Michael Ranta is a legendary but now almost totally unknown percussionist, composer, and improviser who left the U.S. in the late 1960s and has lived abroad ever since. He worked closely with some of the most important composers of the 20th century including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Harry Partch, Jean-Claude Eloy, Mauricio Kagel, and Helmut Lachenmann. In 1977, after seven years in Taiwan learning tai-chi, he settled in Cologne and opened the shop Asian Sound, a source of hard-to-find Asian percussion instruments. Since 2010, the Belgian record label Metaphon has been unearthing hours of unheard music from Ranta’s archives of percussion and electroacoustic music. Composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies has recently undertaken a project to perform and record a large body of scored chamber music mostly from the 1970s that has never been recorded and heard by very few.

Ranta’s works are almost totally unknown with no evidence of live performances. Though it is impossible to know for sure, it seems that almost no one has heard them. This program includes two of these works, Mharuva (1977) for solo marimba and Continuum II (1998) for two bass clarinets, one percussionist, and four-channel tape performed by Hennies and clarinetists Madison Greenstone and Katie Porter. Collectively, the three musicians bring years of experience as performers of experimental music to breathe life into an almost totally unknown major chamber composition for this rare instrumentation.

The Greenstone/Hennies/Porter trio (formed specifically to perform Continuum II by Ranta) will also premiere a brand new work by Hennies.

Madison Greenstone clarinets
Katie Porter clarinets
Sarah Hennies percussion

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing. Watch below or on YouTube.

Madison Greenstone is a New York based clarinetist whose “beautiful and haunting” playing “creeps noisily away from the void” (Foxy Digitalis). They perform throughout a wide range of experimental music contexts as a soloist, improvisor, and chamber musician. Madison is the clarinetist of TAK Ensemble, “one of the most prominent ensembles in the United States practicing truly experimental music” (I Care If You Listen). Madison’s solo performance practice, exstatic resonances, explores the extremes of innate instrumental expressivities by treating the instrument as a site of indeterminacy, chaos, and generative instability. Their recent solo album, Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness (Relative Pitch Records), was praised for its ‘deft and skillful authorship’ and as an ‘incredible exercise that pushes the possibilities of this instrument into a new realm’. (Bandcamp Best of Experimental Music, and Foxy Digitalis). As a soloist, Madison has been presented by the Vigeland Mausoleum (Oslo), ISSUE Project Room (NYC), Fire Over Heaven (NYC), Night of Surprise (DE), with 2023 solo performances at FourOneOne (NYC), Non-Event (Boston), KM28 (Berlin), and Körperklang-Klangkörper (Vienna). Other notable performances have been as a soloist in Brian Ferneyhough’s La Chute d’Icare conducted by Steven Schick, as presented by the New York Philharmonic’s Kravis Nightcap Series with TAK Ensemble, and as part of the Merce Cunningham Centennial in Los Angeles.

Katie Porter is a clarinetist and curator specializing in experimental music. Passionate about creating musical communities, she co-founded the venue Listen/Space (Brooklyn) and curates the Listen/Space Commissions, responsible for 46 new works for mixed chamber group. She also co-directs the biennial VU Symposium for experimental, improvised and electronic music (Park City, Utah) and is working on a giant multi-year project of experimental works for solo clarinet at Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, a land artwork in remote northern Utah.

Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. She is primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, New Music USA, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.