Cleek Schrey is a 2022 Resident Artist
Cleek Schrey and Yasunao Tone come together in a program that spans 60 years of experimental music. The concert will include a realization of Tone’s 1961 piece, Anagram for Strings, composed in Tokyo before his immigration to New York City. After discovering the score to the piece, Schrey approached Tone with the idea of performing the piece on the daxophone, a wooden idiophone played with a bow that was developed by Hans Reichel in 1987. The ensemble will include performers on both stringed instruments and daxophones, with Tone himself performing on a daxophone built for him by Schrey.
The evening will also include new string music by Cleek Schrey and the visceral electronics of Yasunao Tone, both of which lie in the spaces between composition and improvisation, tone and noise.
Yasunao Tone: daxophone, electronics
Quartet:
Cleek Schrey, violin
Joanna Mattrey, viola
Aliya Ultan, cello
Henry Fraser, bass
The ensemble for Anagram also includes:
Gelsey Bell, daxophone
Daniel Fishkin, daxophone
Ron Shalom, daxophone
C. Spencer Yeh, violin
Described by the Irish Times as “a musician at one with his instrument and his music,” Cleek Schrey is a fiddler, composer, and filmmaker from Virginia, now based in NYC. He plays a range of instruments including the hardanger d’amore, a violin with sympathetic strings, and the daxophone, a wooden idiophone designed by Hans Reichel. Recent engagements include the Big Ears Festival (TN), the Kilkenny Arts Festival (IR), SuperSense Festival of the Ecstatic (Aus) and Issue Project Room (NYC). Frequent collaborators include electronic music pioneer David Behrman, the viol da gamba player Liam Byrne, traditional fiddle icon Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, and composer Alvin Lucier. The journal Sound Post has noted that Schrey “possesses a rare combination of traits: deep respect for traditional music and the people who make it, and an unbounded curiosity about new directions for sound.” He was a 2021 Pioneer Works Sound Artist-in-Residence on Governors Island and is currently a Resident Artist at Roulette.
Yasunao Tone (刀根 康尚, Tone Yasunao) (b. 1935) is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Tokyo, Japan and working in New York City. He graduated from Chiba University in 1957 with a major in Japanese Literature. An important figure in postwar Japanese art during the sixties, he active in many facets of the Tokyo art scene. He was a central member of Group Ongaku and was associated with a number of other Japanese art groups such as Neo-Dada Organizers, Hi-Red Center, and Team Random (the first computer artgroup organized in Japan). Tone was also a member of Fluxus and one of the founding members of its Japanese branch.Many of his works were performed at Fluxus festivals or distributed by George Maciunas’s Flux Press. Relocating to the United States in 1972, he has since gained a reputation as a musician, performer and writer working with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Senda Nengudi, Florian Hecker, and many others.Tone is also known as a pioneer of “Glitch” music due to his groundbreaking modifications of compact discs and CD players.
This work was developed as part of Cleek Schrey’s Roulette 2021 Residency, made possible with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation. This performance is presented through Roulette’s GENERATE program, providing over 30 artists each year with in-depth creative and technical support.
