Meridian Xings: Interweaving Voices of Play in Five Movements
Alphabet, Peaceful, Diminished: 29 Proposals from the Towers of Babble

An evening of performance presented by Søren Kjærgaard
$10 general; $5 students/seniors

Featuring Agnes Szelag, cello & voice; Theresa Wong, cello; Phillip Greenlief, saxophones; Bob Marsh, sonic suit & prepared clothing; Torben Ulrich, voice & drainpipe; Søren Kjærgaard, piano & prepared piano.

In March, Meridian Gallery welcomed its first resident musician: 33-year-old Danish composer/pianist Søren Kjærgaard, who will work out of Meridian's third floor Music Room for a total of four months on a grant from the Danish Arts Council.

Søren's work extends through a variety of disciplines, attempting to converge elements of composition, improvisation, performance and practice into one dynamic field of play. A graduate of the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, Søren has toured the globe, released eight albums as a composer/bandleader and been recognized with numerous awards and grants, including three Danish Music Award nominations, most recently for "Jazz Composer of the Year." He has also received the Danish National Radio Jazz Award and a Prize Award from the Danish Arts Council in 2010 for the album Open Opus, featuring his trans-atlantic trio with New York bassist Ben Street and legendary drummer Andrew Cyrille. A truly international artist, Søren has performed with his own groups and others in Europe, Asia, the USA and Canada.

Working in Meridian's historic building amidst a vibrant multidisciplinary arts community has inspired Søren to begin work on a project that will look into ways of sonically interpreting the geographic and bodily meridian lines that interweave and connect us. On June 17th, this will culminate in an evening of performance beginning with Meridian Xings: Interweaving Voices of Play in Five Movements, a sonic event that will bring Meridian Gallery's whole building into play and allow audience members to move freely throughout Meridian's three floors and explore the unfolding events by Søren and his Bay Area collaborators.

The following performance is part of an ongoing collaboration between Søren and noted Danish artist Torben Ulrich. On their 2009 album, Suddenly, Sound: 21 songlines for piano, drainpipe, etc., the Danish pair worked with the five sonic elements: sound, line, pulse, silence and space - along with suddenness, inspired by the Armenian teacher, G. I. Gurdjieff's way of shouting things to a sudden halt, stopping one's habitual train of motion, its freezing as well as its subsequent freeing up. Alphabet, Peaceful, Diminished: 29 Proposals from the Towers of Babble, is in many ways a continuation of this practice, but in a more radicalized form, fusing the two fields of asemic and atonal play, with regards to John Cage, Kurt Schwitters and the dadaists. In both the vocal and tonal approach, there is talk of a diminished aspect, a diminishing of tonality and linguistic comprehensibility: where Babel becomes babble, meaning missing meaning, and where the well-tempered piano is partly prepared for other sonorities and distemperaments.