UNRULY MUSIC

Fall Festival

Spring Festival

About the Artists

About Unruly Music

Co-presented by the UWM Peck School of the Arts
& the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts

Now in its fourth season, Unruly Music has been producing virtuoso performances of postclassical music in Milwaukee since 2006. Spanning a wide variety of genres and styles, the series explores contemporary trends in chamber music, improvisation, and electronic sound. In 2009-2010, Unruly Music presents two festivals of the music of our time as part of the 40th anniversary season at the Marcus Center for Performing Arts. The festival format will enable us to schedule additional activities, like pre-concert talks, around the performances—creating a critical mass of new music activity at Vogel Hall.

All concerts begin at 7:30 pm at Vogel Hall.
929 N. Water St., Milwaukee, WI 53203

Tickets are available from the Marcus Center box office, (414) 273-7206.
Buy Tickets Now!
$15 general/$12 seniors/$7 students.
Festival Pass: 7 concerts for $77.
Fall pass: 3 concerts for $36.
Spring pass: 4 concerts for $48.

Unruly Music Preview in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Unruly Music Preview in Third Coast Digest Unruly Music Review in Third Coast Digest

FALL FESTIVAL
September 8-10, 2009

Tuesday, September 8, 7:30 pm
Recitations with Susan Bender
Theater piece, poetic investigation, and musical tour de force, Georges Aperghis' Recitations is a landmark of late twentieth-century writing for the voice. By turns playful, hypnotic, and heartbreaking, Recitations explores the primal expression of emotion, and the spaces in between language and sound. For the Wisconsin premiere, we present the work with newly created video projections which enrich the musical experience and illuminate the text and score. Stellar soprano Susan Bender, described by the Washington Post as "nothing short of breathtaking," performs.

Wednesday, September 9, 7:30 pm
MiLO: the Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra
MiLO is a new improvisation collective, fusing live electronic sound, instrumental performance, and video projection into a rich multimedia experience.  The group embraces a wide variety of electronic practices: circuit-bending, software synthesis, repurposed effects pedals and portable game devices, live processing of instrumental sound, VJing, and procedural animation all find their way into the mix. Expect a rich, immersive tapestry of sound and image, all created live and in the moment.

Thursday, September 10, 7:30 pm
C2
C2 is a virtuosic new chamber music duo. Lisa Cella (flute) and Franklin Cox (cello) share a love for classical contemporary music, above all for challenging and highly original new works. With C2 they bring together their precision, energy, and intense musicality to create compelling sonic exploration and musical communication. Their Unruly Music recital features works by key figures of the avant-garde like Elliott Carter and Kaija Saariaho, along with younger composers who have created new works especially for the group.

SPRING FESTIVAL
April 15-18, 2010

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Susan Bender
Susan Bender, a versatile soprano and teacher, was a Metropolitan Opera National Council Winner in 1986, the same year she debuted with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra in a concert of operatic arias. From 1985-1989, Ms. Bender was recruited as a member of the United States Navy Band Sea Chanters in Washington, D.C. and toured with their premier wind ensemble as their soloist on three national tours in addition to appearances for international dignitaries. She has appeared as a featured soloist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Washington Opera (Washington National Opera), the Graz, Austria Festival Orchestra, Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, on an international tour to Southeast Asia with the United States Information Service, the Garth Newel Chamber Players in Italy, the Washington Bach Consort, the Iowa Bach Festival, Stony Brook Bach Festival (as an apprentice to soprano Beverly Hoch), the 20th Century Consort at the Smithsonian, Signature Theater and with Interact Theater for several summers performing the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Her work on the musical theater stage earned two Helen Hayes nominations from the Washington Theater Awards Association. Other roles include Norina, Don Pasquale; Susanna, the Marriage of Figaro; Poussette, Manon; Diane, Hippolyte et Aricie; Damigella, L'incoronazione di Poppea. Ms. Bender's concert and oratorio work consistently receives high marks; performed repertoire includes the works of Hildegard von Bingen, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Mozart and Haydn, Schubert and premieres of numerous contemporary chamber works. The Washington Post called her performance of Olivier Messiaen's Pomes pour Mi "nothing short of breathtaking" and the New York Times proclaimed her as possessing "charming, lyric coloratura." Ms. Bender is recorded on the Norton, Foundry and Albany labels; her most recent recording was of Glück's Orphée on Naxos with L'Opéra Lafayette, and Opera News reviewed her as "a persuasive Diana" in that company's production of Jean-Phillippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie.

C2
In January 2006 flautist Lisa Cella and cellist Franklin Cost formed the duo C2. Together they have commissioned numerous new works from composers and have performed throughout the United States and in Mexico.

Lisa Cella
As a champion of contemporary music, Dr. Lisa Cella has performed throughout the United States and abroad. She is Artistic Director of San Diego New Music and a founding member of its resident ensemble NOISE. NOISE was the featured ensemble at the Acousmania Festival in Bucharest, Romania in May of 2004, and an invited ensemble for the Pacific Rim Festival at the University of California, Santa Cruz in May of 2005. Dr. Cella is a co-director of the soundON Festival of Modern Music in San Diego and NOISE is its resident ensemble.Dr. Cella is also a founding member of the flute duo inHale, a group dedicated to developing challenging and experimental repertoire for the flute duo. Dr. Cella received her DMA in contemporary flute performance from the University of California-San Diego, studying with John Fonville. She has performed with SONOR (the faculty ensemble of UCSD), SIRIUS, and in various concert series and festivals in California and around the world. Dr. Cella is as an assistant professor of music at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and is a founding member of its faculty contemporary music ensemble, Ruckus. She is also on the faculty of Soundscape, a festival of new music in Pavia, Italy.

Franklin Cox
Dr. Franklin Cox has received numerous fellowships, prizes, and commissions from leading institutions and festivals of new music, including fellowships from the Schloss Solitude and the Sacher Stiftung, the Kranichsteiner Prize for both composition and cello performance from the Darmstadt Festival (also serving on the Komponistforum in 1994), and commissions from the 1998 Berliner Biennale and 2001 Hannover Biennale. He has performed with many leading new music groups, including SONOR, the Group for Contemporary Music, Exposé, Surplus, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, and Ensemble Köln. Since 1993, he has presented a solo recital entitled "The New Cello," focused on original new works for the cello, more than 100 times throughout Europe and North America. Cox received B.M. degrees in cello and composition from Indiana University, as well as composition degrees from Columbia University (M.A.), and the University of California – San Diego (Ph.D.). He studied cello with Gary Hoffman, Janos Starker, and Peter Wiley, and composition with Steven Suber, Fred Lerdahl, Brian Ferneyhough, and Harvey Sollberger. In 2002 he began teaching on the faculty of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and in 2007 he joined the faculty of Wright State University. He is co-editor of the international book series, New Music and Aesthetics in the 21st Century. His works are published by Rugginenti Editions and Sylvia Smith Publications, and his works can be heard on Rusty Classica, Neuma Records, Solitude Edition, and Centaur Records.

Electro-Acoustic Music Center
The Electro-Acoustic Music Center was established in 1982/3 as a research, teaching and performance center in conjunction with the Music Composition program at UWM (now the Music Composition and Technology program).The opening of the EAMC revolved around the purchase of a C.M.I. (Computer Music Instrument) created by the Fairlight Computer Music Company of Sydney, Australia. UWM was one of only four universities in the United States to house a Fairlight system, making the Music Department a leader in the field of digitally-based stand-alone performance instruments. Today, the EAMC facilitates a broad range of activities involving electroacoustic music, sound art, and multimedia, and works in collaboration with technology-minded practitioners in the Art, Dance, Film, and Theater departments at UWM. EAMC concerts include spatial diffusion of multichannel audio for 2D and 3D "surround,” the reconstruction of classic performances with live electronics from the 1950s to the 1980s, and the latest thinking in multimedia, generative music, and instrumental/electronic hybrids.

ABOUT UNRULY MUSIC

Over the past three seasons Unruly Music has produced eighteen concerts of music showcasing a dizzying range of aesthetics. From the dawn of the twentieth century to the latest thinking of the twenty-first, from the fastidiously notated to the spontaneously improvised, from traditional chamber music to post-jazz improvisation and rock-influenced power electronics, Unruly Music audiences have heard it all! Unruly Music has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Argosy Foundation, Meet the Composer (MetLife Creative Connections) and the William F. Vilas Trust.

Unruly Music is fully integrated into the UWM Peck School of the Arts Music Composition and Technology program, and is committed to training the next generation of composers and performers. At the heart of each season is a two-part residency with a guest ensemble (C2 in 2009-10) that brings them to UWM in September and April to perform, work with undergraduate and graduate students, and prepare a concert of works by UWM’s advanced composition students.

Unruly Music is directed by composer and UWM faculty member Christopher Burns. His experience as a computer music researcher is an important influence on his acoustic composition: many of his instrumental works feature pitch and rhythmic structures which are created and transformed using custom software. One of these pieces, The Location of Six Geometric Figures was awarded first and audience prizes at the 2002 Hitzacker Summer Music Festival, and has been performed widely. Burns’s research interests include algorithmic composition techniques, the application and control of feedback in sound synthesis, and the realization of classic electroacoustic music. He has performed several of these realizations (including digital versions of music by Cage, Lucier, and Stockhausen) as part of his ongoing co-curatorship of the sfSoundSeries contemporary music concerts in San Francisco. Burns received his doctorate in composition from Stanford University and has studied with Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, Jonathan Berger, Michael Tenzer, and Jan Radzynski.