In collaboration with the faculty and fellows of the Summer Institute of Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP), Katherine performs at the New England Conservatory of Music's Brown Hall.

Charles Ives: Sunrise
Gabriela Diaz, violin
Yukiko Takagi, piano

György Kurtág: Einige Sätze aus den Südelbuchern Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs
Kiyoe Wellington, double bass

John Cage: The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs
Mike Jones, percussion

Program Notes:

Here follow some “sentences” from the “scrapbooks” of Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs (1742-1799), German scientist, satirist, and Anglophile. Lichtenbergs is best remembered for his discovery of tree-like patterns created by electrical discharge and for his Sudelbüchern, which he modeled off of the tradition of English bookkeeping or scrapbooks from 1765 until his death in 1799. Hungarian composer György Kurtág (b. 1926) set selections from the volumes to music for voice and double bass in this dark yet playful fragmented composition. Kurtág’s Sätze are highly detailed and nuanced, and build on his earlier Kafka Fragments (1985-1987) for voice and violin and Jozéf-Attila Fragments for solo voice (1981). The humor in Sätze is like that of Kafka’s “A Little Fable”: dark, compelling, and horrifyingly true. Though Lichtenbergs’ bulk of texts offer no central philosophy, they do offer keen observations into human nature and the lighter and darker sides of existence, love, death, suffering and joy. - Katherine Skovira