The Music Gallery is presenting the return of composer Arnold Dreyblatt to the city after several years. His return to Toronto for the first time in more than 15 years will be marked by the creation of a collaborative orchestra with local musicians — the Orchestra of Excited Strings.
He’ll be working with Toronto musicians that include cellist Amahl Arulanandam (Thin Edge New Music Collective, VC2), violinist Laura C. Bates (Völur), and percussionist Brandon Valdivia (Mas Aya, Not The Wind, Not The Flag).
Arnold Dreyblatt live at Festival BBmix 2017:
Composer Arnold Dreyblatt
Composer Arnold Dreyblatt is a native of New York City, where his mother Lucille Wallenrod was a painter. He earned his master’s degree in composition from Wesleyan University — despite the fact his guitar teacher had pronounced him tone deaf, and unteachable.
Discouraged from music, he began with studies in video art until he experienced a performance of the music of Alvin Lucier, an experimental composer and professor at Wesleyan. Lucier’s piece, Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, uses pure sine waves, which bounce off the walls of the concert hall to vibrate the head of a snare drum. It creates music with the most basic of ingredients: moving air. Arnold immediately dropped his art studies at SUNY Buffalo to study composition in NYC.
The title of his thesis at Wesleyan was somewhat prophetic: Nodal Excitation.
Blatt is considered part of the second wave of minimalist composers, and his music underwent the usual trajectories of early success, to be followed by a period of changing tastes, and then rediscovery.
His compositions are based on harmonics, and characterized by his invented instruments, performance techniques, and tuning system. Key to it is his Excited Strings Bass, an upright bass that is strung with piano wire. It allows for the creation of a complex series of overtones. His Excited String Orchestras use the Excited Bass in combination to other instruments which have been modified to his signature system of tuning, which incorporated 20 tones per octave.
His music has been performed by cutting edge ensembles such as the Bang On A Can All-Stars in New York, Jim O’Rourke, The Great Learning Orchestra in Stockholm, Pellegrini String Quartet and the Crash Ensemble Dublin.
Arnold relocated to Berlin in 1984, where he was elected to the Academy of Arts in 2007. He is also known as a multimedia artist, and he has produced public art installations and exhibitions in the US and Europe. He served as Professor of Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design (Muthesius Kunsthochschule) in Kiel, Germany from 2009 until 2022, and is currently Vice-Director of the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
The Details
Arnold’s last residency and performance at the Music Gallery took place in 2007. During a workshop, before the performance, he’ll be introducing the musicians to his tuning methods and performance techniques.
The program, curated by Tad Michalak, consists of:
- Transmissions (2021): a solo performance by Arnold Dreyblatt on his Excited Bass, equipped with a mechanical transducer & real-time audio processing and software control by Sam Ashley;
- A performance by the Orchestra of Excited Strings.
Find tickets and more information about the April 11 performance in Toronto [HERE].
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