LA and OC Weirdo Music and Art Forum

Tickets: $44.25 total, plus 2 drink minimum
https://www.thebakedpotato.com/events/billy-childs-may-2-2025/

6 TIME GRAMMY WINNER BILLY CHILDS
AUBREY SITUMORANG …BASS
CHRISTIAN EUMAN …DRUMS
ANDREW RENFROE …GUITAR
BILLY CHILDS …RHODES

Billy Childs has emerged as one of the foremost American composers of his era, perhaps the most distinctly American composer since Aaron Copland – for like Copland, he has successfully married the musical products of his heritage with the Western neoclassical traditions of the twentieth century in a powerful symbiosis of style, range, and dynamism.

Childs has received orchestral and chamber commissions from, among others: Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Leonard Slatkin, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the National Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Orpheus Orchestra, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Kronos Quartet, the Dorian Wind Quintet, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Isidore Quartet, the American Brass Quintet, the Ying Quartet, the Lyris Quartet, Anne Akiko Meyers, Rachel Barton Pine, and Inna Faliks. His works have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, and Disney Concert Hall.

He has also garnered seventeen GRAMMY nominations and six awards: two for Best Instrumental Composition (Into the Light from Lyric and The Path Among The Trees from Autumn: In Moving Pictures), two for Best Arrangement Accompanying a Vocalist (including New York Tendaberry from Map to the Treasure: Reimagining Laura Nyro, featuring Renee Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma), and two for Best Instrumental Jazz Album: Rebirth (2018) and The Winds of Change (2024). In 2006, Chamber Music America awarded Childs a New Jazz Works Award and in 2019 a Classical Commissioning Award – making him the first artist to receive awards in both genres. In 2009 Childs was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2013 was awarded the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. He has also been awarded a Composers Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2015). In 2018, Childs was named Outstanding Alumnus of the Thornton School of Music (sharing that honor with, among others: Morton Lauridsen, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Marilyn Horne). Childs has also served as president of Chamber Music America (2016-2022).

Childs’ jazz career began in 1977, when he joined the band of trombonist J.J. Johnson. Soon thereafter trumpet legend Freddie Hubbard recognized the 21-year-old’s prodigious talents, and invited Childs to join his star-studded ensemble. Over a six-year internship that followed, Hubbard became Childs’ mentor in mastering the art of small ensemble improvisation. Childs launched his recording career as a jazz solo artist in 1988, when he released four critically acclaimed albums on the Windham Hill Jazz label. He has also recorded two volumes of “jazz/chamber music” (an amalgam of jazz and classical music) – Lyric, Vol. 1 (2006) and Autumn: In Moving Pictures, Vol. 2 (2010); both recordings have collectively been nominated for five GRAMMY awards (winning twice). In 2014, Childs recorded a collection of re-imagined Laura Nyro compositions for Sony Masterworks. Map to the Treasure: Reimagining Laura Nyro was produced by Larry Klein, and features guest artists Renee Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Wayne Shorter, Alison Kraus, Dianne Reeves, Chris Botti, Esperanza Spalding, and Lisa Fischer. In 2017, Childs released the first of his Mack Avenue recordings, Rebirth, which won the 2018 GRAMMY award for Best Instrumental Jazz Album. The second, Acceptance, was released in 2020, and the third, The Winds of Change, was released in March, 2023, winning the 2024 GRAMMY Award for Best Instrumental Jazz Album.

As a pianist Childs has performed with Yo-Yo Ma, Sting, Renee Fleming, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Los Angeles Master Chorale, the Detroit Symphony, Rachel Barton Pine, Anne Akiko Meyers, Chick Corea, the Kronos Quartet, Wynton Marsalis, Jack DeJohnette, the Dorian Wind Quintet, Ying Quartet, the American Brass Quintet, and Dave Holland.

VENUE: ​MICA Studios, Los Angeles (Arts District)
356 S Mission Rd, Los Angeles, CA 90033

Possible dinner at Zinc Cafe before, TBD

Tickets:
GENERAL ADMISSION $25.00
PATRON $50.00
STUDENT / SENIOR $10.00
https://www.mondayeveningconcerts.org/5425---iannis-xenakis.html

​Please make sure that you are signed up for MEC's mailing list for updates on when tickets become available.

PROGRAM:
Rand STEIGER – FOR ROBERT ERICKSON (2024) [20'] *
for quarter-tone vibraphone and live electronics

Iannis XENAKIS – DIAMORPHOSES (1957) [7']
for electronic sounds

Iannis XENAKIS - PSAPPHA (1976) [15']
for percussion solo

Iannis XENAKIS – CONCRET PH (1958) [3']
for electronic sounds

Iannis XENAKIS – PERSEPHASSA (1969) [28']
for spatialized percussion sextet

​* World Premiere

PERFORMERS:
​​Steven SCHICK, solo percussion
red fish blue fish, percussion ensemble

Complete Artist Bios here: https://www.mondayeveningconcerts.org/050425---iannis-xenakis.html

IANNIS XENAKIS​:
Iannis Xenakis (May 29th 1922 - February 4th 2001) was a Romanian-born Greek ethnic, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic music.

Among his most important works are Metastaseis (1953-4) for orchestra, which introduced independent parts for every musician of the orchestra; percussion works such as Persephassa (1969), Psappha (1975) and Pleiades (1979); compositions that introduced spatialization by dispersing musicians among the audience, such as Terretektorh (1966); electronic works created using Xenakis's UPIC system; and the massive multimedia performances Xenakis called polytopes. Among the numerous theoretical writings he authored, the book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (1971) is regarded as one of his most important. As an architect, Xenakis is primarily known for his early work under Le Corbusier: the Sainte Marie de La Tourette, on which the two architects collaborated, and the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58, which Xenakis designed alone.

STEVEN SCHICK:
Percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. Hailed by Alex Ross in the New Yorker as, “one of our supreme living virtuosos, not just of percussion but of any instrument,” he has championed contemporary percussion music for more than fifty years. In 2014 Schick was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.

As conductor, Schick was Music Director of the La Jolla Symphony and Artistic Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the Breckenridge Music Festival, and Co-Artistic Director with Claire Chase of the Banff Centre’s Summer Classical Music program. In 2020, he was awarded the Ditson Conductor’s Award, given by Columbia University, for his commitment to the performance of American music.

Schick’s publications include a book, “The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams,” and numerous recordings including complete collections of the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and the early percussion works of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Steven Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music and the inaugural holder of the Reed Family Presidential Chair at the University of California, San Diego.

RED FISH BLUE FISH:
The New York Times calls red fish blue fish a “dynamic percussion ensemble from the University of California.” Founded more than 25 years ago by Steven Schick, the San Diego-based ensemble performs, records, and premieres works from the last 85 years of western percussion’s rich history. The group works regularly with living composers from every continent. Recent projects include the world premiere of Roger Reynolds’ Sanctuary and the American premiere of James Dillon’s epic Nine Rivers cycle with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). In the Summer of 2011, red fish blue fish collaborated with George Crumb, Dawn Upshaw and Peter Sellars to premiere the staged version of *The Winds of Des

Tickets: $25.00 GA
https://www.mondayeveningconcerts.org/5525---thought-sectors.html

“The interesting thing is that it’s not setting up the performer to fail,
but to create a setting in which the attempt at the task creates the artifacts ​and phenomena that make the performed work alive.” - Sarah Hennies

PROGRAM:

Sarah HENNIES - SETTLE (2012) [12']
for two vibraphonists playing one vibraphone
Sarah HENNIES - PASSING (2020) [7']
short film
Sarah HENNIES - THOUGHT SECTORS (2020) [58']
for percussion solo
PERFORMERS:
Sarah HENNIES, vibraphone
Steven SCHICK, percussion soloist

DESCRIPTION:
THOUGHT SECTORS was somehow based on “divided consciousness,” a term coined by psychologist Ernest Hilgard that theorized the human brain is divided into distinct components rather than a single unified consciousness. He assigns two modes of consciousness to the brain - active and receptive - and the piece is based on these conditions, both separately and then simultaneously. I began this piece before the COVID-19 pandemic began in spring 2020 when I took a long break from composing. The amount of time that has passed since I first conceived of the piece coupled with a harrowing few years of early parenthood, a long distance job, and serious mental health issues mean that this piece is a particularly honed example of a mysterious, semi-rational approach to composition I have been exploring since 2018. What is this piece? How did I make artistic decisions? I truly don’t remember and perhaps this is analogous to the vast portions of our brains to which we have no direct access. (Sarah Hennies)

ARTIST BIOS:

SARAH HENNIES:
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Warsaw Autumn, Ruhrtriennale (Essen), Archipel Festival (Geneva), Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Time:Spans (NYC), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Ensemble Dedalus, The Living Earth Show, Mivos String Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.

Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.

She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Creative Work Fund.
​
As a scholar and performer she is engaged with ongoing research about the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and a recording project to document music by the American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta. Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.

STEVEN SCHICK:
Percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. Hailed by Alex Ross in the New Yorker as, “one of our supreme living virtuosos, not just of percussion but of any instrument,” he has championed contemporary percussion music for more than fifty years. In 2014 Schick was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.

As conductor, Schick was Music Director of the La Jolla Symphony and Artistic Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the Breckenridge Music Festival, and Co-Artistic Director with Claire Chase of the Banff Centre’s Summer Classical Music program. In 2020, he was awarded the Ditson Conductor’s Award, given by Columbia University, for his commitment to the performance of American music.

Schick’s publications include a book, “The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams,” and numerous recordings including complete collections of the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and the early percussion works of Karlheinz Stockhausen. His most recent project, “Weather Systems,” a multi-part retrospective of solo percussion music released on Islandia Music Records, was listed among the best recordings of 2023 by both The New York Times and The New Yorker.

In 2019, he and his wife Brenda began The Brenda and Steven Schick Commissions to foster new creative work that embraces qualities of optimism in themes dealing with community or the environment.
​
Steven Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music and the inaugural holder of the Reed Family Presidential Chair at the University of California, San Diego.

ABOUT MONDAY EVENING CONCERTS:
​“To my knowledge, MONDAY EVENING CONCERTS are the concerts best known in Europe for their work in the field of contemporary music and for their remarkable performances. Each year, we wait impatiently for the publication of their programs so as to be informed of their activity … I will always be delighted to follow the activities of this organization, and I am sure that it will always contribute an element of the great vitality to American musical life, and cast its light toward Europe like a star of special intensity.” -- PIERRE BOULEZ

Founded in 1939 by Peter Yates and Frances Mullen in their modest Rudolf Schindler-designed Silverlake home, Monday Evening Concerts (MEC) is the world's longest-running series devoted to contemporary music. Originally envisioned as a forum for displaced European emigrés and virtuoso Hollywood studio musicians to sink their teeth into the most challenging solo and chamber music of the day (such as the works of Charles Ives, Alexander Scriabin, Erik Satie, John Cage and Béla Bartók), MEC has blossomed its way to international acclaim for its presentation of demanding, uncompromising and poetically-charged music – whether new or ancient.

For eight decades, musical history has been made at MEC, whether it was the American conducting debut of Pierre Boulez, world premieres of compositions by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and Harold Budd, the early-career performances of future classical music icons such as Michael Tilson Thomas and Marilyn Horne, or the first Los Angeles appearances of artists like Marino Formenti, the Arditti and JACK Quartets and Steve Reich and Musicians.

Monday Evening Concerts is a seven-time national winner of the ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming. The series is discussed in Susan Sontag's essay Pilgrimage: Tea with Thomas Mann, Eve Babitz's I Used to be Charming as well as Eve's Hollywood, and is the subject of a full-length book entitled Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939-1971 written by Dorothy Lamb Crawford.

***

Cross-posted with So Cal Explorers

Date: Tuesday, May 6, 7:30 pm

Venue: Frida Cinema
305 E 4th St #100, Santa Ana, CA 92701
Phone: (714) 285-9422

Dinner 6:00 @ 4th St Market, 201 E 4th St, Santa Ana, CA 92701

Tickets: $13.00

Trailer here

Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 88% positive rating.

Andrei Tarkovsky Wikipedia entry

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky Run Time: 124 min. Release Year: 1983 Language: Russian & Italian

Starring: Domiziana Giordano, Erland Josephson, Laura De Marchi, Oleg Yankovskiy, Patrizia Terreno

The penultimate film in our Andrei Tarkovsky Retrospective is his rarely-screen film from 1983: Nostalghia.

Set in Italy, Nostalgia follows Andrei Gorchakov, a Russian poet who is researching the life of an Italian composer while grappling with deep homesickness and a sense of alienation in a foreign land. As Gorchakov reflects on his past and the world he left behind in Russia, the film explores the themes of memory, longing, and the difficulty of reconciling one’s personal history with the present.

The film’s intimate, reflective tone, combined with its stark, beautiful cinematography, earned Nostalgia widespread acclaim. It was awarded the Best Director prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, a recognition of Tarkovsky’s extraordinary ability to capture the emotional and spiritual depth of his characters. As a work of exile and reflection, Nostalgia serves as both a personal meditation for Tarkovsky and a universal exploration of the human condition, making it an essential part of his cinematic legacy.

Several scenes of the film were set in the countryside of Tuscany and northern Lazio; as the Abbey of San Galgano, the spas of Bagno Vignoni, the Orcia Valley, in the Province of Siena, the mysterious crypt of the Chiesa di San Pietro (Tuscania) and the flooded Church of Santa Maria in San Vittorino of Cittaducale, in the Province of Rieti.

Similarly to Tarkovsky's previous films, Nostalghia utilizes long takes, dream sequences, and minimal story. Of his use of dream sequences, to the question asked by Gian Luigi Rondi: “A realism of dream, like that of Mirror?” Tarkovsky answered: “There isn’t 'realism' on the one hand, and on the other hand (in contrast, in contradiction) 'dreams.' We spend a third of our life asleep (and thus dreaming): what is there that is more real than dreams?”

Tarkovsky spoke of the profound form of nostalgia which he believes is unique to Russians when traveling abroad, comparing it to a disease, "an illness that drains away the strength of the soul, the capacity to work, the pleasure of living", but also, "a profound compassion that binds us not so much with our own privation, our longing, our separation, but rather with the suffering of others, a passionate empathy."

Tarkovsky's goal in Nostalghia, in terms of style, was to portray the soul, the memory, of Italy, of which it felt to him being there. When he visited Italy to begin studying the project of Nostalghia with Tonino Guerra, as they visited cities, Tonino would show him Renaissance architecture, art, monuments, and he admired them, and would take notes, but what struck him the most was the sky, the blue sky, black sky, with clouds, with the sun, at dawn, at noon, in the evening. A sky, he said, is always simply just that, but a change in the hour of the day, the wind, climate, can have it speak to you in a different way, with love, violence, longing, fear, etc. Cinema, he said, can give these "ways" back to you and that it must, with courage, and honest, always starting from the real.

According to Tarkovsky, while shooting the film he realized that he would be able to express "something distinctive", which he believed he couldn't in his previous films – for only then he had become aware that "a film can make the inner life of its author visible", and, thereby, he "expanded into [himself]."

Soviet authorities prevented the film from winning the Palme d'Or, a fact that hardened Tarkovsky's resolve to never work in the Soviet Union again.