About Festival Performances

NICK DIDKOVSKY

Schubert's Impromptu in Eb Major, Op. 90 ,arr. Minsky Popolov is a live computer music performance by Nick Didkovsky. His software statistically deconstructs Schubert's Impromptu, and performs a new, statistically transfigured version of it with a computer-controlled virtual grand piano. Schubert's Impromptu was prerecorded to hard disk by piano virtuoso Evelyne Luest. Didkovsky's software extracts musical statistics from Luest's data, and then, during the performance, Didkovsky creates his own statistics, merging his with those extracted from Luest's. The result is a rendition of the Impromptu that shifts between faithfully performed passages and radical statistical distortions.

NICK DIDKOVSKY founded the avant-rock septet Doctor Nerve in 1983. He presently resides in New York City, where he composes for Doctor Nerve, the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, the Bang On A Can All-Stars, and others. Didkovsky has received commissioning grants from Meet the Composer, The Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Steven Schick & Maya Beiser Duo, and The Jerome Foundation.

EVELYNE LUEST is a piano virtuoso and leader of The Eberli Ensemble. An active soloist and chamber music freelancer around New York, Luest is committed to passionate interpretations of classical and new works, covering ground from Schubert to Enescu to Kernis, in concert and on record. The Eberli Ensemble performs newly commissioned works as well as pieces from the classical repertoire. The group has toured the United States on a number of occasions, and is preparing for a European tour.

JOSHUA FRIED

In SHOES, LOOPS AND FM RADIO, four ordinary shoes are mounted upside-down on stands. A pick-up is imbedded in the heel of each shoe; each pick-up is wired to a noise gate which releases a bit of any ongoing source material at the instant the shoe is struck; the source can be anything--from live radio to a spontaneous sound collage. The gates (actually expanders) are dynamics-sensitive, and the release time of each is variable. No digital sampling is involved, but metaphorically the shoes turn the whole world into a giant sound sampler.

Joshua Fried emerged from New York's downtown experimental music and East Village performance art scenes of the 1980s. A re-mix producer on dance records by They Might Be Giants, Chaka Khan and Ofra Haza, Fried's own pop recording Jimmy Because (with guest guitarist Fred Frith) was released by Atlantic Records. The recipient of numerous fellowships including an NEA, NYFA and 1996 Artist Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, Fried's work has been presented in New York at Lincoln Center, The Kitchen, The Bottom Line, Limelight, The Knitting Factory, La MaMa and The Bang On A Can Festval as well as in Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and Prague.

New York City experimental musician and producer Joshua Fried turns technology on its head, using machines to create a live, unique human event with his performance of Shoes, Loops and FM Radio (1989, revised 1997).

I work in a variety of formats, but always use form some of modern technology. And as far as technology is concerned, I try to expose and exploit the most basic structures and assumptions of existing equipment, to use tools in ways not originally intended by the manufacturer, and to put machinery in the service of a live event that is unique to the moment. One of the best things an electronic artist can do is to encourage people to take an active attitude towards technology that in itself might seem to encourage passivity, particularly in the case of those who take an extreme view of the incipient digital age--as deus- or diabolus-ex-machina. Those who would exalt or demonize technology will master and understand it only when they see it turned on its head--in art that communicates effectively, whatever its content. The artist offers survival techniques to the citizen facing the oncoming bulldozers of the information highway. - Joshua Fried