Friday, May 24th, 2019
Atlantic Center For The Arts, Timucua Arts Foundation and The Civic Minded 5 present
Annie Gosfield
Timucua Arts
2000 S. Summerlin Ave, Orlando
7:00 pm doors, 7:30 concert
$10-$20 donation, reservations suggested, all ages welcome

Annie Gosfield and Roger Kleier twice performed in our town all the way back in the full season of Civic Minded 5 offerings, pre-millenia, just after we started to program off the Rollins College campus and just after co-founding member Peter Barber blurted our name out as we critically needed one for promotional materials. As for booking Gosfield- an NYC new music composer and Tzadik Records artist- we were flattered, thinking the word had quickly spread behind our forward-thinking, underdog presenting. We were flattered that the word was out. Pathos crowded out pride when she admitted that it was all an accident. Gosfield mistakenly made her initial Florida inquiry, thinking that it was somewhere else. Somewhere more obvious- a place with a new music pedigree. Years on, we’re all back together again via an Atlantic Center For The Arts Outreach event. This time we all mean it. Twenty-one years on and we are an outlet mall crawl and new music destination.

There’s blurred revision in the auditory and image arc of Gosfield’s output. There’s the alternative fiction of the earthbound Machine Age and the low atmosphere skip of the Solid State Age merged with keyboard sampling and the relative freedom of contemporary classical composition turned out for non-academics. Her promotional photographs are silver gelatin analogs that slip out of and into the world via Dropbox, evoking a reorganization of the past much as the Kraftwerk iconography served Autobahn, Radioactivity, Trans Europe Express and Man Machine. Contemporary music notation merges with the clangor of the L train and the mid-block factory as it masked the familiar ambiance of the tannery and slaughterhouse. Without the advantage or curse of revision, Igor Stravinsky, George Gershwin and Dadaists did the same. Graduate degree syllabus subjects such as Alexander Mossolov did it, too.

We hear a particular focus on timbre as a primary path to emotion- one that can be summoned from Post-Romantic performance techniques of chamber music or a machine sound.

The BBC called Annie Gosfield “A one woman Hadron collider.” She has written pieces for violin and jammed radio signals, a concert-length work for her band that recreates factory environments, and chamber music inspired by deteriorating 78 RPM records.  The New York Times “a master of musical feedback”, adding “Ms. Gosfield’s choice of sounds — which on this occasion included radio static, the signals transmitted by the Soviet satellite Sputnik I, and recordings of Hurricane Sandy— are never a mere gimmick.” We hear a particular focus on timbre as a primary path to emotion- one that can be summoned from Post-Romantic performance techniques of chamber music or a machine sound.

Gosfield and electric guitarist Roger Kleier make a two-plus decade stage encore on May 24th. The ACA Outreach Effect– the possibility of the assembled Associates working with the Atlantic Center For The Arts’ Master Artist In Residence- is still in play as an audible.

Take part in the Timucua instant arts community created at each event by appearing willing – described by composer Anthony Braxton as the “friendly experiencer.” Timucua encourages a small plate dish and a bottle of wine for community distribution. We’ll see you there.