Antiphon Trio (Michael Century, Chris Fisher-Lochhead & Zach Layton) are joined by Levy Lorenzo to present an evening of improvised performances with Pauline Oliveros’s Expanded Instrument System.

Antiphon Trio joins Lea Bertucci for a performance at Time & Space Limited in Hudson, New York. From the venue’s website:

LEA BERTUCCI is an experimental musician whose works revolve around electronic and spatial extensions of instrument and voice. In addition to her longstanding practice performing with woodwinds, she has created compositions for strings, brass, percussion and other instruments, often incorporating electronics and multichannel sound. With an ear toward site-responsiveness and acoustics, her work has expanded toward installation and non-linear presentations of her music, often staged in hyper-resonant spaces.

ANTIPHON TRIO is made up of Michael Century (accordion), Chris Fisher-Lochhead (viola), and Zach Layton (17-string electric bass guitar). This unique instrumentation creates rich, resonant acoustic inputs, which are then fed into Pauline Oliveros’s Expanded Instrument System (EIS). The EIS can be considered as an “ecstatic time machine,” a system designed to expand temporal perception where, in Oliveros’s terms, “present/past/future is occurring simultaneously with transformations”. This temporal layering is achieved through multiple delays and processing algorithms, resulting in an evolving, emergent spatio-temporal field, or timescape, that induces discoveries and disciplined practices of deep listening and response.

The concept of “Antiphon” – meaning “sounding in response” and deriving from roots of “concord” or “concordance” perfectly encapsulates the trio’s interaction, not only among ourselves but crucially with the EIS. It is a continuous call-and-response with the deep-seated echoes and future projections of our own sounds. The EIS, with its capacity for up to 40 discrete voices from its delay lines and ambisonic panners that sculpt “spatial progressions,” creates clouds of sound that envelop the listener.

This concert showcases the musical partnership of Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) and Terry Riley (1935– ) through the lens of time-delay techniques. It features the world premiere performance of Oliveros’s The C(s) for Once (1966) for flutes, voices, trumpets and tape delay system, followed by Riley’s Keyboard Study #1 (1965), Oliveros’s piano solo dedicated to Riley, A Trilling Piece for Terry (2015), and correlated works by James Tenney and J.S. Bach. The program concludes with a performance using the digital version of Oliveros’s Expanded Instrument System (designed by Oliveros, 1965–2016).

The Illinois Modern Ensemble performs “stutter-step the concept” alongside other works by the winners of the Martirano Composition Award, Omer Barash and Daniel Fawcett. The concert will also include music by Sal Martirano, JJ Peña Aguayo, and Odaline de la Martinez.

I will be joining close friends/collaborators Jenna Lyle (voice) and Matthew Oliphant (horn) for Peter Maunu’s Splice Series at the Beat Kitchen in Chicago. Fully improvised sets with a slant towards noise and non-standard techniques in a casual atmosphere.

I will talk about my music and my recent portrait album, Wake Up the Dead, with composers at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.

Description from the EMPAC website:

To mark the release of his portrait album Wake Up the Dead (New Focus Recordings, 2023), composer-performer Christopher Fisher-Lochhead presents a lecture demonstration featuring the music on the album. A lecturer in the Rensselaer Arts Department, Fisher-Lochhead discusses his approaches to notation, instrumental technique, form, harmony, and collaboration. The demonstration will include musical examples from the album itself plus a full performance of grandFather played by the acclaimed bassoonist and long-time collaborator Ben Roidl-Ward. A question-and-answer session and reception will follow.

Wake Up the Dead showcases Christopher Fisher-Lochhead’s notated music and features performances by the JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ben Roidl-Ward, and Quince Ensemble. By turns raucous and tender, frenetic and still, the music on the album documents two fundamental pillars of Fisher-Lochhead's compositional process: intense and long-term collaboration with performers, and a thoroughgoing reimagining of musical materials and organization.

As part of an ongoing collaboration to develop a new piece for viola(s), I will be joining Doyle Armbrust and his two viola-playing siblings, Kyle Armbrust and Rose Armbrust Griffin, to workshop some material for four violas in alternate tunings. The rest of the program will feature music for solo viola and viola trios.

Music faculty from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute premieres The Earliest Seduction for improvisers and electronics. The program also includes works by Ellen Band and Stephanie Loveless.

Ellen Band: Minimally Tough
Ellen Band: Swinging Sings
Chris Fisher-Lochhead: The Earliest Seduction
Stephanie Loveless: A Tree You Have Known
Ellen Band: Portrait of Matthew

Ellen Band, violin
Matthew Goodheart, piano
Chris Fisher-Lochhead, viola
Stephanie Loveless, voice
Robert Whalen, percussion
Rob Hamilton, electronics