Lester St. Louis PRIM ii: Metaphors Made of Soot and Ultraviolet Light (2024, world premiere)
Pauline Oliveros In Consideration of the Earth (1998)
Ben Richter Rewild (2022)

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION:

Ghost Ensemble fosters groundbreaking music that blurs borders of genre, style, and scene, expanding perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Ghost Ensemble’s April 27 performance presents the world premiere of a new commission by Lester St. Louis alongside music by ensemble mentor Pauline Oliveros and artistic director Ben Richter. 

Lester St. Louis’s PRIM ii: Metaphors Made of Soot and Ultraviolet Light (2024) is the second of a series of works engaging with musical rudiments (major scales) as they are, as a means to highlight the expressivity of basic musical components. In this new extension of the series, the layers and seams of these usually definable and recognizable elements become thicker, more transparent and fragmented to highlight the complexity of this ostensibly rudimentary exercise. 

Pauline Oliveros’s In Consideration of the Earth (1998) asks the performers to listen and interact with sounds perceived or imagined in the North, East, South, West, and Center of the performance location. Ghost Ensemble has maintained a practice with Oliveros’s work since collaborating closely with the composer on events including the release concert for her Anthology of Text Scores at Eyebeam (2013) and performances of In Consideration of the Earth and Environmental Dialogue for Skytime 2014 / Moon Rainbow with Elaine Summers Dance at Solar One (2014), later releasing premiere recordings of Angels and Demons (2018) and Mountain Air (2021).

Ben Richter’s Rewild (2022), inspired by nonhuman perspectives and distant orders of magnitude in the universe of life, traverses the thresholds at which pitch becomes rhythm, harmonic interval becomes beating rate, and timbres morph over time. By offering an aural metaphor for the interacting gradual processes of quantum and cosmic systems, Rewild’s pulsing, breathing sonic ecosystem aims to auralize the vast and infinitesimal timescales we do not experience in everyday life.

BIOS:

Ghost Ensemble fosters groundbreaking music that blurs borders of genre, style, and scene, expanding perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Collaboration with living composers is its primary focus. Since its 2012 inception, the ensemble has performed over 100 works and commissioned dozens of new compositions by a diverse range of highly original composers who share a belief in music’s potential for individual and community transformation. Rethinking the norms of composer/performer collaboration, Ghost Ensemble conducts innovative workshops to nurture adventurous new music over the course of multiple seasons. The resulting work often draws from contemporary classical, experimental chamber music, avant-garde jazz, environmental sound art, and territories in between. Critics have praised Ghost Ensemble performances as “prodigious … a thrilling listen” (Christian Carey, Sequenza21), “wonderful work … both exhilarating and a bit scary” (Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily), “beautifully performed and recorded … a body-felt sound mass … a multifaceted texture that evokes the primeval” (Meg Wilhoite, Sound Meets Sound), and “cloudy, mysterious, and dark … Beckettian in its slow spread … certainly a group to keep an eye on” (Brian Olewnick, Just Outside).

Lester St. Louis is a New York City-born and -based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and curator. An autodidact, he did not begin playing the cello until he was 16 years old and quickly learned that he has perfect pitch. Encouraged by his high school orchestra teacher, he dove into the cello with energy and respect. Upon graduating high school, he audited classes all over the NYC area, studying cello, theory, musicianship, and composition all without the aid of an institution. A 2018 Jerome Fund for New Music awardee, Lester has worked, performed, and created in artistic environments in The United States, Canada, South America, Europe and China with groups and artists such as Dré Hočevar Trio, Jaimie Branch Fly or Die, Ensemble Adapter, TAK, and Ghost Ensemble. As a composer, Lester has been commissioned by artists such as the JACK Quartet, Mahan Esfahani and Stefan Jackiw, RAGE THORMBONES, Lauren Cauley and others.

Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) was a composer, accordionist, humanitarian, electronic music pioneer, and founder of Deep Listening. Her career spanned sixty years of boundary-dissolving music making. In the 1950s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco; in the 1960s she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth, and ritual. Among her many recent awards were the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement and the John Cage Award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. 

Ben Richter is a composer, accordionist, and founding Artistic & Executive Director of Ghost Ensemble. Inspired by nonhuman consciousness, Ben’s immersive, gradually evolving compositions seek new orders of magnitude in musical parameters to mark humanity’s transient yet vital role within the immensity of geologic time. Ben also explores the extended microtonal and timbral potential of the accordion in works such as the double album Aurogeny (2023), “consistently fascinating … pulsating, scintillating music … with momentous results” (Julian Cowley, The Wire) and Panthalassa: Dream Music of the Once and Future Ocean (2017), hailed as “likely to offer a profound impact on the very nature of listening” (Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio). Other recent compositions include works for Loadbang, House On Fire Trio, and UMass-Amherst’s Y3K exhibition. An active Deep Listening teacher and researcher, Ben Richter holds a Performer-Composer DMA from CalArts and has taught at CalArts and CUNY-New York City College of Technology.

Tickets can be purchased at the door.
Admission is $20. (CASH ONLY)
All proceeds go to the artists.

At Zürcher Gallery
33 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012