Modernist Movements at the de Young Museum

Modernist interpretations of Water at Friday Nights at the de Young Museum, in conjunction with the ‘Modernism from the National Gallery of Art’ exhibition 

Soundwave creates a modernist event with works that explore water, our most important natural resource, in conjunction with the deYoung’s Modernism from the National Gallery of Art exhibition. Inspired by modernist era sonic artists such as John Cage, Elliot Carter and Igor Stravinsky who reinterpreted music and create innovations that lead to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, this special Friday Nights at the de Young will have artists and musicians explore these notions and pay homage to the modernist movement throughout the museum’s stunning indoor and outdoor spaces.

At the outdoor Pool of Enchantment, sound artist and instrument builder Jay Kremier creates ‘When Its Gone’, a performance installation that explores human use of water and waste with an invented instrument using lab glass, which makes different tones and pitches as it fills and empties, evoking repetition and emptiness. In the main Wilsey Court, the unique 30-member all-male choir Conspiracy of Beards performs water-inspired songs of legendary poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934-present). Staged in the most-inspiring locations – the Observation Tower of the De Young Museum— composer Luciano Chessa envisions ‘Water Memory,’ featuring small piano melodigrand, bullhorn, Vietnamese Dan Bau and Glockenspiel, and accompanied by percussionist Andy Meyerson. He explores a rhapsodic meditation on the possibility that water may be the longest-lasting, and most formidable database we have around, capable of preserving memory of places it travels through.Artist Moses Hacmon presents his breathtaking large-scale photographic art installation ‘Faces of Water,’ that captures the movement and energy of water.

Jay Kreimer  has toured widely, performing on his invented instruments and computer configurations. He has composed and performed a series of conceptual, audience interactive computer compositions, notably in the last three Soundwave series in San Francisco. Over the past 15 years he has collaborated frequently with textile artist Wendy Weiss, providing sound, video, and sculptural components to large scale installations throughout the US, as well as shows in Vancouver and Beijing. He has also collaborated frequently with the painter Michael Burton, providing sound scores for animations. He recently returned from India where he was making a documentary about processional wedding bands on a Fulbright Senior Research fellowship. Recent projects include the fifth release by Seeded Plain, Kreimer’s ongoing project with Bryan Day; with the Mighty Vitamins, incidental sound for the 2013 NET/PBS documentary “The Healing Machine;” the Wired for Sound at the First Annual Deep Listening Conference in Renssaelaer, NY; and, the curation of Hammer, Anvil, Stirrup: People Make Things that Make Sound, an exhibition of invented instruments at the Lux Gallery in Lincoln Nebraska.

Conspiracy of Beards was formed in 2003 and is a 30-member male choir that performs dynamic, original, a cappella arrangements of the poetic songs of Leonard Cohen. Transforming Cohen’s lyrics and simple melodies into complex 4- and 5-part harmonies, and with a wide variety of small ensemble and full choir pieces, Conspiracy of Beards achieves a sound that is both robust and tender. Drawing on influences ranging from jazz and gospel to barbershop and doo-wop, the unique arrangements that choir members create capture all of the emotion and humor of Leonard Cohen’s original music and inspire audiences to ponder common human experiences like romance, heartbreak, politics, sex, longing, and spirituality. It has become an integral part of the San Francisco music scene with performances at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, The Jewish Music Festival, Great American Music Hall, San Francisco City Hall, and SFMoMA. The choir has also been featured on several radio programs including NPR’s “West Coast Live,” “The California Report,” and “Weekend Edition.”

Moses Hacmon is a collaborative artist, photographer and architect. Moses studied cinematography and fine art in Tel Aviv and in the Technion in Haifa before completing his B.Arch with AIA Honors from the Southern California Institute of Architecture. His main interest is the constant creation of physical objects that represent the spirit of the present time and space, both in architecture and art. For the past 10 years Moses has been studying water’s composition, properties, and movement and has developed an original photographic technique that captures the hidden life of water. This project he calls Faces Of Water(facesofwater.com), which exposes the movement within water, previously invisible to our eyes.

Luciano Chessa is a composer, conductor, pianist, and musical saw/Vietnamese dan bau soloist, active in Europe, the U.S., Australia, and South America. Recent compositions include Set and Setting, a San Francisco Contemporary Music Players commission, LIGHTEST, an SFMOMA commission, Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze!, a large-scale work written for The Living Earth Show, and A Heavenly Act, an opera with original video by Kalup Linzy commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Chessa is the author of Luigi Russolo Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult, the first monograph ever to be dedicated to the Futurist Russolo and his Art of Noise. Selected projects include those at the New York-based Biennial of the Arts PERFORMA; the Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners at the Berliner Festspiele-Maerzmusik Festival; and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires to celebrate the Centennial of Russolo’s Art of Noises. Additionally, he has been performing futurist sound poetry for well over 10 years. He holds a D.M.A. in Piano performance and an M.A. in Composition from the G.B. Martini Conservatory of Music in Bologna, Italy, an M.A. magna cum laude in History of Medieval Music from the University of Bologna, and a Ph.D. in Musicology and Music Criticism from the University of California at Davis.