Rochester Folk Art Guild

Music

More and more music lovers of all ages have been coming to enjoy the performances of Ensemble Resonance from the Finger Lakes Region and beyond. They are attracted by the experience of live music making, world-class performers and a first-hand glimpse into the workings of a small chamber ensemble: making arrangements, trying different combinations of instruments, and showing how musical decisions and choices are made. The hands-on, participatory moments of our concerts have been particularly popular, very alive and a real shared adventure for audiences and performers.

Our 30 years of collaborations have included everything from Bach, Mozart and Haydn to Bartok, Doppler and Piazzolla. In recent concerts we have featured improvisations inspired by folk traditions of our own and other cultures.

The central focus of Ensemble Resonance continues to be the music of Gurdjieff / De Hartmann arranged for instruments. We have produced two recordings of this music since 2002 as well as concerts with our colleagues from the Gurdjieff Foundation of Paris.

Ensemble Resonance (available in our Online Store & Gallery) (Michael Hunter, Paul Schliffer, Matthew Shubin, Christian Chanel, Marie Chanel and Herbert Lashner) first met at an international music conference near San Francisco in June 2000. Recognizing that similar aims and ways of working were being pursued in both the American and French groups, they decided to join forces, blending together and benefiting from the richness of new instrumental combinations. Since then, they have made several visits to both sides of the ocean, rehearsing, recording and concertizing.

Christian Chanel has studied with some of the greatest guitarists of our time including Andrés Segovia, Narciso Yepes, Alberto Ponce, Alexandre Lagoya, Oscar Ghiglia, and José Tomas. Laureate of the Cziffra Foundation since 1973, he leads an active career spanning three continents. He has organized an Homage to Andrés Segovia at UNESCO in Paris, played a recital at Wigmore Hall in London and given the world premier of his published guitar transcription of the solo suites for cello by Bach. Christian is professor of guitar at the Conservatoire National de Versailles.

Marie Chanel-Vignon has studied the guitar with Alexandre Lagoya, Carel Harms, and Oscar Ghiglia. It was while working with Mr. Lagoya that she met Christian Chanel with whom a guitar duo was formed that has performed concerts for more than ten years (Salle Gaveau, Salle Cortot in Paris, Palais des Rohan in Strasbourg, Institut Français in London, etc.) Her participation in the International Movement of Music Education founded by Edgar Willems has been a major factor in her search for a living approach to teaching both music in general and the guitar. Marie is professor of guitar at the Conservatoire National de Versailles.

Herbert Lashner has explored music and the oboe in depth with Marc Lifschey, former principal oboe with the Cleveland Orchestra and the inspiration for the greatest American oboists living today. His career extends from the United States to Europe and he has played principal oboe and English horn with the Israel Chamber Orchestra, the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra and l'Orchestre Philharmonique de France. Herbert's recent CD Occident-Orient was recorded with Christian Chanel.

Michael Hunter studied piano with Myron Myers and has degrees in performance and musical literature from Rhodes College and graduate study in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Michael has worked as accompanist and vocal coach in the studio of Marjorie Lawrence, a leading soprano with the Paris and Metropolitan Operas. He appears frequently in chamber music concerts with Matthew Shubin and Paul Schliffer

Matthew Shubin was principal bassoonist of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and then joined the Cleveland Orchestra as associate principal. He teaches and plays at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in New Hampshire and is often heard as soloist with the baroque chamber group Pittsford Camerata. Matthew has performed and taught all over the globe, most recently in Chengdu, China, and Quito, Ecuador.

Paul Schliffer was a pupil of Robert Willoughby at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and later worked with the renowned flute virtuoso Marcel Moyse. Paul is a founding member of the early Rochester Folk Art Guild music group Three Musicians, and can be heard on their recordings. He often collaborates with acclaimed flutist Carol Wincenc, with Matthew Shubin and the Pittsford Camerata, and Michael Hunter, concertizing widely in the United States and abroad.

"G.I. Gurdjieff composed a significant body of music between 1924 and 1926 at his Institute in Fontainebleau, near Paris, in close collaboration with Thomas de Hartmann. It is often heard today when students of the Gurdjieff tradition gather at the various foundations established all over the world to further the study and transmission of his teaching, but it is seldom heard in public, and is almost always played on piano alone.

Although they have found that the piano remains the best instrument for conveying the purity and depth of some of the pieces, the members of Ensemble Resonance, all skilled musicians and at the same time students of the teaching, have pooled their gifts and their reverence for the music to produce arrangements for various combinations of instruments as well. For someone accustomed to hearing a piece played only on piano, the effect can be startling: it is as if other dimensions hidden within the music had suddenly become audible.

While being an integral part of the Gurdjieff teaching, the music is lovely and interesting in its own right and has the power to bring a deeply moving experience to any sensitive listener. It calls to a universal human longing." -- Martha Heyneman

GEORGE IVANOVICH GURDJIEFF (1866? - 1949) was a teacher whose ideas have influenced generations of men and women worldwide since he first began teaching in Moscow in 1913. Today his work is known through many sources, notably P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous and his own writings, which include Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson and Meetings with Remarkable Men. Born to Armenian-Greek parents, he grew up in the Caucasus where cultures and religions, ancient and modern, lived side by side. Trained in religion and medicine, he embarked as a young man on a search for lost knowledge that could answer the question haunting him: What is the sense and aim of human existence? His journeys to almost inaccessible centers of learning, temples, and monasteries brought him into contact with the rituals, dance, and music of many regions of Central Asia. His collaboration in the 1920's with the Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann produced a large body of piano pieces, created at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, near Fontainebleau, France

THOMAS ALEXANDROVICH DE HARTMANN (1885 - 1956) was a composer of the Russian school who, in addition to his work with Gurdjieff, wrote piano sonatas, concerts, ballet music, symphonies, operas, and scores for films. From the age of eleven, he studied harmony and composition with Arensky, piano with Esipova-Leschetizky and, later, counterpoint with Taneiev. In 1903, he received his diploma from the St. Petersburg Conservatory, at the time under the direction of Rimsky-Korsakov. With Arnold Schonberg, Franz Marc, and Wassily Kandinsky, he was part of the pre-World War I avant-garde cultural movement in Munich, whose publications, Der Blaue Reiter, exemplified the modernist search for the spiritual in art. After meeting Gurdjieff in 1916, de Hartmann and his wife devoted the next twelve years to studying with him. This radical change in de Hartmann's life led to the musical collaboration between these two men of extraordinarily different backgrounds. Gurdjieff and de Hartmann created, in the space of about three years, more than 200 piano pieces, which constitute an integral aspect of Gurdjieff's teaching.