About this Event
The 7th show of our Roar Shack Live! season: the world premiere of Bucket List.
Bucket List is a band led by Mark Applebaum to make new, often strange, and trans-idiomatic work. This has led to a repertoire of pieces that lean on the traditions of new complexity, experimental electronic music, ensemble game pieces, minimalism, funk, and jazz, with theatric and video elements.
BUCKET LIST'S TAQs
1. What is a TAQ?
It is a theoretically asked question. This is the first time we’re playing a public event, so there is no prior record of “frequently” asked questions.
2. What is this concert occasion?
This is the public premiere of the band Bucket List.
3. Who are Bucket List?
Mark Applebaum, keyboards, guitar, percussion doodads, weird vocals
Travis Andrews, guitar, bass, percussion doodads
Andy Meyerson, drums, vibraphone, percussion doodads
4. Who instigated this project?Travis & Andy—a.k.a. The Living Earth Show—are a celebrated San Francisco contemporary music duo. Since 2010 they have been playing some of the most interesting new music by some of the most curious living composers.
5. How is this different from other collaborations?
The traditional model in contemporary music is for an ensemble to commission a composer to produce an artifact—a piece of music that adds to our collective musical canon. When completed, a score is sent to the players. Such an artifact might be considered a representation of the "work of art" as noun. In more robust models (and typical of The Living Earth Show), the composer collaborates with the ensemble, working on prototypes at various stages of the creation. This community-orientation pushes toward a "work of art" as verb—the “working” of art.
Recently, The Living Earth Show was inspired to further their pursuit of collective process over product. They decided to invite a composer to form a trio with them; to co-establish a vision for a new band; to develop a mutual musical language through hours of engagement; and to work toward an emergent repertoire that extends beyond a single piece or performance. Mark was selected as their first participant / victim.
6. What kind of music will I hear?
Probably jazz, funk, meditative soundscapes, minimalist phasing, complex and alienating atonal new music, improvisational game pieces, and the like.
7. Will there be some absurd theatrical and/or idiosyncratic video elements?
You can bet on it.
8. Will ludic whimsy and rigorous discipline be on display?
Inshallah.
9. What time should I arrive?
The concert beings promptly at 7:30. But doors open at 6:45, and it is fun to meet others and mingle before the show starts.
10. What time will it end?
We plan to play a 70-minute set. So hopefully we wrap around 8:45.
11. What the hell is a Roar Shack?
It is a dive bar in San Francisco. It has an amazing vibe, three video projection screens, and a fantastic sound system.
12. Where is it? Are there tricks?
The Roar Shack is located at 34 7th Street in San Francisco. Yes, there is a trick: you enter through a secret side door on Odd Fellows Way. It is a secret alley. And it is odd.
Here is a bonus trick: Odd Fellows is called Stevenson Street on the other side of 7th.
13. If I drive, where do I park?
It is best to take public transpiration and ride share. The venue is several steps from the southeastern exit of the Civic Center BART/MUNI station. But there is parking a few blocks away at the Metreon.
14. How much do tickets cost?
Pay what you can for tickets. The minimum is $1. But thank you in advance for any double-digit contributions. (And please consider a tax-deductible donation to the Living Earth Show HERE.)
15. When should I buy my ticket?
Right away! Thanks for that.
Composer Mark Applebaum is the Leland & Edith Smith Professor of Composition at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in composition from the University of California at San Diego where he studied principally with Brian Ferneyhough. His solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and electroacoustic work has been performed throughout North and South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia with notable performances at the Darmstadt Sessions.
Many of his pieces are characterized by challenges to the conventional boundaries of musical ontology: works for three conductors and no players, a concerto for florist and orchestra, pieces for instruments made of junk, notational specifications that appear on the faces of custom wristwatches, amplified Dadaist rituals, silent “potential” music that stimulates listeners to infer sound, and a 72-foot long graphic score displayed in a museum and accompanied by no instructions for its interpretation.
Known for his elaborate and beautiful handwritten scores, in 2022 he was awarded “best-image driven book” and “best manufacturing” by the Publishers Professional Network’s 50 th Annual Book Show for his lavish two-volume, retrospective artbook Prescribe/Describe. Applebaum’s TED Talk—about boredom—has been seen by more than five million viewers.
Applebaum has also engaged in many intermedia collaborations, including neural artists, film-makers, florists, animators, architects, choreographers, and laptop DJs. Applebaum is an accomplished jazz pianist who has performed from Sumatra to Ouagadougou and who concertizes internationally with his father, Bob Applebaum, in the Applebaum Jazz Piano Duo.
Applebaum is also an acclaimed instrument builder who has toured widely with his many electroacoustic sound-sculptures. His music appears on the Innova, Tzadik, Capstone, Blue Leaf, SEAMUS, New Focus, ChampD’Action, and Evergreen labels. He has served on the board of Other Minds and is a trustee of Carleton College.
In 2012 Applebaum convened the symposium Pedagogical Praxis and Curricular Infrastructure in Graduate Music Composition to analyze the state of the field and consider reform. He has held professorial positions at Carleton College and Mississippi State University, and taught courses in Antwerp, Santiago, Singapore, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Finland, and Oxford. In 2000 he joined the faculty at Stanford where he directs [sic]—the Stanford Improvisation Collective; received the 2003 Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching; was named a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education; and holds the aforementioned distinguished chair—the Edith & Leland Smith Professor of Composition.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
34 7th St, 34 7th Street, San Francisco, United States
USD 0.00
