DuoFest: LA’s Most Fearless Fusions
Jul 8-jul 15
Introducing DuoFest! For the first time, Boston Court reimagines its summer music series as a weeklong festival, featuring collaborations from some of LA’s most exciting contemporary performers. Each evening will feature two or more artists, performing separately and together, showcasing new or rarely performed work. DuoFest celebrates collaboration in unexpected and adventurous ways, like only Boston Court can.
Night 4: Potential Energy
Tuesday, July 11 @ 8pm
Aperture Duo: Adrianne Pope, violin & Linnea Powell, viola
Autoduplicity: Rachel Beetz, flute & Jennifer Bewerse, cello
Potential Energy, featuring Autoduplicity and Aperture Duo, is an exploration of stimulating dualities with works by Christian Wolff, Kaija Saariaho, Kurt Isaacson, Catherine Lamb, Andrew Tholl, and Natacha Diels/Jessie Marino. The program also includes the world premiere of Jason Barabba’s micro-opera, Any Excuse Will Serve A Tyrant, pairing together soprano, Justine Aronson, and baritone, Scott Graff, for the first time on the stage of Boston Court.
Program
- On Structure (Natacha Diels and Jessie Marino) – On Silence
- Anonymous – Rock About My Saro Jane (arr. Aperture Duo)
- Christian Wolff – Three Pieces for Violin and Viola
- Kaija Saariaho – Mirrors
- Kurt Isaacson – with billowing sheets tucked in at the edges, puckering like a healing wound
- Catherine Lamb – Frame/Frames
- Andrew Tholl – New work (World Premiere)
- Jason Barabba – Any Excuse Will Serve a Tyrant (World Premiere)
Potential Energy is presented by Boston Court and Synchromy. Synchromy is a composer-directed presenter of engaging new music events shaped and influenced by our home city of Los Angeles. We connect our audiences with living performing artists, creating a greater appreciation and understanding of the many kinds of communities in which we all live. We strive to expand awareness and civic discourse in our community through the common experience of new music performance.
Aperture Duo brings violin and viola chamber music into focus in the Los Angeles area. Violinist Adrianne Pope and violist Linnea Powell met in 2014 while performing in the LA-based modern music collective wild Up. After discovering a shared alma mater and a mutual hunger for rarely performed chamber music, they began exploring violin and viola repertoire and formed Aperture Duo in early 2015. With programs ranging in style from baroque to new complexity, Aperture Duo aims to curate concert experiences that juxtapose the old and the new, foster musical connections, and jump-start conversations. Committed to exploring new sounds and pushing the limits of the violin and viola, Aperture Duo actively commissions new works to expand the already existing duo repertoire.
Dedicated to education through music, Aperture Duo has designed educational outreach concerts with wild Up and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for hundreds of students in the LA area. Aperture Duo has given workshops in Los Angeles County public schools and was the ensemble in residence for the 2016 Young Musician’s Foundation Composer Workshop. In 2017, Aperture Duo will be the ensemble in residence at Eureka! Musical Minds of California Graduate Student Conference at Cal State University Fullerton.
Aperture Duo’s 2016/17 season includes six commissions, a residency at Avaloch Farm Music Institute and performances at the Carlsbad Music Festival, Tuesdays At Monk Space, LA’s Downtown Art Walk, Pasadena’s Boston Court, and Home Audio Concert Series in Brooklyn.
Autoduplicity is Jennifer Bewerse and Rachel Beetz, a cellist and flutist dedicated to performing contemporary and avant-garde music. Rachel and Jennifer created Autoduplicity to explore performance beyond sound-making for highly trained instrumentalists, to explore musical ideas and the bodies that inhabit them, and to find what this exploration might illuminate when done as a duo. Their concerts are carefully constructed as musical, ideological, political, or theoretical explorations probing themes of blurred identities and realities, the physicality of sound, the movements of our bodies, and the rhythms of our speech.
As a result of their first concert project—an exploration of music for performing bodies—Autoduplicity was invited to the inaugural New Music Gathering to give a presentation on theatricality and perform their feminist interpretation of Vinko Globokar’s ?Corporel. Their most recent project, Machaut Rauschen—a continuous performance juxtaposing experimental arrangements of Guillaume de Machaut’s ballade, “Dame, ne regardez pas” with several of Peter Ablinger’s Instrumente und Rauschen and the world premiere of Ablinger’s Kreuze for solo cello and electronics—was described by Peter Ablinger as an “amazing program” and “beautiful combination.” In 2016, Autoduplicity traveled to Iceland where they performed Machaut Rauschen at Mengi in Reykjavik and gave a lecture for the Performance Department of Iceland Academy of the Arts.
Autoduplicity’s projects have additionally been presented at ArtShare (Los Angeles), the Center for New Music (San Francisco), UC Santa Barbara, the MorYork Gallery as part of Dog Star Festival 12, and UC San Diego’s Springfest, and have been awarded funding from the University of California, San Diego Dean of Arts and Humanities and Music Department. Recently, they were artists-in-residence at the Women’s International Study Center, where they worked with Celeste Oram on a new commission.
