Events
Wet Ink Ensemble performs two works by Peter Ablinger—IEAOV "8 Vitrines, Pigment Dust" for percussion and 4-channel electronics, featuring percussionist Ian Antonio, and Black Series, a collection of rigorously organized open-instrumentation works scored "for Rock Band" which must be performed from memory—alongside a world premiere by Sam Pluta written for a sextet of Wet Ink...
Tuesday, January 21 – Saturday, January 25, daily 10am-5pm
Running throughout the week at the Gray Center Lab will be the world premiere of MUSIC’S OVER, one of the most ambitious of Ablinger’s Quadraturen (“Squarings”) series: a computer-controlled piano performs a clangorous, spectrally derived “phonorealist” transcription of a raucous live Doors performance from 1970. Come by and press the red button on the piano, and prepare to lose and refind your way...
Peter Ablinger leads the University of Chicago Composition Seminar.
Free admission and open to the public.
Our special Peter Ablinger Sidebar will revolve around a fabulous elephant in the room: a large quasi-living/ghost-in-the-machine/computer-controlled “Automatenklavier” or automaton-piano. We’ll all take a listen to Ablinger’s latest work in his third Quadraturen or “Squarings”series, an installation in collaboration with artist and instrument builder Winfried Ritsch: MUSIC’S OVER...
Peter Ablinger leads the Northwestern University Composition Seminar.
Free admission and open to the public.
Eric Wubbels will perform selections from Peter Ablinger's ground-breaking "Voices and Piano" series, with the composer at the mixing desk. The highlight of the evening is the world premiere performance of one of the newest additions to the series, a work using the voice of French radical intellectual and artist Georges Bataille...
Composer Peter Ablinger and Chicago-based new music group Fonema Consort will delve together into an array of meanings of the human voice that preoccupy both parties—a clash of artistic worlds having in common the challenge of performative and perceptual notions in music. The septagenarian composer—one whose creative output intersects the modernist and conceptual, performative and technological—will create a new piece for the ensemble, drawing from previous reflections on the meaning of song...
a•pe•ri•od•ic presents 3 Places Chicago, an hour-length work from the ever-evolving Places series by Peter Ablinger. This site specific piece explores the acoustic characteristics of three unique spaces. Prior to the concert, each space is acoustically “measured” in order for the composer to identify the space’s prominent frequencies so that he may prepare scores specific to those rooms. With each performance, a new score is made and titled with its location...
“From the different modes of operation of art I prefer the one of setting a frame—not to fill it, but only to set it, as a suggestion, as an invitation to perception. Within the frame, something appears that is not art itself, but is made visible by it. The simplest example of this is the rectangle I shape with my fingers to enclose a frame...
Past events
Join us for a special book launch and raffle for Pope.L: Campaign, featuring a conversation with Gray Center Fellows, artist and DoVA faculty member Pope.L and Neubauer Collegium Curator, Dieter Roelstraete; and Gray Center Advisory Council Member and Logan Center Gallery Curator, Yesomi Umolu.
Following Loose Machinery: A Symposium on the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, a screening of Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates, accompanied by a new live score by DJ Rae Chardonnay.
The earliest surviving feature film by an African-American director, Within Our Gates (1920, 79min) was made as a direct response to the Chicago Race Riots of 1919 and in the aftermath of D.W. Griffith’s famously racist The Birth of a Nation (1915). Presented on 35mm film, print courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Screening will be followed by conversation with DJ Rae Chardonnay, Jacqueline Stewart, Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, and Allyson Nadia Field, Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, moderated by Eve Ewing.
The symposium and film screening were organized by Eve L. Ewing, Assistant Professor, School of Social Service Administration & John Clegg, Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences.
An interdisciplinary symposium exploring the history and legacy of the 1919 race riots. As the centennial year of the 1919 race riots draws to a close, there is still much to discuss as we strive to understand the causes and legacy of this brutal period in Chicago history. Join us for an interdisciplinary symposium featuring research, art, and theoretical perspectives on the Red Summer. Followed by screening of Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920), featuring live musical accompaniment by DJ Rae Chardonnay.
Convened by Eve L. Ewing, Assistant Professor, School of Social Service Administration & John Clegg, Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences. Presented by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.
The event is free and open to the public, but space is limited so please visit EventBrite to register and see full schedule.