Machine Project

Michael Pisaro
Episode Two of Everybody Loves Difficult Music, a music and discussion series
Thursday Feb 16th 8:00pm
Machine Project
1200 D North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles, CA 90026
213 483 8761

Free

The series of pieces called “perception” all involve human judgments concerning the duration and volume of sounds. The judgments fall outside of the realm of simple intuitive measurement—and enter into a region where quantitative decisions shade into qualitative. While each piece presents a different challenge to the performer(s), they all become increasingly difficult as the duration (of the piece) becomes longer.

Performed by: Lewis Keller, Cat Lamb, James Orsher, Michael Pisaro and Cassia Streb

Score to Perception by Michael Pisaro:
Perception 1 [pdf]
Perception 2 [pdf]
Perception 3 [pdf]
Perception 4 [pdf]

Michael Pisaro was born in Buffalo in 1961. He is a composer and guitarist, and a member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble. His work is frequently performed in the U.S. and in Europe, in music festivals and in many smaller venues. It has been selected twice by the ISCM jury for performance at World Music Days festivals (Copenhagen, 1996; Manchester, 1998) and has also been part of festivals in Hong Kong (ICMC, 1998), Vienna (Wien Modern, 1997), Aspen (1991) and Chicago (New Music Chicago, 1990, 1991). He has had extended composer residencies in Germany (Künstlerhof Schreyahn), Switzerland (Forumclaque/Baden), Israel (Miskenot Sha’ananmim), Greece (EarTalk) and in the U.S. (Birch Creek Music Festival, Wisconsin). Concert length portraits of his music have been given in Munich, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Vienna, Brussels, Curitiba (Brazil), Berlin, Chicago, Düsseldorf, Zürich, New York, Cologne, Aarau and elsewhere. Two CDs of his work have been released by Edition Wandelweiser Records. Before joining the composition faculty at CalArts in 2000, he taught music composition and theory at Northwestern University. His main teachers were George Flynn, Alan Stout and Ben Johnston.