Music Department
A solo program:
- Three Songs, Ben Leeds Carson
- Song 18, Michael Finnissey
- Inside, Kenneth Gaburo
- Wherefore do you, so oft, so oft (improvisations around John Dowland's "Lady if you so spite me")
- on and on and always slowly nowhere, Malcolm Goldstein
Admission is free.
parking $4
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About the Artist
Christopher Williams is a Berlin-based composer, contrabassist, organizer, and researcher originally from San Diego, where he studied at the University of California with Chaya Czernowin, Bertram Turetzky, Charles Curtis, and others. He is currently completing a PhD at the University of Leiden (Netherlands) under the supervision of Richard Barrett and Marcel Cobussen on the subject of notation for improvisers.
Williams has performed throughout Europe and North America with musicians including Derek Bailey, Justin Bennett, Charles Curtis, LaMonte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, Robin Hayward, Hans W. Koch, Maggie Nicols, and dancer Martin Sonderkamp. He has collaborated with composers such as Chris Adler, Benjamin Carson, Yoav Pasovsky, Benjamin Patterson, Ana-Maria Rodriguez, Marc Sabat, James Saunders, and Erik Ulman. Current projects include Reidemeister Move, a just intonation duo with tubist Robin Hayward; COG, with drummer Andrea Belfi and Atari ST player Nat Fowler; and Nidus Nodus, a phonographic project with members of French collective Ouïe/Dire and woodwind performer Chris Heenan.
His compositions run the gamut from conventionally notated chamber music to radio art and collaborations with dancers and other improvisers. Performers include ensemble chronophonie, Patrick Crossland, Ferran Fages, Mary Oliver and Rozemarie Heggen, Barbara Held, trigger ensemble für aktuelle musik, NOISE Ensemble, and Sabine Vogel. His work with visual artist Tanja Smit has been shown at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and his radio work has been broadcast on VPRO Radio 6 (Holland). Arcanum 17, a multimedia piece based on André Bretons's book of the same name, was realized in collaboration with sound artist and poet Charlie Morrow in summer 2012.
Williams has published articles on experimental music in Open Space Magazine, The Improvisor, and Critical Studies in Improvisation. He has presented lectures and workshops at Stanford University, Penn State University, Universität der Künste (Berlin), Janacek Conservatory of Music (Brno, Czech), Espai d'Art Jove (Barcelona), and in conferences at the University of Lund (Sweden) and Jewarharlal Nehru University (New Delhi). Scholarships, grants, and prizes from the University of California, the Darmstadt Summer Courses, the Arts Council of Catalunya, Goethe Institut, Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin, and the Festival Acanthes composers' workshop.
As a curator, he organized over 70 concerts of contemporary and experimental music in Barcelona between 2003-2009 with Associació Musical l'Embut. He currently he co-curates Certain Sundays, a monthly salon in Berlin.
“Williams knows how to create a dialogue with his sonic environment in which he actually manages to say musical things – something few improvisors, outside Lol Coxhill, are rarely capable of.”
- Ben Watson, critic and author of Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation.
www.nauchristopher.thenthis.org