"Each year the Philadelphia Fringe Festival presents cutting edge work in Theater, Music and Dance from around the world. This year's festival, which will take place from August 29 through September 13, will be no exception. One of these performances will be a unique celebration of the 70th birthday of conceptual artist Yoko Ono, whose pioneering work has had an enormous influence on contemporary artists.

Pianist Robert W. Getz was an Ono fan early on: "I thought that her 'Plastic Ono Band' album was one of the most exciting things I'd ever heard in my life," he says. "I still think that, and it's been out for over 30 years." Getz, who met the artist in 1971 during her "This Is Not Here" show at the Everson Museum in 1971, found himself tremendously excited by the possibilities created by Ono's work. His "Recital (for Yoko Ono)", a piece for improvised piano, will reflect some of that inspiration.

"I wanted to create something about boundaries, lines we're afraid to cross, that keep us apart, but don't really exist. A lot of Yoko's work seems to me to be about commonality, about saying we're not as separate as we think we are. Hers is really a utopian vision of a world without boundaries, whether those boundaries are our bodies, our minds, or our spirits."

"I wanted to talk about those kinds of artificial separations, especially where artists and audiences are concerned. It's a piece that, at first glance, seems to be taking place on the bandstand for an hour a night over five nights. But on reflection, maybe the real piece is happening during the 23 hours between the sections. Ideally, it should make you think a little about the relationship between life and art, and how artists aren't creating an escape for their audiences but, rather, engaging life in a much more concrete way than we usually of."

About "Recital (for Yoko Ono)"

The basic idea behind "Recital (for Yoko Ono)" is to present a weeklong piece of improvisation for piano. Over the course of 5 nights, the performer presents a one-hour segment of the work. Each night, he or she must build upon and extend the work of the previous evening, while simultaneously creating a work that should be complete in itself for that night.

The challenge for the performer (and the audience, depending on how many evenings they decide to attend) is to think of the work as a totality, although each segment will be seperated by 24 hours. Traditionally, any performance in any discipline has a boundary drawn for that evening: "Recital" does, too, but in addition, it questions the accepted idea of what the boundary of a performance is. Is it over when the performer leaves the bandstand? What might happen during the next 24 hours that might alter, change, and inform the direction of the work? In that sense, because actions will occur between the segments, the performance "continues" insofar as the performer is having experiences that will be brought to the next evening's segment.

All the while, the performer will be considering the previous night's performance and how to appropriately continue when the time comes. This also means they must carefully calculate some effects: as the piece is actually a 5-hour work presented in pieces, the pay-off for a motif or section performed on Monday may not reach its full potential until Wednesday. "Recital (for Yoko Ono)" asks what the boundaries of performance are, what the boundaries between life and performance are, and how do we observe an aesthetic whole when that whole is spread over 5 nights?

About Robert W. Getz

Robert W. Getz was born on October 17, 1955 in Scranton, PA. Although he has experimented with different ways of composing and performing music for many years, it was only recently that he began to document his work on disc. He has released three CD's to date, "Wooden Box: Piano Improvisations Vol. 1", "Live At The Knitting Factory:Knitting/Unknit", and "Sassafras Hello", a collection of improvised duets with saxophonist Elliott Levin. In a review of this most recent disc, Cadence Magazine compared him with pianists Joel Futterman and Borah Bergman. Last year he debuted his "American Ecstasy (For Unprepared Piano)" at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

When and where

The panels of this year's Festival are still in the process of judging the submissions. If "Recital" is not an official choice of the Festival, it will be performed as part of the "Unfiltered Fringe", in which artists present their work independently. Dates and times will follow as soon as they have been determined."

Contact

For more info on Robert W Getz's recordings, visit Idyll Hands Recordings