ARNOLD DREYBLATT

TONIGHT'S PROGRAM:

Dreyblatt’s Solo Performance involves a newly developed amplified “Excited String” instrument fitted with an audio transducer system in performance with live digital electronics. Recent concerts have included the CTM Festival, Berlin; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Viernulvier Festival, Ghent, and Conservatoire Pierre Barbizet in Marseille. In addition to the new solo project “Transmissions”, Dreyblatt performs a new version of his seminal work “Nodal Excitation” for Excited Strings Bass, first performed in New York in 1979.

Transmissions, 2021 Amplified upright bass prepared with music wire and mechanical transducer including sine waves tuned in the "Dreyblatt tuning system" along with real-time audio processing and software control and including voice by Sam Ashley with texts by John Cage.   Nodal Excitation, 1979-2022 In development since 1979, Nodal Excitation is performed with an amplified upright electric bass prepared with unwound music wire, in order to excite the higher overtones with a percussive rhythmic technique for exciting chords of overtones above the fundamental.

ARTIST BIO:

Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American media artist and composer. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. A student of first-generation minimalists Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier, Dreyblatt invented his own tuning system early in his career. He enacts this method in his work as a solo artist, often percussively playing an upright bass, and with his ensemble, the Orchestra of Excited Strings.

In 2007, Dreyblatt is deputy director of the visual arts section at the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). He was  Professor of Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design in Kiel, Germany from 2009 to 2022. One of the second generation of New York minimal composers, Dreyblatt studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier and media art with Woody and Steina Vasulka. His early activities in music and performance included the albums "Nodal Excitation", "Propellers In Love", “The Sound of One String” and the opera project "Who's Who in Central and East Europe 1933”.

Arnold Dreyblatt has charted his own unique course in composition and music performance. He has invented a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning. Often characterized as one of the more rock-oriented of American minimalists, Dreyblatt has cultivated a strong underground base of fans for his transcendental and ecstatic music with his "Orchestra of Excited Strings".

His music has been performed by the Bang On A Can All-Stars in New York, Jim O'Rourke, The Great Learning Orchestra in Stockholm, Pellegrini String Quartet and the Crash Ensemble Dublin. He has recorded for such labels as Tzaddik, Hat Hut, Table of the Elements, Cantaloupe, Important, Choose and Black Truffle. Dreyblatt has taught music workshops resulting in performed compositions with musicians at  "The Music Gallery", Toronto; MIT Boston, Serralves Foundation, Porto and many others.  He has performed with and without his ensemble at the Whitney Museum, New York; the Maerz Music Festival, Berlin; the Angelika Festival, Bologna; The Lab in San Francisco , Berghain Berlin and countless other festivals and concert venues in Europe and in North America.

Enjoy this recent Pitchfork review of his last album: RESOLVE