Role Models and How We See Ourselves
April 26 2016 at 18:45 CET – STUDIO 1, Koninklijk Conservatorium in Den Haag
We are honored to have Anne La Berge as a guest, who will give us a talk about her work and her experiences as a flutist, improviser, and composer.
What is still required: Discourse is rich, and our social environment important. Are we asking the right questions? Can we reflect? The Social Space described by Doreen Massey allows for the existence of our stories. We control our ability to think, to respond and to listen. So, we can construct our social space, to be what it could be.
The discussion carries on, and we shall continue. Anyone with any questions or thoughts that they think could be discussed will be very welcome to send this.
A few words about our guest
Anne La Berge’s career as flutist/improviser/composer stretches across international and stylistic boundaries. Her performances bring together the elements on which her international reputation is based: a ferocious and far-reaching virtuosity, a penchant for improvising delicately spun microtonal textures and melodies, and her wholly unique array of powerfully percussive flute effects, all combined with electronic processing. Many of her compositions involve her own participation, though she has produced works intended solely for other performers, usually involving guided improvisation and text. She also uses these compositions that work with a flexible combination of imposed musical situations and electronics where performer/improvisers are an integrated part of the music making process as material for workshops and masterclasses. In addition to creating her own work she regularly performs in other artists’ projects in a range of settings from modern chamber music to improvised electronic music.
Anne La Berge performs regularly with Robert van Heumen in their duo Shackle. She is a member of MAZE, an electroacoustic ensemble dedicated to performing music that challenges the idea of fixed form. She is an active artist in Splendor Amsterdam, a collective of 50 musicians, composers and stage artists who have transformed an old bathhouse in the center of Amsterdam into a cultural mecca.
She can be heard on the Largo, Artifact, Etcetera, Hat Art, Frog Peak, Einstein, X-OR, Unsounds, Canal Street, Rambo, esc.rec., Intackt and Data labels which include recordings as a soloist and with Ensemble Modern, United Noise Toys, Fonville/La Berge duo, Rasp/Hasp, Bievre/La Berge duo, Apricot My Lady, Big Zoom, the Corkestra, La Berge and Williamson duo and MAZE.
‘La Berge is a precursor of some of the important things contemporary composition has now come to mean.’
-The Wire
Her music is published by Frog Peak Music, Donemus, and can be directly ordered by contacting her. She plays a Brannen Kingma System custom flute and a Kingma custom alto flute, and creates most of her electro acoustic performances using Max and the Kyma. She is the co-director, with her husband David Dramm, of the Volsap Foundation that supports projects for composed and improvised music.
‘The miracle of her sound technique is supported by, among other things, different lip-positions, attacks, ways of breathing, distance from the microphone – everything has been foreseen and elaborated. . . Her textures are often two-voiced. It is all so complicated that it defies description and yet it sounds very natural, like a bird’s song.’
– Muusika, Tallin
Find out more at the Facebook event here.