INTERPRETATIONS CONCERTS SERIES
presents
S.E.M. ENSEMBLE
In the complete, six-hour performance of
Petr Kotik’s Many Many Women
Text by Gertrude Stein
Staging and Projection by Jo Fabian
Thursday, September 29, 6pm - 12am
@ Roulette Intermedium
509 Atlantic Avenue / at 3rd Ave
Brooklyn Downtown (one block from BAM)
Tickets available here: https://roulette.org/event/interpretations-peter-kotik-80th-birthday-celebration/
Audience members are free to come and go for the entire duration of the performance
Preview Friday, September 23, 5pm - 11pm
@ Willow Place Auditorium
(26 Willow Place, Brooklyn 11201)
RSVP here
Sopranos: Zen Wu, Ana Caseiro
Countertenor, Tenor: Padraic Costello, Nathan Fletcher
Bass-Baritone, Bass: James Gregory, Nicholas Hay
Flutes: Petr Kotik, Roberta Michel
Trumpets: Sam Jones, Max Morel
Trombones: Will Lang, Jen Baker
Percussionists: Chris Nappi, Juan Herrera,
Sam Lazzara, Russell Greenberg
To open the 33rd season of Interpretations Concert Series, the S.E.M. Ensemble will perform Petr Kotik's six-hour-long, magnum opus Many Many Women (MMW) (1975-78), set to Gertrude Stein's 86-page novella of the same title. After its NYC premiere at The Whitney Museum of American Art and Paula Cooper Gallery in 1979, Richard Kostelanetz called the piece “continually austere and yet engaging”— a classic of underground music in the 1970s. The upcoming concert follows the first staged performance of MMW, produced at the New Opera Festival NODO in Ostrava, Czech Republic this past June. Featuring Berlin director Jo Fabian’s staging and projections, the Roulette production will also include a simultaneous performance of Kotik’s Drums for percussion (1977-80). MMW hasn’t been performed in its entirety in NYC since 2013.
It was the invitation to perform the piece at NODO, that inspired the creation of the staged opera version. NODO festival explores new approaches to opera and this year, it included operas that turned away from the romantic notion of an opera as drama. These new operas could be described as “variable situation spectacles,” such as the monumental Prometeo by Luigi Nono (two conductors, four orchestras, choir, vocal and instrumental soloists, percussion, narrators and extended electronics). – Petr Kotik
MMW will be performed as an opera – a spectacle without a plot or a story. The score consists of 173 sections across 378 pages. The sections are distributed among all the performers, who shape the piece during the performance, improvising their entrances and creating a musical flow of unpredictable configurations. Despite its open form, MMW is traditionally and exactly notated. The twelve musicians – six singers and six instruments – will perform continuously for six hours.
Tickets Available Here: https://roulette.org/event/interpretations-peter-kotik-80th-birthday-celebration/ Audience members are free to come and go at will for the entire duration of the performance.
Interpretations Concert Series is produced by Mutable Music. This year's Interpretations series will include major works by Wadada Leo Smith, Tyshawn Sorey, Michael Byron, and Alexandra Gardner, among others.
More about Many Many Women:
In MMW, the audience follows a flow of musical events that have no clear beginning or ending. It is a “situation” instead of “dramatic story.” This notion was eloquently described by Morton Feldman in his comments on Samuel Beckett's libretto to the opera Neither:
"…there's something peculiar about the text. I can't catch it. Finally, I see that every line is really the same thought said in another way. And yet the continuity acts as if something else is happening. Nothing else is happening. What you're doing, in an almost Proustian way, is getting deeper and deeper saturated into the thought."
Kotik began composing for voice in 1971, as a result of his close collaboration with the composer and singer Julius Eastman. From the first piece he composed for Eastman, Kotik was using the writings of Gertrude Stein. Many Many Women is the culmination of the series of Stein-related works.
Kotik's hands, the iron-clad rhythms that drive words and music have weight but are not heavy – they are deliberate and move horizontally with a regularity. – George Grella, 2021
...consistently strong and distinctive, Many Many Women is a 20th century masterpiece. – Christian Wolff, 2022
Many Many Women is an enormously demanding composition... dedication, stamina and concentration of the performers is astounding. The music has an ingenuous effect on the listener...Like watching a river, a sea surf, a fire or the swaying of treetops... – Jan Borek, Harmonie magazine, Prague, July, 2022
About the Artists:
Although as a composer, Petr Kotik is regarded as self-taught, he undertook rigorous musical training, studying the flute at the Prague Conservatory and taking private composition lessons with Jan Rychlík, followed by composition studies at the Akademie für Musik in Vienna. Rychlík has been a source of inspiration and admiration for Kotik throughout his life (similar to Philip Glass's admiration for Nadia Boulanger). Rychlík's work and ideas were far ahead of his time. In the late 1950s, he began to work with phase music based on African drumming, similar to Steve Reich's compositions more than a decade later. Rychlík's early beginnings as a jazz player as well as his scholarly research into music practice led him to understand and appreciate the significance of improvisation, almost half a century before it became part of the avant-garde. It is possible that the unconventional openness of Rychlík, together with the writings of Cage, which Kotik discovered at the age of eighteen, may have influenced the composer's way of thinking at this very early stage.
Born in Berlin (East) in 1960, Jo Fabian is an author, director, stage designer, and choreographer. He is the founder and artistic director of the theatre group known today as DEPARTMENT/fabian.dept. Since 1987, Jo Fabian has created more than 40 stage productions for theaters throughout Germany. In 1989 he worked closely with the Bauhaus in Dessau and founded the independent project group ›example dept.‹ that worked under his direction for six years. His unusual theater of images suspends the borderlines between theater, dance, performance, concerts and installation and typically combines polished artificial aesthetics with precision and subtle irony.
SEM is dedicated to the performance and advancement of new music, with a focus on current compositions. Since its inception in 1970, SEM has collaborated with composers who have also often performed with the group. They have included Earle Brown, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Morton Fedman, Alvin Singleton, Leroy Jenkins, Pauline Oliveros, Elliott Sharp, Jackson Mac Low, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, David Tudor and Christian Wolff, among others.
