Charles Curtis: Four Works for Solo Cello

Alvin Lucier: Glacier (2009)
Morton Feldman: Projection 1 (1950)
Morton Feldman: Intersection 4 (1953)
Alison Knowles: Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis (2008)

Charles Curtis presents four works for solo cello that reimagine the instrument as both physical and acoustical space. Morton Feldman’s earliest graphic scores, Projection 1 and Intersection 4 map register, timbre, and density across a visual grid, reducing the score to a schematic or sketch for a speculative music. Alvin Lucier’s Glacier takes the radically reduced gesture of a very slow glissando across the cello’s range to reveal acoustical anomalies, sweeping harmonics, non-linear responses of the instrument, and unpredictable shifts in directionality echoed in the surrounding room. In Alison Knowles’s Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis, the entire body of the cello, as a unified reverberating mass, is meticulously investigated to seek out the local resonances of every part of its tensile length.

One of the premier avant-garde cellists of his generation, Charles Curtis studied at Juilliard and with vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and composer La Monte Young, mastering Young’s rigorous practice of just intonation. He has performed and premiered modern classical, minimalist, and chamber works worldwide, and numerous composers—including La Monte Young, Alison Knowles, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, Christian Wolff, and Tashi Wada—have written works specifically for him. Curtis is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.