I. M. Pei's early conceptual sketches divided the trapezoidal site into a large isosceles triangle (split in

two here) — centered on the axis of the West Building — to accommodate exhibitions and public

activities, and a smaller right triangle to feature the library and private offices. 75TH SEASON

OF CONCERTS

SEPTEMBER 30-OCTOBER 2, 2016 • NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

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REOPENING

East Building Reopening

On September 30, 2016, the National Gallery of Art's East Building galleries, which house

the modern collection and several temporary exhibition spaces, will reopen after three

years of both renovation and construction of new galleries and a roof terrace. A completely

new configuration of the permanent collection of modern art will be unveiled to the public

on this date. In celebration of this event, the Gallery's music department presents a series

of concerts that honors the spaces and highlights the art displayed in them.

One of the exhibitions that opens on September 30, Los Angeles to New York: Dwan

Gallery ig$g - 7977, presents the Dwan Gallery's storied history and marks the occasion of 

Virginia Dwan's promised gift of 250 objects from her extraordinary personal collection to

the National Gallery of Art. Dwan founded the gallery in L.A.'s Westwood neighborhood,

and it became a leading avant-garde space on the West Coast until its move to New York

in 1964. In 1965, Dwan established a second space on West Fifty-Seventh Street, which

remained open until 7971. Early on, Dwan's gallery showed abstract expressionist artists and

works by artists from other New York galleries. After traveling to New York and France,

Dwan's interests developed and became manifest in her 7967 exhibition of nouveau realiste 

artist Yves Klein. Through Klein, Dwan connected to other nouveaux realistes and featured

their work in solo and group shows. Later exhibitions featured land and minimalist artists.

Dwan saw the gallery as an opportunity to expose the public to different styles of art.

Tristan Perich, whose work is featured on Friday, is Virginia Dwan's grandson. It

seemed a natural connection to present his work on the opening day of the show. On

Saturday, audiences have a rare opportunity to experience a performance of Yves Klein's

composition "Symphonie Monoton-Silence,'' and on Sunday afternoon, Philip Glass talks

about the experiences of collaborating with artists in the culturally rich and unique period 

of S0H0 in the 7970s.

75th Season • 3
SEPTEMBER 30

12:30 • East Building Large Auditorium

Vicky Chow, piano

Tristan Perich (b. 1982)

Surface Image

Surface Image was commissioned by Vicky Chow.

4 • National Gallery of Art

Photo by Tristan Perich

The Musician

Canadian pianist Vicky Chow has been described as "brilliant" (New York Times), "a

monster pianist” (Time Out New York), and "new star of new music" (Los Angeles Times).

She is the pianist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Grand Band, and New Music Detroit,

and has collaborated with other ensembles. Her solo album AORTA on New Amsterdam

releases this fall 2016 and features six new works by American composers, such as Rome

Prize-winners Andy Akiho and Christopher Cerrone. An EP of a solo piano work by Bang

on a Can founder Michael Gordon titled Sonatra also releases this fall under the Cantaloupe label. As an artist frequently broadcast on WNYC's Q2 radio, Chow's recorded

work can be found on the Nonesuch, New Amsterdam, Tzadik, Cantaloupe, Innova,

Hinterzimmer, and AltaVoz labels. Interviews and articles featuring Chow have been

published in the Huffington Post, Gramophone, New York Times, Vancouver Sun, and other

publications. Her recent recordings of Steve Reich's Piano Counterpoint (Nonesuch) and

Tristan Perich's Surface Image (New Amsterdam Records) were listed as top albums of

the year in Rolling Stone and Rhapsody. Her performances of Morton Feldman and John

Cage were featured on BBC3's documentary series The Sound and the Fury, based on Alex

Ross's book The Rest Is Noise. Her next commissioned projects include works by composers

Fjola Evans, David Brynjar Franzson, Vincent Ho, and Nicole Lizee.

Chow began her piano study at age five and was invited to perform at the age of nine

at the International Gilmore Music Keyboard Festival. She made her orchestral debut at the

age of ten with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and made her New York debut appearance at Alice Tully Hall with the Juilliard Symphony, performing Bartok's Piano Concerto no. 1.

Chow resides in Brooklyn.

The Composer

Tristan Perich's work is inspired by the aesthetic simplicity of math, physics, and code.

The WIRE magazine describes his compositions as "an austere meeting of electronic and

organic." His 2004 release, i-Bit Music, was the first album ever released as a microchip

programmed to synthesize his electronic composition live. His follow-up circuit album, 

i-Bit Symphony, was called "sublime" (New York Press), and "its oscillations have an intense, 

hypnotic force and a surprising emotional depth" (Wall Street Journal). The New York Times

called his latest circuit album, Noise Patterns, "techno for silicon-based life forms." As

an electronic musician, he has performed internationally, from Sonar, MUTEK, and FutureEverything, to Lampo and The Kitchen. As a composer, he has received commissions from

So Percussion, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Calder Quartet, and more, as well as an award 

of distinction from Ars Electronica for his work for violins and i-bit electronics, titled Active

Field. The New York Classical Review wrote, "More than any composer of his generation,

Perich is establishing a new language and a new future path for music." As a visual artist,

his audio installations, video works, and machine drawings have received commissions

from the likes of Rhizome and L'Auditori in Barcelona, and his artwork has been exhibited

internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, VOLT Festival, Hungary, 

the San Diego Museum, the Georgia Museum of Art, and bitforms gallery, New York.

75th Season • 5
Composer’s Compositional Statement

I am interested in the threshold between the abstract world of computation and the

physical world around us. Scored for traditional instrumentation combined with i-bit

electronics, these compositions are duets between musicians and code, exploring an

interest in foundations of electronic sound. The simplest electronic tones can be created

by sending on and off pulses of electricity to a speaker, creating an oscillation at the

desired pitch. These pulses are represented digitally in binary as i-bit information, where

a i or o signifies the corresponding electrical state. When working with i-bit waveforms,

data is equivalent to sound — no higher-level translation is needed.

6 • National Gallery of Art

OCTOBER 1

4:00 • East Building Large Auditorium

Petr Kotik, guest conductor

New Orchestra of Washington

18th Street Singers

Yves Klein

"Symphonie Monoton-Silence"

Yves Klein, Gelsenkirchen Musik-Theater, Germany, 1959.

c Yves Klein ADAGP, Paris. AR5, New York, 2016. c photo

Charles Wilp. BPK, Berlin

75th Season • 7
The Musicians

Petr Kotik was born in 1942 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), and

studied music in Prague and Vienna. Since 1969, he has lived in the United States. From

the start of his career, Kotik has divided his time between composing, performing (conducting and solo flute playing), and organizing concerts. In 1964, in Vienna, he met John Cage

when asked to perform Museum Event No. 1 with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

A few months later, Kotik organized his group in Prague, the Musica viva Pragensis, with

Cunningham, Cage, and pianist David Tudor. It was the start of a relationship with Cage

that continued until 1992. A few weeks after his arrival in the United States in 1969, Kotik

founded the S.E.M. Ensemble, which expanded in 1992 to the Orchestra of the S.E.M.

Ensemble, with a debut at Carnegie Hall. The ensemble's eighty-six musicians premiered

Cage's complete Atlas Eclipticalis, with Tudor as the soloist performing Winter Music. In 2001,

Kotik founded the biennial summer institute and festival Ostrava Days, in Ostrava, Czech

Republic. In 2005, he founded the international chamber orchestra Ostravska banda, and

in 2012, he cofounded NODO. In 1973, Kotik researched and realized the work of Marcel

Duchamp (recorded by S.E.M. on the Dog w/a Bone label), as well as performed throughout the United States, Europe, and South America, including a residency at the Centre 

Pompidou, Paris, in 1977.

Among major works by Kotik are the six-hour composition, Many Many Women

(1975 -1978), based on a text by Gertrude Stein; the four-hour composition, Explorations in

the Geometry of Thinking (1982), based on a text by R. Buckminster Fuller; Letters to Olga

(1991), based on a text by Vaclav Havel; Music in Two Movements (1998) for large orchestra;

Variations for 3 Orchestras (2005); String Quartets i and 2 (2007 and 2011); and the chamber

opera Master-Pieces (2014), based on a libretto by Gertrude Stein. Kotik recently completed

a dance-opera titled William William (2016), inspired by William Shakespeare and Natalie

Babel, which premiered at the NODO festival in June 2016.

New Orchestra of Washington

New Orchestra of Washington (NOW) is a unique chamber ensemble typically performing

with only one instrumentalist per part, allowing for every member's individual and collaborative artistic contributions to be elevated to his or her highest potential. Founded in 2012, NOW 

embodies a common belief in the importance of revitalizing the role of music in daily life.

NOW maintains artistic standards of the highest quality, while simultaneously creating 

a more flexible and more individually virtuosic model than most ensembles of its size. NOW's 

programming includes canonic works, newly commissioned pieces, and genre-bending

adaptations, with a particular focus on symphonic works rearranged for smaller ensembles.

NOW also emphasizes thematic programs conceived to attract and inspire audiences and

to be remembered. Its members —comprised entirely of professional musicians —are

hand-selected for each performance, and the ensemble can expand and contract to suit the 

needs of various repertoire and the sizes of various performance spaces.

8 • National Gallery of Art

New Orchestra of Washington aims to make orchestral and chamber music relevant

to new generations of audiences through virtuosic performances that combine a diversity

of genres together with fresh interpretations of classic works. Uninhibited by a set structure

or repertoire, NOW creates a modern and sustainable alternative to a traditional orchestra, 

proving that classical music can survive, flourish, and remain artistically viable in the

twenty-first century.

18th Street Singers

Founded in 2004, the 18th Street Singers is a fifty-voice ensemble of young professionals

living, learning, and working in and around the nation's capital. Named after the road along 

which many of the members live and play, the group's mission is to reinvigorate a new

generation of choral music audiences by offering fresh, spirited interpretations of both 

traditional and contemporary choral works, while insisting on the very highest standards

of performance.

Recent performances at the Kennedy Center, Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, the 

National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony (attended by President Barack Obama), and

the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, have highlighted the group's

rising reputation in the Washington area and beyond. The ensemble's diverse repertoire

ranges from classical to contemporary, including masterpieces for double choir by such

composers as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Frank Martin, American spirituals, folk songs

from around the globe, and a continued commitment to the music of emerging contemporary composers, such as Eric Whitacre and Ola Gjeilo.

75th Season • 9
Program Notes

Yves Klein said he first conceived of an idea for a work of art consisting of a single continuous

sound in 1947-1949. Composer and friend Eliane Radigue recounts carrying out a series of

spontaneous vocal experiments on a beach in Nice with Klein and artist Arman around 1948.

After the trio attempted to "glossolalier in chorus" — speak in incomprehensible babble —

it occurred to them to vocalize a continuous sound. Radigue evaluated each voice and

suggested a simple harmonic chord. In retrospect, she speculates it was Klein's memory

of this sound sustained by three voices that evolved into the "Symphonie Monoton-Silence."

Klein would later write, "During this period of concentration, I created, around 1947-1948,

a monotone symphony whose theme expresses what I wished my life to be. This symphony

of forty minutes duration (although that is of no importance, as one will see) consisted 

of one unique continuous sound, drawn out and deprived of its beginning and of its end,

creating a feeling of vertigo and of aspiration outside of time. Thus, even in its presence,

this symphony does not exist. It exists outside of the phenomenology of time because

it is neither born nor will it die, after existence. However, in the world of our possibilities

of conscious perception, it is silence —audible presence."

Over the course of 1957, Klein referenced a monotone symphony at various lectures

organized in connection with exhibitions of his monochromatic paintings. In association

with an exhibition of work by Klein, Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, and Ralph Rumney, an

advertisement for a "Conference monosonore" by Klein appeared in February 1957 (while

there is no evidence this lecture occurred, this might be the first documented evidence 

of the monotone concept). According to Klein's writings, he was forced to respond to a

critique of his "symphony consisting of one sustained note" during a discussion with

Pierre Restany that June, which was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London,

in connection with his exhibition at Gallery One, London. Klein "descended from the

stage... and lifted [a] tape recorder [on which there were effectively recorded several long,

sustained human screams] from the floor, placed it on a table, and turned it on. The room 

roared with joy." Though, later he remarked, "the gesture had won the day, even though,

ultimately, I was not able to play the sounds and the screams because there was no

electrical outlet nearby." In 1959, at a lecture at the Sorbonne, Klein did present what he

called selections from a monotone symphony in the form of tape recordings of three

distinct "monotone scream[s]," produced by the voices of Francois Dufrene, Charles 

Estienne, and Antonin Artaud.

According to Radigue, Klein worked with composer Louis Saguer to score his

symphony for orchestra. With subtle variations, the artist subsequently titled and dated 

several versions of the score "Symphonie Monoton-Silence," 1947-1961, penning the work's

idiosyncratic instrumentation in the margins. On one score, Klein indicates "lively (tres

vive) interpretation —very sharp— continuous. Attacks must not be perceptible. You must

not feel/hear (sentir) the strokes of the bow." The symphony can also be performed as five 

to seven minutes of continuous sound followed by forty-four seconds of absolute 'silence'."

10 • National Gallery of Art

"My old Monotone Symphony of 1949," Klein wrote, "was destined to create an

aftersilence, after all sounds had ended, in each of us who were present at that manifestation. Silence... This is really my symphony and not the sounds during its performance."

The only documented public performance of Klein's symphony during his lifetime took

place on March 9,1960, as part of the happening "Anthropometries de I'epoque bleue" at

Galerie internationale d'art contemporain in Paris. In a silent film documenting the event, 

Klein signals six instrumentalists and three singers before directing three nude models, 

his "living brushes," as they paint and press their bodies against the paper-lined walls and

floor. The same year, Klein dedicated a self-portrait Anthropometry, a blue impression of 

his own body to Louis Saguer. Since the artist's death, "Symphonie Monoton-Silence" has

been performed on fourteen separate occasions, in Europe, Los Angeles, and New York.

75th Season • 11
OCTOBER 2

2:00 • East Building Large Auditorium

Philip Glass

Creativity and the Collaborative Spirit

Moderated by William Robin

Chuck Close, Phil, 1976, National Gallery of Art, Washington,

Gift of Bob Stana and Tom Judy

12 • National Gallery of Art

The Musicians

Philip Glass

Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his

wide-ranging collaborations with diverse artists, such as Twyla Tharp, Allen Ginsberg, 

Woody Allen, and David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented

impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.

The operas — Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten, and The Voyage, among 

many others — play throughout the world's leading houses. Glass has written music for

experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures, such as The Hours

(2002) and Martin Scorsese's Kundun (1997), while Koyaanisqatsi, his initial filmic landscape

with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential

mating of sound and vision since Fantasia. His associations, personal and professional, with

leading rock, pop, and world-music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of

his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to

win a wide, multigenerational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world,

and in film and popular music —all simultaneously.

Glass was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. He studied at the

University of Chicago, the Juilliard School, and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding

himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to

Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also

taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the

sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed

the Philip Glass Ensemble —seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed "minimalism."

Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of 

"music with repetitive structures." Much of his early work was based on the extended 

reiteration of brief, elegant, melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry.

Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns,

surrounds, and develops.

There has been nothing "minimalist" about his output. In the past twenty-five years,

Glass has composed more than twenty operas, eight symphonies, two piano concertos,

concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet, soundtracks to films, string

quartets, and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with

Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents 

lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world.

75th Season • 13
William Robin

William Robin is an assistant professor of music at the University of Maryland. As a musicologist, his research interests include contemporary classical music, early American sacred

music, Stravinsky, and the European postwar avant-garde. In summer 2016, he completed a

PhD in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a dissertation that

focused on the "indie classical” phenomenon in American new music in the twenty-first

century. He is currently working on a book that will examine institutional shifts in the United 

States in the 1980s and 1990s that led to the present day's pluralist and populist culture of

contemporary classical music.

Robin's article "Traveling with Ancient Music: Intellectual and Transatlantic Currents

in American Psalmody Reform" (Journal of Musicology, Spring 2015), reassesses the Europeanization of American sacred music at the turn of the nineteenth century by examining the

impact of transatlantic travel. He has contributed a chapter to Reassessing Stravinsky's Le

Sacre du Printemps, 7973/2073 (Indiana University Press, 2016, forthcoming), which reconsiders Stravinsky's development of a rhetoric of musical objectivity. Robin has presented

papers at the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the New 

Music Gathering, and the Frederick Loewe Symposium.

As an active public musicologist, Robin contributes to the New York Times, the New

Yorker, and NewMusicBox. In 2014, he received an ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson

Award for his NewMusicBox article "Shape Notes, Billings, and American Modernisms."

He is the curator of Q2 Music's annual Symphomania, a twenty-four hour marathon radio

broadcast of orchestral music composed in the twenty-first century. Robin regularly

writes liner notes for the independent record label Irritable Hedgehog, including acclaimed

releases of piano music by Paul Epstein, William Duckworth, and Jurg Frey. In 2014-2015, 

Robin served as the North Carolina Symphony's inaugural scholar-in-residence, contributing program notes and preconcert lectures for the orchestra's performances. He also

helped curate the symphony's upcoming presentation at Washington Performing Arts and

the Kennedy Center's SHIFT Festival in spring 2017. He cofounded the Experimental Music

Study Group, which presents discussions and performances in the Chapel Hill area.

14 • National Gallery of Art

Upcoming Events of the SeventyFifth Season of The William

Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot

Belin Concerts

Sphinx Virtuosi and Catalyst Quartet

Latin Voyages: Viajes Latinos

October 8, Saturday, 2:00

West Building, West Garden Court

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month

Curtis on Tour

Hugo Wolf, Italienisches Liederbuch

October 16, Sunday, 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

LeStrange Viols

The Duarte Family: A Musical Household

in the Age of Rembrandt

October 23, Sunday, 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

Presented in honor of Drawings for

Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt

Anderson & Roe Piano Duo

Danse Macabre

October 30, Sunday, 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

General Information

Admission to the National Gallery of Art

and all of its programs is free of charge,

except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording equipment

during the performance is not allowed.

Please be sure that all portable electronic

devices are turned off.

Concerts are made possible in part

through the generosity of donors to the

National Gallery of Art through The Circle. 

Reserved seating is available in recognition

of their support. Please contact the

development office at (202) 842-6450 or

circle@nga.gov for more information.

www.nga.gov

www.instagram.com/ngadc

www.twitter.com/ngadc

www.facebook.com/nationalgalleryofart

The department of music produced these

program notes. Copyright © 2016 Board of

Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington