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San Diego-based ensemble The Nonsense Company performs new chamber works for piano, percussion, banjo, and accordion. The program will include music by Aperghis, Burkhardt, Burns, Ulman, and Xenakis. The Nonsense Company was founded in 1999 by Rick Burkhardt, Andy Gricevitch, John Mark Harris and Aiyun Huang, with the goal of furthering intense collaboration between composers and performers dedicated to expanding the possibilities of contemporary music. The Company's name is borrowed from Schubert's company, die Unsinn Gessellschaft, who with radically spare resources spawned a revolution in the music and poetry of the nineteenth century. The members of the quartet have diverse, distinguished backgrounds in music making as well as poetry and theater. Their repertoire includes works by established composers such as Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Georges Aperghis, Helmut Lachenmann, and James Wood, but also, more importantly, works by emerging composers whose approach to music breaks uncharted ground, such as Chris Mercer, Susan Parenti, Erik Ulman, Rick Burkhardt, and Mark Enslin. The Company regularly commissions works from young composers whose work they find startling; pending commissions are from Avi Tchamni, Ming Tsao, and Farangis Nurulla-Khoja. Members of the Nonsense Company have performed in various groupings all over the U.S., Canada, Europe, Mexico, and Japan, with repeated invitations to festivals in New York and New England, to Universities and Conservatories in Washington, Illinois, Florida, Arizona, Massachusetts, and California, and to performance series in churches, coffehouses, theaters, media centers, and living rooms in the biggest cities and smallest towns in the U.S. As students of the University of California, San Diego, they have participated in seminars conducted by groundbreaking musicians such as Brian Ferneyhough, Steven Schick, Chaya Czernowin, Aleck Karis, Alvin Lucier, Roger Reynolds, and Robert Ashley. The Nonsense Company is based in San Diego, California. strictly Ballroom | CCRMA home | Christopher Burns home Copyright © 2002 Christopher Burns. All rights reserved. |