2024 Program
BCMC/andPlay
Tuesday, February 20, 8:30 PM
Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
BCMC is the duo of multi-instrumentalist Cooper Crain (Bitchin Bajas) and guitarist Bill MacKay. On their ravishing 2023 debut album Foreign Smokes on Drag City they united to create a record that's equal parts deep space, rock’s dreamy lyrical interior, soloed multi-track, remix, raga, new age fugue state, field recording, blues and beyond — gossamer-light avant-garde noir flowing into fire-and-icy jams, collecting bright shades and warm stretches of infinity drawn through the buzzy overdrive of this side of life’s strange and sunny days. They will headline the opening night program of the 2024 Frequency Festival with a characteristically meditative journey that ignores the lines between disparate styles. Instead, the pair extends its reach to generate shifting, interactive textures, drifting melody, and dreamy clouds of harmony.
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andPlay is committed to expanding the existing violin/viola duo repertoire by commissioning new works and actively collaborating with living artists. The New York City-based duo of Maya Bennardo (Mivos Quartet), violin, and Hannah Levinson, viola, has since commissioned over forty works.
andPlay’s “Translucent Harmonies” allows listeners to deeply immerse themselves in sound, silence, and resonance. This hour-long program includes Vid stenmuren blir tanken blomma by Kristofer Svensson (Sweden) and Prisma Interius VIII by Catherine Lamb (USA, Germany), both composed in Just Intonation. The rare experience to hear a full program in Just Intonation invites one to listen in a detailed way to the “sensation of tone.” This shifts the concept of intonation, which is often unnoticed by the listener, to the foreground, where it becomes a focal point to explore the most simple, yet nuanced, relationships in sound.
Though the evening is one curated experience, the two pieces complement each other in their form. Lamb, in her chant-like work, uses droned pitches to slowly build the relationships between notes and intervals, transforming them into longer phrases. Alternatively, Svensson creates their work out of silence, with brief melodic fragments appearing against a backdrop of silence and noise. Together, they pause time -- guiding the audience through an alternate reality where there is ample opportunity to sit and listen.
Catherine Lamb's work courtesy Zeitvertrieb Wien/Berlin
Photos: Haley Fohr / Shervin Lainez
Nate Wooley/Sarah Saviet
Wednesday, February 21, 8:30 PM
Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
Nate Wooley used a Foundation for Contemporary Art award, received in 2016, as the seed money to begin For/With, a commissioning project to expand the solo trumpet literature with pieces that value collaboration, the spontaneity of improvisation, and exploring beyond the tradition of the instrument. American composer Sarah Hennies, known initially for her psycho-acoustic percussion works, wrote Monologue to close the last of For/With’s annual festivals in 2018. The piece, first intended to be comically performative, as the trumpet player slowly dismantles the horn and mimes its destruction, is underpinned by a feeling of a slow rite to failure, a meditation on everything gone wrong. The piece was premiered at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room October 16, 2019. Straw, by Canadian composer Martin Arnold, was commissioned in 2022, the result of funding from the New York Foundation of the Arts. Arnold’s music presents a fuzzy, warm, and slightly askew combination of extreme contemporary extended techniques with hummable and intimate folk melodies. The piece was premiered in Bergen, Norway on September 30, 2023, and this performance marks its American premiere.
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Sarah Saviet is a violinist based in Berlin and dedicated to the performance of contemporary music. She performs as a soloist and chamber musician and is a member of the Saviet/Houston Duo and Ensemble Mosaik. She will give the US premier of British composer Bryn Harrison’s
A Coiled Form (2020/2022) for solo violin. It was commissioned for Saviet by the Riot Ensemble, with funding provided by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. She premiered the piece as a 15-minute version in Wigmore Hall in September 2021. She and Hrrison met to rehearse before the premiere and both felt that the material was calling for expansion. Over the following months she built a new route through the piece, winding through circular forms of holding and releasing through loops and slowly changing timbre. The construction of this path was informed by the different physical states and perceptions of time she experienced as it unfolded.
Photos: Julia Dratel / Dorothea Tuch
Eyvind Kang & Jessika Kenney / Zarabanda Variations
Thursday, February 22, 8:30 PM
Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
Eyvind Kang & Jessika Kenney
Having each followed their own distinct trajectory of exploration for decades - interweaving rigorous experimentalism with transcultural conversations - and building upon roughly 20 years working as a duo, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang recently released Azure, their third full-length Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ label. Among their most riveting outings to date, comprising five new compositions recorded in Seattle during the spring of 2022, this remarkable body of sonority culminates in a singular gesture of contemporary minimalism that slowly unfolds across the album’s length.
Emerging from the Pacific Northwest, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang have retained a strong presence within the context of North American experimental music since the mid 1990s, each producing some of the most grippingly original music to have appeared over the subsequent years.
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Zarabanda Variations
(Keir GoGwilt, Wilfrido Terrazas, Kyle Motl, Alec Goldfarb)
Zarabanda Variations is a speculative sounding of music from 16th- and 17th-century New Spain/Mexico. Taking inspiration from both material histories of instruments and tunings, and musical histories of dances, rhythms, chants, and counterpoints, the quartet experiments in the archival gaps of early American music. The zarabanda—a dance with putative Spanish, American, and Arab origins, a plausible etymology from the Kikongo “nsala-banda” [Sublette, 1951], and which eventually transformed into a courtly dance of the European baroque—represents one such fragmentary, transatlantic musical-material genealogy. Zarabanda Variations references the generative role that the zarabanda—amongst other folk, baroque, and popular genres—plays in the formation of this project. The quartet was brought together by Keir GoGwilt (violin) in collaboration with Wilfrido Terrazas (flutes), Kyle Motl (bass), and Alec Goldfarb (guitars).
Special thanks to the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) for their support in developing this project.
Ellen Arkbro
Friday, February 23, 8:00 PM
co-presented with the Renaissance Society in partnership with Rockefeller Chapel
Bond Chapel (1025 E. 58th St.)
Sculptures is a work for organ by composer and musician Ellen Arkbro. The piece grows out of Arkbro’s fascination for the textural qualities of chordal sound and is an extension of the explorations on her latest release Sounds while waiting. By fine-tuning complex, yet clear, harmonies she guides the listener through rare moments when harmony and space blend and become perceptually inseparable. The concert marks her Chicago debut.
Ellen Arkbro (b. 1990) is a composer, musician, and sound artist working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony and installation. Arkbro composes for acoustic instruments, synthetic sounds, and combinations of the two. She has presented her site-specific work at Barbican in London, Kölner Philharmonie, Serralves in Porto, Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, Silent Green in Berlin, Ina GRM in Paris, and Tempelaukkio Kirke in Helsinki. In all aspects of her practice, Arkbro focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.
Photo: Marcus Pal
Ensemble Dal Niente
Saturday: February 24, 8:30 PM
Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
Ensemble Dal Niente returns to the 2024 Frequency Festival with a program featuring a large-scale new work from Louis Goldford, commissioned for Dal Niente by the Fromm Foundation. Also on the program are Lei Liang’s glassine, skittering Listening for Blossoms (2013) for flute, harp, violin, viola, double bass and piano; a new orchestration by Kari Watson, winner of the 2023 Kranichstein Music Prize; and Carlos Carillo’s dancing, magnetic Will the Quiet Times Come for violin and piano.
Austin Wulliman/Cory Smythe
Sunday, February 25, 8:30 PM
Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
Austin Wulliman: Live News
The News From Utopia is the title of violinist Austin Wulliman's debut release as composer. This concert presents the Chicago premiere of several works by him and continues unspinning the breaking News with questionable journalistic practices and improvisational lines of weaving the conspiratorial thread. The record is a solo project built from many multi-tracked layers of Wulliman, which he composed, recorded and mixed. The live experience will incorporate electronics built of samples from the album, as well as live performances from himself using live violin processing and sampling and video by Argentinean artist Daniel Bruno. Additionally, the concert includes Down Pat for electric guitar and electronics, written for the unique talents of guitarist and improviser Alec Goldfarb.
Violinist, composer and educator Austin Wulliman embodies the imagined and empathizes with the absurd through sounds both familiar and radical, telling stories with a limitless passion for tuning cries from every corner of the human capacity to hear. He is a member of JACK Quartet, called “the nation’s most important quartet” by the New York Times and has been praised as a “gifted, adventuresome violinist” by the Chicago Tribune. Through in-depth collaboration with performers and composers working in a panoply of aesthetic realms, Austin searches daily for the violin’s voice in today’s musical world.
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Pianist Cory Smythe has worked closely with pioneering artists in new, improvisatory, and classical music, including multi-instrumentalist-composer Tyshawn Sorey, violinist Hilary Hahn, and transdisciplinary composers from Anthony Braxton to Zosha Di Castri. His own “perplexingly perfect” (The Wire) music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader).
Smythe has been featured at the Tectonics, Newport Jazz, Wien Modern, and Mostly Mozart festivals. He has received commissions from Present Music, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the Wiener Festwochen, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which he is a longtime member. Smythe received a Grammy award for his work with Ms. Hahn and a 2022 Herb Alpert Award in music.
Improvising wisps and ringlets of "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" at a piano augmented by novel microtonal extensions, Smythe explores an instrument that, like the love affair lamented in the Kern/Harbach standard, isn't quite what it seems.
Photos: Alex Sopp / Moritz Bichler