuto e molto risoluto
II. Sérénade: Modérément animé
III. Final: Animé, léger et nerveux

Marc Coppey, cello
Molly Morkoski, piano

Images Book I (1905)…................................…………………….Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
“Reflets dans l'eau"

Préludes (1928-29)…......................................…………………. Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
No. 1  La colombe
No. 2  Chant d'extase dans un paysage triste
No. 3  Le nombre léger
No. 4  Instants défunts
No. 5  Les sons impalpables du rêve
No. 6  Cloches d'angoisse et larmes d'adieu
No. 7  Plainte calme
No. 8  Un reflet dans le vent

Molly Morkoski, piano

Eyebeam Art+Technology Center

7:30pm - Open Cage: NEW YORK – Celebrating John Cage at 100

DON'T MISS OPEN CALL FOR CAGES!

A ONE HUNDRED MINUTE PERFORMATIVE WORK HONORING JOHN CAGE IN 2012, THE CENTENNIAL OF HIS BIRTH

Japanese-born visual artist Morgan O’Hara, who personally knew John Cage, leads members of the New York art, poetry and music communities, Cage enthusiasts, musicians of the Chelsea Music Festival, and interested audience members in this 100 minute performative work will involve recorded music and music performed live, texts from Cage's writings, stories written by Cage collected in his books, objects and instruments for which he composed music, a complete chronology of his works read aloud by a musicologist, moving images of Cage himself talking about his work and life, texts describing his methodology with chance operations, and his studies of Zen Buddhism. Interested members of the audience will be invited to participate in the piece.  Simultaneous activities will take place in and around an installation of cages with their doors open in an omni-genre tribute to John Cage and his 100 years of influence on the entire world of music and art.

A reception to follow by Chef Lance Nitahara plays on John Cage’s excursions into mycology. John Cage described a mushroom as “divine, improving the flavor of whatever it touched” and once wrote, “When I wasn’t involved with music, I was in the woods looking for mushrooms.”(Cage in Darmstadt)

Themed Reception
Pluteus Cervinus
by Culinary Artist-in-Residence chef Lance Nitahara