Andrew McIntosh plays Biber’s Rosary Sonatas
Program
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Biber The Rosary Sonatas
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In music, tuning sets the stakes and the boundaries of our world. It is the carbon we build mountains with, the oxygen we breathe in, it is our environment and, within the duration of a piece, it becomes us. Tunings often resemble nature, ratios instead of generalities, cycles mirroring the cosmos, and patterns turning up anywhere and everywhere the way we see for example Fibonacci in nature. It is with that outlook then that we turn to look toward ancient musics and pieces not yet heard to find tuning, central in its crystal mathematics and ecstatic formalities shaping a whole weekend of music making. For this special search we call Darkness Sounding congregating and coalescing for the first time outside Los Angeles at 92NY, this year honoring tuning.
Baroque violinist and Wild Up member Andrew McIntosh will give a rare complete performance of Heinrich Biber’s Rosary Sonatas, joined by Ian Pritchard (harpsichord/organ), Maxine Eilander (baroque harp), and Malachai Bandy (viola da gamba). Composed circa 1675, the Rosary Sonatas are a set of fifteen violin sonatas, each featuring a different re-tuning of the open strings, and many of them extreme in their evocations of various episodes from the life of Jesus, with radical musical depictions of earthquakes, trumpets, prayer, suffering, adoration, awe, violence, love, pain, acceptance, crowns, joy, teaching, mystery, and victory. These sonatas served as an inspiration for Tony Conrad in the 1950s when he was a violin student at Harvard, sending him down the path of re-tuning which would later become central to his work with the Theater of Eternal Music. Conrad’s iconic 1964 recording, Four Violins (which Wild Up is performing in McIntosh’s arrangement on the Friday night show), is in the same tuning as Biber’s Sonata X, which depicts the crucifixion. A recent performance by McIntosh of the complete Rosary Sonatas in Los Angeles was described by Alex Ross in The New Yorker as one of the most memorable performances of 2023.
The fifteen Rosary Sonatas are divided into three sections, each lasting approximately 40 minutes: the joyful mysteries, the sorrowful mysteries, and the glorious mysteries. The performance will be presented with two intermissions, for a total runtime of 2 1/2 hours.
About Endless Season
Art in LA has been about freedom and an abundant eschewing of history. With intersecting methods and intentions, humble, aspiring, a city appealing to the aesthete and the mystic in all of her citizens. Here, famous artists are also street-side sign painters, our best restaurants drive or live in strip malls, and our landmarks are geographical before architectural or fleetingly experiential instead of permanent monuments to their own lineages. Here, our religious and secular musics sound the same.
Endless Season gathers around these uniquely West Coast traits. We ask lead artists to question, reinterpret, and challenge the past, modality, and genre. We hold a space of intersectionality and dialogue surrounding every aspect of our work. Together, we will explore the breadth of work and practices, discovering the many shapes of music and ideas in LA today.
Endless Season 2024 - 2025
Endless Season continues internationally and across Los Angeles, as we embark on a year of festivals, residencies, and deep explorations of sound and those close-to-the-heart feelings that draw us toward one another. We begin by bringing the music of Julius Eastman to Germany at Ruhrtriennale. Then, we look toward the future of society with a weekend of democratic music-making with Democracy Sessions at MOCA Warehouse. In 2025, we untether Darkness Sounding, a festival that explores how listening, sound, and music shape our understanding of the world, from LA to congregate in New York around tuning and droves of medieval harmonies at 92NY. And we explore what it means to live life To The Fullest, celebrating selves brimming with unique righteousness, around the music of Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell in a three-month-long festival with the LA Philharmonic and REDCAT and other partners yet to be announced.
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The LA Composer Series from Wild Up
Sep 9 & Nov 11, 2024 Sierra Madre Playhouse -
Democracy Sessions
Nov 8-10, 2024 WAREHOUSE at Geffen Contemporary at MOCA -
Wild Up Composers at Noon to Midnight
Nov 16, 2024 Walt Disney Concert Hall -
Modern Masterworks: Schoenberg, inti figgis vizueta, John Adams
Jan 26, 2025 Broad Stage -
To the Fullest: The Music of Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell
Mar 4 - May 4, 2025 REDCAT and Walt Disney Concert Hall -
Darkness Sounding
Mar 21-23, 2025 92NY, New York