Review | Composer, performer,...

Generated on 2024-07-26 10:25:19

Result #1

Composer, performer, educator MARK LACKEY works in a range of genres to reach listeners who might not otherwise encounter newly-composed art music. Mark Lackey has garnered premieres from gifted artists including Orquestra Sinfonica do Teatro Nacional Claudio Santoro (Brasilia), the Idaho Falls Symphony, Rhymes With Opera, and the Eastman Wind Orchestra. His music was recognized with a 2024 Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and is available on the Centaur, Potenza, Composers Concordance, and MSR Classics labels. Mark Lackey's current project, TOGETHER, blends musical styles as a metaphor and an opportunity for bringing people together with a message of renewal and hope. CREATIVENICE, 2019, took place in four rooms of the Black Swan, a former boiler room at the National Gallery of Ireland, the world-famous memorial to the late late Irish poet and painter Robert MacNeill. Among the thirty-six works in this new body of work, artists from the artist-run organization HAVE POSE—currently in its second year—dug together over an hour of their own song and danced to the original compositions. They sang their voices to the songs, which then were passed around the gallery. A few of the songs were performed on a turntable and played by producers in live performance, such as photographer and songwriter Gerry Malone and composer Jason Bohannon, as well as by a choir of young Irish artists who have chosen to remain anonymous and largely unknown outside their home countries. A crowd of audience members moved around the room to listen to the recordings, and one of the songs was Aír/Aarda (All My Children), written by the late John Keegan.Deemed by the American authorities to be obscene by definition, Aír/Aarda had been the subject of a long-running sex- and drug-abuse scandal in 1970. It was written by then-titled songswriter Dave Peadbeg and spoken by not only the four actors in the 1973 film but also the songwriting duo Billy and the Kids. As part of the publicity campaign for this film, the song was performed live by twenty-one young Irish performers in 1977. The way that the songs lyrics were read and interpreted by the actors was visually stunning, but also a metaphor for the manner in which the artist-run organization ATALLY worked. Founded in 1971, the group included such notable figures as Philip Glass, Joan Graham, and David Gluckman. They promoted the exploitation of the criminal arts and the carnival of drugs and alcohol with an artful sense of humor and a fervent commitment to social justice.

Result #2

Composer, performer, educator MARK LACKEY works in a range of genres to reach listeners who might not otherwise encounter newly-composed art music. Mark Lackey has garnered premieres from gifted artists including Orquestra Sinfonica do Teatro Nacional Claudio Santoro (Brasilia), the Idaho Falls Symphony, Rhymes With Opera, and the Eastman Wind Orchestra. His music was recognized with a 2024 Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and is available on the Centaur, Potenza, Composers Concordance, and MSR Classics labels. Mark Lackey's current project, TOGETHER, blends musical styles as a metaphor and an opportunity for bringing people together with a message of renewal and hope. Born in San Francisco and raised in Las Vegas, Lackey considers his adopted hometown a cultural and spiritual home. He lives in a craft-world community and spends much of his time in music, film, and design. The first of a series of twenty-five new works on display here, TOGETHER is an experience of a multiplicity of approaches and intensifying qualities. In the first three pieces, Lackeys work is composed of several different key elements: looped footage, clips from video and video projections, and clips of the sound track. The accompanying sound is limited to the acoustical qualities of the instrumentals—the tuning fork and violin—and a loudspeaker to help convey the results. In the fourth piece, several media artifacts are juxtaposed, including wood and steel construction forms, stereo audio, and sets from sound and video clips. To get to the show, one had to journey through the gallery with a bicycle, swinging, peering, or turning in the background. Finally, after entering the space, one found a memory of a childhood spent in the 1950s in the backyard of an old friend and enjoyed by Lackey, his parents, and aunts. Once the viewer got the hang of the piece, it became clear that the performance did not replace the experiences the video recording created.Lackeys work is affected by his upbringing in a highly religious, albeit apolitical, community. The message he seeks to convey with his work and his performance is the possibility of relationships between artists and people of all generations. He offers a fusion of religion and music, as well as between cultural and racial traditions. With his videos and videos, Lackey sees the possibilities for a new, more inclusive time, one in which people can work together to form a new community.TOGETHER is a production of the programs available for listening to the music created for it.

Result #3

Composer, performer, educator MARK LACKEY works in a range of genres to reach listeners who might not otherwise encounter newly-composed art music. Mark Lackey has garnered premieres from gifted artists including Orquestra Sinfonica do Teatro Nacional Claudio Santoro (Brasilia), the Idaho Falls Symphony, Rhymes With Opera, and the Eastman Wind Orchestra. His music was recognized with a 2024 Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and is available on the Centaur, Potenza, Composers Concordance, and MSR Classics labels. Mark Lackey's current project, TOGETHER, blends musical styles as a metaphor and an opportunity for bringing people together with a message of renewal and hope. Last year, he opened the title of the show, an introduction to the artist-run, audio-based production center at the University of Texas at Austin, to draw in visitors who may not have otherwise experienced the exhibition.TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2016, marked the second time in the exhibition that visitors were invited to leave the museum and enter the nearby Acoustica museum. After entering the Acoustica exhibitions three buildings—Acoustica, Studio, and Art Gallery—at different times each day for seven days, visitors were treated to the sound track for the shows main event, which was a series of four electronically synthesized recordings. Through a series of backward-looking links, visitors acquired new information about the arrangement and composition of these recordings, the digital and physical rhythms and subtle harmonic diversity of their synthesized sounds.The first work was an instrumental fusion of electronic and acoustic sounds recorded in the Acoustica Museum offices, which each day they were played simultaneously and integrated with their adjacent visual spaces. The music, composed of sounds produced by the sound chip used to synthesize the analog and digital sounds, was played on a small FM radio inside the museum, positioned on the floor. This work was accompanied by an installation titled Sound Archive, 2016, consisting of four vertical speakers arranged in a grid, one set to a different recording of the same sound. The first of several rows of sound generators, the sound archive served as a laboratory for further experiments and experimentation with the acoustics of music and sound as an acoustic and visual system.Two other audio works were arranged in the Acoustica Museum annex. Plença à deux (Disco with wax) was a dance game consisting of four minutes of waxed-up disco music played against a large white wall in the museum courtyard, and it transformed the gallery into a multichannel video installation incorporating the sound of disco music.

Result #4

Composer, performer, educator MARK LACKEY works in a range of genres to reach listeners who might not otherwise encounter newly-composed art music. Mark Lackey has garnered premieres from gifted artists including Orquestra Sinfonica do Teatro Nacional Claudio Santoro (Brasilia), the Idaho Falls Symphony, Rhymes With Opera, and the Eastman Wind Orchestra. His music was recognized with a 2024 Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and is available on the Centaur, Potenza, Composers Concordance, and MSR Classics labels. Mark Lackey's current project, TOGETHER, blends musical styles as a metaphor and an opportunity for bringing people together with a message of renewal and hope. The mission of the CD, which was first shown in September in a San Francisco music club, has evolved into an oral history, recorded and illustrated, that includes influences from a variety of disciplines: from jazz to folk music and African-American music. Instead of subjecting the work to the usual art-world constraints and practices, Lackey uses language as an expression of his vision, of his ideals. He freely mixes, dissolves, and synthesizes his disparate influences into a single, universal composition. The vinyl edition was produced by the same artists in a special mixing unit, so that the first two tracks were of equal length. THE WORK OF ART, with its associations with art, politics, and culture, is inseparable from each other, but this is perhaps the clearest relationship between Lackeys work and its form. The project was initially conceived as a conceptual record that would reveal, through a sonic analysis, his vision of the world. Its an effort that is more than conceptual. Lackey takes his music and his project as seriously as any artist, and as such, his compositions have a visual form and a written text, a graphic logic, that puts both together. This is the conclusion of the artists cultural engagement with his musical environment. If he were to create a collection of musical material, it would never fit together properly. He uses music to describe the world, but this is not an empty form of communication. Lackeys music is not only the products of his creative process, but it is not a descriptive approach to the world. Lackeys musical practices and concepts are not merely conceptual or analytical, but are also creative. His music is not a traditional recording of a sound, but is an experience in which all of the instruments are played simultaneously and in harmony. Lackeys music is made up of forms that reflect his artistic strategy, but he does not create an auditory equivalent for it. Instead, he organizes a world that is simultaneously visual and aural.

Result #5

Composer, performer, educator MARK LACKEY works in a range of genres to reach listeners who might not otherwise encounter newly-composed art music. Mark Lackey has garnered premieres from gifted artists including Orquestra Sinfonica do Teatro Nacional Claudio Santoro (Brasilia), the Idaho Falls Symphony, Rhymes With Opera, and the Eastman Wind Orchestra. His music was recognized with a 2024 Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and is available on the Centaur, Potenza, Composers Concordance, and MSR Classics labels. Mark Lackey's current project, TOGETHER, blends musical styles as a metaphor and an opportunity for bringing people together with a message of renewal and hope. The show was originally scheduled to be presented on January 29, but Lackeys song was postponed to February 13. Artist teams provided samples of original recordings of popular music and contemporary jazz as well as pop and electronica. At the last minute, the artist left the entire music the project had to provide. The show was intended to serve as a collaborative reminder of the origins of American musical form. To wit: We are the things that emerge from a place that has no name. Sometime one day we will be a part of the same world as you.To his credit, Lackey is an artist-organizer who lives up to his own rhetoric, creating a kind of Sisyphean labor of creation. He does not deny the legitimacy of musical form, but he is not afraid to reveal it as a necessity for contemporary culture. As a young man, he gave up music for the theater; he thought it a waste of time to become a painter. Lackey is now a painter of form—a beautiful, handcrafted graphite drawing on scrap board. Most of the drawings, however, are unfortunately incomplete. One sketch shows the outlines of a complex organism, whose colors and solid forms are so random they almost look like random phenomena. Other drawings show a single object, or a combination of several objects, stacked up to create a form that is more complex than it appears. Only one of these works shows the head of a human being, one of the most important elements of the universe. The other drawings show him in human form, and he is represented as a group of figures, one male, the other female. On the back side of each of the drawing, Lackey has scribbled the number: 17. The drawings are divided into a text fragment and a diptych. In the diptych, each sketch is separated by a blank page. The text fragment is the work that a storyteller creates.