ANTHONY BRAXTON I ROLAND DAHINDEN
WORKSHOPS
July 23-31, 2023
9:00 am - 6 pm
Gallery, Academy of Performing Arts in Prague
Roland Dahinden
Roland Dahinden is a Swiss composer and trombonist. He studied the trombone and composition at Musikhochschule Graz with Erich Kleinschuster and Georg Friedrich Haas, at Scuola di Musica di Fiesole Florenz with Vinko Globokar). He earned an MA at Wesleyan University in Connecticut (1994), studying with Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier and a PhD at Birmingham University, England (2002), studying with Vic Hoyland. In 2003, he was awarded the "werkjahr" prize of the art council of the Canton of Zug, Switzerland. He is married to the pianist Hildegard Kleeb, whom he has worked with as a duo since 1987. Since 1992 he has worked as a trio with violinist Dimitrios Polisoidis. As a conductor and trombonist he specializes in the performance of contemporary music and improvisation/jazz. He has given concerts throughout Europe, America and Asia. Composers such as Peter Ablinger, Maria de Alvear, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Peter Hansen, Hauke Harder, Bernhard Lang, Joelle Léandre, Alvin Lucier, Chris Newman, Pauline Oliveros, Hans Otte, Lars Sandberg, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Daniel Wolf and Christian Wolff have written especially for him. In 2005, the CD Silberen was picked as one of the 'Top Classical Albums of the Year 2004' by The New Yorker. As a composer he collaborated with visual artists Guido Baselgia, Andreas Brandt, Stéphane Brunner, Daniel Buren, Rudolf de Crignis, Philippe Deléglise, Inge Dick, Rainer Grodnick, Sol LeWitt, Lisa Schiess, with the architects Morger & Degelo, and with the author Eugen Gomringer. His exhibitions with sound installation and sculptors are shown in Europe and America.
Anthony Braxton
The Chicago-born composer and multi-instrumentalist, is recognized as one of the most important musicians, educators, and creative thinkers of the past 50 years. He is highly esteemed in the experimental music community for the revolutionary quality of his work and for the mentorship and inspiration he has provided to generations of younger musicians. His work, both as a saxophonist and a composer, has broken new conceptual and technical ground in the trans-African and trans-European (a.k.a. “jazz” and “American Experimental”) musical traditions in North America as defined by master improvisers such as Warne Marsh, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and he and his own peers in the historic Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM, founded in Chicago in the late '60s); and by composers such as Charles Ives, Harry Partch, and John Cage. He has further worked his own extensions of instrumental technique, timbre, meter and rhythm, voicing and ensemble make-up, harmony and melody, and improvisation and notation into a personal synthesis of those traditions with 20th-century European art music as defined by Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Varese and others.
From his early work as a pioneering solo performer in the late 1960s through to his eclectic experiments on Arista Records in the 1970s, his landmark quartet of the 1980s, and more recent endeavors, such as his cycle of Trillium operas and the day-long, installation-based Sonic Genome Project, his vast body of work is unparalleled. His small ensembles of the 1970s through to the present day are considered among the most innovative groups of their respective eras, while his Creative Orchestra Music has brought together the varying streams of American jazz orchestras, marching bands, and experimental practices with the traditions of European concert music in a wholly individual compositional voice. His continuing and evolving current systems of the past 15 years, including Ghost Trance Music, Diamond Curtain Wall Music, Falling River Music, Echo Echo Mirror House Music, and ZIM Music, have served as the artistic incubators for some of the most exciting artists of the current generation. Braxton’s many awards include a 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1994 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a 2014 NEA Jazz Master Award, and honorary doctorates from Université de Liège (Belgium), New England Conservatory (USA) and the 2020 United States Artists Fellowship.