Press Kit - Kathleen Supove, The Exploding Piano

kathleen supové press kit
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kathleen supové
“What Ms. Supové is really exploding is the piano recital as we have known it, a
mission more radical and arguably more needed.”
- New York Times
“A living multimedia work of art…ignited by vivid hair and cooled by stark clothing,
Ms. Supové arrests an audience by stimulating more than one sense.”
– Boston Globe
biography
Pianist and performance artist Kathleen Supové is one of today’s
most celebrated and versatile contemporary artists. Classicallytrained and virtuosic but never classical on stage, Supové has traveled
internationally, premiering new works by numerous composers and
multimedia artists. Her aurally- and visually-stimulating performances
have wooed audiences in concert halls and clubs alike, and have made
her a household name for edgy yet accessible concert-theater.
A Yamaha artist since 2001, Supové’s frequently-toured multidisciplinary
piano performance series, The Exploding Piano, described by the
New York Press as “classical music played like the best rock n’ roll”,
uses Disklavier, electronics, vocal rants, lights, videos, costumes
and staging to create a theatrical experience and champion music of
powerful virtuosity and audience connection. Other recent projects and
collaborations include: Pictures of an Exhibitionist for piano and photos
by Phil Kline, Digits for piano and laptop by Neil Rolnick, Delta Space
for piano and sampler by Lukas Ligeti, Revolution for Disklavier by Dan
Becker, a new work for moving pianist and video by Mary Ellen Childs,
and a new work for Gameboy sounds and piano by Bubblyfish.
In 2004, Koch International Classics released Supové’s Infusion,
an enhanced CD hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “utterly
idiomatic piano music ingeniously touched up and played to dexterous
perfection.” This solo recording features four works for piano and
electronics by signature avant-garde composers Randall Woolf, Carolyn
Yarnell, Marti Epstein, and Elaine Kaplinsky, and a video of her live
performance. iClassics.com adds, “the walls between acoustic sound
and electronics merge together and house a music concerned with
contemporary intricacies of form most prevalent in the most influential
modern compositions of today.”
Supové has received grants and commissioning awards from Meet The
Composer, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Greenwall Foundation,
The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and American Composers Forum,
and has recently appeared at The Lincoln Center Festival, Brooklyn
Academy of Music, Music at the Anthology, Carnegie Hall, The Kitchen,
The Flea Theater and The Cutting Room. Supové has recorded for
Tzadik, CRI, New World, Neuma, Bridge, Centaur, OO, and XI labels,
and is also a member and founder of the composer/musician consortium
Exploding Music.
recordings
supove.com
INFUSION
Koch International Classics, 2004
4 works for Piano and Electronics (Enhanced-CD with video)
by Yarnell, Woolf, Kaplinsky, and Epstein
Kathleen Supové, piano and electronics
“This is meant to be a real 21st Century Piano CD. The medium melds two great technologies: electronic
sound and the acoustic grand piano. I chose these pieces because they were imaginative, non-doctrinaire,
beautiful, intriguing---accessible to the listener, but never mindless. I wanted the person listening to be
surrounded by mysterious beauty. I also wanted a seamless and continuous experience from beginning to end.”
-Kathleen Supové
With the four compositions pianist Kathleen Supové performs on Infusion, the walls between
acoustic sound and electronics are completely porous. Sometimes she will play in duet with
computer-generated piano sounds that will only sound electronic once you realize that no human
being, not even a pianist as dexterous as Supové could ever tackle such speeds. Other times
the notes she strikes will be altered in real time and made to sound completely un-piano-like.
Other selected recordings:
Mystery System
music by Lukas Ligeti
(Tzadik) 2004
including Delta Space for
Disklavier; Kathleen Supové,
Yamaha Disklavier
Awakening at the
Inn of the Birds
music by Michael Byron
(Cold Blue) 2003
Kathleen Supové, synthesizer
Play Nice
twisted tutu (Kathleen Supové, Eve
Beglarian)
(O.O. Discs) 2000
Kathleen Supové, keyboards,
vocals, other instruments; Eve
Beglarian, vocals, keyboard, other
instruments
Robert Carl: Works for
Piano
(Centaur) 1996
major works for solo piano;
Kathleen Supové, piano
performances
The John-Adams-Louis Andriessen
Jukebox: In Shuffle Mode
December 5, 2004
The Flea Theater, NYC
with Jennifer Choi, violin
Vijay Ivyer, piano & sounds
Dafna Naphtali, sounds & processing
& Randall Wolf, sounds & turntable
2 Redheads and
88 Solenoids
November 3 & 6, 2004
Slavonic Cultural Center
Berkeley Arts Festival Gallery, CA
EXPLODING PIANO
June 20-22, 2002
The Flea Theater, NYC
with: Randall Woolf,
Composer
& Valeria Vasilevski,
Writer/Director
June 26, 2003
Mildred Sainer Music & Arts Pavilion
New College of Florida, Sarasota
Vibe of the Venue
THE EXPLODING PIANO
April 13, 2004
Forman Theatre
Rhode Island College
CD Release
June 22, 2004
Joe’s Pub, NYC
Peter Kirn, Composer
Piece for piano and CD track, possible
video components.
Mary Ellen Childs, Composer
Work for moving pianist and video.
Collaboration with video artists TBA.
Bubblyfish, Composer
(Hae Young Kim)
Piece for laptop with sounds from
Gameboy and other sources, plus
piano.
Dan Becker, Composer
Revolution for Yamaha Disklavier
(Meet The Composer commission).
Yamaha Dislavier
Neil Rolnick, Composer
“Digits”, New work for pianist &
laptopist.
David Borden, Composer
Heaven-Kept Soul for piano and CD
track.
John Luther Adams, Composer
Concert-length work for piano and
effects processing.
Ongoing Projects:
Barbara Kolb, Composer
Piece for piano and CD soundtrack
of samples.
Commissioning a repertoire for
Piano and Electronics (either as CD
soundtrack or effects processing).
Michael Gatonska, Composer
Piece for piano and effects processing
using drums and other low-tech
items as filters, installation-oriented
presentation.
Commissioning a
Yamaha Disklavier.
Corey Dargel, Composer
Piece for pianist and Corey Dargel
himself, both act as performance
artists as well.
repertoire
for
Inner workings of Yamaha Disklavier
projects
Recent and Upcoming projects:
“This was classical music played
like the best rock’n’roll. It was
passionate, earnest, loud and more
complex than the gatekeepers of high
culture would like to think. Brava.”
—Ben Sisario, NY Press
“What’s it like to be at a Supové concert? The best thing
about it is that you can never answer that question; she’s
taking you on a voyage with her and it’s always to a new
place. But you resonate with what’s happening because
she dares to explore those personal shadowy places that
all of us have an inkling about, that we sense only fleetingly
in flashes of intuition. In a time of endless talk about the
blurring of boundaries of art, here is an artist who simply
ignores the boundaries altogether. You go with her to unmarked territories of the spirit.”
- Wes York, composer/author/producer
“This isn’t electronic music in the famililar beep-boop
mode - it’s utterly idiomatic piano music ingeniously
touched up and played to dexterous perfection.”
- Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle
“Philip K. Dick dropped into my dream to explain a mystery:
‘Yes, Kathy Supové is human, which is why her playing exhibits profound
and genuine passion. But yes, she is also android-enhanced, which is
why she can play impossibly difficult pieces at impossible speeds with
impossible precision.’
‘And is that also why...,’ I began.
p r e s s
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is the reason she gives spectacular hybrid shows in
which she rants, and confesses, and interrogates the audience. And it is
why,’ he said just before revaporizing into the void, ‘she will never fail
to astonish.’
-Jane Ransom, writer
April 10-17, 2003
CLASSICAL GAS Pianist Kathleen Supové accompanies photographs from
her Cold War-era childhood in Picture of an Exhibisionist on Sunday 13.
Avant-garde concert melds laptop, traditional piano fare
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Friday, November 5, 2004
KATHLEEN SUPOVÈ
SARAH CAHILL
Composers can use computers or human players to
coax sounds out of a concert grand piano these days,
but some of the most intriguing possibilities emerge
when the two join forces.
That was the strong impression left by Wednesday’s
exciting joint recital by two of the reigning divas of
avant-garde pianism, New York’s Kathleen Supové
and Bay Area luminary Sarah Cahill.
In a program titled “Two Redheads and 88 Solenoids” given at the Slavonic Cultural Center in the
Excelsior, the two performers took turns playing recent music for piano and Disklavier -- the latter a sort
of high-tech player piano in which a standard acoustic
piano is controlled by laptop, thus opening up all kinds
of rhythmic complexities and virtuoso pyrotechnics
that would be beyond the reach of a mere human.
But if the stage seemed set for a John Henry-style
showdown between, well, woman and machine, the
reality was otherwise. For all the beauty and intricacy
of the traditional piano fare and the works for unaccompanied Disklavier that played during intermission,
the most spellbinding offerings combined both live
and computer-driven veins in a single, sometimes
uneasy synthesis.
The program got off to a powerful start with “Revolution,” a hard-driving 18-minute manifesto by the
concert’s organizer, San Francisco composer Dan
Becker.
Becker throws everything into the mix here. The
piano, played simultaneously by Supové and the
computer, is prepared with the usual arsenal of metal,
wood and rubber gizmos to produce a range of percussive sounds. On top of that, there is a tape recording
of a speech by Martin Luther King Jr., about Rip van
Winkle, who had the tragic fate of sleeping through a
revolution.
Yet a texture that could easily have become overburdened emerges clean and sharp, thanks to the muscular
vitality of the writing and the mastery with which
Becker juggles the various elements.
Often he sets the Disklavier playing a repetitive (or
not so repetitive) rhythmic groove, while the pianist
plays melodic riffs or aggressive punctuating chords
on top of it. Frederic Rzewski’s “The People United
Will Never Be Defeated!” rears its head now and
again to receive a well-merited homage. An ominous ticktock figure recurs at key junctures, and the
King excerpts come and go with perfect timing. It’s a
dynamic whirlwind of a piece, and Supové played it
superbly.
A more amiable combination of pianist and comput-
er came at the close, with Cahill’s energetic rendition
of Carl Stone’s “Sa Rit Gol.” Based on some transmuted Mozart piano music, this is a jovial but eerie
sort of duet for four-hand piano -- one human pair and
one ghostly.
The unthreatening tonal harmonies and congenial
rhythmic palette seemed to be the point here, as Cahill
accommodated herself in traditional chamber music fashion to her unseen cyber-partner. The tension
between the two, and between Stone’s old-fashioned
materials and up-to-date methods, gave the music its
charge.
In between, humans and computers kept their
distance, which was a little disappointing only by
contrast. Intermission was given over to Disklavier
music -- including Kyle Gann’s “Texarkana,” in which
Scott Joplin and Conlon Nancarrow (that Texas
town’s most famous native sons) meet and have a beer
-- and Becker’s witty musical Calder mobiles based on
Bach’s two-part inventions.
On the human side, Supové gave a vigorous account of John Adams’ “American Berserk,” a stretch
of fractured, two-fisted barrelhouse writing. She also
gave vent to her most theatrical impulses in Randall
Woolf’s “Sutra Sutra,” a whimsical but rather slender
bit of performance that joins string theory and Sufi
mysticism, with a cameo appearance by a loaf of
sourdough.
Cahill played Gann’s “Private Dances,” six lovely,
streamlined character pieces that ranged from a wistful
tango to a blues stomp, and “Mistica,” a brief virtuoso
etude by Tania León.
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Supove’s ‘new music’ explodes at New College
January 29, 2003
You couldn’t ask for a more unusual pre-game
show than Kathleen Supove’s “Exploding Piano,”
presented by the enterprising New Music New
College on Super Bowl-Sunday afternoon.
Supove, who joked that her clothing (black vinyl
low-rise trousers and a spider-web top) was really
the new Buccaneer cheerleader outfit, promised,
“You’ll be out of here in time for kick-off.” And
so we were, but not without first sustaining an
unrelenting assault on our preconceptions about
music. Difficult, even painful as some of it was,
this program was good for us. If that sounds a bit
like your mother administering a dose of medicine, so be it.
The music, all of it written between 1979 and
2002, was almost always interesting and invariably well performed by Supove and various
prerecorded sounds.
“Jam,” by Daniel Bernard Roumain, began the
program with what turned out to be the dominant
device of the entire concert: a driving, repetitive
rhythmic pulse, insistent and dominant, subject
to subtle variations, at first seemingly without
direction.
However, after an abrupt interruption, the frantic
activity rises inexorably until a climax is reached.
A point is made, not as Brahms or even Stravinsky
would have made it, but it is made nonetheless.
Orlando Jacinto Garcia makes his point more
obviously, but more compellingly, in his “Why
References?” Every technique imaginable is present here, including prerecorded voice, plucked
piano strings and Latin percussion. Much of this is
vaguely Debussy-like, hazy and faintly sinister.
Much of it is also very pretty, indeed. But where
is this going?
Why does it take so long to get there?
Carolyn Yarnell’s composition, “The Same
Sky,” is a complex creation involving more
electronic sounds and live piano. There seems
little doubt that we heard a definitive performance
on this occasion; the piece was, after all, commissioned by Supove. It is powerful, no doubt, but
seemingly endless and self-indulgent. One must
ask what is being expressed here, other than what
sounds a lot like anger. Does the audience need
stronger clues?
“Sutra Sutra,” by Randall Woolf (who was present for this performance), is much more accessible. That may be due to the fact that Woolf has
included spoken word in the electronic components that help us to understand where he is going
with his examination of the forces that make up
our universe: “All that we call matter is made up
of vibrations and, in reality, all life is one.”
The music which carries this message is, by
turns, lush and impressive, commanding and a
bit cute, entertaining and memorable. Here is a
composer who wants to say something and knows
how say it.
Supove closed her program with a thunderous
performance of “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues,”
by Frederic Rzewski. The heavy thudding of the
mill machinery is suddenly dominated by a lovely
blues segment, before the final notes die away in
the sympathetic vibrations of the piano’s strings.
This concert was essential to our grasp of the
music of our time. However, if brevity is the soul
of wit, this is not witty music. Why, one must ask,
must it be so repetitive? Are we so brain-dead that
we must be told everything several times? Or is
the plan here to devise an incremental repetition
that is, in itself, instructive?
One is tempted to say, “Enough, already! I get
it!” But one would be wise to ask, “Is there something here that I don’t really get? Is the repetition
part of our modern culture and powerful in itself?”
Heretofore, art has been defined by the discipline
which produces it, by the relentless self-editing
that must go on in the creative process. Isn’t art
defined almost as much by what is left out as by
what is retained? All of this is brought into question by the music we heard here, and we are the
better for the agonizing reappraisal it has caused.
And we were ready to watch the kickoff (and the
commercials) in plenty of time.
Supove is redefining the piano-recital experience
January 24, 2003
CHRISTINE HAWES CORRESPONDENT
As a pioneer of New York’s “new
music” scene, pianist Kathleen Supove
usually is associated with the future of
music.
She delves into such concepts as
enhancing the acoustic with the electronic, piercing the traditional barrier
between performer and audience, and
transforming conventional piano recitals into “multi-dimensional experiences.” Yet, tried-and-true musical
traditions were the childhood influences Supove recalled during a recent
telephone interview. She recalled a
father who loved traditional Russian
music, and a first piano teacher who
turned her on to such “light classics” as
boogie-woogie tunes.
Most vividly, she recalled watching
her older brother telling stories “like
a character from ‘Seinfeld,’” she said,
while he two-fingered a melody by ear
on the piano she had not yet learned to
play herself.
Supove said she has never lost
respect for tradition, even as she has
helped create a new form of musical
language.
In fact, Supove said, disciplined
exposure to what has come before has
been pivotal in preparing her to match
the “unforgiving” precision of the
electronic music she incorporates into
her performances.
“There’s no substitute for classical
training and chops,” she said, adding
that she spends a minimum of four
hours daily at the piano.
Supove is the first guest performer
appearing as part of the New College
New Music series, which thus far has
featured students and faculty perform-
ing the works of new music composers such as John Cage and Pauline
Oliveros.
“Kathleen is one of the finest
contemporary performers around on
any instrument,” said Stephen Miles,
director of NCNM and a New College
associate professor of music.
Supove’s performance will help
audience members better understand
what is meant by the term “rethinking
the concert convention,” he said.
Her concerts typically include not
only a combination of electronic and
acoustic piano, but also other electronic
sounds, theatrical devices, vocal rants,
audience interrogations and, occasionally, audience plants.
Although she said she never intends
to be overtly political, Supove does
interject sharp commentary into her
work. For example, she recalled a
guest performance recently with the
art-rock band Dr. Nerve, during which
she dismembered a Barbie doll while
asking, “Why isn’t there a Ground
Zero Barbie?”
Further enhancing the pointed quality
of Supove’s performances is her own
physical appearance, distinguished by
red hair cut in a sharp French bob, and
revealing black-vinyl outfits.
“It keeps clothes out of my way,” Supove said. “And also, I like the feeling
of not being heavily padded.”