“Ensemble Audience in Retreat”
An audience of 17, including wives and other relatives, remained out of an original 100 attendees, at the conclusion of Wednesday evening’s performance of the newly-formed SEM Ensemble in Domus arts center, setting some sort of local record…”Treatise,” in its Wednesday version, was an interminable succession of episodes shifting gradually from strings to brasses to recorders, by turns noodling, sustained, or brutally distorted sounds. The pattern was continually punctuated by percussion, piano, amplified scrapings of various instruments and objects.
In the middle of all this, Cage’s brief opus was introduced, Miss Sims’ gorgeous voice was heard singing part scat, Hebrew chant, spiritual and Schoenbergian intervals, with a taped mix of generated noises and snippets of radio programs in the background…
Herman Trotter
Buffalo Evening News
April 16, 1970
…I met a man who said that the whole thing reminded him of a bargain basement–not so much as to quality; more in the matter of abundant choice…So what about it all? An overheard conversation–”You want to hear the absolute, definitive explanation of this whole thing?”
“Sure, what is it?”
“I don’t know.”
Buffalo Evening News
October 1, 1970
…The S.E.M. Ensemble from Buffalo (USA) presented a concert entitled “Music of the American Avant-garde.” Regardless how one thinks about more or less serious plays at Cage, one can not deny that the “Song Books 1, 2″–as the title reads–show an antitraditionalism full of fantasy. Such manipulation of human voice mixed with electronics has some charm, yet unfortunately it is not music. Also…Julius Eastman’s “Macle” is not not music. Nevertheless it made a peculiar effect….
Aachener Nachrichten
January 31, 1972
…performance by Petr Kotik’s S.E.M. Ensemble from Buffalo, in an absurd action, with lots of humor and brilliant ability.
WAZ Cologne
February 2, 1972
There is no use asking for the musical logic or the musical sense of this purposely willfully baked conglomerate of instrumental and vocal melismas, noises, scratching and scraping sounds; the question itself would not be adequate to the circumstances; Cage is here not interested in music in its traditional meaning, but in a structuring of time and in the disturbance of traditional ways of listening…In “Macle,” Julius Eastman, being narcissistically in love with himself, aleatorically combines pieces of taped speaking with singing voices, electronically changed with all kinds of acoustical garbage.
Die Welt
February 7 1972
That it was worth it to young American artists, this I am willing to admit. Their introduction here was designed to condition us to a language and expression very admired in the USA, but I leave to Mr. Guyonnet’s judgement and responsibility for his affirmation that these musicians “have something to say.”…I will grant them their need to break up the dreariness of the universe by the contrast of totally gratuitous effect…But, tell me, what is the value of the idea of brushing one’s teeth, of shaving and, scanning a magazine only to rip it up, while another partner operates a typewriter and a third tries out vocal effects?
You will excuse me for not having stayed for La Monte Young’s work…
La Suisse
February 8, 1972
Although I applaud artistic liberty or even anarchy, whose intensity supposes an abnegation ending is pure wit, I would never along with these lifeless outpourings of musicians overcome by an abdication of being produced by a state of nerves…
But why give in to the purely emblematic subversion of the “Pope” John Cage, this pseudoleader whose example leads to the confusion of values and who has today lost even his sense of humor?
…An informative evening, informing us of the uselessness of the vocation of art in the contemporary western world. There exist, fortunately, other fighters among contemporary musicians capable of taking over…
Tribune de Geneve
February 8, 1972
What was going on for almost four hours in the Academy of Arts? Was it supposed to be an experiment, clowning, a happening or was it a circus?…What is really “beautiful” is the electronically changed typewriting noise, that creates percussion effects and the fully composed voice part, which the colored Julius Eastman interprets so well. Eastman’s voice does not do any harm, even in the most extreme screams in his own piece.
…One may at first feel that the relaxedness of the musicians would be distracting, when they have nothing better to do; eat, pass out a cake, brush their teeth, or play “Pick up Sticks,” but with Cage this is reversed; because of the carelessness, one’s attention is drawn to the musical happening.
Spandauer Volksblatt
February 9, 1972
Over the weekend I was trying to read the label on my necktie, and sadly found that no longer can I get it far enough away from my eyes to focus properly without taking it off.
This exercise in futility was acted out during a portion of the S.E.M. Ensemble’s weekend bash in the lower level of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. There was little else to do at the time, since I’d thrice scrutinized every “object d’art” within eyeshot. Simultaneously, a few other attendees rummaged idly in pocketbooks, more just left, a prominent visiting composer slept, and a small child avidly devoured a chocolate bunny.
Buffalo Evening News
1972(?)
Herman Trotter
Those who have been criticizing contemporary music for lacking true melodic lines, may be consoled to learn that some composers now are very much concerned with melody. I don’t mean that they are writing romantic melodies, of popular melodies, or any other familiar kind of melodies, but they are certainly writing melodies. I heard two very good new pieces of this sort last week. One was Frederic Rzewski’s “Coming Together”….the other was Petr Kotik’s “There is Singularly Nothing,” presented at the Space for Innovative Development as part of a concert by the S.E.M. Ensemble from Buffalo.
…Also on that program was something called “Juea Pekoro Lajaw,” which appeared to be a simultaneous performance of solo ideas by each of the four members of the group. Kotik played another long flute solo; Jan Williams played rhythms on slit drums; Robert Laneri offered fragments of live and recorded clarinet music; and Julius Eastman periodically banged on the door in a very dramatic way.
Tom Johnson
The Village Voice
April 13, 1972
There are so many kinds of fine new music today that no one can expect to really understand them all, so we tend to oversimplify. That is particularly true in the case of a composer like Morton Feldman, whose music is so distinctive that one only needs to hear about three notes of one of his pieces in order to recognize the style. By now, I don’t think anyone denies that Feldman is one of our major composers, but I don’t think many people really listen to his music very carefully either.
One recent piece, called simply “Instruments” (1974), received an excellent performance Friday night by the S.E.M. Ensemble of Buffalo.
The Village Voice
March 20, 1975
Tom Johnson
A coup of considerable historic interest was scored on November 10 in Buffalo, an internationally acknowledged well-spring of experimental music, when the locally-based, world touring S.E.M. Ensemble set up shop in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery auditorium for the first performance of “the complete musical work” of that free spirit extraordinaire, Marcel Duchamp. Ensemble director Petr Kotik learned of the virtually unknown Duchamp oeuvre through John Cage. Cage himself had never produced any of these works, products of the year 1913. As with so much experimental art, the results were more reportable than reviewable.
Actually, only one of the four pieces, Erratum Musical, was fully notated by Duchamp. As sung by Mr. Kotik, Julius Eastman, and Jan Williams, the resultant andante progression of equal-duration chords sounded like Gesualdo gone totally mad.
It all reconfirmed one of this critic’s strong beliefs, that it is perfectly possible to applaud an experiment heartily without necessarily embracing its result.
High Fidelity
March 1975
Herman Trotter
Petr Kotik has been composing music for instruments and voices using texts by Gertrude Stein since 1971. His latest work, “Many Many Women,” is too long for a conventional concert presentation, but a portion of it was performed Tuesday night by two flutists, two trombones and four singers from the S.E.M. Ensemble at the Paula Cooper Gallery, 155 Wooster Street.
This reviewer has often found works consisting of very long tones or of one continuous drone fascinating, but he found “Many Many Women” only episodically interesting. The melodic materials were not very remarkable in themselves, and the sounds changed too rapidly for one to really examine them, without offering any developmental interest by way of compensation.
The New York Times
January 27, 1977
Robert Palmer
Buffalo-based composer Petr Kotik presented his latest work, “Observing with Variations 26″ at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Saturday evening.
“Observing with Variations 26″ is a collage of earlier Kotik pieces, and as such achieves a greater variety of texture and more interest than we are used to in the work of this composer.
Dominating the collage were parts of “Many Many Women,” a setting of an entire Gertrude Stein novel for pairs of voices and instruments playing in parallel fourths, fifths and octaves. These perfect intervals are extremely difficult to play in tune, especially over long periods, and the performers did a heroic job of it.
The unpredictable starting and stopping of the various paired and solo lines created sufficient interest to sustain the piece through most of its great length, but not all. And though interest is the least one asks form a composition, this one seldom rose above the merely interesting.
Buffalo Evening News
February 20, 1978
Andrew Stiller
A little of Petr Kotik’s “Many Many Women,” performed by his S.E.M. Ensemble in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Saturday night went a long way. Not much happens in “Many Many Women,” Kotik’s six-hour setting of a text by Gertrude Stein. The music drones on and on, its iterations moving lazily. There is a great feeling of something not progressing, not going on. “Many Many Women” elevates monotony to an art.
Buffalo Courier-Express
April 22, 1979
Tuesday from 5pm to 11pm at the Whitney Museum musicians from the group offered the first local performances of the complete score of Mr. Kotik’s “Many Many Women.” The performance will be repeated tomorrow from 6pm to midnight at the Paula Cooper Gallery in SoHo.
As a Stein setting, this is no challenge to Virgil Thompson’s wonderful scores, at least to judge from the hour this writer accorded it. But as a mildly pleasant bit of background music for a gallery stroll, it had its charms.
The New York Times
May 18, 1979
John Rockwell
Petr Kotik is one who has been feeling something for a long time. In his early feeling of this thing he was not one who was really feeling what he was feeling, and he was certainly not one who was really knowing what he was feeling.
He was a patient one and he was already beginning to be knowing what he was feeling and to really feel what he was feeling, but he was not yet one who was really doing what he was feeling. Even in his early feeling of this thing he was knowing that what he was feeling had something to do with what Gertrude Stein had been feeling in her early feeling, and he was already knowing that it had something to do with music.
In his early feeling no one else was really feeling what he was feeling. Hardly anyone was even trying to be feeling what he was feeling. But he was a patient one, and being a patient one, he was always taking much time trying to be one who was really feeling what he was feeling and trying to be knowing more and more about this thing and trying to make wonderful music out of what he was feeling. In his early feeling of this feeling hardly anyone was caring, and no one was feeling what he was feeling, and no one was really caring. But he was certainly feeling something, and he was needing to be feeling what he was feeling. He was needing to be one who was really feeling what he was feeling, and he was needing to be knowing all about this thing and how to make wonderful music out of it. Being a patient one, he went on feeling what he was feeling and knowing more and more about this thing. He was never seeming to be caring that no one else was feeling what he was feeling and that hardly anyone else was even caring what he was feeling. He was a patient one.
In his later feeling of his feeling he was beginning to be knowing more and more about all of this. He was beginning to be knowing that he was one who was needing to be using Gertrude Stein’s Many Many Women and that he was needing to be using all 82 pages of it. He was a patient one, and he was beginning to be knowing more and more about what he was feeling and how to make wonderful music out of this thing.
He was one who was needing six fine singers and six fine instrumentalists. He was one who was needing to be making wonderful music for seven hours. He was beginning to be one who was also knowing what the listeners would be needing. He was beginning to be one who was knowing that to be hearing his wonderful music the listeners would be needing to be coming and going as well as hearing.
At the Whitney Museum on May 15 he was no longer one who was needing to be waiting. He was was one who was only needing to be sitting down and making wonderful music out of this feeling he was still feeling. The six fine singers were singing, the six fine instrumentalists were playing, the listeners were coming and going, and everyone was seeming to be caring. He was one who was finally really feeling what he had been feeling ever since his early feeling, and finally knowing all about it, and finally knowing just how to make wonderful music out of this thing.
The Village Voice
June 4, 1979
Tom Johnson
Individual scenes – vocal or theatrical, with or without electronics, unconnected sequences of simultaneities, the ninety solos, from the “Song Books” from 1970, resulted in a three hour meaningful event: facets of absurd, involved, nonsensical, cleverly-portrayed human behavior (presented with concentration and enthusiasm by the S.E.M. Ensemble, Buffalo, under the direction of Petr Kotik) rush together as a mirror image of society, which is envisioned as real and utopian at the same time.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
May 14, 1982
Monika Lichtenfield
John Cage was born in 1912, so this year a round of 70th birthday celebrations is under way. The composer does not actually turn 70 until September, but that isn’t stopping anyone. The performances were uniformly excellent, and the composer was on hand to share the bows.
The Buffalo News
April 4, 1982
Andrew Stiller
The players of the S.E.M. Ensemble and its overflow audience at the Whitney responded with alternating boldness and timidity to Mr. Cage’s gentle pressures—-the pianist, Joseph Kubera, strong and assertive, the soprano, Dora Ohrenstein, more careful in her changing vocal styles, and in Atlas Elipticalis, the 15 or so players ranging between tentative instrumental mumblings and vivid involvement.
In all these responses, there was always a sense of space. Not one convoluted or cluttered sound should be heard during an hour and a half of music. By intent or accident? Who shall say?
The New York Times
April 4, 1982
Bernard Holland
Most of the sounds should be soft, according to the notation, and all should be separated by silences, so the S.E.M Ensemble’s subdued, pointillistic realization on April 1 at the second of their three Whitney concerts (“mumbled,” as The New York Times critic said) seemed appropriate, if not especially lovable.
The Village Voice
1982
Gregory Sandow
The Whitney Museum of American Art at Phillip Morris began a series of free concerts with a Wednesday evening performance by the S.E.M. Ensemble, under the direction of Petr Kotik. Mr. Kotik has put together a disciplined and eclectic group; it plays with a palpable commitment to the challenging new music it performs.
Mr. Kotik’s “Solos and Incidental Harmonies” contrasted open fifths and fourths played by the ensemble with concise but insistent solo passages for flute, violin and drums. The result sounded both very old and very new, simultaneously combining an idiosyncratic minimalism with a neo-medieval preoccupation with linear clarity. For this listener, however, Mr. Kotik’s work, despite an interesting concept and passages of stark beauty, was simply too long.
This program was scheduled to last more than three hours. Audience members were free to come and go as they pleased; a good number chose to say for most of the performance.
The New York Times
June 19, 1983
Tim Page
There was good music I haven’t mentioned; the Harmonic Choir, for example, and Petr Kotik’s “Solo and Incidental Harmonies,” a sad-eyed romp in a combined minimal; and medieval style that evoked the improbable thought of Samuel Beckett dancing a jig.
The Village Voice
July 24, 1984
Gregory Sandow
About a half hour into “In C”, a rising, repeated figure generated a lot of emotional intensity, leading to a unison chant that suggested an approaching resolution of some sort. But no! It settled back for another 25 minutes of warbles and ostinati, in the middle of which Kotik wagged his head and it was over.
Here was philosophy, not music, on display–an experiment to test the boundaries of music and limits of an audience’s willingness to sit still for bizarre experiments.
The Buffalo News
December 3, 1984
Herman Trotter
Kotik’s S.E.M. Ensemble, formerly based here (the director-composer, once the only Kotik in Buffalo, now is the only Kotik in Brooklyn) always has had a quiet, unruffled, esoteric personality. To find that it may be reflecting an element of pop culture is surprising. Yet the pieces with the beat, by Kotik and Ben Niell, who plays trumpet in S.E.M., provided the program with a liveliness that was appreciated.
The Buffalo News
March 16, 1987
Thomas Putnam
The first time I heard the S.E.M. Ensemble, in 1974 at Oberlin, they exuded the same aura they do now: a deadpan absurdness, which then induced a class clown to try to interrupt the concert by banging on the concert hall doors. It failed: the banging simply became part of the music. At the same time, S.E.M. (a referentless acronym) consisted of only flutist Petr Kotik and singer Julius Eastman, intoning long, meaningless words in utter obliviousness to applause or outrage. Their single-minded attention made a lasting impression and brought to mind words from the Tao-te Ching: “The sage is humane; he regards all people as straw dogs.”
Their enthusiastically attended May 19 concert at the Paula Cooper Gallery of works by John Cage and Marcel Duchamp was a dry and unremitting as ever, even if their expanded instrumentation made for a prettier sound.
The Village Voice
July 7, 1987
Kyle Gann
Rip! Woof! Bang! (Ouch!)
At the end of the S.E.M. Ensemble’s second annual Fluxus retrospective, the capacity crowd rose in a frenzy. The audience members threw paper wads, wrapped ach other with brown paper, and ripped newspapers to ribbons (including a Voice; I searched in vain for a shred of my last column). This climax, the last of 17 concepts pulled off on us March 14 at Brooklyn’s Willow Place Auditorium, was Paper Piece by Ben Patterson, one of the Fluxus movement’s craziest progenitors. And the mayhem was incited by Petr Kotik’s new S.E.M. orchestra, made up partly of young, Juilliard-trained, yet amiably uninhibited musicians.
Downtown music has inherited its insouciance, but what made Fluxus a splash of cold water on a sweltering day is that the movement had no pretentions. So much new music pretends to be art and isn’t, that to hear a concert of work that doesn’t pretend to be art and yet often serendipitously is, is an unexpected holiday.
In Wall Piece for Orchestra II by Yoko Ono, the Orchestra assembled themselves with their backs to the wall. At a signal from conductor Kotik, they banged the wall, in unison, with the backs of their heads. Under one second, Wall Piece is the briefest large ensemble work I know of. Next briefest is Robert Watt’s Trace for Orchestra, in which the orchestra set their music on fire. Joe Jones’s Dog Symphony brought six canines to the stage, whereupon a few ensemble members blew dog whistles to incite them to bark or howl. Four of the dogs only stared at the audience, and the soloists, a soprano terrier and a baritone mutt, had already been barking anyway. Just as entertaining as if it had come off as planned, the piece proved that, in Fluxus, failure versus success is a moot distinction.
One thing Fluxus demonstrates is that once pretentions are kicked out the door, beauty often slips in the window.
The Village Voice
April 14, 1992
Kyle Gann
Both [S.E.M. Ensemble] performances demonstrate what committed and intelligent interpreters can do with Cage’s blueprints, and how close their dedication can bring the result to the Zen-like inclusiveness that was Cage’s ambition. There are many ravishing moments in both works, sudden conjunctions of textures and colors that tease and delight: the arrivals matter not at all, but the journeys are certainly diverting.
BBC Music Magazine
July 1993
S.E.M. Evokes Cage as Teacher
Where there is a well-defined school in music, there must be a great teacher. Music from the Viennese Classical period, even the early romantic, bore the stamp of Haydn. Earlier in this century, Arnold Schoenberg spread the 12-tone catechism throughout Europe and America. And John Cage, who himself studied briefly with Schoenberg, formed his own topsy-turvy academy in the late 1950s. He taught students and colleagues alike how to be free, and also subtly impressed upon them the importance of self-imposed systems.
On Tuesday night at the Paula Cooper Gallery, 155 Wooster Street in SoHo, the Brooklyn-based S.E.M. Ensemble brilliantly recreated the atmosphere of those years. With the aid of two original participants (Dick Higgins and Jackson Mac Low), Petr Kotik, the director of S.E.M., followed the letter of the scores without seeming to dryly re-enact them.
The New York Times
December 24, 1992
Alex Ross
Whim and Logic in a Risky Program
That it happened at all represents a kind of heroism. To put on a Monteverdi Opera, follow it with a major piece by John Cage and then two vastly complex ones by Varese and Morton Feldman required a large and various instrumental force, skillful conducting lots of rehearsal time, a not inexpensive rental hall and money to pay for all of the above. The histories of organizations like the S.E.M. Ensemble make it clear that the path to Saturday’s concert at Alice Tully Hall was not easy and the means not easily come by.
This was the Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, a two-year-old enlargement by the composer Petr Kotik of his original smaller band. Mr. Kotik and his colleagues had also to fight off the weather: a fierce rain storm delayed the concert for a number of minutes but could not keep away an audience of respectable size and high enthusiasm.
The New York Times
December 6, 1993
Bernard Holland
The festival’s title was “400 Years of Music in Prague”; Petr Kotik, director of the S.E.M. Ensemble, chose the programs in collaboration with Petr Danek, the director of the Prague Spring Festival. There has been at times a national sound in Czech music, but more important there has been as extraordinary diversity of accomplishment rooted in a singe place. As with the Austrian-Viennese tradition, it is really the tale of one city, a cultural colossus with music in its veins.
A segment devoted to the Prague early Baroque skipped the greatest of early Bohemian composers, Heinrich Biber, but shed light on such significant talents as Silvius Leopold Weiss, Jan Zelenka and Pavel Vejvanovsky. …the brass players of S.E.M. distinguished themselves in the brilliant textures of Vejvanovsky’s “Sonata la Posta.”
Mr. Kotik’s most significant contribution was his perspective on contemporary Czech music: a program devoted to the 1960s, when the Communist regime temporarily loosened its hold on the arts, and also a selection of works by the youngest generation of composers, who have emerged from Communism’s final decline. Mr. Kotik, a brilliant flutist, as well as a conductor and composer, played a crucial role in this recent history, founding the contemporary music group Viva Pragensis before leaving for the United States in 1969.
Mr. Kotik’s “Spontano” (1964), for piano and 10 winds, was the best of the 1960s works: its austere, grand chordal sequences interspersed with long silences brought to mind Cage, early Feldman and slowed-down Varese. Vladimir Sramek’s “Six Minute Excercises” gave Mr. Kotik a brilliant flute showpiece in a sort of jazzy serialist idiom. Rudolf Komorous’s “Sweet Queen” was a brief, mystifying sequence of Cagean gestures. Jan Klusak’s “Four Small Vocal Excerices on Texts by Kafka” and Jan Rychlik’s Second String Trio harked back to established Modernist models, particularly Bartók and Berg, in concise and eloquent fashion.
Members of S.E.M. moved through this huge array of music with panache; Anna Hlavnenkova sang vocal selections early and late with a strong, pure soprano.
The New York Times
November 1, 1994
Alex Ross
The concert by the Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble on Monday evening at Alice Tully Hall was an extended essay on the attractions of textural variety.
Petr Kotik, the ensemble’s director, set the tone with his own “Quiescent Form” (1994-1996), which begins with gentle, fragmented string phrases in neo-medieval harmonies. The work then undergoes a metamorphosis that takes it through an energetic percussion assault and a dialogue of string and brass bursts toward a closing brass section that reasserts the antique harmonies of the opening. Mr. Kotik’s notes suggest that the layers of percussion and pitched music are independent, yet they gave the impression of clockwork precision.
The contrasts in John Cage’s “Five” (1989) were between strands of sustained sound–almost invariably played pianissimo–and punctuating stretches of silence. There was a touch of Morton Feldman in this work, which offered a kind of serenity so concentrated as to be slightly unsettling.
Earle Brown’s “Centering” (1973), with its virtuosic solo violin line played compellingly by Jacqueline Carrasco, had an intriguingly tactile, pointillistic quality, to the nothing of a sound world that grew both more otherworldly and more inviting as the work unfolded. And Christian Wolff’s “Spring” (1995) offered an atonalist’s view of Neo-Classicism, alluding to earlier styles filtered thought a modernist prism.
Mr. Kotik drew vibrant, polished performances from his players, who also addressed Telemann’s “Overture in B flat”–wedged into the contemporary program, yet suiting Mr. Kotik’s theme with its contrasting wind and string writing–with uncommon freshness.
The New York Times
March 27, 1996
Allan Kozinn
In a 20-year run of concerts at the Paula Cooper Gallery in SoHo, the S.E.M. Ensemble has put forward a fiercely focused perspective on contemporary music. It has joined the radical wing of New York music with a more prickly European avant-gardism characteristic of its founder, the Czech-born composer, conductor and flutist Petr Kotik. Sometimes playful, sometimes forbidding, S.E.M. represents the best of what is left of the experimental tradition, as an anniversary concert on Tuesday night testified.
The New York Times
May 23, 1996
Alex Ross
The concert held at Tokyo’s Oji Hall to commemorate the first anniversary of Toru Takemitsu’s death was rich in content despite its limited duration. It featured arrangements of popular songs, film scores, and works of composers who were close friends of Takemitsu. Another unique aspect of the concert was that no Japanese were among the performers.
We heard a faithful and extremely convincing performance of Takemitsu’s music by The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Enselmble, a New York-based string orchestra conducted by Petr Kotik.
The Mainichi Newspapers (Tokyo)
March 25, 1997
If there is still valor in the music world, it survives in men like Petr Kotik. Mr. Kotik crowded his Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble into Merkin Concert Hall on Thursday night and played the music he thought his audience should be hearing. Some of these pieces worked better than others. Most had a distinguishable character of their own. All would made classical-music marketing departments blanche.
The sternest test for player and listener alike was Maria de Alvear’s “World,” a sprawling, wandering hour-long geological survey of the composer’s ambitious spiritual world.
…Comic relief came after intermission in “From Unknown Silences” by Pauline Oliveros…Alvin Lucier’s “Sweepers” joined “World” in its avoidance of rhythmic and melodic growth as a central method of composing. Again, the music comes in sheets of sound. Collective pitches, wavering back and forth from their center, gradually ascend and descend over the length of the piece.
…Mr, Kotik, who conducted this evening of premieres, put his own “Adagio” last on the program. The annunciatory deep brass chords come straight from the 14th century. Drum and percussion rustle discreetly. Melodic patterns recur with ever-changing note lengths. This is music that is not interested in going anywhere. It recognizes several stationary ideas before it and examines them from different angles. Mr. Kotik drew an audience of reasonable size on Thursday and most were young. That in itself is an encouraging sight.
The New York Times
May 17, 1997
Bernard Holland
Perhaps the mainspring of Petr Kotik’s creative life dates from 1971…He discovered, in a science professor’s office, a box of graphs set out to do thrown away…Attracted to the gently undulating shapes, Kotik asked for the box and took it home. For years he based his melodies on those graphs, drawing from them all of his major works of the ’70s such as There is Singularly Nothing and Many Many Women (you may recognize the Gertrude Stein titles).
Today, Kotik no longer uses the graphs…but along the way he extracted from them an instantly recognizable idiom. The basis in “found” melodies gives his music a Cagean, egoless insouciance and allover consistency. The sense of hard work and craftsmanship he brought from his native Czechoslovakia brings a superb ear for balance and detail. And Kotik’s peculiar habit of always stating his melodic lines in parallel fifths or fourths…gives his music an incandescent contrapuntal luminosity, as well as rendering it sharply idiosyncratic.
All these qualities were evident in Kotik’s massive and too modestly named Fragment, which he conducted with his S.E.M. Ensemble, and which finally gives me sufficient pretext to voice the overdue sentiment that he is one of the best composers working today. If you exclude theatrical composers, minimalists, and electronic musicians, and limit the field to those writing abstract works for ensembles of conventional instruments, Kotik stands very near the top and possibly at the top. He produced some of the most durable, though still little known, musical monuments of the post-Cage ’70s, and his output has been amazingly consistent in quality. Yet because his “day job” is as the perfectionist conductor of S.E.M. (which, characteristically, doesn’t stand for anything), his career has been focused on rescuing earlier works of historical importance, and his own music, championed by almost no one, gets shoved to the side even in his own concerts.
With Fragment, it’s time to change all that. Most of Kotik’s music is highly linear, like Gregorian chant in random keys, but Fragment diffracted his usual lines of parallel fifths into pointillist dots of sonority. As always, the fifths allowed for splashes of noble consonance–including bits of American-sounding brass fanfares that seemed sampled from Copland–but also tense clashes of conflicting lines. Adagio and allegro penetrated each other; the basses would pound out a massive descending scale, then suddenly the clamor would vanish, leaving a plaintive trumpet duo, like a muted message of pain in an alien language.
…Nothing I’ve heard an orchestra do in years has been more original, more surprising, and more exquisitely etched at the same time.
The Village Voice
June 9, 1998
Kyle Gann
There is a new Christmas tradition in New York, one to join the inevitable “Messiah” and “Nutcracker” performances. Lately, Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos have become holiday fare. While these six secular Baroque showpieces, originally written for coffeehouse entertainment, are not exactly appropriate to the season, Bernard Holland suggested Tuesday in the New York Times that they do, at least, supply a sense of order and familiarity we find comforting at this chaotic time of the year.
A performance of the fourth “Brandenburg” on Tuesday night, however, did precisely the opposite. Though engagingly played by young eager, accomplished and historically alert musicians, this Bach sounded startling, disconcerting, jarring even. Fluxus struck again.
Fluxus–a hard-to-pin-down, sneakily influential school of conceptual, new-Dada art begun 36 years ago–lost one of its founders and most astonishing voices recently. Dick Higgins died, with the alarming suddenness of a Fluxus event, of a heart attack on October 25. The concert by the S.E.M. Ensemble at the Paula Cooper Gallery was the first of a number of tributes to Higgins.
Higgins, who was born in England in 1938 and came to America in his youth, became deeply involved in the avant-garde as a student at the New School in New York, where he studied with the progressive California composer and early world-music specialist Henry Cowell and John Cage. In the early ’60s, he and a group of like-minded artists devoted to Cage, to Marcel Duchamp and to the notion that nothing stands still, decided the best way to appreciate the world is by dramatically deconstructing it.
They were young, newsworthy and nutty. The composer, La Monte Young, fed hay to a piano. In Meiko Shiomi’s “Music for a Disappearing Face,” which was included on the S.E.M. program, the orchestra musicians slowly wiped the smiles off their faces.
Some Fluxus artists eventually became famous. The video artist Nam June Paik was a Fluxus founder, although he was a composer then. Yoko Ono got her start as an artist through Fluxus. Joseph Beuys joined in. Al Hansen is becoming well known thanks to the efforts of his grandson, the pop star Beck. Fluxus’ chairman, as Higgins called George Maciunas, has become something of a cult figure since his death in 1978.
…Higgins was the broadest, the most ambitious, the most prolific, the most tireless, the most intellectual and maybe the smartest of the Fluxus artists. A typical Fluxus piece was his “A Thousand Symphonies” project, which he began by shooting a machine gun at orchestral manuscript pages. S.E.M. performed Symphony #179, which uses paint smudges instead of bullets, looks interesting and sounds interestingly chaotic.
…But an overview is, right now, impossible. There are no collections of his essays, no retrospectives, no one-man concerts. Something Else Press books are collectors’ items. Practically none of his music exists on CD. That will probably change, but not entirely.
…And the S.E.M.’s “Brandenburg” brought that point home brilliantly, played as it was in a significantly incongruous context. It was preceded by a raw, disturbing string trio by Petr Kotik, the ensemble’s founder, conductor and solo flutist in the Bach. Kotik’s “Music for 3 in Memoriam Jan Rychlik” practically caused a riot at its Prague premiere in 1964 what with its raw sounds made by bowing and thumping nearly every inch of the instruments.
…In such an environment, and one with modern paintings on the gallery walls, Back seemed edgy and fresh. In an environment of unpredictable events and surprising sounds, everything became new.
New York, everyone complains, has never been more crowded or chaotic than it is this Christmas. Higgins’ legacy is to exuberantly remove the escape hatch. All the world is Fluxus. Even Bach.
The Los Angeles Times
December 25, 1998
Mark Swed
A Bach suite, then something by Jackson Mac Low, followed by Richard Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” before a bit of Cage, and this was just the first half of the concert. Nobody else creates programs the way Petr Kotik does. It was a long evening he presented with the Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea on Tuesday night, and a switchback ride. But strong playing, an informal setting and the acoustic immediacy of a small, cubic space all contributed to lift the music right out of its normal context and let new relationships form.
…Nothing really happens in “Metamorphosen.” Everything has happened before the music begins. The piece does not so much develop as keep finding new opportunities to say what it has said before, and here the returning melodies, especially those from cellos and violas, had a robust presence, thanks to the musicianship and proximity of the players.
With Feldman, what returns has been reduced from a melody to a chord and the preparation for return has been abandoned. “For Samuel Beckett” is one of the many late works he wove like a carpet maker, chord by chord pulsing slightly irregularly with slow alterations, while harp, piano and vibraphone make stray threads in the interstices.
Like “Metamorphosen,” it is music that calms, creating the patience it needs to be heard. But its gentleness is also severe, and this performance was admirably determined and unsentimental, as the Strauss, more surprisingly, had been.
The concert…also offered a jolting contrast in the juxtaposition of Strauss and Cage. Cage’s “Five,” with its long single notes played by strings without vibrato, had two qualities as distant as could be from “Metamorphosen”: it was fresh and amazed.
The Bach suite at the start was the one in B minor, which Mr. Kotik led from the flute, with a string group including a fine solo cellist. The jump then to Mr. Mac Low’s “Free Gatha 1″ was almost as extreme as that from Strauss to Cage.
The New York Times
December 25, 1999
Paul Griffiths
Listening to music, in most cases, one is also listening to something else: an experience of shape, a swerve of feeling, a message from another time, evidence of a creative personality, the skill and taste of a performer. Check: If none of these things are to be found, you are probably listening to one of the longer works of Morton Feldman, whose “For Philip Guston” was performed at the Paula Cooper Gallery on Sunday during a long afternoon that started at 3 and ended after 7:30.
…Facts always defeat you. You might start out listening to “For Philip Guston”–a tribute to one of Feldman’s painter friends–as if were saying something, as if it were going somewhere, as if there might be something to be gained from following its progress, but it offers no help to such modes of appreciation, and you cannot go on doing all the work for four-and-a-half hours. Soon you relax. You let the music go on. You do not stand in its way.
…Being always the same and unpredictable, the music keeps hovering in the rare space between what you can ignore and what you can understand… All you can say is that you are there. And when it is all over, that you were there.
…The S.E.M. Ensemble matched their sounds and rhythms so finely, so that sometimes one might have to think before recognizing which was playing what. At other times, repeating a middle-register note alone, Mr. Kotik might vary his tone with breathy attacks and squeaks of harmonics in the manner of a shakuhachi player, and one was glad of that. But the musicianly qualities most necessary and most evident were those of quietness and dedication.
The New York Times
April 6, 2000
Paul Griffiths