As part of a Chicago-wide festival celebrating German composer Mathias Spahlinger’s 70th year, the Graham Foundation will host a performance of three of the composer’s works. Suono Mobile will present his early fünf stücke für zwei klavier (1969) and the explosive octet aussageverweigerung/gegendarstellung (1981), and the Illinois Modern Ensemble and conductor Stephen Andrew Taylor will perform Spahlinger's large ensemble work furioso (1991), along with in nuce (2003/2009) by former Spahlinger protégé Philipp Blume.

This performance is the fourth concert in the Spahlinger festival, a 10-day residency and retrospective of his music and thought. The first of its kind in the States, this festival presents six concerts and a symposium, all free and open to the public, and brings together renowned musicians and scholars from Chicago, New York, Berlin, Zürich, and Basel.

The Illinois Modern Ensemble comprises students dedicated to the performance of contemporary and experimental music. Its repertoire in recent seasons includes works by leading figures such as Steve Reich, George Friedrich Hass, and Augusta Read Thomas, as well as a constant stream of new works by student and faculty composers.

Suono Mobile USA was established in 2012 by saxophonist Nathan Mandel and composer Philipp Blume. As part of the larger Suono Mobile initiative for new music worldwide, Suono Mobile USA is a modular collective, a sort of “think tank,” for presenting and curating modern and new musical works, programs, and art/music initiatives.

Related Links
there is no repetition. Mathias Spahlinger at 70
http://norepetition.tumblr.com/
there is no repetition: complete program
http://norepetition.tumblr.com/completeprogrampdf

On Saturday, February 28th, Jennifer Walshe and Tony Conrad will perform together as Ma La Pert, an improvisational collaboration that blends a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional instruments such as violins, autoharps, drums, vocalizations, found objects, and costumes to generate unique sounds during their live performances.

Jennifer Walshe is a London-based vocalist, composer, and conceptual artist who often works under various identities individually as Grupat, and also with different collaborators across Europe and the US, including Ma La Pert with Tony Conrad and with Tomomi Adachi on the People’s United Telepathic Improvisational Front. Walshe’s work has been exhibited in New York, Dublin, London, and Toronto.

Tony Conrad is an experimental filmmaker, artist, composer and musician based between Brooklyn and Buffalo, NY. He is known for his early pioneering drone-based minimalist music, as well as his involvement in the Theatre of Eternal Music (The Dream Syndicate) and collaborations with numerous filmmakers, artists, and musicians such as John Cale, La Monte Young, Mike Kelley, Marian Zazeela, Jim O’Rourke, Lou Reed, and Walter De Maria. In addition to experimental filmmaking, Conrad has composed numerous audio works for amplified strings, and has more recently focused on examining traditions in Western music and geometry from Pythogoras to the present.

This performance is presented in partnership with Lampo. Founded in 1997, Lampo is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects. Visit www.lampo.org for more information.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVP is required, and event entry is on a first-come, first-serve basis. RSVP does not guarantee entry, so please plan to arrive early. Doors will open at 7:30PM.

Please join us for presentations by Chicago-based designer Kyle Reynolds of is-office and Thomas Kelley and Carrie Norman, co-founders of the Chicago and New York-based architecture collaborative Norman Kelley, whose works are featured in “Treatise: Why Write Alone?”—the Graham Foundation’s current exhibition and publication project that brings together fourteen young conceptual design offices to explore the architectural treatise as a platform for debate. Reynolds, Kelley, and Norman will discuss their design practices and recent projects, which include is-office's speculations about urban forms and conditions using generative Photoshopping and the subverting of Google to Norman Kelley's "Wrong" chairs and site-specific drawings which re-examine architecture’s relationship to vision through deceptive optics.

is-office is a Chicago-based design firm specializing in objects, interiors, and buildings. Founded by Kyle Reynolds and Jeff Mikolajewski, the firm leverages the unique agency of physical form to engage issues of culture, urbanism, lifestyle, and iconography indigenous to the modern metropolis. Kyle Reynolds is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning. He received an MArch from Princeton University and a BS in architecture with a certificate in urban planning from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His work and writing have been published in On Farming: Bracket 1, The SANAA Studios 2006–2008, and Pidgin Magazine, among others. Jeff Mikolajewski is a project designer at Johnston Marklee in Los Angeles. He has lived previously in Shanghai, Milan, Copenhagen, and Chicago, all while working for firms such as Bjarke Ingels Group, Andrew Zago Architect, UrbanLab, and Gensler. He received his MArch from the University of Illinois at Chicago and he holds a BS in architecture from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Norman Kelley is the architecture and design collaborative of Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley, based in New York and Chicago. The firm’s work has been published and exhibited widely, most recently in Log 31: New Ancients and the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. They are the recipients of the 2014 Architecture League of New York Young Architect’s Prize, and their design work is currently represented by Volume Gallery in Chicago. Thomas Kelley received an MArch from Princeton University and a BArch from the University of Virginia. He is the recipient of the Peter Reyner Banham Fellowship from SUNY Buffalo and the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. Kelley is currently a clinical assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Carrie Norman received an MArch from Princeton University and a BArch from the University of Virginia. Norman is a licensed architect and a member of the Architecture League of New York’s Young Architects and Designers Committee. She is currently a senior design associate with SHoP Architects in New York.

Image: View of “Treatise: Why Write Alone?”, 2015, Graham Foundation, Chicago. Photo Matthew Messner.

For more information on the exhibition, Treatise: Why Write Alone?, click here.

On Saturday, February 7, American media artist and sound composer Arnold Dreyblatt will perform two works: "Turntable History / Spin Ensemble" (2011), a multi-channel sound composition created from Dreyblatt's own recordings of a Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scanner, which he treated as a giant Tesla coil, and "Nodal Excitation," a 1979 work for amplified “excited strings'” bass, strung with piano wire.

Arnold Dreyblatt is a composer, performer, and visual artist. He studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier, and has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. Among the second generation of New York minimal composers, Dreyblatt developed a unique approach to composition and music performance. As he began his music career in the late 1970s in New York, he invented a set of new and original instruments and performance techniques, as well as a just intonation tuning system. He has formed and led numerous ensembles, working under the name “The Orchestra of Excited Strings.” In 2007, he was elected to the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin).

This performance is presented in partnership with Lampo. Founded in 1997, Lampo is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects. Visit www.lampo.org. The Graham Foundation and LAMPO are grateful to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Sound and Department of Visual Critical Studies for their support of this performance.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVP is required, and event entry is on a first-come, first-serve basis. RSVP does not guarantee entry, so please plan to arrive early. Doors will open at 7:30PM.

On January 28, Belgian artist and designer Pieterjan Ginckels of the collaborative SPEEDISM will discuss "TWO-FACED MF EASY RIDE," a new work currently on view in the Graham Foundation's exhibition, Treatise: Why Write Alone?

“TWO-FACED MF EASY RIDE” is a cruise through an architect's rendered theme park. Hyper-layered and immersive, SPEEDISM’s new dual channel video installation with sound and fog presents a possible anti-design method, revealing how embracing speed and the superficial as a condition might help construct alternative methods, tools, and modes of (re)production.

Pieterjan Ginckels is a Belgian artist and architect whose work concerns itself with the acceleration of modern life, which he explores through exhibitions and experiences that interweave spatial, artistic, and design practice, and everything in between. He studied architecture at K.U.Leuven, WENK Sint-Lucas Brussels, and Universität Stuttgart, and currently teaches at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, Brussels. In 2008, Ginckels co-founded with German artist and architect Julian Friedauer, SPEEDISM, which proposes anti-methods for an increasingly theme-based, spectacular, and accelerated society.

"TWO-FACED MF EASY RIDE" is produced by Pieterjan Ginckels, Aster De Valck and Hantrax.

For more information on the exhibition, Treatise: Why Write Alone?, click here.

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