Called by ArtForum "one of the great cellists" as well as "spellbinding and minimal," Charles Curtis has woven a unique career through the worlds of classical performance and musical experimentation.
A student of Harvey Shapiro and Leonard Rose at Juilliard and the recipient of the Piatigorsky Prize, upon graduation Curtis was appointed to the faculty of Princeton University. Subsequently he was Principal Cellist of the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, where he appeared as soloist with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, André Previn, Günter Wand, John Eliot Gardiner and Christoph Eschenbach.
Curtis has been guest soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, National Symphony, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Janacek Philharmonic, Orquestra de la Maggio Musicale Florence, and orchestras in Brazil and Chile, among many others.
For more than twenty years Curtis has been closely associated with the legendary avant garde composer La Monte Young.
(2002-2003)
As soloist and as director of Young's Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble, Curtis has participated in more performances and premieres of Young's music than any other musician. He is one of the few instrumentalists to have perfected Young's highly complex just intonation tunings, and is one of only a handful of musicians to have appeared in duo formations with Young.
The La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela four-hour-long solo composition, "Just Charles and Cello in the Romantic Chord," for solo cello, pre-recorded cello drones and light projection, the only solo composition composed by Young for a performer other than himself, received performances in Berlin, Paris, Lyon, Dijon, Bologna, in the New York Dream House, and in the monastery village of Polling in Bavaria.
Curtis has studied the Kirana style of Indian classical music both with La Monte Young and in master classes with the late North Indian master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath since 1989, and has been a regular member of the Just Alap Raga Ensemble, led by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, since 2003.
La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and The Just Alap Raga Ensemble perform with Charles Curtis at The Dream House in New York's Guggenheim Museum
Already in the early 1980's Curtis was involved in the downtown New York alternative music scene, performing regularly in clubs like the Mudd Club, CBGB, Acme Underground, The Cooler, ABC No Rio, Tonic and the Knitting Factory. He collaborated over a period of years with poetry-rock pioneers King Missile, John S. Hall, You Suck, Dogbowl and Kramer, and with creative musicians such as Donald Miller of Borbetomagus, Michael J. Schumacher, Alan Licht and Dean Roberts.
Emerging from this scene in the 1990's, Curtis led the Charles Curtis Trio, presenting sound-installation-style minimal rock music with spoken texts, sine waves and slide projection in clubs and festivals throughout Europe; their double LP/CD "Ultra White Violet Light", designed for simultaneous play on multiple stereo systems, was described by British magazine The Wire as "one of the most treasured sound art objects of the last few years".
His large ensemble and electronics work for children, "Richard's Trip", was released in 2000 by Deutsche Grammophon. Curtis has created original music for films by Luke Fowler, Raha Raissnia and Jeff Perkins, whose 2008 film "The Painter Sam Francis" was screened at festivals and museums internationally.
Curtis has enjoyed a distinguished and extensive chamber music career. The cultivation of the art of chamber music as an intellectual history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is at the heart of the project Camera Lucida, an ensemble and concert series of which Curtis is Artistic Director.
In the last few years Curtis has developed a unique repertoire of major works created expressly for the distinctive qualities of his cello-playing. The great American experimental composer Alvin Lucier has composed numerous works for Curtis, including pieces for cello and sine waves, cello and piano, and cello with large orchestra.
Source:
http://music.ucsd.edu/bio.php?fn=Charles+Curtis
A student of Harvey Shapiro and Leonard Rose at Juilliard and the recipient of the Piatigorsky Prize, upon graduation Curtis was appointed to the faculty of Princeton University. Subsequently he was Principal Cellist of the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, where he appeared as soloist with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, André Previn, Günter Wand, John Eliot Gardiner and Christoph Eschenbach.
Curtis has been guest soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, National Symphony, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Janacek Philharmonic, Orquestra de la Maggio Musicale Florence, and orchestras in Brazil and Chile, among many others.
For more than twenty years Curtis has been closely associated with the legendary avant garde composer La Monte Young.
La Monte Young Marian Zazeela
Just Charles & Cello in The Romantic Chord
(2002-2003)
in a setting of Abstract #1 (2003)
from Quadrilateral Phase Angle Traversals
with Dream Light
As soloist and as director of Young's Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble, Curtis has participated in more performances and premieres of Young's music than any other musician. He is one of the few instrumentalists to have perfected Young's highly complex just intonation tunings, and is one of only a handful of musicians to have appeared in duo formations with Young.
The La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela four-hour-long solo composition, "Just Charles and Cello in the Romantic Chord," for solo cello, pre-recorded cello drones and light projection, the only solo composition composed by Young for a performer other than himself, received performances in Berlin, Paris, Lyon, Dijon, Bologna, in the New York Dream House, and in the monastery village of Polling in Bavaria.
La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela with Disciple Jung Hee Choi
In 1970, Pandit Pran Nath (1918-1996) established his first school, the Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music, in New York City. Under the direction of his disciples, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, the Kirana Center continues to provide a unique opportunity for musicians and students of both Eastern and Western music to study singing and the art of raga according to the method of Pandit Pran Nath.
Curtis has studied the Kirana style of Indian classical music both with La Monte Young and in master classes with the late North Indian master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath since 1989, and has been a regular member of the Just Alap Raga Ensemble, led by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, since 2003.
Already in the early 1980's Curtis was involved in the downtown New York alternative music scene, performing regularly in clubs like the Mudd Club, CBGB, Acme Underground, The Cooler, ABC No Rio, Tonic and the Knitting Factory. He collaborated over a period of years with poetry-rock pioneers King Missile, John S. Hall, You Suck, Dogbowl and Kramer, and with creative musicians such as Donald Miller of Borbetomagus, Michael J. Schumacher, Alan Licht and Dean Roberts.
Emerging from this scene in the 1990's, Curtis led the Charles Curtis Trio, presenting sound-installation-style minimal rock music with spoken texts, sine waves and slide projection in clubs and festivals throughout Europe; their double LP/CD "Ultra White Violet Light", designed for simultaneous play on multiple stereo systems, was described by British magazine The Wire as "one of the most treasured sound art objects of the last few years".
His large ensemble and electronics work for children, "Richard's Trip", was released in 2000 by Deutsche Grammophon. Curtis has created original music for films by Luke Fowler, Raha Raissnia and Jeff Perkins, whose 2008 film "The Painter Sam Francis" was screened at festivals and museums internationally.
In the last few years Curtis has developed a unique repertoire of major works created expressly for the distinctive qualities of his cello-playing. The great American experimental composer Alvin Lucier has composed numerous works for Curtis, including pieces for cello and sine waves, cello and piano, and cello with large orchestra.
French composer Eliane Radigue created her very first work for a purely acoustic instrument for Curtis, "Naldjorlak I,"(2005) which Curtis has performed scores of times throughout the world. Radigue’s Naldjorlak is a nearly hour-long, continuous exploration of the acoustical properties of the cello, centered around a tuning of the cello to its own intrinsic resonance. All of the strings are brought into alignment with the cello’s “wolf tone”; the entire corpus of the cello is engaged to elicit a complex, closely related spectrum of harmonics and resonances.
Naldjorlak I, II, III, Charles Curtis Carol Robinson, Bruno Martinez , composed by Elaine Radigue
More recently "Naldjorlak III" and "Occam V" part of the ongoing series "Occam River" have been developed collaboratively with Curtis.
Artist and performer Alison Knowles created a unique graphic score for Curtis which has been realized in galleries and alternative settings.
These, along with the monumental works of La Monte Young and rarely-heard pieces by Terry Jennings, Richard Maxfield and Morton Feldman, have been championed by Curtis through regular performances and recordings. In 2005 Curtis presented "Waking States," a series of seven concerts in fifteen days at various New York venues of music by Young and Zazeela, Lucier, Radigue, Jennings and Feldman.
Solo concerts in the last few years have taken him to Christchurch Spitalfields London, the Auditorium of the Louvre in Paris, the Hebbel-Theater in Berlin, the Kampnagelfabrik in Hamburg, Issue Project Room in New York, the RedCat at Disney Hall in Los Angeles, and to festivals, museums and alternative spaces in Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland and Canada.
Each summer Curtis performs and teaches in the La Monte Young - Marian Zazeela permanent installation at Kunst im Regenbogenstadl, Polling, Bavaria.
Artist and performer Alison Knowles created a unique graphic score for Curtis which has been realized in galleries and alternative settings.
These, along with the monumental works of La Monte Young and rarely-heard pieces by Terry Jennings, Richard Maxfield and Morton Feldman, have been championed by Curtis through regular performances and recordings. In 2005 Curtis presented "Waking States," a series of seven concerts in fifteen days at various New York venues of music by Young and Zazeela, Lucier, Radigue, Jennings and Feldman.
Solo concerts in the last few years have taken him to Christchurch Spitalfields London, the Auditorium of the Louvre in Paris, the Hebbel-Theater in Berlin, the Kampnagelfabrik in Hamburg, Issue Project Room in New York, the RedCat at Disney Hall in Los Angeles, and to festivals, museums and alternative spaces in Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland and Canada.
Cello and Orchestra, for cello & orchestra (1972). Robert Cohen, cello
New World Symphony Orchestra. Michael Tilson Thomas
New World Symphony Orchestra. Michael Tilson Thomas
Source:
http://music.ucsd.edu/bio.php?fn=Charles+Curtis