Sound sculptor re-creates work
In 1981, the celebrated San Francisco sound sculptor Bill Fontana placed microphones at eight spots around the bay — two on Angel Island and one apiece at Treasure Island, Fort Point, China Beach, the Legion of Honor, the San Francisco Yacht Harbor and the Cliff House. He transmitted the live ambient sounds from those disparate sites to Fort Mason, where he broadcast them simultaneously from speakers stretching along Pier 2.
The echoing foghorns and seal barks carried from those distant locales merged with the more immediate sounds of the foghorns, gulls and lapping waves heard right there at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, where Fontana created “Landscape Sculpture With Foghorns” for the New American Music festival that year.
KQED-FM recorded a 20minute version of the installation, and with NPR, broadcast a live national radio version of the piece in 1982. Now the installation version of KQED’s recording of “Landscape Sculpture With Fog Horns” will play at the same Fort Mason site — in shifting harmony with the waterfront sounds of the moment — starting Feb. 14. That’s when Fontana and the San Francisco Art Institute, which renovated the Pier 2 building for its studio-filled second campus and moved in last fall, plan to revive the piece for a contemporary audience. Maritime sounds from 1981 will overlay the music made on any given day by the wind and birds and those horns blasting and moaning from Alcatraz, Point Bonita and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Writing in the album’s liner notes about his method of drawing together ambient sounds from many points in the landscape, Fontana explained: “The resulting structure is an imaginary landscape, created by reducing the real space between sounds in the landscape, while bringing together the real time between these sounds.”
The artist, who fell in love with foghorns when he first came to the Bay Area from Cleveland and savors them from his Russian Hill home, was in Abu Dhabi last week working on a project, but plans to be at the installation’s opening on Valentine’s Day.
He’s working with the Art Institute’s Curator of Exhibition and Public Programs Katie Hood Morgan on the Fort Mason show, which will include photographs the artist took in 1981 and more recent videos of the terrain he’s been shooting.
With the original work, Fontana “was really capturing the topography of the bay through sound,” says Morgan, standing in a drizzle on Pier 2 the other day. The fog had swallowed the Golden Gate Bridge and horns echoed across the water.
“You’ll hear a bird from 1981 and a bird from 2018,” says Morgan, who appreciates the play of time and distance in this atmospheric work.
“Some people will come seeking this out, some people will stumble upon it, and some will walk by and never know it’s here.”
For more information, go to www.sfai.edu.
Country music
Country music fans can once again buy the Country Megaticket, which provides access to five big country music concerts at Mountain View’s Shoreline Amphitheater this season.
This year’s headliners are Kenny Chesney ( June 20), Keith Urban ( July 20), Lady Antebellum and Darius Rucker (Aug. 16), Jason Aldean (Sept. 28) and Dierks Bentley (Oct. 5).
The Megatickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday, Jan. 26.
For details, go to www.megaticket.com.
Talking about jazz and art
Loren Schoenberg ,an excellent tenor saxophonist, music writer and founding director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, will be at Stanford’s Anderson Collection on Thursday, Jan. 25, riffing verbally on the connections between modern art and jazz.
He explores abstract painter Joseph Albers’ signature series “Homage to the Square” in a talk titled “Joseph Albers, Sonny Rollins, Stephen Foster and the Search for the American Sound.” Schoenberg, however, won’t be playing his horn.
If you’d rather consider the sculpture of Manuel Neri, Yale University Art Gallery Director Jock Reynolds and San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art Director Cathy Kimball will discuss the work of the venerable Bay Area artist at the Anderson Collection on Saturday, Jan. 27, in conjunction with the “Manuel Neri: Assertion of the Figure” exhibition on view.
For more information, go to https://anderson.stanford.edu.
Homage to Hughes
San Francisco State University’s esteemed Poetry Center, which presented the great Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes at the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1958, will celebrate his 116th birthday with a performance at the university on Thursday, Feb. 1, by jazz saxophonist and Hughesinfluenced poet Lewis Jordan’s trio, with original music and poetry by him and Hughes.
For more information, go to https://lca.sfsu.edu/events.