Simeon ten Holt: Canto Ostinato co-presented by MAF and Monday Evening Concerts

Still, Tacita Dean, FILM, 2011, 35mm color and black and white portrait format anamorphic film with hand-tinted sequences, silent, 11 minutes, continuous loop. Simeon ten Holt, Canto Ostinato (1976), alongside the screening of Tacita Dean: FILM (2011) Image: Still, Tacita Dean, FILM, 2011 On December 7 and 14 at 7PM, Marciano Art Foundation and Monday Evening Concerts (M.E.C.) collaborate on presenting two live performances of late Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt’s 1976 masterpiece, Canto Ostinato – widely considered one of the most significant works of Dutch contemporary classical music – to soundtrack Tacita Dean’s silent 2011 work FILM in MAF’s Theater Gallery. Held one week apart, the performances will feature MEC’s resident ensemble ECHOI, whose members include Vicki Ray, Gloria Cheng, Sidney Hopson, Tim Feeney, and MEC Artistic Director Jonathan Hepfer, who will lead the quintet of two pianos, two vibraphones, and marimba. More ritual than conventional performance, Canto Ostinato unfolds through an expansive, open-ended structure of repeating musical cells, allowing performers to shape the work in real time. `There’s Simeon ten Holt and then there’s all the rest,’ the composer of works including Canto Ostinato, Horizon and Lemniscaat once said jokingly of his position in Dutch musical life. Even today, one could say that, in a certain sense, this is still true. Anyone challenging a select group of contemporary music lovers to a fiery debate need mention only one name: that of Simeon ten Holt (b. 1923). In the late 1970s, this Dutch composer provoked the wrath of countless musical know-alls by returning to sounds that every ear could understand. He had the courage to abandon the complex, twelve-tone scores of the post-war era, which he traded in for simple triads, shifting rhythmic patterns and repeat signs. Completely independent of American composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, Ten Holt created a Dutch version of minimal music. Although Ten Holt deviated from the American approach by placing more importance on process than on technique and by taking an interest in the social interaction that occurs (in the case of several musicians) and the `liberation of the musical object’, the listener need not be aware of this to appreciate his music. The music that was and still is denounced by the diehards of the serial school as `insipid cult music’ and fatal, new simplicity became the new music that spoke to the experience of an ever-growing audience. –Paul Janssen About Monday Evening Concerts Founded in 1939 by Peter Yates and Frances Mullen in their modest Rudolf Schindler-designed Silverlake home, Monday Evening Concerts (MEC) is the world’s longest-running series devoted to contemporary music. Originally envisioned as a forum for displaced European emigrés and virtuoso Hollywood studio musicians to sink their teeth into the most daunting solo and chamber music of the day (such as the works of the then-revolutionary Charles Ives, Alexander Scriabin, Erik Satie and Béla Bartók), MEC has blossomed its way to international acclaim for its presentation of demanding, uncompromising, philosophical and poetically-charged music – whether new or ancient. For eight decades, musical history has been made at MEC, whether it was the American conducting debut of Pierre Boulez, world premieres of compositions by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage and Harold Budd, the early-career performances of future classical music icons such as Michael Tilson Thomas and Marilyn Horne, or the first Los Angeles appearances of artists like Marino Formenti, the Arditti and JACK Quartets and Steve Reich and Musicians. Monday Evening Concerts is a seven-time national winner of the ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming. The series is discussed in Eve Babitz’s I Used to be Charming and Eve’s Hollywood, Susan Sontag’s essay Pilgrimage: Tea with Thomas Mann, and is the subject of a full-length book entitled Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939-1971 written by Dorothy Lamb Crawford. For more information visit www.mondayeveningconcerts.org