ST. LOUIS – The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts will host back-to-back performances of chamber music by Erik Satie, John Cage, Charles Amirkhanian and Frederic Rzewski on Thursday, April 6th and Friday, April 7th. Both concerts will begin at 7:30pm (doors open at 7:00pm). The concert is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.

Continuing its exploration of minimalist currents in music, this final program in the Minimalism and Beyond series presents music ranging from 19th-century France to contemporary North America.

Two piano pieces by Erik Satie demonstrate two models of simplicity: a melody over just two harmonies, and a chromatic progression to be repeated 840 times.

The second composer in the program, John Cage, claimed that Satie was “indispensable” to contemporary music. The musicologist Richard Taruskin recently argued that Cage’s art was founded in part on a willful misinterpretation of Satie. This program allows us to judge for ourselves by including Cage’s Amores (1943) and The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1961). Beyond Satie’s distillation of melody and harmony, John Cage focuses on the percussive possibilities of the piano, first as a prepared instrument then as a sounding box with voice.

The voice is also featured in works by Charles Amirkhanian and Frederic Rzewski. Amirkhanian is widely known for his live and taped works utilizing speech (or sound poetry) elements in rhythmic patterns resembling percussion music. The first, Dutiful Ducks, displays a laconic, affectionate humor and a taste for surreal combinations, and the second, Ka Himeni Hehena (The Raving Mad Hymn), uses consonants and vowel combinations from classical Hawaiian language.

Frederic Rzewski composed Coming Together on excerpts from a letter of Sam Melville, the civil rights activist killed in the Attica prison uprising in 1971. The text is declaimed over a fabric of melodic and harmonic change that the instruments in the ensemble interpret in different ways, their collective improvisation mirroring the social concerns of the letter.

Tickets are available through the Powell Symphony Hall box office at 314-534-1700 or through their website, www.slso.org. Tickets for each event are $20.00. Availability for each performance is limited due to venue size (100 tickets). Visit www.pulitzerarts.org for more information on the exhibition and concert series.

Chamber Music Program

David Robertson, conductor