Bill & Virginia: A Celebration of the Work of William O. Smith & Virginia Paquette Smith
$5-$20 donation at the door
- Jesse Canterbury, clarinet
- Mary Kantor, clarinet
- Beverly Setzer, clarinet
- Rachel Yoder, clarinet
- Jeffrey Cohan, flute
- Stuart Dempster, temple bells
- Renko Dempster, temple bells
- James Falzone, clarinet
- Greg Campbell, percussion
- Brian Cobb, double bass
William O. Smith / Virginia Paquette Smith — Slow Motion
William O. Smith — Jazz Set
William O. Smith — Epitaphs for Double Clarinet
Rachel Yoder — Aspects/Respects
James Falzone — Selected works (improvisation)
The work and collaborations of clarinetist/composer William O. Smith and artist Virginia Paquette Smith will be celebrated with an exhibition of paintings and a wide-ranging concert of experimental music and jazz, including a structured improvisation for clarinet ensemble composed by Virginia after Smith’s passing, with performers including James Falzone, Stuart Dempster, and many others.
William O. Smith (1926–2020) and Virginia Paquette Smith, who passed away in 2022, first met in 1973 and were married for 42 years, living in Seattle, supporting each other’s artistic endeavors, and collaborating through art and music until their last day together. “Bill & Virginia” honors their life and work through recorded video performances, live experimental clarinet pieces written by and inspired by William O. Smith (as he was known in classical circles), a set of jazz tunes written by Bill Smith (his name in jazz and to his friends), and an exhibition of paintings by Virginia.
About the paintings: Curated by Carol Whittaker, a former student of Virginia's, this one-night only exhibition of Virginia's paintings will include works from throughout her prolific career, spanning periods of realism, abstraction, and experiments with different materials. Of particular note is the family-favorite version of her Birds of Paradise series. The paintings exhibited here are drawn from family and personal collections, with several having been recently shown at the Mercer Island Community Center.
About the music: Bill and Virginia's earliest formal collaboration was Slow Motion for electric clarinet with computer graphics (1987), which will be shown in a recorded performance by Christopher Mothersole. In 1993 Bill and Virginia collaborated on 86910 for clarinet and digital delay at the Cliff Michel Gallery in Seattle. This piece was a transparent spiral construct inspired by Da Vinci's Codex Sketches of the shape of moving water. Bill's notation is painted on the spiral, and he walks through this transparent vortex as he plays the piece forwards and then backwards upon itself. Video of Bill's 1993 performance will be shown.
A team of clarinetists (Jesse Canterbury, Mary Kantor, Beverly Setzer, and Rachel Yoder) will play movements of Smith's landmark work Variants, the pioneering 1963 work of extended clarinet techniques. Rachel Yoder and Jeffrey Cohan will play Smith's Jazz Set for Flute and Clarinet (1974), the first of several Jazz Set pieces, all combining rhythms and style of jazz with pitch content driven by set theory. Canterbury will play Smith's Epitaphs (1993) for double clarinet – a work for two clarinets played simultaneously, with text from the ancient Arcadian poet Anyte of Tegea.
Local musicians pay their respects to Smith with original works. Stuart and Renko Dempster perform a tribute piece with temple bells; Rachel Yoder plays her Aspects/Respects for clarinet with audio of Bill's voice, and James Falzone does a solo improvisation dedicated to Bill.
After a jazz set by frequent collaborators of Bill's — clarinetist James Falzone, percussionist Greg Campbell, and bassist Brian Cobb — the night concludes with a structured improvisation for clarinet ensemble composed by Virginia after Bill's passing in 2020.
About Wayward Music Series
Each month, Nonsequitur and a community of like-minded organizations and artists present 10 concerts of adventurous and experimental music in the gorgeous Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center: contemporary/post-classical composition, free improvisation and the outer limits of jazz, electronic/electroacoustic music, new instruments, phonography, sound art, and other innovative musics.
https://www.waywardmusic.org/About Mary Kantor, clarinet
About Beverly Setzer, clarinet
Beverly Setzer holds degrees in clarinet performance from the University of Washington where she studied with William McColl and William O. Smith. She is a member of Symphony Tacoma, Roadside Attraction, Cascade Symphony, the Seattle Bass Clarinet Project, and was Principal Clarinet of La Filarmónica del Bajío in Guanajuato, Mexico. She enjoys playing a wide variety of music ranging from classical to polkas to jazz.
About Rachel Yoder, clarinet
About Jeffrey Cohan, flute
Flutist Jeffrey Cohan, who the Boston Globe calls "The Flute Master," has performed in 25 countries throughout Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and for the USIA Arts America Program in the South Pacific, South America, Turkey, and Portugal. First Prize winner of the Olga Koussevitzky Young Artist Competition in New York and recipient of grants from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music and the French Government, he has received international acclaim both as a modern flutist and as one of the foremost specialists on transverse flutes from the renaissance through the early 19th Century. The only musician to have been awarded both the highest prize in the Concours Musica Antiqua in Bruges, Belgium and in the Erwin Bodky Competition in Boston, two of the most prestigious prizes for performers of early music on period instruments, he has premiered new music by many American and European composers. Jeffrey Cohan directs the Cascade Early Music Festival, the Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival, and the Black Hawk Chamber Music Festival. The New York Times has heralded his ability to "play several superstar flutists one might name under the table."
https://www.jeffreycohan.com/About Stuart Dempster, temple bells
About James Falzone, clarinet
Clarinetist, penny whistle player, composer, and improviser James Falzone is an acclaimed member of the international jazz and creative music scenes, a veteran contemporary music lecturer and clinician, and an award-winning composer who has been commissioned by chamber ensembles, dance companies, choirs, and symphony orchestras around the globe. He leads his own ensembles Allos Musica, Elaía Ensemble, Renga Ensemble, and the duo Wayfaring with Chicago bassist/vocalist Katie Ernst, and has released a series of critically acclaimed recordings on Allos Documents, the label he founded in 2000. James performs throughout North America and Europe, appears regularly on Downbeat magazine's Critics' and Readers’ Polls, and was nominated as the Clarinetist of the Year by the Jazz Journalist Association. He has been profiled in the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, New Music Box, and Point of Departure, among many other publications. Also a respected educator and scholar, James is the Dean of Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington. He is a Backun clarinet artist and plays penny whistles made by Chris Abell.
http://allosmusica.org/about-james/