Music  and  Art  Festival
Abstract Expressionism 
From Pollock to Cage, Rothko to Feldman
June 2017
​Trinity Laban 

Curator | Mahsa Salali
Advisor | Douglas Finch
​Co-ordinator | Emma Grimsey
Head of Department | Peter Tuite

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Abstract Expressionism: From Pollock to Cage, Rothko to Feldman

“If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.”  John Cage
Abstract Expressionism was a post-WWII art movement, which developed in New York in the late 1940s. The idea of this proposal is to explore the cross-culture of art and music in 1940s-1950s New York. Artists likePhilip Guston, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline have been considered the most influential artists of this movement. It is known that John Cage (1912-1999) and Morton Feldman (1926-1987) soon became part of this circle of New York painters, Feldman hung out with them at the Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village and dedicated scores to them, and, he later insisted, they were the ones who most influenced his music. 
This concert explore the development of the piano works of the abstract expressionist composers of New York: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown. The layout of the concert will resemble that of an art gallery rather than the traditional concert setup.  The event will be carried in 3 different rooms in Kings Charles Court, where each room would have a different programme of music and with some pieces overlapping each other, from one room to another.  The layout will give the listeners - who, in John Cage’s opinion, are part of the performance - the freedom to walk in and out and explore the different possibility of listening to piece while having the choice of sitting down and listening to a whole programme.  All 3 rooms, with different performers, will at some point feature John Cage’s 4’33’’ , again with overlapping with other performances that is happening in other rooms. This will capture the ambient of each room; every performance of this piece that is taken place in different rooms will have different environmental and accidental sounds; which in some sense becomes the different version of the same piece.
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Programme:

John Cage
In a Landscape 
Dream
Winter Music (2 pianists)
Winter Music (4 pianists)
Two Pieces
4'33"

Morton Feldman
For John Cage, Piano and Violin 
Five Pianos
Two Pianos
Pieces for Four Pianos

Christian Wolff 
Trio III (for Piano, Percussion, Violin)
Tilbury

Earle Brown
Twenty Five Pages (4 pianists)
Music for Piano and Cello
Summer Suite
Three pieces for piano


Piano | Hone Cheung,  Neus Peris, Maria Gomez, Maria Nikitidou,
Mahsa Salali, Marina Gomez, Georgios Vardakis, Joseph Howson
Violin | Aura Fazio
​Cello | Roxanna Allbayati 
Percussion | Robert Howat

The Rotkho Chapel, photographer Hickey Robertson

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