Happy 30th Birthday C3! A Celebration
October 6, 2019 Experimental Sound Studio, 2-5p
C3 combines music, food and friends in the galleries and gardens of ESS. Over the course of the afternoon, our guests are invited to listen to works from our repertoire played by our ensemble – – Lawrence Axelrod (piano), Timothy Ernest Johnson (guitar) and Elizabeth Start (cello) joined by collaborating partners Sebastian Huydts (piano) and Caroline Pittman (flute).
I
Sebastian Huydts -Various for Piano – 10 min
Kyong Mee Choi – For those who left us (for guitar and piano) – 9 min
II (performed in garden, weather permitting)
Lawrence Axelrod – Mandala (for guitar)- 8 min
Elizabeth Start – Various for Cello – 9 min
III
Timothy Ernest Johnson – Three C Thirty (piano, cello and flute) – 6 min
Martha Horst – Shades of Silence (for piano) – 8 min
IV
Kathleen Cecilia Ginther – Windpool (for guitar) – 9 min
Laura Schwendinger – Rapture (for piano and cello)
Beth Bradfish – Sound Art Chair – an installation
It’s Spring: Electro-Acoustic Music Festival
February 21, 2020 Ganz Hall at Roosevelt University, 7p
C3 presents It’s Spring, an annual electro-acoustic festival, featuring Guest Composer Sam Pluta, a Chicago-based composer, laptop improviser, electronics performer and sound artist, plus CCC members Kyong Mee Choi, Tim Edwards, Tim Johnson and Beth Bradfish.
Call & Response: C3/Spektral Quartet/Bernard Rands
April 19, Constellation, 8:30p
C3 launches a bold 30th Anniversary Season with Call and Response, a concert of 10 World Premieres written for and premiered by Chicago’s superb Spektral String Quartet. It’s a double birthday – for C3 and for Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Bernard Rands, Illinois resident and world renowned composer, who is celebrating his 85th birthday year. The concert features a new string quartet written specifically for this project by Rands, plus short quartets written by C3 composers in response to Rands’ newly composed work, using Rands’ work as a jumping off point into their individual musical landscapes. Riffing on Rands’ musical ideas, C3 enters into a unique musical conversation with each other, with Spektral Quartet, and with the composer whose work inspired this project.
Call & Response – The Tour – C3/Spektral Quartet/Rands
C3 and Spektral Quartet hit the road with a tour throughout Illinois, bringing 10 world premieres plus a variety of outreach activities to local community venues, schools and universities in Carbondale, Cairo, Normal, and Champaign.
Lawrence Axelrod and Sebastian Huydts, pianists
Kyong Mee Choi’s Water Bloom II is inspired by the Clarence F. Buckingham Memorial Fountain in Chicago. Originally the piece, Water Bloom, was written for two pianos and eight hands. Water Bloom II used most of the ideas from the original piece while some sections were altered in order to add more colorful expressions. The image of multi-layered water spreading during a sunny day was the main inspiration of the work.
Timothy Johnson’s Logan Square: Tough Neighborhood, from From Jørgensen to Johnson is based on the family history of the composer in the city of Chicago. It is a loving tribute to his family: Danish immigrants to Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, evoking the life they faced in old Chicago in all its brutality and beauty.
Océanie La Mer by Laura Schwendinger is inspired by Matisse’s work of the same name, a weaving exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago.