Dafne Vicente-Sandoval and Charles Curtis
Dafne vicente-sandoval
Charles curtis
thursday, april 23, 2025 at 8pm
Goethe-Institut Boston
170 Beacon Street, Boston
Music: 8pm (Doors: 7:30pm)
Admission: $20 general | $15 for students and Non-Event members
No one turned away for lack of funds
MCC Card to Culture holders get in free
For information about accessibility call the Goethe-Institut Boston at 617-610-9398 . Questions about tickets, contact susanna@nonevent.org.
Non-Event is pleased to present the return of bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval and cellist Charles Curtis. In this concert, Vicente-Sandoval will premiere a new version of Tashi Wada's Witness, in which a series of microtonally inflected scales and tetrachords are explored through repetition, variation and improvisation. Vicente-Sandoval's own Minos Circuit Rewired, for microphone feedback, voice and disassembled bassoon, will close the evening. Curtis will intersperse short performances, possibly including Tashi Wada, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Alvin Lucier and/or other works-in-progress.
About the Artists
Born in Laguna Beach, California in 1960, cellist Charles Curtis has followed a singular path through the worlds of concert performance and musical experimentation. A graduate of the Juilliard School and the recipient of the Piatigorsky Prize, Curtis taught at Princeton and performed internationally as a soloist and chamber musician. His long creative relationships with experimentalists La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Alvin Lucier, Tashi Wada and Éliane Radigue have brought into being a body of distinctive works modeled on his cello-playing and performing persona. His own creative work has spanned sound-based and installatory work in galleries and alternative spaces, as well as experimental rock merging sustained sine waves and spoken word. He has made original music for experimental films by artists such as Raha Raissnia, Luke Fowler and Jeff Perkins. Very recent performances have taken Curtis to Empty Gallery in Hong Kong, the Biennale Son in Valais, Switzerland, London’s Café Oto for a series of four solo concerts, the Big Ears festival in Knoxville, EMPAC in Troy, New York, the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and Blank Forms in New York. Since 2000 Curtis has taught contemporary music performance at the University of California, San Diego, where he is now Distinguished Professor of Music.
Dafne Vicente-Sandoval (b. 1979 in Paris) is a bassoonist who explores sound through contemporary music interpretation and electroacoustic performance. Her work engages the volatility of materials and the fragile interface with the human performer, inhabiting the threshold between instability and control.
A graduate of the Paris Conservatory and the Musik-Akademie Basel, her instrumental research has translated into an intuitive investigation of the bassoon’s complex acoustical properties. Her practice has led to the creation of a significant body of distinctive solo pieces in close collaboration with a handful of composers (Éliane Radigue, Jakob Ullmann, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Tashi Wada).
Over the last decade, Vicente-Sandoval has concurrently pursued an exploration of feedback generation and its contingent musicality. She presents solo performances in which the resonant spaces of the disassembled bassoon merge with the concert space through microphone feedback, turning acoustical volume into frequency and unintended harmony.
