July 2007
  

7/8 - 7/22

 Theater for Development Fellow at the Guapamacataro
Interdisciplinary Residency in Art and Ecology, Michoacan, Mexico
7/24 Performance at 1st Encuentro Interdisciplinario Internacional de Arte Actual, Morelia Michoacan, Mexico
August 2007
  

8/31

 Performance of the Music of John Luther Adam's at The Cuyahoga Valley National Park with the Akros Percussion Collective, Northeast Ohio
September 2007
  

9/7 - 9/9 and
9/14 - 9/16

 Performance as part of GroundWorks DanceTheater at
the Northside Icehouse, Akron Ohio
October 2007  
10/29 - 11/7 Performances in Brussels, Paris, Geneva
November 2007  
11/10 Akros Percussion Collective
Performance for Akron Arts Alliance
11/13 Lecture/Performance
University of Akron
11/15 Masterclass
University of Texas, Brownsville
11/17, 18 Performance Gallery 409
Brownsville, Texas
11/20 Lecture
University of Texas, Brownsville
December 2007  
12/2 Music with a View Music Series
Performance with Kristin Norderval, Monique Buzzarte,
and Katherine Liverovskaya
Flea Theater, NYC
January 2008  
1/12 -- 8pm

Warmer by the Stove 2008
The Gustavo Aguilar Get Libre Collective

Lotus Music and Dance Studios
109 W. 27th, 8th Floor
New York City

Admission: $10
8pm

Gustavo Aguilar (Solo Set)
El Gran Güiro by Marcelo Toledo**
Boardplay by Art Jarvinen**
Memorias by Julio Estrada*
Shekere by Javier Alvarez*

The Gustavo Aguilar Get Libre Collective (Second Set)
Free Fall and the Acceleration of Gravity**
Featuring:
Gaelyn Aguilar (text)
Gustavo Aguilar (drums)
Lisle Ellis (acoustic bass)
J.D. Parran (woodwinds)
Angelica Sanchez (piano)
Jill Sigman (dance)

*NY premier
**World premier
1/19 -- 10:30pm
 Lisle Ellis's Tactile 3

Lisle Ellis (acoustic bass)
Rudresh Mahanthappa (alto sax)
Gustavo Aguilar (drums and percussion)

Vision Series
@The Living Theatre
21 Clinton St., 10:30 pm
New York City
More Info: 212/696-6681

Vision Series
   
   
   
Liner notes for the new cd on Henceforth Records:

unsettled on an old sense of place
Xochicalco (for Julio)
In September 2005, my wife, Gaelyn, and I took a trip to Cuernavaca, México so that I could work with Julio Estrada, the great Mexican composer. During our visit, Julio and his wife, Velia, urged us to visit the ruins of Xochicalco, one of Central México’s most important pre-Hispanic commercial, cultural, and religious centers. Gaelyn and I spent a better part of a day walking around the grounds, with few companions other than the crows circling high atop the vast plateau, and the apparitions of a once thriving civilization. A few months later, back in the United States, I had a chance to take my ensemble, soNu, into the recording studio with Anne LeBaron and Mary Oliver. My experience at Xochicalco had left a deep impression on me, and I was curious how that impression might filter through the histories of others whose musicianship and sensitivity I respected. In preparation for recording, I took each player aside, one-by-one, and revealed three things to them, only one of which, a quote from William Carlos Williams (“It is difficult to get the news from poems/But men die everyday with the lack of what is found there”), was I consistent in repeating exactly each time. The other two things? Random excerpts from recordings of indigenous music from México; and random recollections of my walk through Xochicalco. Gathered back in the studio, and with headphones on, we listened one time through to a teponatzli (Aztec drum) and flute song I had composed, recorded, and processed the night before. After a minute of silence, I re-cued the pre-recorded material and pressed Play/Record. Dedicated to Julio Estrada, Xochicalco joins others in my series of Imaginative Reaction Compositions.
Contrafactum for Scelsi
For some time now, I have been performing improvised pieces for guitar played as a hand-percussion instrument. My good friend and ethnomusicologist, Robert Reigle, once heard me playing such a piece, and asked if I had ever heard Ko-tha by the great Italian composer, Giacinto Scelsi. I hadn’t. But shortly after I did; and I have gone on to perform Scelsi’s composition several times. My particular present-composed work is a contrafactum on Ko-ta that also doubles as an homage to my parents—a serenade song that draws its inspiration from those nights when my father, feeling guilty about coming home late yet again, would bring a cancionero (singer) to the house with him to serenade my mother and help soften the blow. Accompanied by his own guitar playing, the cancionero would plead my father's case, singing songs that spoke of a man's passion and devotion to his mujer. Of course, my mother never fell for these sweet songs, nor was ever fooled by my father's gesture. Yet, seeing just how much my brothers and I loved to listen to the cancionero, and seeing, ironically, just how much these moments brought us together as a family, my mother would go along with the charade, and invite the cancionero into our living room. Love songs would turn into corridos, whose themes made us proud to be of Mexican descent.
RoKaMaYoHa
RoKa came to me in a waking dream, in anticipation of attending my first live kabuki performance in Tokyo. Kabuki is often popularly translated to mean “the art of singing and dancing.” Yet in tracing the actual etymology of the characters to the verb kabuku (meaning “to lean” or “to act out of the ordinary”), some suggest that a more accurate translation would be “avant-garde” or “bizarre” theater. Reaching for a sheet of letterhead from the hotel where I was staying, I sketched out a loose structured improvisation, and presented it to Keiko Hatanaka and Robert Reigle, with whom I was rehearsing for an upcoming concert as the newly formed KYA Trio. The original version of RoKa was debuted by KYA at Tokyo Hall in 2002. This re-worked version with soNu includes just the right amount of live processing to make manifest a frequent theme of kabuki—that of a sudden, dramatic revelation or transformation.

A simple song
explodes with grandeur.
Saliva drips from my mouth.
Dirac’s Theory
The conceptual impulse for Dirac’s Theory was to compose a solo based upon my exploration of the sound producing capabilities a brand new snare drum. My first day in rehearsal with the snare, I took the drum out of its box and began to woodshed; essentially going at it with all kinds of beaters: spoons, chopsticks, barbeque skewers, maracas—anything in sight that looked interesting but that would not harm the instrument. With each of these beaters, I played all parts of the snare—its head, its rim, its body. I experimented with using one stick, then two sticks; matching different beaters, muffling the drum with one hand; applying different degrees of pressure onto different parts of the head. At night, I would reflect on what I had heard from the drum that day. Over the course of two days, as I began to know the drum's temperament, I began to conceive of my solo's starting point. In listening to what the drum was trying to tell me about itself, I noticed that it had a nice crisp, bright sound, and that soft, quiet manipulations resonated with such clarity. My recent collaborations with Earl Howard and other electronic musicians who do live processing had me fascinated with what is called transience—those ephemeral, living particles that momentarily co-exist with the predominant rhythms and tones that we hear. Could I create a piece, I wondered, that mimicked this kind of transience but with absolutely no electronic manipulation to it?
Suprachiasmatic Nuclei
Time was born of rhythm,
and periodicity is part of who we are.

—Roger G. Newton
Galileo’s Pendulum

The suprachiasmatic nuclei are the two clusters of nerve-cell bodies located behind the retinae, and function as the primary pacemakers of the many, though not all, biological rhythms performing in our bodies. Suprachiasmatic Nuclei, conceived in reaction to Steve Reich’s, Pendulum Music, addresses the interpolation of these internal pacemakers, and the flow of time within just one sound. This work was originally commissioned by Steven Schick as an October 2004 premier with the SONAR Concert Series at the University of California, San Diego.
Wendell’s History
One of my wife’s favorite poets is Wendell Berry, a man who left behind a literary career in New York City in order to forge a deeper clarity of purpose on a farm in Kentucky. I, too, have left behind careers in search of deeper clarity, forging a trail from Texas to Ohio, South Korea to California, and then back again by way of the Republic of Macedonia. Yet time and time again, through Gaelyn, I return to one Wendell Berry poem in particular, History, whose theme, ironically, is about being rooted; the seasons of one’s flesh combining with the seasons of the soil. I live in New York City now, where I continue to practice “my art of being here.”