Lecture by Sharon Kanach

Topoi: places and spaces of making and perceiving music.

Every musician or ensemble, before performing in a given space, has a “sound check” to test the hall, the balance, the ambiance of the venue. The information thus collected informs the manner in which a given programme will be played; not what will be played (in the case of written music – improvisation being another question –) but rather how it will be played. During this presentation we will attempt to shift this process to the listener by demonstrating that what someone hears is affected by how it is heard. Listener immersion, since the 1960s, is increasingly a part of new music’s paradigm. Through an overview of historic experiences and literature exploring spatialization and immersion, heavily relying on Iannis Xenakis’s pioneering “polytopes,” The Shoe Factory will become a temporary laboratory to actively explore such considerations. The Lecture will be in English and will last approximately 90 minutes.

Sharon Kanach is an American musician who has been based in France for the past thirty-some years. After graduating from Bennington College as a double major in music (composition) and literature (linguistics) she went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. Quickly however, her path crossed that of Iannis Xenakis, under whom she worked during her graduate studies at the Université de Paris I. Subsequently, the two collaborated closely for the last twenty years of Xenakis’s life, especially, but not exclusively, on his writings.

Their first collaboration was published in 1985 by Pendragon Press (NY): her translation of the defense of Xenakis’s Doctorat d’ Etat: Arts/Sciences: Alloys. Then, they collaborated on the revised and augmented edition of his seminal Formalized Music (Pendragon, 1992, originally published in English by Indiana University Press in 1971). Soon after that, they began what ended up being an over ten-year collaborative project, and Xenakis’s last one, as co-authors of the publication in French of Musique de l’architecture (Éditions Parenthèses, Marseille, 2006), also published in Spanish (Akal Editores, 2009), forthcoming in Chinese (HUST Editions) and in a distinct version in English, Music and Architecture, by Pendragon Press (2008).

Kanach was also the musical assistant of the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) during the last ten years of his life. To mark the 100th birthday of this composer, Kanach set out to create a critical edition of Scelsi’s complete writings, published in French by Actes Sud: Les anges sont ailleurs… (2006) – compiling his writings on music and art, L’ Homme du son (2007) – his collected poems, and Il Sogno 101 (2009) – his autobiography.

Kanach’s own scholarly articles are regularly published by international peer publications, such as Perspectives of New Music in the USA and in various international Proceedings of symposia where she is a regular keynote speaker on Xenakis, Scelsi and trans-disciplinary studies in general.

As an independent artistic director/producer/new music consultant, Kanach regularly collaborates with Mode Records (USA), Radio-France (Paris, France), WDR (Cologne, Germany), and various new music festivals in Europe and North America. Since June 2007, Kanach is the acting artistic director and co-vice-president of the newly reestablished Centre Iannis Xenakis (= CIX, formerly CCMIX and Ateliers UPIC, originally created by Xenakis in 1985 in Paris), now based at the Université de Rouen.

The event is part of the 5th International Pharos Contemporary Music Festival