Marilyn Nonken with Sound Icon: Vortex Temporum Revisited

About

Pianist Marilyn Nonken joins forces with the Boston-based ensemble Sound Icon to honor the 70th anniversary of the birth of spectral music founder Gérard Grisey. The evening’s performance Grisey's magnum opus, Vortex Temporum (1996), will present this rarely heard work for de-tuned piano and five instruments alongside new commissions by young composers inspired by Grisey. Richard Carrick, Nina C. Young, Christopher Trapani, Marcos Balter, Victoria Cheah, Brian Erickson, and Edmund Campion will offer new ways of exploring the scordatura piano and examine the influence of spectralism on today's younger voices.

Spectral music is a compositional technique developed in the 1970s that uses computer analysis of the quality of timbre in acoustic music or artificial timbres derived from synthesis. The technique was developed in France and refined at IRCAM in Paris by Ensemble l’Itinéraire and composers Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail.

Founded in 2011, Sound Icon is a sinfonietta committed to performing significant progressive works of the past few decades. Through ambitious programming performed to the highest standards, Sound Icon engages audiences in dialogues about what progressive music is and can be: music that redefines rules, experiences, and expectations.

Marilyn Nonken is one of the the foremost interpreters of spectral piano music. Renowned for her performances and recordings with Michael Finnissy, Alvin Lucier, Charles Ives, Morton Feldman, and Pierre Boulez, Nonken has recorded the complete piano music of Tristan Murail and Joshua Fineberg. Nonken is the author of The Spectral Piano: From Liszt, Scriabin and Debussy to the Digital Age.