media information

reviews
18 November 2007 Washington Post by Stephen Brookes
20 November 2007  Washington Post by Andrew Lindemann Malone
December 2007  Remarks by Director Steven Butler to the meeting of   
                           the Institute of Current World Affairs in Washington

world premiere program
National Gallery of Art Program (pdf)


Contacts
Steve Antosca, contemporary music forum
301.606.6404 -cell
Contemporary Music Forum
cmf@contemporarymusicforum.org

David Curry, davidrcurryAssociates
267.251.2305 -cell
davidrcurryAssociates
david.r.curry@drcurryassociates.net  

Web Resources
UC San Diego Music: videos/documentation
contemporary music forum
Roger Reynolds site
Library of Congress: Roger Reynolds Collection
National Gallery of Art Exhibition and Concert Information

Overview
Sanctuary is the opening event in a year-long series of concerts that
are a collaboration between the Contemporary Music Forum and the
Embassy of France, a French-American New Music Festival. A
consortium of venues in the Washington area are participating in these
events, including The National Gallery of Art, La Maison Française, the
Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress.

Roger Reynolds is the principle American composer for the festival.
Sanctuary is a co-commission by red fish blue fish percussion
ensemble, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Contemporary
Music Forum (cmf), and the Randy Hostetler Living Room Fund.

This performance represents an extension of cmf's consortium activism
to new trans-continental partnerships. The Contemporary Music Forum
plans a number of other connections with ensembles and new music
institutions in the US and, in fact, throughout the world.

Sanctuary will be presented in the Atrium of the East Building of the
National Gallery of Art, under the gaze of the Calder mobile “Untitled”,
something that has never before been undertaken in this space.
Sanctuary utilizes the unique architecture and acoustics of the East
Building to explore sonic transformations and spatial manipulations.

It is a very rare event for the great public spaces in Washington to
sponsor innovative art and music in performance. Roger, as a
composer, has a long history of projects such as this throughout the
world [see Web Resources above]. In fact, the world premiere of
Justice,
commissioned by the Library of Congress for the celebration of the
Library's Bicentennial in 2000, took place on Nov. 30, 2001 in the
Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building.

Sanctuary is in three movements, an evening length performance of
about 1 hour:

I. Chatter/Clatter - for solo percussionist Steve Schick
II. Oracle – for red fish blue fish percussion quartet
III. Song – for red fish blue fish percussion quartet

The concert will be preceded by a lecture by Roger at 6:30 PM in the
auditorium on the concourse level of the East Building. Late entry or
reentry of the building after 6:30 p.m. is not permitted. (http://www.
nga.gov/programs/music.shtm).

Sanctuary is timed to coincide with the National Gallery’s exhibit “Let
the World In: Prints by Robert Rauschenberg” opening on  October 28,
2007 (http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/rauschenberginfo.shtm) and
explores parallels among Art and Music and Technology:

• Rauschenberg has always shown an interest in collaging media,
exploring new media, and extending traditional physical boundaries
(shape, surface, etc.). Rauschenberg included new techniques in his
work such as digital imaging and experimentation with unconventional
papers, cardboard, fabric, and plastic. In his Combines, Rauschenberg
appropriates the commonplace through his integration of images from
newspapers, magazines, and his own photographs.

• Reynolds' work utilizes the collaging and computer transformation of
musical sounds as well as those from the natural world. His work often
features choreographic sound distribution. Reynolds has frequently
been involved in collaborative interactions as composer and sound
designer for theater, video, and dance events.

• In the Atrium of the East Building, we will have unique seating
arrangements on all floors of the Gallery. As a component of the non-
traditional viewpoints into the performance, we will add an aspect of
audience migration during the piece so that listeners will observe the
performance from differing perspectives, creating varying aural and
visual perceptions.

• Reynolds makes use of the computer’s technological capacity through
the digitization of information, to bring about novel combinations,
distributions and transformations of sound materials. Roger has been
working with an exceptional team of programmers from UCSD and
McGill University for four years to develop the software for Sanctuary.

• Percussion is the last "instrumental frontier", the newest, most varied,
and least-codified resource for acoustic music. Sanctuary speaks to the
codification of this new medium by summoning the image and the
standards of the string quartet: music with a high level of scale and
aspiration. Steve Schick is recognized world-wide as one of the leading
proponents of new music for percussion.

– Steve Antosca and Roger Reynolds
October 2007

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The Sanctuary Project
by Roger Reynolds