[rohrpost] COUNTERPOINT | ERGODOS SUMMER EDITION | 19-20 AUGUST 2011 (free entry)

[Daniel Franke]

COUNTERPOINT
ERGODOS SUMMER EDITION @ LEAP – 19-20 AUGUST 2011

*
Opening: Friday 19 August, 20:00*
with performance by Jonathan Sage <http://www.jonathansage.co.uk/> at 21:00,
followed by DJ
set from Ergodos co-curators Benedict Schlepper-Connolly and
Garrett Sholdice.

Entrance free

*
Installations: 19–20 August, 12:00-18:00.*

Entrance free

_____________________________________

Following the success of Immersia in April, Ergodos will continue
an ongoing series of quarterly editions at LEAP (Lab for Electronic
Arts and Performance) in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz.

The summer edition, entitled ‘Counterpoint’, will feature a performance
of music for solo clarinet and playback by Ergodos Musicians clarinetist
Jonathan Sage, alongside an interactive sound installation by
acclaimed Irish composer Jonathan Nangle, and a new sound installation
in celebration of the mix-tape.

My father is an architect and I am a composer. From time to time we talk
about problems of design as they relate to our professions. This usually
leads to his quoting the iconic German architect Mies van der Rohe:
‘Architecture begins when two bricks are placed carefully together.’ This
simple, powerful statement always reminds me of the primacy of counterpoint
in the craft of music. It makes me think of the medieval-period Latin origin
of the word: punctus contra punctum – literally, ‘note against note’.
Counterpoint is more than a musicological term with a plethora of historical
understandings; it’s a profound and elegant idea, perhaps the elemental idea
in all creative work.

— from ‘When Two Bricks Are Placed Carefully Together’, an article
by Ergodos co-curator Garrett Sholdice, published at journalofmusic.com

Ergodos has curated a programme of work that emphasizes the elemental
nature of counterpoint as idea:

Clarinetist Jonathan Sage will perform Steve Reich’s classic New York
Counterpoint, a work Sage recently recorded for Ergodos Records. New
York Counterpoint creates visceral excitement from careful superimposition
of a pattern over itself. Benedict Schlepper-Connolly’s Another Country,
commissioned by Sage and conceived as a sister-piece to New York
Counterpoint, uses a language of interlocking melodies to transport the
listener from graceful contours to biting intensity and back. Schlepper-
Connolly’s solo clarinet arrangement of J.S. Bach’s ‘Sarabande’ from the
Partita in D minor for solo violin is poetic in its creation of the
impression
of two distinct voices singing within a single line.

Touch Music, an interactive sound installation by composer Jonathan
Nangle, uses three iPod

Touches as a means of generating and controlling rhythmic, melodic
and visual output. Users are invited to engage with the devices and,
through gestural touch, create a unique sonic environment: instant
composition through juxtaposition.

Nangle’s Touch Music will be complemented by a black box installation
featuring looping digital ‘mix-tapes’ created by Berlin-based Irish composer
Brian Ledwidge Flynn, musicologist Karin Weissenbrunner and composer/
filmmaker Neil O’Connor. The colliding of audio against audio – the basic
principle of DJ’ing – is, perhaps, musical counterpoint in its most direct
form.



www.leapknecht.de
www.ergodos.ie

_______________________________________________


LEAP
Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance
(Berlin Carré 1. Stock)
Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 13
10178 Berlin

www.leapknecht.de

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