Contact Vimeo Twitter Facebook

Event Info:

Cecil Taylor & Pauline Oliveros

Taylor and Oliveros are two of America’s most unique musical voices— both internationally renowned as improvisors, composers, and philosophers-of-sound. As part of EMPAC’s opening celebration, they will each perform as soloists, and then together for the first time in the Concert Hall.

Curator: Micah Silver

Tickets are REQUIRED for this event

Images: Dagmar Gebers, Pietr Kers

About Pauline Oliveros:

Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian is about opening her own and others' senses to the many facets of sound. Since the 1960's she has profoundly influenced American Music through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. Many credit her with being the founder of present day meditative music. All of Oliveros' work emphasizes musicianship, attention strategies, and improvisational skills.

She has been celebrated worldwide. During the 1960's John Rockwell named her work Bye Bye Butterfly as one of the most significant of that decade. In the 70's she represented the U.S. at the World's Fair in Osaka, Japan; during the 80's she was honored with a retrospective at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C.: the 1990's began with a letter of distinction from the American Music Center presented at Lincoln Center in New York: In 2000 the 50th anniversary of her work was celebrated with the commissioning and performance of her Lunar Opera:Deep Listening For_tunes. Oliveros work is available on numerous recordings produced by companies internationally. Sounding the Margins (as it was) - a forty year retrospective will be released soon in a six CD boxed set from Deep Listening.

About Cecil Taylor:

Composer, pianist, poet, Guggenheim Fellow, MacArthur Genius Award winner, and one of the most singular voices of the last century, Cecil Taylor is widely understood to have created a new language for the piano— treating the centuries-old device as the complex pitched, percussive object that it is —coaxing it to sing, scream, and orate in a wide-ranging style from the quietest of whispers to the roaring of a wild cat.