Resonant Bodies Podcast: Recent Episodes
Lucy Dhegrae
Resonant Bodies Festival director Lucy Dhegrae interviews vocalist from around the world to discuss singing, performing, curating, and more. Resonant Bodies Festival, an annual Festival of contemporary and avant-garde vocal music is held in New York City each September. “In equal measures intelligent, playful, ambitious and moving” (New York Times) "young but already essential festival of new vocal music" (New York Times) "today’s most talented singers... seamlessly blend classical, avant-garde and indie-folk” (Feast of Music) "It’s an enterprise that wants and deserves to go everywhere, geographically and artistically, letting singers build 45-minute sets, with unpredictable results." (New York Times) The Resonant Bodies Festival is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to hear expert contemporary music vocalists present repertoire that feeds their passion. Presented over three nights, nine dynamic and unique vocalists curate and present 45 minute sets expressing their particular blend of musical tastes; the result is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to hear virtuosic contemporary music vocalists perform cutting-edge repertoire in New York City. Future seasons will expand the festival to new cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Melbourne, Australia. The festival is directed by Lucy Dhegrae. In anticipation of the coming festival, our podcast spotlights each performer and delves in to their programming ideas and inspirations and establishes a year-round dialogue about what it means to be a solo vocal performer working in the medium of contemporary classical and avant-garde music.
Festival Director and Founder Lucy Dhegrae talks with ResBods past artist (and 2019 Intermission Performance Troll) Ariadne Greif about the 2019 Fest with a brief review of each artist’s performance and a review of the core values of the Festival and its evolution since 2013.
Composer and vocalist Erin Gee (ResBods 2019, September 5th) happened into her singular composition style somewhat by accident—she was assigned a composition exercise as a graduate student: write a work for solo voice. She wondered, as many composers do, “is there a way to go beyond the emotions that we automatically apply to voice? Can I make sounds with the voice that are truly abstract?” What she came up with has been her incredible artistic output, the Mouthpiece series, which lives in a sound world all of her own making. On this episode, Erin goes into a deep dive with ResBods director Lucy Dhegrae about how these pieces came to be, how she transitioned to being a vocal performer, and where she sees her work going next.
Acrobatic, otherworldly soprano Jane Sheldon, who first sang on the 2014 NYC Festival, talks about her upcoming set on opening night of the 2019 NYC Festival on September 3rd at Roulette where she will premiere “Poem For a Dried Up River” which she composed for herself and ensemble, using the poem of the same name by Alice Oswald. In this episode she discusses the challenges of authoring as well as performing in a new work; motherhood vs. composerhood; and Virginia Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women.”
Vocalist, improvisor, composer, and noise artist Charmaine Lee dives deep into her technique, musical journey, and equipment with ResBods Festival director Lucy Dhegrae on this podcast episode. Charmaine opens the 2019 NYC Fest on September 3rd with close collaborator Conrad Tao (piano & electronics). The conversation ends with a beautiful <10' improvisation by Charmaine using several microphones—including one that picks up her sound through her neck & larynx—ending a very special and thrilling ResBods Podcast episode!
Countertenor extraordinaire Anthony Roth Costanzo joins festival director Lucy Dhegrae for a talk about his upcoming set on the 2019 NYC Festival. Anthony performs on the opening night, September 3rd, showcasing his many operatic collaborations with living composers, and chats about his work with Kaija Saariaho, Gregory Spears, Phillip Glass, Suzanne Farrin, and others. Anthony also discusses his upcoming appearance with the Metropolitan Opera in the title role of Phillip Glass's "Akhnaten" and his multi-sensory album-turned-megaproject "Glass/Handel."
PC: Alexandr Karjaka
American soprano Christie Finn is actively involved in the world of contemporary vocal performance and new music theater. Finn has performed as a soloist with the Asko | Schönberg Ensemble (Netherlands), CrossingLines (Spain), the Hezarfen Ensemble (Istanbul, Turkey), ICTUS (Belgium), Nadar(Belgium), Oerknal! (Netherlands), oh ton-ensemble (Germany),
VocaalLAB (Netherlands), and several ensembles in New York City, including ekmeles, the S.E.M. Ensemble, Experiments in Opera, and Tactus. She is a co-founder and member of the experimental music duo NOISE-BRIDGE, collaborating with clarinetist Felix Behringer, and Co-Artistic Director of ExVoCo. She is also a permanent member of Forum Neue Vokal Musik and Ensemble Hörwerk (currently on hiatus). All of these ensembles all based in Germany.
International festivals and concert series include the Bregenzer Festspiele (Austria), the Beijing Modern Music Festival, klarafestival (Brussels, Belgium), Hamburg International Music Festival, (Germany), Festival Mixtur (Barcelona, Spain), MUSICON (Durham, U.K.), and Resonant Bodies (New York City, U.S.A.) In the Stuttgart area, festivals include Musik am 13., Südseite Nachts, Klangraum, Sommer in Stuttgart, Konzertreihe für aktuelle Musik, tonArt (Esslingen a. N.), musica nova (Reutlingen), Zeitgenuss (Karlsruhe), and Opernfestspiele Heidenheim. Finn is a two-time winner of an interpretation prize at the International Stockhausen Concerts and Courses (Kürten, Germany) and was awarded a prize in the Karlsruher Wettbewerb für die Interpretation zeitgenössischer Musik 2014.
Highlights from the 2018-2019 season include the German premiere of Beat Furrer’s a sei voci with Voces Suaves (Basel) as part of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s Barocktage 2018 (Pierre Boulez Saal, Berlin); directing and performing with her ensemble ExVoCo in the Klangraum Festival (Stuttgart); and creating the role “Spider Woman” in the world premiere of Thierry Pécou’s staged Nahasdzáán: A Navajo Oratorio (Rouen, France). This season, Finn will also teach and perform as a guest lecturer at the Interpretation and Performance Practice Days in Saarbrücken (Germany), as well as work with students at the University of Bristol. Upcoming recording releases include Christopher Trapani’s Waterlines with Ictus; current collaborations include a new multimedia work by Anthony R. Green for her duo NOISE-BRIDGE.
In addition to her career as a professional singer, Finn is also an active poet. Composer Matt Aelmore set her poetry in the five-movement Pierrot Opera, and she collaborated with Chicago-based composer Christopher Fisher-Lochhead on his piece Tandem, written for NOISE-BRIDGE. For more information about Finn’s projects in music and poetry, please visit Passion-Flowers. For her rants about music, poetry, and aesthetics, please visit her blog: The Single Artificer.
Finn also serves at the Managing Director of the Hampsong Foundation (http://hampsongfoundation.org). Past work with the Hampsong Foundation include the radio series Song: Mirror of the Worldand the Song of America radio series, both syndicated through WFMT Chicago, among other projects.
A native of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, she is a graduate of Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart. Finn is also a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music’s Contemporary Performance Program, where she studied with Lucy Shelton. Finn holds a Master of Music in Voice from Southern Methodist University (Dallas, Texas), where she studied with Joan Heller, and a Bachelor of Arts in Music with a minor in Modern Languages & Linguistics from UMBC (University of Maryland Baltimore County). She currently resides in Stuttgart, Germany, where she sits on the Music Advisory Board for Kunstraum34 (http://kunstraum34.de) and is actively involved with the Stuttgarter Kollektiv für aktuelle Musik (http://skam.io).
Winner of two Walter W. Naumburg Awards - as chamber musician and solo recitalist - soprano Lucy Shelton continues to enjoy an international career bringing her dramatic vocalism and brilliant interpretive skills to repertoire of all periods. An esteemed exponent of 20th- and 21st- Century repertory, she has worked closely with today’s composers and premiered over 100 works. Notable among these are song cycles by Elliott Carter, Oliver Knussen, Louis Karchin and James Yannatos; chamber works by Carter, Joseph Schwantner, Mario Davidovsky, Stephen Albert, Lewis Spratlan, Charles Wuorinen, Gabriella Lena Frank, Bruce Adolphe, Alexander Goehr, Poul Ruders, Anne Le Baron and Thomas Flaherty; orchestral works by Knussen, Albert, Schwantner, David Del Tredici, Gerard Grisey, Ezra Laderman, Sally Beamish, Virko Baley and Ned Rorem; and an opera by Robert Zuidam. In recent seasons, Shelton has premiered works written for her by Shulamit Ran, Dan Visconti, Frank Stemper, Kathleen Ginther, Tamar Muskal and Fang Man.
An avid chamber musician, she has been a guest artist with ensembles such as the Emerson, Brentano, Enso, Mendelssohn, Chiara and Guarnieri string quartets, the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, 21st Century Consort, Speculum Musicae, Da Capo Chamber Players, Sospeso, New York New Music Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, Da Camera of Houston, eighth blackbird, Dolce Suono Ensemble, the Ensemble Moderne, Nash Ensemble, Klangform Wien, Schoenberg-Asko, and Ensemble Intercontemporain. Shelton has participated in numerous festivals including those of Aspen, Santa Fe, Ojai, Tanglewood, Chamber Music Northwest, BBC Proms, Aldeburgh, Caen, Kuhmo, Togo and Salzburg. In the fall of 2013, she is honored to begin a three-year term as a Board Member of Chamber Music America.
Shelton has appeared with major orchestras worldwide including Amsterdam, Boston, Chicago, Cologne, Denver, Edinburgh, Helsinki, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Minnesota, Munich, New York, Paris, St. Louis, Stockholm, Sydney and Tokyo under leading conductors such as Marin Alsop, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Reinbert De Leeuw, Charles Dutoit, Alan Gilbert, Oliver Knussen, Kent Nagano, Simon Rattle, Helmuth Rilling, Mstislav Rostropovich, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin and Robert Spano.
Highlights of recent seasons include Shelton’s 2010 Grammy Nomination (with the Enso Quartet) for the Naxos release of Ginastera’s string quartets, her Zankel Hall debut with the Met Chamber Orchestra and Maestro James Levine in Carter’s A Mirror On Which To Dwell, multiple performances of a staged Pierrot Lunaire in collaboration with eighth blackbird (most recently at the Ojai Festival, and in Austin Texas) and, in celebration of the work’s centenary, concert versions with 10 different ensembles worldwide. Shelton also coordinated two intense 8-day residencies at the University of Oregon (Eugene) and Southern Illinois University (Carbondale), where she coached composers and singers in “The Art of Unaccompanied Song”.
Over the years Shelton has participated in various composers’ birthday and memorial celebrations as follows: Elliott Carter’s 100th in Turin, Italy and New York; Oliver Knussen's 50th in London; Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' 70th in Turin, Italy; James Primosch's 50th in Philadelphia; both George Perle's and Milton Babbitt's 90th in Princeton and New York, followed in a few years by their memorials. In May 2013 Shelton sang Elliott Carter’s “What Are Years” for his memorial tribute concert held at Juilliard.
Shelton’s extensive discography is on the Deutsche Grammophon, Koch International, Nonesuch, NMC, Bridge, Albany and Innova labels and includes works by Carter, Knussen, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Wuorinen, Del Tredici, Adolphe, Rands, Ginastera, Kim, Le Baron, Baley, Ung and Schwantner.
A native of California, Shelton’s primary mentor was mezzo-soprano Jan De Gaetani. Ms. Shelton taught at the Third Street Settlement School in Manhattan, Eastman School, New England Conservatory, Cleveland Institute and the Britten-Pears School. She joined the resident artist faculty of the Tanglewood Music Center in 1996 and in the fall of 2007 she was appointed to the Manhattan School of Music’s Contemporary Performance Faculty. Shelton teaches privately in her New York City studio.
In recognition of her contribution to the field of contemporary music, Shelton has received Honorary Doctorate Degrees from both Pomona College (2003) and the Boston Conservatory (2013).
Photo: Karjaka Studios
Kate Soper is a composer, performer, and writer whose work explores the integration of drama and rhetoric into musical structure, the slippery continuums of expressivity, intelligibility and sense, and the wonderfully treacherous landscape of the human voice. She has been hailed by The Boston Globe as "a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power" and by The New Yorker for her "limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and...mastery of modernist style." A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Soper has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters (The Virgil Thomson and Goddard Lieberson awards and the Charles Ives Scholarship), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Chamber Music America, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, the Music Theory Society of New York State, and ASCAP, and has been commissioned by ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the Tanglewood Music Center/BUTI, the MIVOS string quartet, and Yarn/Wire. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Civitella Raineri Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Camargo Foundation, the Macdowell Colony, Tanglewood, Royaumont, and Domaine Forget, among others.
Praised by the New York Times for her "lithe voice and riveting presence," Soper performs frequently as a new music soprano. As a singer and performer with experience in Western Classical and Indian Carnatic music, songwriting, improvisation, and experimental theatre, she has sung in U.S. and world premieres of works by composers such as Peter Ablinger, Beat Furrer, George Lewis, Matthias Spahlinger, and Katharina Rosenberger, and has appeared with groups such as the Morningside Opera Company, the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, and the Dinosaur Annex Ensemble. She performs regularly in her own works, and has been featured as a composer/vocliast on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's MusicNOW series, the New York City-based MATA and SONiC festivals, the Lucerne Forum for New Music, Gaudeamus Muziekweek New York, the Sacramento Festival of New Music, and the American Composers Orchestra's Orchestra Underground series.
Soper is a member of Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries. She is the Iva Dee Hiatt Assistant Professor of Music at Smith College.
Kate's NYTimes Profile
Caroline Shaw is undaunted by new artistic experiences, like having her first conversation with Resonant Bodies Festival director Lucy Dhegrae recorded on mic for this podcast. Caroline discusses her upcoming set on September 12 at Roulette, the power of communal singing, performance personas, and of course, Kanye West. For more information about Caroline Shaw and links to the recordings mentioned on this episode, please visit our Show Notes!
Show Notes
PC: Kait Moreno
Caroline Adelaide Shaw is a New York-based musician—vocalist, violinist, composer, and producer—who performs in solo and collaborative projects. She is the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for Partita for 8 Voices, written for the Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member. Recent commissions include new works for the Dover Quartet, the Calidore Quartet, the Aizuri Quartet, FLUX Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Anne Sofie von Otter, The Crossing, Roomful of Teeth, yMusic, ACME, ICE, A Far Cry, Philharmonia Baroque, the Baltimore Symphony, and Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect. In the 2017–18 season, Caroline’s new works will be premiered by Renée Fleming with Inon Barnatan, Dawn Upshaw with Sō Percussion and Gil Kalish, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with John Lithgow, the Britten Sinfonietta, TENET with the Metropolis Ensemble, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Netherlands Chamber Choir, and Luciana Souza with A Far Cry. Future seasons will include a new piano concerto for Jonathan Biss with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and a new work for the LA Phil. Caroline’s scoring of visual work includes the soundtrack for the feature film To Keep the Light as well as collaborations with Kanye West. She studied at Yale, Rice, and Princeton, and she has held residencies at Dumbarton Oaks, the Banff Centre, Music on Main, and the Vail Dance Festival. Caroline loves the color yellow, otters, Beethoven opus 74, Mozart opera, Kinhaven, the smell of rosemary, and the sound of a janky mandolin.
Listen to Caroline's interview on WNYC's Meet the Composer
Melbourne-based Deborah Kayser chats with both Jane Sheldon (ResBods Australia co-director) and Lucy Dhegrae (ResBods director/founder) to talk about her upcoming set for the inaugural Sydney festival at Carriageworks, co-presented by Sydney Chamber Opera. Deb presents a work with her partner in music and life, Nick Tsiavos, that is a journey of text in English, French, and Ancient Greek, a collaborative composition begun by Nick Tsiavos as the a solo bass piece “One Hundred Months, Third of East.” The three also chat about Dithyramb by Jason Eckardt, which Deb premiered, and Deb’s musical heroes (which includes the one and only Freddie Mercury!). For more information, please visit our show notes.
SHOW NOTES
Deborah Kayser performs in areas as diverse as ancient Byzantine chant, French and German Baroque song and classical contemporary music, both scored and improvised. Her work has led her to tour regularly both within Australia and internationally to Europe and Asia. She has recorded, as soloist, on numerous CDs, and her work is frequently broadcast on ABC radio.
As a member of JOUISSANCE, and the contemporary music ensembles ELISION and LIBRA, she has performed radical interpretations of Byzantine and Medieval chant, and premiered works written specifically for her voice by local and overseas composers.
For Kayser, performance highlights include works by composers Liza Lim, Richard Barrett, David Young, Volker Heyne, Michael Finnissy, Helen Gifford and Chris Dench.
Sofia Jernberg sits down with ResBods founder Lucy Dhegrae to discuss her set for the Sydney Festival on August 31, 2018 at Carriageworks in collaboration with Sydney Chamber Opera. Sofia, who performed on the 2016 NYC Festival, will present a solo vocal work, as well as a world premiere by Johan Jutterström, and a collaboration with saxophonist Jim Denley. Sofia talks about her approach to performance and improvisation and what she is looking for in a collaborator. For more information on Sofia, please visit our show notes.
SHOW NOTES
Jernberg on the 2016 NYC Festival at Roulette
Sofia Jernberg is a Swedish experimental singer, composer, improviser and performer, born in Ethiopia 1983. She grew up in Ethiopia, Vietnam and Sweden. Since 2011 she lives in Oslo, Norway.
One of her deepest interests as a singer is to explore the “instrumental” possibilities of the voice. Her singing vocabulary includes sounds and techniques that often contradict a conventional singing style. She has dug deep into non verbal vocalizing, split tone singing, pitchless singing and distorted singing.
Music theater/Contemporary Opera
She has performed several staged music theater pieces like Arnold Schönberg’s ”Pierrot Lunaire”, Salvatore Sciarrinos "Lohengrin”. Composers have written roles especially with her in mind like in Emily Hall’s ”Folie à Deux and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s ”UR:”.
Currently she is working with a new contemporary chamber opera work, premiering in 2019, together with Cia Rinne, Henrik Strindberg and Louise Beck. Sofia will both compose and perform in this opera.
Visual Art
She has performed together with visual artist Camille Norment and was part of her piece ”Rapture” (Venice Biennale 2015) and ”Lull” (Festspillene i Bergen 2016).
She is featured as a singer in an 80 minute cinematic work, ”Union of the North”, by Matthew Barney, Erna Ómarsdóttir and Valdimar Jóhannsson.
She is central, as the only singer/performer/human on screen, in an audiovisual work by visual artist Kristina Norman and composer Märt - Matis Lill exhibited in Tallin art museum in feb 2018.
Composer
As a composer she has been commissioned by Barents composer orchestra, Swedish Radio P2, Stockholm Jazz Festival, Trondheim jazz orchestra, vocal ensemble Oslo 14, Klang - Copenhagen Avantgarde Music Festival, BANFF - Center for arts and creativity, The Gothenburg Combo and various chamber ensembles.
Teacher
As a teacher in singing and composition she has been part of faculty at BANFF - Center for arts and creativity contemporary music summer curse 2017 and will continue in 2018. She has given 4 hour lectures/workshops at several Universities around Europe.
Selection of active bands
Electric Daisy (Kim Myhr, David Stackenäs, Christian Wallumrød, Jernberg)
Solo (voice solo, Jernberg)
Fire! Orchestra
The End (Kjetil Møster, Mats Gustafsson, Anders Hana, Greg Saunier, Jernberg)
Trondheim Jazz Orchester Sofia Jernberg and Olav Mjelva
Trondheim Jazz Orchestra Espen Reinertsen
Trondheim Jazz Orchestra Ole Morten Vågan
Mette Rasmussen/Sofia Jernberg duo
Lene Grenager/Sofia Jernberg duo
Alexander Hawkins/Sofia Jernberg duo
Peter Evans/Sofia Jernberg duo
PAAVO
The New Songs
Australian vocalist Sonya Holowell sits down with RBF founder Lucy Dhegrae to discuss her upcoming set for the Sydney Festival at Carriageworks (co-presented by Sydney Chamber Opera) on September 1, 2018. Sonya talks about her improvisatory practice and how so many people and ideas have influenced her work, including the indigenous practice of “dadirri,” collaborations with designer/flutist Elia Bosshard, jamming with pianist and improvisor Jonathan Holowell (who is also her dad) and the discovery of her indigenous heritage. To read more about Sonya, please visit our show notes.
SHOW NOTES
PC: Vesevold Vlaskine
Indigenous Australian Sonya Holowell is an emerging vocalist dedicated to presenting the most challenging and rarely-performed compositions for voice. Holowell has performed at many of the leading national and international classical and new music festivals as a soloist, ensemble singer and improviser. She has performed with a number of ensembles at the forefront of contemporary music including Ensemble Offspring, Australian Art Orchestra, Decibel, and the Splinter Orchestra and has collaborated with an array of artists and composers of new music, in Australia and abroad. Projects include the Holowell Duo, an improvising partnership with pianist/trumpeter Jonathan Holowell; and CACHE in POINT, which she curates/performs with designer/flutist Elia Bosshard. Last year Holowell presented her work in Europe where she was invited to participate in the soundSCAPE Composition and Performance Exchange in Maccagno, Italy; the Improvisation Xchange in Berlin; and the International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt.
Mitchell Riley sits down with Resonant Bodies Australia co-director Jane Sheldon to talk about his upcoming set on September 1, 2018, at Carriageworks in Sydney. Mitch talks about the influence that his recent studies at L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq have had on his approach to performing, and gives us the story behind the world premiere he's going be presenting at the festival. For more information about Mitch and links to the recordings heard on this episode, please visit our Show Notes.
SHOW NOTES
Mitch is an Artistic Associate with Sydney Chamber Opera and has recently undertaken studies at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. In 2016 Mitch performed in the Australian premieres of two works by the pre-eminent French composer Pascal Dusapin as part of the Sydney Festival: Passion, in a production by Pierre Audi, and O Mensch!, a staged song-cycle for baritone and piano. He gave the Australian premiere of György Kurtág’s …pas à pas – nulle part… in a world-first staging for the 2014 Sydney Festival; performed the role of Blazes/Officer 2 in The Lighthouse by Peter Maxwell Davies (2012); premiered lead roles in stage works by Australian composers Elliott Gyger (Jim in Fly Away Peter for Melbourne Festival, 2015), Michael Smetanin (Lenin/Stalin in Mayakovsky, 2014) and Jack Symonds (Parsifal in Climbing Toward Midnight, 2013; Nunc Dimittis, 2011; Aboveground Man in Notes from Underground, 2011) and in 2012 he performed at the 18th Biennale of Sydney in Through The Gates, a semi-staged song cycle which took place amid the installations of Belgian artist Honoré δ’O. Mitch has performed with The Renaissance Players and sung regularly in the chorus for Opera Australia. He has a Bachelor of Music from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
On a recent rare day home in New York, world-roving musician Jen Shyu joined Resonant Bodies Festival director Lucy Dhegrae for a chat. Jen discusses her upcoming set on September 12th at Roulette, her origins as a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and singer, and her process collecting folk songs from community elders across the world and integrating them into projects of her own. For more information about Jen Shyu and links to the recordings mentioned on this episode, please visit our Show Notes.
This episode was edited by Jeremy Hirsch.
SHOW NOTES
Jen Shyu ("Shyu" pronounced "Shoe" in English, Chinese name: 徐秋雁, Pinyin: Xúqiūyàn) is a groundbreaking, multilingual vocalist, composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, dancer, 2016 Doris Duke Artist, and was voted 2017 Downbeat Critics Poll Rising Star Female Vocalist. Born in Peoria, Illinois, to Taiwanese and East Timorese immigrant parents, Shyu is widely regarded for her virtuosic singing and riveting stage presence, carving out her own beyond-category space in the art world. She has performed with saxophonist and 2014 MacArthur Fellow Steve Coleman since 2003 and has collaborated with such musical innovators as Nicole Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Vijay Iyer, Bobby Previte, Chris Potter, Michael Formanek and David Binney. Shyu has performed her own music on prestigious world stages such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rubin Museum of Art, Ringling International Arts Festival, Asia Society, Roulette, Blue Note, Bimhuis, Salihara Theater, National Gugak Center, National Theater of Korea and at festivals worldwide.
A Stanford University graduate in opera with classical violin and ballet training, Shyu had already won many piano competitions and performed the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto (3rd mvmt.) with the Peoria Symphony Orchestra by the age of 13. She has studied traditional music and dance in Cuba, Taiwan, Brazil, China, South Korea, East Timor and Indonesia, conducting extensive research which culminated in her 2014 stage production Solo Rites: Seven Breaths, directed by renowned Indonesian filmmaker Garin Nugroho. Shyu has won commissions and support from Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards, MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, Chamber Music America’s New Jazz Works, New Music USA, Jazz Gallery, and Roulette, as well as fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, Hermitage Artist Retreat, Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Korean Ministry of Sports, Culture, and Tourism.
Shyu has produced seven albums as a leader, including the first female-led and vocalist-led album Pi Recordings has released, Synastry (Pi 2011), with co-bandleader and bassist Mark Dresser. Her critically acclaimed Sounds and Cries of the World (Pi 2015) landed on many best-of-2015 lists, including those of The New York Times, The Nation, and NPR. Her latest album Song of Silver Geese (Pi 2017) is receiving rave reviews and was also included on The New York Times’ Best Albums of 2017.
Even with the acclaim she has received for her recordings, Shyu is just as renowned for her dynamic performances. Ben Ratliff wrote in The New York Times that her concerts are "the most arresting performances I’ve seen over the past five years. It’s not just the meticulous preparation of the work and the range of its reference, but its flexibility: She seems open, instinctual, almost fearless." Her duo performance with Tyshawn Sorey was among The New York Times’ Best Live Jazz Performances of 2017. Larry Blumenfeld wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “her voice, a wonder of technical control and unrestrained emotion, tells a story dotted with well-researched facts and wild poetic allusions. She claims both as her truths.”
Currently based in New York City, Shyu premiered her latest solo work Nine Doors at National Sawdust June 29, 2017, kicking off a 50-state U.S. tour of “Songs of Our World Now / Songs Everyone Writes Now (SOWN/SEWN),” planting seeds of creativity and threading communities together through art.
Article on Jen in Pitchfork
German soprano Sarah Maria Sun is creative performer—part vocalist, part comedian, part stage director. Her set for September 13th on the 2018 New York City Festival has works by Thierry Tidrow, Rebekah Saunders, and Georges Aperghis. She discusses her upcoming album release—Harawi, by Olivier Messiaen—and the choice to go vinyl, as well as her road to loving the stage. For more information about Sarah Maria, including full tracks heard on this episode, please visit the show notes.
SHOW NOTES
Photo: Rüdiger Schestag
Sarah Maria Sun is known as one of the foremost and most extraordinary performers in the contemporary music scene. In addition to numerous songs, operas and oratorios, her repertoire currently includes more than 800 compositions from the 20th and 21st centuries, including more than 300 world premieres. She has a close working relationship with a wide variety of composers, including Helmut Lachenmann, Heinz Holliger, Georg Friedrich Haas, Salvatore Sciarrino and Bernhard Lang, among many others. North German Radio (NDR) has dedicated portrait concerts to her in 2012, 2016 and 2018.
She regularly performs as a soloist in concert halls and festivals such as the Suntory Hall Tokyo, the Muziekgebow Amsterdam, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Tonhalle Zurich, the Auditorio National Madrid, the Berlin and Cologne Philharmonic, the Biennale Paris, Venice and Munich, the Arnold Schönberg Center Vienna and the festivals in Witten, Donaueschingen and Herrenhausen.
Her tremendous adaptability is demonstrated on a regular basis on the music-theater stage. She has appeared at the opera houses in Zurich, Basel, Dresden, Frankfurt, Munich, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Mannheim, Leipzig, Strasbourg, Luxembourg, Zagreb, and the Opéra Bastille and the Opéra Comique in Paris. She shows her skill for haunting theatrical and musical interpretation time and again in the depiction of complex female figures. In particular, the monodramas Yes I Will Yes by Dieter Schnebel (Elbphilharmonie Hamburg), Kolik by Jannik Giger, Leo Hoffmann and Benjamin von Bebber (Gare du Nord Basel) and Lohengrin by Salvatore Sciarrino (Salzburg Easter Festival) are especially noteworthy. For her role as Elsa in Sciarrino’s monodrama, she was nominated by Opernwelt in 2017 as singer of the year.
Sarah Maria Sun has performed with conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle, Kent Nagano, Thomas Hengelbrock, Susanna Mälkki, Peter Rundel, Heinz Holliger and more with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, the North, Bavarian, South-West and West German Radio Orchestras, the Dresden Philharmonic, the Antwerp and Tokyo Symphony Orchestras and ensembles such as musikFabrik Köln, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Mosaik, Ensemble Intercontemporain as well as the string quartets Diotima, Arditti, Minguet and Signum.
From 2007-2014, she was the first soprano of the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, a chamber ensemble of seven singers that has been one of the world’s leading pioneers of contemporary music for 30 years.
Sarah Maria Sun’s discography includes more than 30 CDs, some of which have been awarded prizes. In 2017, four of her six new releases were nominated for the Deutschen Schallplattenkritik prize.
Sarah Maria Sun studied singing in Cologne and Stuttgart and most importantly worked with Darinka Segota and Tanja Ariane Baumgartner. She regularly gives masterclasses for vocal music from the 20th and 21st centuries; for instance, at universities and conservatoires in Oslo, Harvard, Chicago, Stockholm, Zurich, Rostock, Moscow, Dresden, Hanover or Berlin.
Experimental vocalist Rully Shabara makes use of a wide range of extended techniques. His work fuses traditional Javanese musical forms with the experimentation of the avant-garde and ideas imported from metal and noise music. His duo Senyawa is a collaboration with instrument creator Wukir Suryadi. Suryadi's assemblages of bamboo, string, and metal have accompanied Senyawa on tours throughout Asia, Australia, Europe, and the USA. They have collaborated with the likes of Yoshida Tatsuya, Otomo Yoshide, Lucas Abela, KK Null, Keiji Haino, Rabih Beiani, Trevor Dunn, Greg Fox, Sofia Jernberg, Arrington De Dionysus, Melt Banana, Jon Sass, Damo Suzuki, Jerome Cooper, Oren Ambarchi, David Shea and Kazu Ushihashi; and they have performed at the Adelaide Festival; MONA FOMA; theGlatt und Verkert Festival (Austria); the Malmo Sommarscen Festival (Sweden); CTM Festival (Berlin); and SuperDeluxe Tokyo.
For more information, please visit our show notes here:
resonantbodiesfestival.org/podcast/2018/anthony-roth-costanzo-show-notes
Photo: Matthu Placek
Countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo began performing professionally at the age of 11 and has since appeared in opera, concert, recital, film, and on Broadway. He is an exclusive recording artist with Decca Gold, and his first album will be released in September of 2018.
Costanzo has appeared with many of the world’s leading opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, English National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Los Angeles Opera, Canadian Opera Company, Glyndebourne Opera Festival, Dallas Opera, Teatro Real Madrid, Spoleto Festival USA, and Finnish National Opera. In concert he has sung with the New York Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, among others. He has performed at a wide-ranging variety of venues including Carnegie Hall, Versailles, The Kennedy Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Sawdust, Minamiza Kyoto, Joe’s Pub, The Guggenheim, The Park Avenue Armory, and Madison Square Garden.
Costanzo is a Grand Finals Winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions and won first prize in Placido Domingo’s Operalia Competition. He was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for his role in a Merchant Ivory film. He has begun working as a producer and curator in addition to a performer, creating shows for National Sawdust, Opera Philadelphia, the Philharmonia Baroque, Princeton University, WQXR, The State Theater in Salzburg, Master Voices and Kabuki-Za Tokyo. Costanzo graduated from Princeton University where he has returned to teach, and he received his masters from the Manhattan School of Music. In his youth he performed on Broadway and alongside Luciano Pavarotti.
Read Show Notes here:
www.resonantbodiesfestival.org/podcast/2018/peter-tantsits-show-notes
Peter Tantsits, named one of his generation’s most consistently satisfying contemporary vocal music specialists by Opera magazine, continues to receive acclaim for his performances of 20th-and 21st-century compositions, as well as the high-tenor opera repertoire of Rameau, Mozart, Britten, Henze, Ravel, Janacek, Berg, Strauss and Ligeti. He debuted at the Teatro alla Scala under Lorin Maazel in 2008 and last season made his debut at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera in the acclaimed new production of Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten. Notably with the New York Philharmonic he sang in the New York premiere of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre under Alan Gilbert. Highlights for this and the upcoming season include a return to the Bavarian State Opera for Die Soldaten; the title role in the German premiere of Dusapin’s Perelà at the Staatstheater Mainz; and Andres in Wozzeck at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam. He returns for an engagement with the London Symphony Orchestra and will make debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic, LA Opera, Theater Basel, Fort Worth Opera, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, his Carnegie Hall debut with the New York Oratorio Society and returns to BAM for Nathan Davis’s Hagoromo. Highlights from engagements in recent seasons include his debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in Bernstein’s Candide with the MDR Sinfonieorchester, his debut as Ramiro in Rossini’s La Cenerentola at the Konzert Theater Bern, in Carmina Burana at the Vienna Konzerthaus, and in the Swiss premiere of Elena Kats-Chernin’s The Rage of Life. He appeared as Beauty in The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit at the Händel-Festspiel of the Badischen Staatstheater Karlsruhe, and as John Worthing in Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest in a touring production by Antony McDonald in Ireland and the UK; he gave the European premiere of the same work at the Barbican Center in London under Thomas Adès, which was recently released by NMC records.
Visit our show notes here:
resonantbodiesfestival.org/podcast/2018/gelsey-bell-show-notes
Photo: Reuben Radding
Described by the New York Times as an “imaginative” “winning soprano” whose performance of her own music is “virtuosic” and “glorious noise,” Gelsey Bell is a New York City-based singer, songwriter, and scholar. Her performance creations have been presented internationally. She has released multiple albums, including most recently Ciphony with John King, and Toyland, with Joseph White. She was a 2017 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Music/Sound grant and she is currently the EtM Ridgewood Bushwick Composer-in-Residence. Her works include Bathroom Songs, Scaling, Our Defensive Measurements, This Takes Place Close By (with thingNY), Prisoner’s Song (with Erik Ruin), and the acclaimed adaptation of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives (with Varispeed). She is a core member of thingNY, Varispeed, and the Chutneys. Her work has been commissioned by the Jerome Foundation/Roulette, Ne(x)tworks, Avant Media, and the Lumen Festival. She also wrote and performed music for Anna Sperber’s Wealth from the Salt Seas, Compagnie CNDC-Angers’s performance of Merce Cunningham’s EVENT, directed by Robert Swinston, and Kimberly Bartosik’s You are my heat & glare. Other performance highlights include Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812(on Broadway) and Ghost Quartet, Robert Ashley’s Crash, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler’s River of Fundament, John King’s Micro-Operas, Yasuko Yokoshi’s BELL, Kate Soper’s Here Be Sirens, and Gregory Whitehead’s On the Shore Dimly Seen, for which she offered original vocal improvisations. She has a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU and is currently completing a book about American experimental vocal music in the 1970s. She is the Critical Acts Co-editor for TDR/The Drama Reviewand the Reviews Editor for The Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies www.gelseybell.com
Photo: Aleksandr Karjaka
Composer Paul Pinto creates, performs and produces experimental music and theatrical works, primarily focused innovative and engaging new form of opera-theater that fuse the musicality of American speech, poetry, classical music, extended vocal techniques and electronic sound art. He is a founding member of the acclaimed collectives Varispeed and thingNY, and his music has been performed across the U.S. and internationally with and by ensembles, performers and presenters around the world, including Joan La Barbara, Pauline Oliveros, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ne(x)tworks, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, loadbang, wildUP!, The Industry in LA, The Royal Scottish Academy Chamber Chorus, the Carnegie Mellon Concert Chorus, New Thread Saxophone Quartet, Iktus Percussion, BRIC Arts, The Whitney Biennial, The Kitchen, Roulette, Experiments in Opera, the Panoply Performance Laboratory and Performa.
His recent work as a composer, collaborator, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist has been praised in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, NewMusicBox and Time Out New York. His opera Thomas Paine in Violence was hailed as “expressive, impressive and engaging” by the Times, and “thrilling and rare, and must be experienced” by Schmopera. With his performance collective, Varispeed, Paul created a new site-specific arrangement of Robert Ashley's seminal opera for television, Perfect Lives, which made TONY's "Best of 2011" List and was praised by the Times as one of the "standout operas of recent decades".
For years, Paul has been an advocate of underrepresented experimentalists in the classical music concert halls, particularly Julius Eastman and Robert Ashley, and has worked to diversify modern opera and experimental music theatre both in casting, and in form and style. Paul has chosen to work equally with traditional instruments and vocalists, lo-fi electronics, unconventional sound-makers and amateur musicians, creating one-minute opera, concert length chamber music, and durational performance art. At the helm of thingNY, Paul has premiered hundreds of works from emerging and established composers including Pauline Oliveros, Vinko Globokar, Art Jarvinen, Gelsey Bell, John King, Kyle Gann, Rick Burkhardt, and Gerard Grisey. With thingNY, he co-created and performed the operas ADDDDDDDDD (2008), TIME: A Complete Explanation in Three Parts (2011), Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Public Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment (2013) and This Takes Place Close By(2015). Of their latest work, the new music journal I Care If You Listen writes “rarely, if ever, [have I] seen an encyclopedic array of experimental effects so intimately linked with their expressive potential."
As a vocalist, Paul has performed in the U.S. and Asia in untraditional chamber music works and experimental and improvisatory creations, including the 5-octave lead role in Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King, in John Sanborn and Dorian Wallace's video opera, Temptation of St. Anthony, and originating the Broadway role of Balaga in Dave Malloy and Rachel Chavkin's hit musical, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812.
Scenes from his ballet, Miseke are available on DVD and CD through the educational UK label, Learning and Teaching Scotland. In addition to thingNY's comic book opera release ADDDDDDDDD and their latest album minis/Trajectories, Paul has self-released four albums: The Gentlemen (2009), a suite for vocals and electronics, Every Note on the Piano (2010), NUDES: live at the Mary Benson Gallery (2010), and For Stefanos Tsigrimanis (2011) an elegy for turntables, voice, guitar and electronics. His scores have been published by Deep Listening Publications.
Paul is a recipient of several awards and grants from the New York Department of Cultural Affairs, New Music USA, Chamber Music America, The Puffin Foundation, and a three-year residency at the HERE Arts Center, where he developed Thomas Paine in Violence. He was born and raised in Queens, a child of immigrants, studied at Carnegie Mellon with Nancy Galbraith, Leonardo Balada and with Robert Page, and then at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama with John Maxwell Geddes, before moving back to New York. He now lives in Jersey City with his wife, Amanda, and his new dog, Lady.
With her expressive and nuanced interpretations of contemporary works, Canadian pianist Vicky Chow has been described as “brilliant” (New York Times), “new star of new music” (Los Angeles Times) and “one of our era’s most brilliant pianists” (Pitchfork). Captivating audiences around the world with her expansive repertoire and musical prowess, she enjoys a diverse career collaborating with many of the world’s most renowned composers and ensembles.
2017-2018 season highlights will include appearances at the POLIN Museum (Warsaw, Poland), the International PuSh Festival, and ISCM World Music Days (Vancouver, Canada), as well as presenting an all John Zorn program including a world premiere at National Sawdust (Brooklyn, New York) with Tyshawn Sorey and Shanir Blumenkranz. Chow’s piano duo X88 will tour Holland and the U.S. with their new program Outer Limits, premiering works by Nik Bärtsch, Pete Harden, Vanessa Lann, and Tristan Perich.
She is the pianist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, piano duo X88, Grand Band, New Music Detroit, and has collaborated with other ensembles such as the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Wet Ink Ensemble, and Momenta Quartet. Her critically-acclaimed sophomore solo album A O R T A released in 2016 on New Amsterdam Records, was hailed as “imaginative” and “compelling” (I Care If You Listen) and “above all else a triumph of curation” (Second Inversion). Her recordings of Steve Reich’s 'Piano Counterpoint' (Nonesuch) and Tristan Perich’s 'Surface Image' (New Amsterdam Records) was included in the top albums of the year lists such as The Rolling Stone Magazine and Rhapsody. Later this year, an EP of a solo piano work by Bang on a Can founder Michael Gordon titled SONATRA will be released on Cantaloupe Music (http://www.sonatralp.com/).
As an artist frequently broadcasted on WNYC’s Q2 radio, her recorded work can be found on the 'Nonesuch', 'New Amsterdam', ‘Tzadik’, ‘Cantaloupe Music’,’ Innova’, ‘Hinterzimmer’, and ‘AltaVoz’ labels. Interviews and articles featuring Ms. Chow has been published in Musicworks Magazine, Huffington Post, Gramophone, The New York Times, The Vancouver Sun, and many more. Her performances of Morton Feldman and John Cage were featured on BBC3‘s documentary series ‘The Sound and The Fury’, based on Alex Ross’ book ‘The Rest is Noise’.
In the summer, Ms. Chow is on faculty at the Bang on a Can summer festival held at Mass Moca in North Adams, Massachusetts. She was recently on faculty at the Banff Centre in Canada for their first Composer/Pianist summer ARC program.
A graduate of The Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music, Vicky Chow is a Yamaha Artist.
Ariadne Greif, who performed not only on the inaugural 2013 NYC Festival but also on the 2014 NYC Festival, discusses her set for the Sydney Festival which is a collection of her favorite things: juvenilia, toys, transcriptions, and dreams. Her fabulous Dreams and Nightmares project travels for the first time outside of NYC, and will receive a special expansion this September. For more information, please visit the show note: resonantbodiesfestival.org/podcast/2018/ariadne-greif-show-notes
SHOW NOTES
ARIADNE GREIF, praised for her "luminous, expressive voice" (NYTimes), her "elastic and round high notes"(classiqueinfo), and her "mesmerizing stage presence" (East Anglian Daily Times), began her opera career as a ‘boy’ soprano in the Los Angeles area and at the LA Opera, eventually making an adult debut singing Lutoslawski’s Chantefleurs et Chantefables with the American Symphony Orchestra. She starred in roles ranging from Therese/Tirésias in Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias, singing a “thoroughly commanding and effortless” run at the Aldeburgh Festival, to Sappho in Atthis by Georg Friedrich Haas, for whichthe New York Times noted her “searing top notes,” and “dusky depths,” calling it “a solo high-wire act for Ms. Greif,” “a vehicle for Ms. Greif’s raw, no-holds-barred performance,” “one of the most searingly painful and revealing operatic performances in recent times.”
Last season she sang three performances of Carmina Burana, debuted as Musetta in La Bohemewith Eric Jacobsen and the Greater Bridgeport Symphony, appeared with The Knights for the first time, and returned to the Orlando Philharmonic as Adina in The Elixir of Love with Eric Jacobsen, where she was praised as a "sassy" Adina, with "tonally pleasing high notes and a delightful sparkling quality to both her singing and acting." In the fall, she sang the main role of Rhinemaiden Melania in eleven performances of Matti Kovler's opera The Drumf and the Rhinegold, directed by Doug Fitch, with a reprise in May, and returned to Metropolis Ensemble to perform solo Cage on roller-skates at their 10th Anniversary Musicircus. In spring she made an appearance in Doug Fitch's Art Gallery Variety Show at National Sawdust, sang recitals of Crumb and Britten and 2nd Viennese School masterpieces, as well as a recital at Mainly Mozart Miami with baritone John Moore and pianist Marina Radiushina, and toured for a fourth time to the Middle East with SHUFFLE Concert.
This season includes concerts in France, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, Utah, Virginia, Ohio, and New York. In November, Ariadne made a cameo appearance alongside William Kentridge in performances of the Dada masterpiece Ursonate. She returns to the The Knights, Shuffle Concert, Floating Tower, and Metropolis Ensemble, and sings for the first time with the Refugee Orchestra Project, the MATA Festival, and Alterity Chamber Orchestra. She appeared at the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, Washington Square Music Festival, and Festival Daniou. Repertoire includes Carmina Burana, Mendelssohn's concert aria "Infelice!", Bach's Wedding Cantata, new songs by Angélica Negrón, various recital appearances of Viennese music from the 20th century including an all-star Degenerate Cabaret, and three workshops of new operas. In January she performed in 1933, a new theatrical cabaret of music from the eponymous year with the ensemble SHUFFLE Concert. In her fourth project with director Doug Fitch, Greif was part of the premiere of the new opera Six. Twenty. Outrageous., by Daniel Thomas Davis, in February. Projects in the spring included David Gordon's 40 minute song cycle Mysteria Incarnationis at the MATA Festival with Miranda Cuckson and Blair McMillen, as well as a concert of Mozart and Haydn concert arias with Michael Feldman and The Orchestra at St. Veronica's, a new performance series in a deconsecrated church in the West Village. In May, Ariadne is featured in Classical Celebration, a gala event at the Sarasota Opera House.
Concert performances in 2015/16 included Beethoven Symphony No. 9, Mozart Requiem, and Mozart Vespers K.321, concerts of chamber music in venues from Carnegie’s Weill Hall to Le Poisson Rouge, across the US, Canada, and in the Middle East, as well as several contemporary music projects. She created and executed a twenty-composer commissioning project of her own, called DREAMS & NIGHTMARES, subject of an upcoming documentary, Only a Dream, by filmmaker Caroline Mariko Stucky. In 2016 she performed Milton Babbitt’s Solo Requiem with Joel Sachs and Robert Fleitz at the Juilliard Focus! Festival, went on a recital tour with the AW Duo in the American South, and made an American Midwest tour with the ensemble SHUFFLE Concert, with whom she has performed over 250 concerts. She made a repeat performance of Ricardo Romaneiro's Coarse Air with the Metropolis Ensemble, sang a concert with Gabriel Kahane of music by Kahane and David Lang at the Meidän Festival at the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki. In April she sang the role of Papagena in Die Zauberflöte with the Orlando Philharmonic.
A champion of new music since her teens, she has premiered over fifty large-scale pieces and a half-dozen new operas, which most recently included Yaga the Witch in Matti Kovler’s Ami & Tami, where she played a villain for the first time, and a nameless main role in Gabrielle Herbst’s disturbing masterpiece BODILESS. Though the opera is hardly ‘new’ at a hundred years old, Ariadne sang the main female role, Lady Madeline, in the US premiere of Debussy’s unfinished opera La Chute de la Maison Usher in its most complete form, with the Opera Français de New York.
In this episode, Christine Schneider—who joins this summer's (R)Evolution: Resonant Bodies faculty at Banff Centre—talks about her laryngeal massage practice in NYC. Chatting with festival director Lucy Dhegrae, they discuss how trauma is stored in the body, the many layers and functions of our body's fascia, and how Christine first became interested in laryngeal massage.
SHOW NOTES
Christine Schneider is the leading manual laryngeal therapist in the Country. She is a graduate of the Swedish Institute College of Health Science in New York City where she specializes in laryngeal and TMJ therapies. After graduating Christine received extensive training in Myofascial release, laryngeal therapy, TMJ therapy, CranioSacralTherapy, and Visceral Minipulation along with several other specialties and modalities. She works along side New York's Otolaryngogist's, Speech Pathologists and Voice teachers providing the manual component for vocal rehabilitation and vocal health maintenance.
She has a Bachelors of Music in Vocal Performance from Oklahoma City University and has worked as a professional performer all around the world.
Christine has a thriving private practice in NYC where she works with a variety of professional voice users including Tony Award winning Broadway Actors, Grammy Award winning singer/songwriters, Oscar nominated actors, Opera Singers, Sports Broadcasters, Lawyers, and CEOs.
Christine's Website: LifeLight Massage
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. She uses MAX MSP and Isadora software on a MacBook Pro along with custom MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound and image with physical gestures. Her performances range in scale from small concerts in galleries to large-scale multi-media works in theaters and concert halls. In addition to her performance work, she has a growing body of inter-media gallery works including multi-channel sound and video installations.
Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan – performing in international festivals including Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center (New York); La Biennale di Venezia (Italy); the Interlink Festival (Japan); Other Minds (San Francisco); and Pina Bausch Tanztheater's 25 Jahre Fest (Wuppertal, Germany). She has composed, recorded and performed original scores for choreographers and for film/video artists, and has done vocal work for other composers (including Charles Amirkhanian, Vijay Iyer, and Henry Brant). Her large-scale, multi-media performance works, including Memory Trace, Baggage Allowance, Voci, and Gaijin, have been presented at venues like the Kitchen in New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Theater Artaud (Z Space) in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art Theatre in Chicago, as well as at theaters in Washington D.C. and Budapest Hungary. Her one-act opera Wunderkabinet inspired by the Museum of Jurassic Technology (co-composed with Matthew Brubeck) premiered at The LAB Gallery in San Francisco, and was presented at REDCAT in Los Angeles and Open Ears Festival in Canada. She has shown media works in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum (Cologne); the Tang Museum (Saratoga Springs NY); the Dakar Biennale (Sénégal); Krannert Art Museum (IL), and the Kitchen (NY).
Ms. Z has had chamber music commissions from Kronos Quartet, the Bang On A Can All Stars; Ethel String Quartet, the California E.A.R. Unit; the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble; the Empyrean Ensemble, and St. Luke’s Chamber Orchestra. She curates and produces "the ROOM Series", a San Francisco avant-chamber series featuring the work of a variety of virtuosic solo artists and chamber groups playing experimental music. She has collaborated with a wide range of artists including Joan La Barbara, Joan Jeanrenaud, Brenda Way (ODC Dance), Miya Masaoka, Jeanne Finley + John Muse, Shinichi Iova Koga (Inkboat), Christina McPhee, and Luciano Chessa. She has participated in several New Music Theatre events (including John Cage festivals), and has performed with The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Her interactive web-based work Baggage Allowance can be viewed at baggageallowance.tv where it is permanently installed.
Pamela Z is the recipient of many honors and awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; the Creative Capital Fund; the MAP Fund, the ASCAP Music Award; an Ars Electronica honorable mention; and the NEA Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. For more information visit: www.pamelaz.com
“Soprano Tony Arnold is a luminary in the world of chamber music and art song. Today’s classical composers are inspired by her inherently beautiful voice, consummate musicianship, and embracing spirit” (Huffington Post). Hailed by the New York Times as “a bold, powerful interpreter,” she is internationally acclaimed as a leading proponent of contemporary music in concert and recording, having premiered hundreds of works by established and emerging composers. Since becoming the first-prize laureate of both the 2001 Gaudeamus International Competition (NL) and the 2001 Louise D. McMahon Competition (USA), Tony Arnold has collaborated with the most cutting-edge composers and instrumentalists on the world stage, and shares with audiences her “broader gift for conveying the poetry and nuance behind outwardly daunting contemporary scores” (Boston Globe). Her unique blend of vocal virtuosity and communicative warmth, combined with wide-ranging skills in education and leadership were recognized with the 2015 Brandeis Creative Arts Award, given in appreciation of “excellence in the arts and the lives and works of distinguished, active American artists.”
As the soprano of the intrepid International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Tony Arnold is a catalyst for dozens of groundbreaking projects, the most recent of which is David Lang’s Whisper Opera in ICE’s touring production directed by Jim Findlay. She has toured the U.S. extensively as a member of the George Crumb Ensemble, and has become the voice most associated with Crumb’s music since the beloved Jan DeGaetani. A noted guest artist at international festivals on four continents, Tony Arnold has been featured at the Darmstadt Festival and Witten New Music Days (Germany); Time of Music (Finland); Cervantino (Mexico); Musica Sacra Maastricht (Netherlands); Tongyeong Festival (Korea); Perspectives XXI Festival (Armenia), and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. She regularly appears with leading ensembles including the JACK Quartet, Orion Quartet, Ensemble Modern, Talea Ensemble, Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Now, Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
With more than thirty discs to her credit, Tony Arnold has recorded a broad segment of the modern vocal repertory with esteemed chamber music colleagues. Her recording of George Crumb’s iconic Ancient Voices of Children (Bridge) was nominated for a 2006 Grammy Award, and her recording with ICE of Nathan Davis’s On the Nature of Thingness (Starkland) was named Best Contemporary Classical Album at the 2016 Independent Music Awards. Other notable releases include György Kurtág’s monumental Kafka Fragments (Bridge); Jason Eckardt’s uncompromising Undersong (Mode) and Tongues (Tzadik); Olivier Messiaen’s mystical Harawi(New Focus); and the complete Webern project under the direction of Robert Craft (Naxos). Of the Webern, The Guardian writes, “sung with remarkable poise and warmth by soprano Tony Arnold…each [song] is a perfectly etched miniature, a nugget of impacted lyricism, and Arnold unwraps them with immense care.”
A strong advocate for the creation and commissioning of new music, Tony Arnold’s artistry has attracted many of the most gifted composers of our time. The growing repertoire of vocal chamber music now includes major works written for her voice by Georges Aperghis, Eric Chasalow, Philippe Manoury, Josh Levine, George Crumb, Pamela Madsen, Fredrick Gifford, David Liptak, Brett Dean, Christopher Theofanidis, Jason Eckardt, Hans Tutschku, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Jesse Jones, Nathan Davis, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, John Zorn and David Gompper, amongst others. In 2012, Arnold and violinist Movses Pogossian were the recipients of a Chamber Music America Commissioning Grant to support the creation of Seven Armenian Songs by Gabriela Lena Frank. Upcoming commissioning projects include a new work for voice with the International Contemporary Ensemble by Marcos Balter, and the premiere of Amy Williams’s Fünf Worte for soprano and harmonium.
Tony Arnold has worked on a sustained basis with young composers and performers, sparking new musical ideas and fostering collaboration with succeeding generations. In the summer of 2017, she will join the vocal arts faculty of the venerable Tanglewood Music Center, followed by an appointment to the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory beginning September 2017. In 2015-16, she was the Kunkemueller Artist-in-Residence at the Boston Conservatory, and was simultaneously in residence at Brandeis University as part of the Brandeis Creative Arts Award. In 2009, Tony Arnold was the first performer ever invited to be the Howard Hanson Distinguished Professor of Composition at the Eastman School of Music. For over a decade she served on the faculty of the University at Buffalo, where she founded the extended techniques vocal ensemble, BABEL. She is currently on the faculty of the Wellesley Composers Conference (MA); the soundSCAPE Festival (Italy); and New Music on the Point (VT). She has performed, lectured and given master classes as a guest in over 50 universities worldwide.
Tony Arnold is a graduate of Oberlin College and Northwestern University. Growing up in suburban Baltimore, she composed, sang and played every instrument she could persuade her parents to let her bring home, but never intended to become a professional vocalist. Instead, she applied her varied musical background to the study of orchestral conducting. Following graduate school, she was a fellow of the Aspen Music Festival (as both conductor and singer), and she enjoyed success as the music director of several orchestras in the Chicago area. In her early thirties, Tony reconnected with her love of singing, and discovered a special ability for making the most complex vocal music accessible to every audience. Having been inspired by many mentors, she is especially indebted to the teaching of sopranos Carmen Mehta and Carol Webber, conductors Robert Spano and Victor Yampolsky, and composer György Kurtág.
Life Story (1993) Thomas Adès (b. 1971) Tony Arnold, soprano Jacob Greenberg, piano Randall Zigler, double bass Gleb Kanasevich, bass clarinet Michael Norsworthy, bass clarinet Performed live on September 9th, 2015, at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City.Lotófagos (2006) Beat Furrer (b. 1954) with Tony Arnold, soprano and Randall Zigler, double bass Performed live at the Resonant Bodies Festival on September 9th, 2015 at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City. José Ángel Valente, "Lotófagos," from Fragmentos de un Libro Futuro Estábamos en un desierto confrontados con nuestra propia imagen que no reconocíamos.
Puerto Rican-American soprano Sophia Burgos is fast emerging internationally as a young talent of outstanding intelligence, musicality and stage presence. Her repertoire ranges from concert repertoire and chamber music to contemporary opera, collaborating with artists in the United States and Europe.
Last season, Ms. Burgos performed Claude Vivier’s Lonely Child with Teodor Currentzis and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at the Prinzregententheater in Munich and the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, appeared at the Bregenzer Festspiele as Lily Briscoe in the world premiere of To The Lighthouse by Zesses Seglias, performed Emily Dickinson songs by Robin de Raaf with Het Gelders Orkest and Antonello Manacorda and sang the lead role Enoa in a new children's opera by Andrew Norman, To the Moon and back, with the Berlin Philharmoniker and the London Symphony Orchestra, both conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.
Other recent appearances include her European operatic debut premiering the title role of Maria Republica by François Paris with Nantes-Angers Opera. Her intense portrayal, “a veritable tour de force” (Opéra Magazine) contributed to the production being awarded the 2016 Meilleure Création Musicale prize by the Association Professionnelle de la Critique Théâtre, Musique et Danse. In March 2015, Ms. Burgos had the pleasure of singing the title role of Jennie in the New York premiere of Oliver Knussen’s Higglety Pigglety Pop! with the Bard College Conservatory. She also had the great honor of making her Carnegie Hall debut performing Correspondances by Henri Dutilleux with the American Symphony Orchestra.
Highlights in 2017/18 include a return to the Elbphilharmonie for Quatre Chants Pour Franchir Le Seul by Gérard Grisey, as part of the Festival ‘Greatest Hits’, co-produced with the NDR and Kampnagel, and debuts with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and MDR Sinfonieorchester, both in Bernstein’s Songfest, and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence as Belinda in Dido and Aeneas.
A champion of new works, Ms. Burgos has collaborated with esteemed composers such as Andre Previn, premiering his Two Lyric Songs: The Waking as part of the 75th year anniversary of the Tanglewood Music Center, and was recognized in her performance of George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children by the London Times for “making light of the vocal part’s virtuoso technical demands… with an always beautiful sound.” Ms. Burgos also developed operatic roles such as Iphigenia in Osvaldo Golijov’s latest opera, Iphigenia in Aulis, with excerpts workshopped at the Metropolitan Opera. In 2014 Ms. Burgos appeared at the Lucerne Festival Academy as a soloist in Luciano Berio's Coro, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, and was selected for masterclasses and private lessons with Barbara Hannigan. She performed as soloist in Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2 and Matthias Pintscher's Twilight Song.
Sophia Burgos earned her Bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music where she collaborated with Brad Lubman and the Muscia Nova Ensemble performing works such as Akrostichon Wortspiel by Unsuk Chin and Steve Reich’s Tehillim. She also had the pleasure of performing Knoxville Summer of 1915 by Samuel Barber in the Eastman Theatre with the Graduate Chamber Orchestra as the winner of the Eastman concerto competition. In 2013, Ms. Burgos was awarded third place in both the Friends of Eastman Opera competition and the Jesse Kneisel Lieder Competition, and won the German Lied Prize at the 2017 Nadia and Lili Boulanger International Voice-Piano Competition in Paris.
She completed her Master’s Degree at the Bard College Conservatory’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program where she portrayed the title role of Handel’s rarely performed oratorio, Esther, conducted by James Bagwell, and the role of Angel Gabriel in Haydn’s The Creation with the Bard Conservatory Orchestra and members of the American Symphony Orchestra. Burgos has performed art song and contemporary music recitals throughout New York City and the Hudson Valley. She is proud to receive close mentorship from Dawn Upshaw, Barbara Hannigan, and Jan Opalach.
In addition to her career as a singer, Ms. Burgos is passionate about education and outreach through art, holding a degree and certification in Music Education. Originally from Chicago, IL, her earliest musical influences were Spanish folk song and dance, as she and her family are strongly tied to their Puerto Rican heritage. She is currently living in Cologne.
Sophia Burgos, soprano Casey Grev, soprano saxophone
September 8, 2016 at Roulette in Brooklyn
www.resonantbodiesfestival.orgSophia Burgos, soprano Isabel Gleicher, flute
September 8, 2016 at Roulette in Brooklyn
www.resonantbodiesfestival.org
Soprano Nina Dante, a classical chamber musician based in Chicago and NYC, draws deep artistic satisfaction from the continuous rediscovery of the expressive and technical capabilities of the voice in both contemporary and traditional repertoire.
Dante has performed on concert, festivals and as a guest of venues such as National Sawdust’s Original Music Series, the University of Chicago Presents, the Renaissance Society of Chicago, the Goethe Insitut, the City of Chicago’s Loops and Variations, the Strasbourg Conservatoire (France), the Pianoforte Foundation’s Schubertiade, the New Music Miami Festival, Oberlin Conservatory Modern Music Guild series, Experimental Sound Studio’s Outer Ear Series, Chicago’s Frequency Series and Festival, the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneous (Mexico City), Visiones Sonores (Morelia), the Latino Music Festival of Chicago, De música y músicos (Costa Rica), New York’s Performa 15, and LAMPO. In Chicago, she has served as soprano soloist for works such as Vivaldi’s Gloria, Bach’s Christ lag in Todesbanden, Fauré’s Requiem, Schubert’s Mass in G, and the world premiere of Jeff Enns’ Gloria.
Dante is a founding member of the contemporary chamber music ensemble Fonema Consort, which specializes in new chamber music for the voice and instruments. She can be heard on the ensemble’s debut album Pasos en otra calle with label New Focus Recordings, and label Parlour Tapes’ compilation Glitteringadingding: Frequency Series Mixtape. She looks forward to the release of Fonema Consort’s second album in spring 2017 featuring works of young American composers. She is a recipient of honors such as a 2015 DCASE grant, a 2012 CAAPS grant and was a 2014 artist in residence at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts.
Dante is dedicated to educating young musicians on traditional and new classical music. In addition to her private voice and piano studios, she is currently on faculty at Art House Astoria Conservatory; and has led numerous workshops and lectures at institutions such as the University of Chicago, Oberlin Conservatory, UNAM (Mexico City), the University of Wisconsin Whitewater, Saint Xavier University, and North Central College.
Dante graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern University in 2010, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Vocal Performance, where she studied with Sunny Joy Langton and Theresa Brancaccio. From 2008-09, she studied voice and chamber music in Paris at the École normale de musique; and in 2012 she studied and performed at the Darmstadt Courses for New Music, studying voice with Donatienne Michel-Dansac, and working in chamber settings under the tutelage of such recognized soloists/chamber musicians as violinist Graeme Jennings, saxophonist Marcus Weiss and pianist Nicholas Hodges.
Photo: Alexandr Karjaka
Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, DMA is an Omaha-based classical soprano who specializes in the work of living composers. Along with her solo repertoire, she is a member of Ensemble Dal Niente, Hasco Duo and Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble.
Recent and upcoming premieres and performances include operas by Katherine Young, Eliza Brown, and Frederick Gifford, a performance of David Lang's "love fail" at the Kody Festival in Poland with Quince, the Ear Taxi Festival in Chicago, as well as music by Holly Herndon, Marcos Balter, Christopher Cerrone, noise rock band Deerhoof, Erin Gee, and Natacha Diels.
Ms. DeBoer is featured on albums with Holly Herndon, Deerhoof, Ensemble Dal Niente, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, Christopher Wild, and Hasco Duo.
Outside of her performance work, Ms. DeBoer is also the founder and director of an experimental performance festival called Omaha Under the Radar, which has presented nearly 200 individual artists from around North America during its first four seasons.
Born and raised in Omaha, NE, Ms. DeBoer moved to Chicago to study at DePaul University where she received a Bachelor of Music. She received a Masters degree from the University at Buffalo, where she studied with acclaimed contemporary interpreter Tony Arnold, and a Doctorate of Musical Arts from Bowling Green State University.
For our Show Notes on this episode, please visit:
www.resonantbodiesfestival.org/podcast/2018/jenna-lyle-show-notes
Composer, performer, installation-builder, and administrator, Jenna Lyle has worked with various ensembles and specialized in the performance of works by living composers. She has presented her own works as well as those of her colleagues throughout the U.S. and abroad, with performances recently by Spektral Quartet, Mocrep, Chicago Composers Orchestra, Loadbang, D U C K R U B B E R, and The Riot Ensemble, of London. As a performer, Lyle takes on long-term collaborations drawing upon her background in theater and vocal performance. Her latest projects include an international tour of choreographer Erica Mott and composer Ryan Ingebritsen's 3 Singers, a dance and multi-media opera; a collaborative duo work for bodies, voices, hanging speakers, and electronics with Australian mezzo Jessica Aszodi entitled Grafter; and a one-woman adaptation of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat. Lyle is also a performing member of Mocrep and a co-founder of Parlour Tapes+, a New Music cassette tape label and media/performance collective based in Chicago. She holds degrees in composition from Northwestern University (DMA), Cleveland State University (MM), and Birmingham-Southern College (BM) and curates and coordinates programming at The Arts Club of Chicago as Programs Manager.
As an artist, Lyle explores how the physical body, and in turn the culture in which it functions, adapts to its semiotic or "data-based" representation. Magnifying the relationship between sonic output and physical process and separating it from the second nature, she often places performers in physical arrangements that force a heightened awareness of body while they execute a set of instructions for sound production. Performer configurations may highlight interpersonal dynamics, the connection between a sonic object and movement, or the production of sound as contingent upon the perception of one's own bodily processes, among other things. As a result, movement and corpus become increasingly significant as musical material, fueling a discourse of movement as motive in Lyle's work.
Composed/Devised and Performed by Jessica Aszodi and Jenna Lyle Photography by Yonatan Aljadeff & Jenna Lyle Excerpts from documented performances at Space4Art (San Diego), Eaton Chapel (Beloit, WI), and Elastic Arts (Chicago)Mocrep performs a work collaboratively devised with composer/performer Jenna Lyle Plank Rodeo for 4 performers on amplified wooden planks Performers: Alex Ellsworth, movement Ray Evanoff, lights Zachary Good, movement Jenna Lyle, sound Isaac Stevenson, movement Chris Wood, movement Conceptual Framework/Direction/Scoring: Jenna Lyle Performed on August 13, 2016 at Orangerie Darmstadt, Hessen Official video from Darmstadt International Music Courses 2016
Show notes for this episode can be found here:
www.resonantbodiesfestival.org/podcast/2018/alejandro-t-acierto-show-notes
For more info: visit Alejandro's website
Alejandro T. Acierto is an artist and musician whose work is largely informed by the breath, the voice, and the processes that enable them. He has exhibited artworks at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Issue Project Room, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Salisbury University, SOMArts and presented performance works at Rapid Pulse, the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, Center for Performance Research, and Center for New Music and Technology. Noted for his “insatiable” performance by the New York Times, Acierto has performed extensively throughout the US and abroad and can be heard on Carrier, Albany, New Focus, Parlour Tapes+, and Avant Media Records and has issued a solo record on Prom Night Records. He is a 3Arts awardee and a recipient of the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Darmstadt Festival for New Music with Ensemble Dal Niente, with whom he is a founding member.
Acierto has also held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff Centre, High Concept Laboratories, Chicago Artists' Coalition and was recently an FT/FN/FG Consortium Fellow and a Center Program Artist at the Hyde Park Art Center. He received his undergraduate degree from DePaul University, an MM from Manhattan School of Music, an MFA in New Media Arts from University Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and is currently Artist-in-Residence for Creative Practice in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University.
Vocalist, composer, and flutist extraordinaire Nathalie Joachim talks about her upcoming set on Resonant Bodies Festival in Chicago on April 8, 2018 at Constellation. In addition to bringing her work as vocalist/composer/flutist on stage together, Nathalie’s project for ResBod, Fanm d’Aiti, is a deep exploration of her own identity as a Haitian women, and “an attempt to celebrate the women of Haitian song and to explore their individual stories as they relate to Afro-Caribbean culture, society, history and music, by giving them a long deserved international platform.” For more information about Nathalie and links to music and topics discussed on this episode, please visit our Show Notes!
SHOW NOTES
NathalieJoachim.com
Read Nathalie's blog post on Liquid Music about her project for ResBods
Nathalie Joachim is “an edgy multi- genre performance artist who has long been pushing boundaries with her flute”. (The Washington Post) Critics hail the Brooklyn born Haitian-American for creating “a unique blend of classical music, hip-hop, electronic programming and soulful vocals reminiscent of neo- R&B stars like Erykah Badu.” (The Wall Street Journal) Ms. Joachim regularly combines her exceptional performance skill as a flutist with her creative talents as a composer, producer and singer, navigating genres ranging from classical and jazz to indie-rock and electronic. She was recently appointed flutist of the four-time Grammy winning contemporary chamber ensemble, Eighth Blackbird. Joachim is also co- founder of the critically acclaimed urban art pop duo, Flutronix, known best for “redefining the flute and modernizing its sound by hauling it squarely into the world of popular music.”(MTV Iggy)
Ms. Joachim has performed and recorded with an impressive range of today’s most exciting artists and ensembles including Miguel Zenón, Vampire Weekend, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Richard Reed Parry, Dan Deacon, Center for Contemporary Opera and The Lone Bellow. Her original compositions have been broadcast on NPR, WNYC, WQXR, Q2, J-Wave, Tokyo FM, FM Yokohama and more. In addition, Ms. Joachim has been featured in television segments on SNL, Late Show with David Letterman, Telemundo, BK Live and The Daily Buzz, as well as an internationally broadcast ESPN super bowl commercial.
As a composer, Joachim has acquired a number of notable commissions for dance, instrumentalists and interdisciplinary theater, each featuring her signature electroacoustic style. Upcoming premieres include Fanm d’Ayiti, an evening-length work for flute, voice, string quartet and electronics, commissioned by and developed in residency through St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series (2018). Other recent projects include Land Bridge, an evening-length score for Helen Simoneau Danse (2016) funded by New Music USA; Ulysses in 3, a collaboration with renowned jazz drummer Ulysses Owens, Jr. as part of Park Avenue Armory’s Under Construction residency program (2015); and Dam Mwen Yo for solo cello and processed field recordings written for Amanda Gookin of PUBLIQuartet as part of her Forward Music Project, and premiered at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY (2017).
Ms. Joachim is an official Burkart Flutes & Piccolos artist, and has appeared as a concert soloist both in recital and with orchestra on stages throughout the United States, Europe and Japan, where she is signed to Village Again Records. Highlights include featured performances at the Newport Jazz Festival, Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Museum, Fukuoka Symphony Hall, National Flute Association Conventions, Gezmataz Genoa Jazz Festival, Symphony Space, Biwako Hall, Virginia Arts Festival, WNYC’s Greenespace and 92Y Tribeca among others.
Ms. Joachim is a graduate of The Juilliard School, where she studied with Carol Wincenc and Jayn Rosenfeld, and was the first person to successfully complete the conservatory’s MAP, Pre-College, and College Division programs. Upon graduation, she was granted the first ever Juilliard InterArts Award for independently producing and presenting exceptional interdisciplinary arts performances involving music, dance, theater and technology while pursuing her degree. She continued her graduate degree studies at The New School, where her focus was audio production and sound design. Ms. Joachim’s graduate performance thesis, presented at BRIC House, was an evening length work entitled Moving Words featuring an original score and video.
Since then, education has continued to play a major role in her career as an active educator of students of all ages and skill levels. Ms. Joachim is Director of Contemporary Chamber Music at the Perlman Music Program; a former flute faculty member at The Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program; and has coached chamber music for The Juilliard School’s Pre- College Division. Her youth education workshops, presented nationally with Flutronix, focus on creative collaboration and the use of traditional instruments in modern ways including improvisation, extended techniques and the integration of technology. At the university level, she has been presented as a music career lecturer and panelist, and has led masterclasses for The Juilliard School, University of Michigan, University of the Arts, New York Flute Club, New England Conservatory, Oklahoma Flute Society, Atlanta Flute Club, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and other institutions across the country. She is a faculty member and Artistic Director at Eighth Blackbird’s Blackbird Creative Lab, and next season, joins the faculty of Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
HEARD ON THIS EPISODE:
Jessie Marino chats with Resonant Bodies Festival director Lucy Dhegrae about her upcoming set on April 8th, 2018 at Constellation for the inaugural Chicago festival. Jessie talks about her unique approach to performing, her work with Pamplemousse and her duo On Structure, and how Rot Blau, her fantastic Super Premiere (her first piece ever as a composer) came to be. For more information about Jessie and what we discuss on this episode, please visit our Show Notes!
SHOW NOTES
Jessie Marino is a composer/performer/media artist from New York. Her current work explores the repetition inside common activities, ritualistic absurdities, and the archeology of nostalgic technologies. Her pieces score out sound, video, physical movements, lighting and staging which are then placed within organized temporal structures, fractured narratives and musical frameworks.
Jessie is the Co-Founder of the experimental performance duo ON STRUCTURE and is Co-Artistic Director, Composer, and Cellist for the composer-performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse. Her compositions have been performed internationally by groups such as Ensemble Pamplemousse (USA), SCENATET (DK), SoundInitiative (FR), We Spoke Percussion (UK), Line Upon Line Percussion (USA), Handwerk (DE), Ensemble Adapter (DE), Die Ordnung Der Dinge
(DE), Zwerm Electric Guitar Quartet (BE), Mocrep (USA) and presented at performing arts venues/festivals such as Café Oto (UK), MATA Festival (NYC), Borealis Festival(NO), SPOR Festival (DK), Darmstadt International Summer Courses (DE), and The Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao). Jessie's work has recently been commissioned by Darmstadt Summer Course (DE), Borealis (NO), Kong Tomorrow (DK), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), SPOR Festival (DK), Retro Disco, SCENATET Ensemble, We Spoke Percussion, and she was an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Foundation for the Arts (CA).
As a performer, Jessie works on developing new modes of musical performance styles with her duo ON STRUCTURE (with composer/performer Natacha Diels), plays regularly as a cellist with Ensemble Pamplemousse, and has developed a motley cast of performative and compositional Alter Egos. She has worked closely with influential composers such as Alvin Lucier, George Lewis, Klaus Lang and Steve Takasugi, and has been a guest performer with prominent contemporary music and theater ensembles such as, Object Collection (NYC), Wet Ink Ensemble (NYC), and Ensemble Adapter.
Jessie lives and works in Chicago. www.jessiemarino.com
Jessie's duo: On Structure
Ensemble Pamplemousse
rot blau, for two performers performer one: jessie marino performer two: natacha diels by jessie marino, june 2009 (thanks adam for the filming help!)
Matthew Thomas's performance of Eight Songs for a Mad King (Peter Maxwell Davies) on the inaugural Melbourne Festival was "astoundingly effective" wrote ArtsHub in a review. The piece calls for "a realisation of [a] deranged royal... demanding a range of three octaves, a raft of extended vocal technique (some extreme), and fine acting skills." Thomas talks with RBF Australia's co-director Jane Sheldon about the evening.
Photo: Agata Yim
Show Notes
Bass Matthew Thomas is a graduate of the ANU School of Music and the Opera School of the Sydney Conservatorium.
As a soloist Matthew has been engaged by companies including Melbourne Opera, Opera Australia, Opera Queensland, Victorian Opera, Opera Australia and Tokyo Experimental Opera.
On the concert platform he has appeared with Sydney Philharmonic Choirs, The Arcko Symphonic Project, Melbourne Bach Choir, Canberra Symphony Orchestra, Pacific Opera and the Ho Chi Minh Symphony.
From 2009 to 2012 he was a member of the Melbourne-based vocal ensemble Aria Co and performing with them as part of the art-music cabaret programs at venues including the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne Recital Centre.
He has been a finalist in numerous national singing competitions most recently being the 2013 Acclaim Awards which enabled him to undertake intensive studies and performances in Italy, firstly in Jesi and secondly at the Accademia Teatro alla Scala, in Milan.
In 2005 in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the cultural industries he was the ACT recipient of the Young Australian of the Year Award.
Jennifer Walshe is a composer, vocalist, and improviser from Ireland. Her work combines pop culture, theatre, video— a practice that she called The New Discipline—and her work for the 2017 Resonant Bodies Festival, The Church of Frequency and Protein, is a prime example.
Show Notes
Photo: Blackie Bouffant. Bluebell Woods, Knockvicar, Co. Roscommon, Ireland
Read more at milker.org
“Without a doubt, hers is the most original compositional voice to emerge in Ireland in the last 20 years.”
-- Michael Dervan, The Irish Times
Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1974. She studied composition with John Maxwell Geddes at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Kevin Volans in Dublin and graduated from Northwestern University, Chicago, with a doctoral degree in composition in June 2002. Her chief teachers at Northwestern were Amnon Wolman and Michael Pisaro. In 2000 Jennifer won the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt. In 2003-2004 Jennifer was a fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; during 2004-2005 she lived in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm. From 2006 to 2008 she was the composer-in-residence in South Dublin County for In Context 3. In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York. In 2008 she was awarded the Praetorius Music Prize for Composition by the Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur. In 2009 she lived in Venice, Italy as a guest of the Fondazione Claudio Buziol. She is currently Reader in Music at Brunel University, London.
Jennifer’s work has been performed and broadcast all over the world by ensembles such as Alter Ego, ensemble récherche, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Orchestra Sinfonica del Teatro La Fenice, Nadar Ensemble, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, Ensemble Resonanz, Apartment House, ensemble Intégrales, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Stuttgarter Kammerorchester, Plus Minus, Schlagquartett Köln, Crash Ensemble, Con Tempo Quartet, ensemble ascolta, Champ d’Action, ensemble laboratorium, ensemble ]h[iatus, ensemble surplus, trio nexus, the Rilke Ensemble, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the Irish Youth Wind Ensemble, Bozzini Quartet, Callino Quartet, Ensemble 2000, Concorde, Kaleidoscop, Black Hair, Continuum, Ensemble Musica Nova, ensemble chronophonie, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Wind Quintet, the Hebrides Ensemble, Psappha, and Q-02 among others. Walshe has written many operas, ranging from XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! (2003) for Barbie dolls and ensemble to most recently Die Taktik, an opera commissioned by the Junge Oper Stuttgart, which received 14 performances in Stuttgart in 2012.
In addition to her activities as a composer, Jennifer frequently performs as a vocalist, specialising in extended techniques. Many of her compositions are commissioned for her voice either as a soloist or in conjunction with other instruments, and her works have been performed by her and others at festivals such as RTÉ Living Music (Dublin), Båstad Kammarmusik Festival (Sweden), Maerzmuzik (Berlin), Wundergrund (Copenhagen), Ultraschall (Berlin), Transit (Leuven), Ars Musica (Brussels), Sonorités (Montpellier), Ultima (Norway), Borealis (Norway), Experimental Intermedia (New York), November Music (Holland), All Tomorrow’s Parties (UK), Steirischer Herbst, Rainy Days (Luxembourg), Wien Modern, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, Donaueschinger Musiktagen, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Late Music Festival (York), Hamburger Klangwerktage, Gaida (Lithuania), BMIC Cutting Edge, Composer’s Choice (Dublin), SoundField (Chicago) the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, Stockholm New Music, BELEF (Belgrade), Traiettorie (Parma), Cut & Splice (London), Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), SPOR (Denmark), Frau Musica Nova (Cologne), Performa (New York), Electric Eclectics (Canada), Dresdener Tage der zeitgenössischen Musik, Reihe 0 (Austria), Stimme+ (ZKM, Karlsruhe) and MATA (New York). Jennifer is also active as an improviser, performing regularly with musicians in Europe and the U.S., and in her duos Ma La Pert with Tony Conrad and Ghikas & Walshe with Panos Ghikas. Other collaborators include film-maker Vivienne Dick and Drew Daniels’ The Soft Pink Truth.
Interview with Jennifer Walshe on her piece, "THIS IS WHY PEOPLE O.D. ON PILLS/AND JUMP FROM THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE"
Link to Walshe's writing on The New Discipline
This is a small excerpt from the DVD release XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! by Jennifer Walshe on Mere Records. For more info check our website www.mererecords.com
Odeya Nini explores the landscape of her voice through movement. Her ever-evolving work A Solo Voice is a space for her to explore timbre, texture, emotion, and audience interactivity. She writes, “The work is a series of malleable compositions and improvisations that include field recordings and theatrical elements, aiming to dissociate the voice from its traditional attributes and create a new logic of song that is not only heard but seen through movement and action.” Odeya closes the evening of September 6th, the second night of the 2017 Resonant Bodies Festival in New York City.
Show Notes
Read more at odeyanini.com
Odeya Nini is a Los Angeles based experimental vocalist and contemporary composer. At the locus of her interest is performance practices, textural harmony, gesture, tonal animation, and the illumination of minute sounds, in works spanning chamber music to vocal pieces and collages of musique concrète. Her solo vocal work extends the dimension and expression of the voice and body, creating a sonic and physical panorama of silence to noise and tenderness to grandeur. Odeya has collaborated extensively with dancers, visual artists, filmmakers and theater directors as both a composer and soloist and has worked with and appeared in works by artists and ensembles such as Meredith Monk, Butch Morris, Lucy & Jorge Orta, wild Up and The Industry.
Odeya's work has been presented at venues and festivals across the US and internationally, such as The Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Joyce Soho, MONA and Art Basel Miami, from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv, Australia, Mongolia, Madagascar and Vietnam. She has lectured on contemporary vocal techniques and composition at the university level and leads workshops exploring the creative and healing qualities of voice and movement.
Odeya holds a BFA from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and an MFA in composition from California Institute of the Arts.
Listen to the two tracks we played on the episode: Idiomia and Tunnel, both written and performed by Odeya Nini.
Hai-Ting Chinn is a not-so-secret science geek, and her set for the 2017 New York City Festival on September 6th celebrates her fascination with the universe in two works: first, in an excerpt from Science Fair, what she calls “a cabaret of science,” and second in a super premiere—her first-ever publicly performed composition—called Pale Blue Dot, which she wrote for her vocal trio Triumphatrix.
Show Notes
Hai-Ting Chinn
Read more at www.hai-ting.com
American Mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn performs in a wide range of styles and venues, from Purcell to Pierrot Lunaire, Cherubino to The King & I, J.S. Bach to P.D.Q. Bach. She was featured in the revival and tour of Phillip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, performed at venues around the world from 2011–2014, and she is currently singing the role of Belle in Glass’s La Belle et la Bête, also on tour. She has performed with New York City Opera, The Wooster Group, OperaOmnia, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and the Waverly Consort; and on the stages of Carnegie Hall, the Mann Center in Philadelphia, the Edinburgh Festival, the Verbier Festival, and London’s West End. She has premiered new works by Amy Beth Kirsten, Du Yun, Conrad Cummings, Stefan Weisman, Yoav Gal, and Matt Schickele. Hai-Ting is also an Artist in Residence at HERE arts center, where she is developing Science Fair, a staged solo show of science set to music.
From a gothic country band to firework coloratura vocals, Kamala Sankaram is a composer and vocalist who knows bel canto AND belting. Her set for Resonant Bodies Festival on September 7th 2017 reflects her polyglot artistic ways and includes a world premiere of her own composition, as well as her eclectica Yma Sumac cover band Bombay Rickey.
Show Notes
Kamala Sankaram
Read more at kamalasankaram.com
Praised as “strikingly original” (NY Times), Kamala Sankaram has received commissions from Beth Morrison Projects, HERE Arts Center, Opera on Tap, and Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Orchestra, among others. She is the recipient of a Jonathan Larson Award from the American Theater Wing, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Opera America, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Meet the Composer, the Augustine Foundation, the Anna Sosenko Trust and the Asian Women’s Giving Circle. Residencies and fellowships include the MacDowell Colony, the Watermill Center, the Citizens, HERE Arts Center, CAP21, Con Edison/Exploring the Metropolis, the Hermitage, and American Lyric Theater. As a resident artist at HERE Arts Center, Kamala created MIRANDA, a steampunk murder mystery, which was the winner of the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical. THUMBPRINT, her second opera (written in collaboration with playwright Susan Yankowitz), premiered in the 2014 PROTOTYPE Festival, and was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Agence French Presse, and over 25 media outlets around the world. THUMBPRINT will next be produced as part of the 2016/17 season at LA Opera and Opera Ithaca.
As a performer, Kamala has been hailed as “an impassioned soprano with blazing high notes” (Wall Street Journal). She has performed with and premiered pieces by Anthony Braxton, Beth Morrison Projects, the Philip Glass Ensemble, the Wooster Group, Anti-Social Music, and Petr Kotik, among others. She is the frontwoman for the band Bombay Rickey, whose debut album won the 2015 Vox Pop Award for Best Eclectic Album from the Independent Music Awards. Bombay Rickey’s opera cabaret on the life of Yma Sumac premiered in the 2016 PROTOTYPE Festival, where it was praised as a “rocking musical show” (Wall Street Journal). Most recently, Bombay Rickey was invited to perform the piece in London at Téte á Téte Opera’s Cubitt Sessions.
In addition to her musical pursuits, Kamala has been a voice actor on Comedy Central’s Superjail and Cartoon Network’s Golden Age, and holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the New School for Social Research.
Mary Bonhag, who performs on the closing night of Resonant Bodies 2017 in New York, has planned a set that combines her love of text, humor, unconducted chamber music, and programming all in one. In this episode we talk about her nearest and dearest collaborators, and the way her favorite pieces seem to have magical, spell-casting properties. Mary is the co-artistic director of Scrag Mountain Music which is in her home state of Vermont.
Show Notes
Mary BonhagRead more at marybonhagsoprano.com
Photo: Arielle Doneson
The “extraordinary” (Classical Voice N. America) soprano Mary Bonhag is captivating audiences around the country with her “marvelous versatility” and “supple, expressive” voice (San Antonio News). Mary made her Carnegie Hallsolo debut in 2009 and orchestral debut with the American Symphony Orchestra in the same year. She is co-artistic director of Scrag Mountain Music with her husband, composer/double bassist Evan Premo. Together they organize chamber music residencies and innovative and affordable concerts around VT. A consummate collaborator, Mary has performed with the Aizuri Quartet, Decoda, Spektral Quartet, as well as chamber music festivals around the country including Cactus Pear (TX), San Francisco Contemporary Players, 21st Century Consort, and Yellow Barn. As a recitalist, she has been presented at Dartmouth, Smith, Goucher, and University of Vermont, and was a SongFest Stearns Fellow. Mary has premiered and commissioned works by Lembit Beecher, C. Curtis-Smith, Premo, Shawn Jaeger, and Evan Chambers. She has been featured on the NPR shows Performance Today and From the Top and appears on Albany Records.
Upcoming: Mary is a 2017 Tanglewood Fellow, she again sings the role of Eve in Premo’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve, at the Sembrich Opera Museum on Lake George, is a featured performer on the Resonant Bodies Festival in NYC, appears at the Beethoven and Banjos Festival in Michigan, and is in residence at the University of Michigan School of Music.
In between travels, she and her husband Evan make music and homestead in Vermont where they tend to their two young boys, animals, and gardens.
Davóne Tines brings not only his gorgeous and powerful voice to all of his performances, but also a thoughtfulness about his platform, and an ability to engage with the social consciousness. In our conversation, we discuss his upcoming 2017 Resonant Bodies set on September 5th entitled “Memorial”, a preview of a forthcoming album connecting songs that span time and genre with questions about spirituality, family, and community. We also discuss Davóne’s work with artists like Peter Sellars, Kaija Saariaho, and John Adams; his education at Harvard and Juilliard; and his process of engaging with harder-to-look-at subject matter.
Show Notes
Davóne Tines
Read more at alsoanoperasinger.com
Read LA Times article, "At 29, this 'El Niño' singer is the buzz of California's opera world"
Davóne Tines, deemed a “…singer of immense power and fervor…” by The Los Angeles Times and a “…charismatic, full-voiced bass-baritone…” by The New York Times, commands a broad spectrum of opera and concert performance as a singer and creator. The 2015-16 season offered breakout performances on both sides of The Atlantic: the Dutch National Opera presented his company debut starring opposite French counter tenor Philippe Jaroussky in the premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars and The Los Angeles Times exalted Davóne Tines as “the find of the season,” for performances of Caroline Shaw’s By & By with the Calder Quartet and Kaija Saariaho’s Sombre with members of ICE at the Ojai Music Festival.
Performances of the present season include John Adams’ El Niño under the composer’s baton with the London Symphony Orchestra in London and on tour in France as well as with Grant Gershon conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bruckner’s Te Deum with Christopher Warren-Green and the Charlotte Symphony, and the Paris premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire with the Orchestre national de France. On the opera stage, Davóne Tines makes his debuts at Lisbon’s Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in a new production of Oedipus Rex (Stravinsky)led by Leo Hussain and at the Finnish National Opera reprising the roles he created at the Dutch National Opera in Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars. National Sawdust brings to the stage Requiem for: A Tuesday, a ceremony of music and dance created and administered by Davóne Tines with his collaborator, Helga Davis, during which the audience is invited to witness and face collective and individual engagements of mortality and fear in the context of racialized police brutality. Requiem for: A Tuesday is reprised during the season in further performances across North America.
Highlights of the recent past include the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s opera, Crossing, directed by multi Tony Award-winning director Diane Paulus, for which The Wall Street Journal called him a “glowing bass-baritone” and the Stylus Music Journal said he “…brought the house down with his eloquent and painful singing” in the leading role of Freddie Stowers. Davóne Tines also premiered the one-man chamber opera, American Gothic, for which Details applauded his “…lush voice” and stated that “each section of the work benefits from Tines’ heartbreakingly rendered supplications…”
Mr. Tines performed with the Boston Pops in Symphony Hall and at Tanglewood where he was a Tanglewood Music Center Fellow. He has given performances of La bohème at the Royal Opera House Oman, La fanciulla del West with the Castelton Festival and on tour in Spain, as well as Otello all under the baton of Lorin Maazel.
Mezzo-soprano Kayleigh Butcher is an adventurous vocalist who is exploring her own connection between singing and choreography in performance. Her Resonant Bodies set features three world premieres (Cara Haxo, Sivan Cohen-Elias, and Daniel Felsenfeld) and works with two choreographers (Katelyn Halpern and Miro Magloire), a piece for pvc pipe, and an unusual late work by Giacinto Scelsi. In this episode we talk about all of these exciting pieces, as well as her ensemble, Quince, a quartet of female voices that has commissioned and recorded dozens of new works.
Show Notes
Kayleigh Butcher
Photo: Alexandr Karjaka
Read more at kayleighbutcher.com
Described as having "a light, flexible mezzo soprano sound that is well suited for the strange world of new music" (Chicago Classical Review) as well as her "flawless rhythm, nuanced articulations, and formidable talent" (I CARE IF YOU LISTEN), Kayleigh Butcher has gained critical and audience acclaim as a soloist and contemporary chamber musician all over the country.
As a fervent supporter and advocate for contemporary music, Kayleigh has also worked with many composers including David Lang, Tristan Perich, Eve Beglarian, Holly Herndon, John Luther Adams, Chris Fisher-Lochhead, David Reminick, Jennifer Walsh, Robert Honstein, Danny Clay, Alex Temple, Molly Herron, Fjola Evans, Levy Lorenzo, Daniel Felsenfeld, Morgan Krauss, Eliza Brown, Jonathan Sokol, Max Grafe, Amanda Feery, LJ White, Bethany Younge, Ravi Kittappa, and Jennifer Jolley.
She has also collaborated with many new music ensembles including Eighth Blackbird, Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble Dal Niente, Opera on Tap NYC, the Morton Feldman Chamber Players, the Grant Wallace Band, Anti Social Music, thingNY, Fonema Consort, a.per.i.o.dic, and Rhymes With Opera, among others.
Kayleigh is also a founding member and the director of Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, an all-female, a cappella vocal quartet that explores experimental vocal techniques and improvisation. Quince has performed on many contemporary series, festivals, and at prestigious venues such as Contagious Sounds, Elastic Arts Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, HERE Arts, Chicago’s Ear Taxi Festival, Fast Forward Austin, Chicago’s Pritzker Pavillion in Milennium Park, Omaha’s Under the Radar, National Pastime Theater, Chicago’s Cultural Center, San Francisco’s The Center of New Music, Stanford University, Nortwestern’s NUNC, Issue Project Room, Permutations, Constellation Chicago’s Frequency Series, thingNY’s Immediacies, BGSU’s Forefront Series, Chicago’s Comfort Music, High Concept Labs, and NYC’s SONiC Festival at Shapeshifter Lab.
Kayleigh received her Bachelor’s of Vocal Performance from the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory, where she studied with Dr. Anne DeLaunay and Dr. Denise Knowlton. She was a graduate teaching assistant to Dr. Jane Schoonmaker Rodgers at Bowling Green State University, where she earned her M.Mus. She currently resides in New York City.
Theo Bleckmann is a trained jazz vocalist whose body of work spans pieces for vocal improvisation with toys, Charles Ives, Kate Bush, and Schumann. In addition to working with composers like Meredith Monk, David Lang, and John Zorn, Theo is also a composer himself. In this interview we talk about his upcoming performance on Resonant Bodies Festival’s opening night on September 5th at Roulette; his recording made in a medieval monastery in Switzerland; his work as a visual artist; and his fifteen years working as a core vocalist with Meredith Monk. To read more and listen to tracks played on this episode, check out our Show Notes.
Show Notes
Theo BleckmannPlease read more at theobleckmann.com
Photo: Lynn Harty
GRAMMY® nominated jazz singer and new music composer Theo Bleckmann’s diverse recorded work includes albums of Las Vegas standards, Weimar art songs, and popular “bar songs” (all with pianist Fumio Yasuda); a recording of newly-arranged songs by Charles Ives (with jazz/rock collective Kneebody); and his acclaimed "Hello Earth - the Music of Kate Bush." Bleckmann has most recently appeared as a special guest on recordings by Ambrose Akinmusire for Blue Note Records and Julia Hülsmann’s trio for ECM Records. In January 2017, ECM will release Bleckmann’s recording with his new Elegy Quintet, produced by legendary label head and founder, Manfred Eicher. Bleckmann has collaborated with musicians, artists, actors and composers, including Ambrose Akinmusire, Laurie Anderson, Uri Caine, Philip Glass, Ann Hamilton, John Hollenbeck, Sheila Jordan, Phil Kline, David Lang, Kirk Nurock, Frances MacDormand, Ben Monder, Michael Tilson Thomas, Kenny Wheeler, John Zorn, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and, most prominently, Meredith Monk, with whom Bleckmann worked as a core ensemble member for over fifteen years. He has been interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air and appeared on the David Letterman show with Laurie Anderson. In 2015, Bleckmann premiered a new work for the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and in 2016 he brings new work to the New York Philharmonic Biennial and the LA Philharmonic. Bleckmann has consistently appeared in the top-five spots in the DownBeat Critics’ Polls for Best Male Vocalist, and top-ten spots in their Readers’ Polls, and his work on Phil Kline’s “Out Cold” helped place that production on WQXR's Operavore "Best Opera of 2012". In 2010, Bleckmann received the prestigious JAZZ ECHO award from the Deutsche Phono-Akademie in his native Germany.
Legendary composer, performer, and sound artist Joan La Barbara has had an undeniable impact on the course of contemporary vocal music. Her work with composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley, and dozens of others—as well as her own work as a composer and vocal explorer— make her an icon in the contemporary vocal music world. She joins us this year on night two of Resonant Bodies Festival, on September 6th, at Roulette. In this interview we discuss her new opera about Virginia Wolf and Joseph Cornell, her compositional process, her work with Cage, Berio, and Feldman, and about her experience as a woman in the music world. Check out more about this podcast, including audio links to excerpts heard on the show, in our Show Notes page.
Show Notes
Legendary composer, performer, and sound artist Joan La Barbara has had an undeniable impact on the course of contemporary vocal music. Her work with composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley, and dozens of others—as well as her own work as a composer and vocal explorer— make her an icon in the contemporary vocal music world. She joins us this year on night two of Resonant Bodies Festival, on September 6th, at Roulette. In this interview we discuss her new opera about Virginia Wolf and Joseph Cornell, her compositional process, her work with Cage, Berio, and Feldman, and about her experience as a woman in the music world.
Podcast notes: correction to La Barbara's statement about the tempo of Three Voices: determined by five 32nd notes in the space of one eighth note. Correction to the name of the ensemble: Electronic Phoenix.
BiographyRead a full biography at joanlabarbara.com
Joan La Barbara’s career as a composer/performer/soundartist explores the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument expanding traditional boundaries in developing a unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques: multiphonics, circular singing, ululation and glottal clicks that have become her "signature sounds". In 2008, La Barbara was awarded the American Music Center's Letter of Distinction for significant contributions to the field of contemporary American music. Creating works for multiple voices, chamber ensembles, music theater, orchestra and interactive technology, her awards in the U.S. and Europe include: 2016 John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; 2013 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship; 2011 Premio Internzionale "Demetrio Stratos" Per la sperimentazione musicale; 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition; DAAD Artist-in-Residency in Berlin and 7 National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in Music Composition, Opera/Music Theatre, Inter-Arts, Recording (2), Solo Recitalist and Visual Arts; ISCM International Jury Award; Akustische International Competition Award; Aaron Copland Fund for Music; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Collaboration Award of NY Coalition of Professional Women in the Arts and Media; Meet The Composer and ASCAP Awards.
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Carolyn Connors (b.1962) is an Australian composer, vocalist, instrumentalist, performer, collaborator and teacher, working in the fields of contemporary music, improvisation, and theatre. Recent solo works include Pitcher at the Avantwhatever Festival at the 3RRR Performance Space (2016). What comes after love? and Pitcher were both recorded and broadcast on ABC FM in 2015. Hector and Susan, for voice and Google translate, weaves vocal extravaganza with translation technology, and was a LA15 commission which premiered at the National Gallery of Victoria for Capitalist Surrealism, Liquid Architecture 2015. Carolyn collaborates as a deviser/singer in new works. In 2016 she co-devised and performed in the award-winning Between 8 and 9 which was performed in Chengdu, China, for the signing of the sister-state relationship between Sichuan and Victoria. In 2015 she collaborated and performed The Perfect Human and Domicile by Aviva Endean; and Suite Actuality by Ad Hoc Music Collective at the Ballarat Festival of Slow Music. Carolyn performed the lead role of Miss Tinklefinger in Still Awake Still (2011-14), which premiered at the Victorian Arts Centre and toured extensively in 2014, including the New Victory Theater, New York; Fayetteville; Pittsburgh; Los Angeles; and 23 Australian venues. Her trio Hammers Lake with Judith Hamann performed at Tectonics Adelaide, Adelaide Festival 2014. Recent recognitions include The Age Melbourne Music Genre Award: Best experimental/avant garde act 2015 and the 2017 George Fairfax New Theatre Award, for Between 8 and 9.
Carolyn Connors sits down with ResBods Australia co-director Jane Sheldon to talk about her upcoming set on May 5th, 2017, at Melbourne Recital Centre. Carolyn discusses her path to the particular vocal language she’s developed since leaving behind her initial plans to be a pianist. For more information and for links to the recordings heard on this episode, please visit our Show Notes page!
Show Notes
In preparation for the first expansion of Resonant Bodies Festival outside of New York City, Festival director Lucy Dhegrae speaks with Jane Sheldon (RBF 2014) and Jessica Aszodi (RBF 2015) about their vision for the first Resonant Bodies Australia, presented by Melbourne Recital Centre as part of the Metropolis New Music Festival 2017. ResBods Oz will feature five vocalists who will come together for the first time on May 5th, 2017.
Soprano and Resonant Bodies Festival administrative associate Alexandra Porter chats with Festival director Lucy Dhegrae about her work with the festival as well as how it has inspired her own concert series, CUSP, in Princeton, NJ, and her work as a solo vocalist.
Swedish vocalist Sofia Jernberg sits down with ResBods director Lucy Dhegrae to talk about her set from RBF 2016 on September 6th at Roulette. Sofia discusses her use of extended vocal techniques and her upcoming CD release, as well as her experience as an improvisor, growing up in Sweden and Vietnam, and where she sees her artistic vision moving in the future. For more information about Sofia Jernberg and links to the recordings heard on this episode, please visit our Show Notes here!
Show Notes
Sofia Jernberg is a Swedish experimental singer, composer and performer, born in Ethiopia in 1983. She grew up in Sweden, Ethiopia and Vietnam. Since 2011 she is based in Oslo, Norway.
SINGER
One of her deepest interests as a singer is to explore the “instrumental” possibilities of the voice. Her singing vocabulary include sounds and techniques that often contradict a conventional singing style. She has dug deep into split tone singing, pitchless singing and distorted singing.
BAND LEADER
In contemporary jazz octet Paavo and new music quartet The New Songs.
MUSIC THEATER
She has performed several staged music theater pieces like Arnold Schönberg’s ”Pierrot Lunaire”, Salvatore Sciarrinos "Lohengrin”. Composers have written roles especially with her in mind like in Emily Hall’s ”Folie à Deux and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s ”UR:”.
VISUAL ART
She has performed together with visual artist Camille Norment and was a part of her piece ”Rapture” (Venice Biennale 2015) and ”Lull” (Festspillene i Bergen 2016).
IMPROVISER
As an improviser, Sofia appears in many different constellations, but regularly in duo with cellist Lene Grenager.
COMPOSER
As a composer, her main focus lies in blending improvisation and composition. Besides composing for her own ensembles, she regularly gets commissions from others. Previous commissions: Barents composer orchestra, Swedish Radio, Stockholm Jazz Festival, Trondheim jazz orchestra, vocal ensemble Oslo 14 and various chamber ensembles.
SIDE MAN
Fire! Orchestra, M&M&M and the Instant Gratification, Trondheim Jazz Orchestra
"Open-hearted" mezzo soprano Abigail Fischer talks with Resonant Bodies Festival director Lucy Dhegrae about her upcoming 2016 Festival set. In this episode you will hear tracks by Lewis Pesacov, Missy Mazzoli, and Caleb Burhans; Fischer discusses her collaborations with composers Nico Muhly, John Zorn, Burhans, Mazzoli, and her surprising path to commissioning works related to spirituality.
Show Notes
"Open-hearted" mezzo soprano Abigail Fischer talks with Resonant Bodies Festival director Lucy Dhegrae about her upcoming 2016 Festival set. In this episode you will hear tracks by Lewis Pesacov, Missy Mazzoli, and Caleb Burhans; Fischer discusses her collaborations with composers Nico Muhly, John Zorn, Burhans, Mazzoli, and others.
Bio"With her dramatic tumble of red hair and cello-mellow voice, Ms. Fischer sings with dramatic restraint that has no equal in her generation. You didn't want her to stop." So said Zachary Woolfe of the New York Times after Ms. Fischer's performance of George Benjamin's Upon Silence with Orchestra of Saint Luke's at the New York Phil Bienniel. Among the contemporary pieces she has championed, the most notable may be Missy Mazzoli's first opera Song from the Uproar, performed at LA Opera, Chautauqua Opera, and Da Camera Houston in the 2015-2016 season.
Also in 2015-16, Ms. Fischer returned to Boston Symphony Orchestra as soloist (and Fairy actress!) in incidental music from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream conducted by Andris Nelsons, championed the lead role as Mrs. X.E. in the world premiere of Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone in New York City’s Prototype Festival, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with New Bedford Symphony Orchestra, and dug into her new favorite role of Carmen in both La Tragèdie de Carmen (Brook/Bizet) at Colorado Music Festival and an abridged Bizet version at Bay Chamber Concerts in Rockport, Maine.
Upcoming in the 2016-17 season will include Handel Messiah with the Milwaukee Symphony and the Duke Chapel Choir, Missy Mazzoli's Song from the Uproar at the Gardiner Museum in Boston, and her Italian stage debut in Toshio Hosakawa's The Raven in Bolzano, Italy.
German vocalist Frauke Aulbert has been called “Hamburg’s Queen of the Avante garde.” With a four octave range and a pocket full of extended vocal techniques, Frauke takes curiosity very seriously, and is one of the most accomplished virtuosic vocalists in the new music world today. Her set on the Resonant Bodies Festival on the closing night, September 8th, features improvisations using tuvan throat singing and beatboxing, as well as works by Christine MacComb and Alexander Schubert. For more information, please visit our Show Notes.
Show Notes
Frauke Aulbert
As “Hamburg’s queen of avantgarde” (Hamburger Abendblatt), Frauke Aulbert boasts a vocal range of four octaves and has specialized in the contemporary vocal performance having mastered overtone- and undertone-singing, multiphonics and other timbre-altering techniques, in addition to her formal training in lyrical singing. As a vocal-sound-researcher she studies, describes and sings many different genres - including gamelan, jazz, chanson, dhrupad, beatboxing, höömii – and applies those sounds to her interpretation of contemporary vocal music.
Improvisation and (première) performances of pieces specifically written for her voice have led to performance in festivals all over Europe, such as the Casa Giacinto Scelsi in Rome, Radio France/Festival Presence, the ZKM, the Internationale Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Sommerliche Musiktage Hitzacker, International Stockhausen-Summerclasses, Hamburger Klangwerktage, aDevantgarde, Klang Copenhaguen, Next came Brussels, Berghain and Klangwerkstatt Berlin. International concert tours have included Brasil, the USA, Australia Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Tunisia and Georgia. An invitation to the LIG Art Hall in Seoul led her to Korea in 2015.
In 2009 she was awarded the first prize by the Stockhausen Foundation for her interpretation of Stockhausen’s INDIANERLIEDER. The music theatre piece ‚Josefine singt’, in which she developed and played the lead character, was given the international Music Theatre NOW award in 2012.
Frauke Aulbert has collaborated with the composers Georges Aperghis, Vinko Globokar, Hans-Joachim Hespos, Simon Stockhausen, Geoffroy Drouin and Alexander Schubert. She has been recording for film ('The Future', Miranda July), CD (Decoder Ensemble, Magic Mallik etc.) and radio (Deutschlandradio, RAI, Radio France etc.)
She studied in Kiel, Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Hamburg (diploma) and has attended masterclasses with Lauren Newton, Sainkho Namchylak, Michael Vetter, Michiko Hirayama, Linda Wise and Amelia Cuni. Her dissertation examined “Overtone Singing in Contemporary Music.”
In 2012 she was awarded a one month residency in Rome by the Goethe-Institute and received a grant from the Culture Secretary of Germany providing for a six month residency in the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris. Her work and her concerts are supported by the Ministery of Culture of Germany, IMPULS New Musik, the Stockhausen Foundation, Feldtmann kulturell, the Deutsche Auswärtige Amt, the Hamburger Kulturbehörde and the Foundation Katharina und Gerhard Hoffmann.
Sophia Burgos sits down with RBF director Lucy Dhegrae to talk about her upcoming set on September 8th, 2016, at Roulette. Sophia discusses working with Barbara Hannigan and Sir Simon Rattle, on-stage nudity, extended techniques, and her secret list of composers she’s keeping tabs on. For more information and for links to the recordings heard on this episode, please visit our Show Notes.
SHOW NOTES
Catch Sophia Burgos on Night Three of the 2016 Resonant Bodies Festival on September 8th!Biography
Hailed by the London Times as “astounding”, Chicago born soprano Sophia Burgos is a passionate interpreter of vocal works ranging from art song and chamber music to contemporary opera, collaborating with artists in America and Europe. In the 2015-2016 season, Ms. Burgos made her European opera debut premiering the title role of Maria Republica by François Paris with Angers-Nantes Opera, as well as singing the title role of Jennie in the New York premiere of Oliver Knussen’s Higglety Pigglety Pop! with the Bard College Conservatory conducted by James Bagwell. In October, Ms. Burgos had the pleasure of making her Carnegie Hall debut with theAmerican Symphony Orchestra performing Henri Dutilleux’s masterpiece Correspondances with conductor Leon Botstein.
A champion of new works, Ms. Burgos has collaborated with esteemed composers such as Andre Previn, premiering his Two Lyric Songs: The Waking as part of the 75th year anniversary of the Tanglewood Music Center, and was recognized in her performance of George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children by the London Times for “making light of the vocal part’s virtuoso technical demands… with an always beautiful sound.” Ms. Burgos also developed operatic roles such as Iphigenia in Osvaldo Golijov’s latest opera, Iphigenia in Aulis, with excerpts workshopped at the Metropolitan Opera.
As a member of the [Switch~ Ensemble], Ms. Burgos performs innovative electro-acoustic works such as (Voi)Rex by Philippe Leroux, Star Me Kitten by Alexander Schubert, and the multimedia opera HUNGER by Jason Thorpe Buchanan. As a soloist, she has given dozens of premieres of works by young composers in both Europe and the United States.
During her time in the Bard College Conservatory’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, Ms. Burgos portrayed the title role of Handel’s rarely performed oratorio, Esther, conducted by James Bagwell, and the role of Angel Gabriel in Haydn’s The Creation with the Bard Conservatory Orchestra and members of the American Symphony Orchestra. Under the close mentorship of renowned American soprano Dawn Upshaw, Burgos has performed art song and contemporary music recitals throughout New York City and the Hudson Valley.
In the summer of 2014, Ms. Burgos was invited to the Lucerne Festival Academy as a soloist in Luciano Berio's Coro, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, and selected for masterclasses and private instruction with Barbara Hannigan. She performed as soloist in Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2 and Matthias Pintscher's Twilight Song, reviewed by Deutschlandfunk as the “Highlight of the evening, but also, and above all, due to the fantastic soprano Sophia Burgos”.
During her Bachelor’s studies at the Eastman School of Music, Ms. Burgos performed works such as Akrostichon Wortspiel by Unsuk Chin and Steve Reich’s Tehillim with the Musica Nova Ensemble conducted by Brad Lubman. She also had the great pleasure of performing Knoxville Summer of 1915 by Samuel Barber in the Eastman Theatre with the Graduate Chamber Orchestra as the winner of the Eastman concerto competition. In 2013, Ms. Burgos was awarded third place in both the Friends of Eastman Opera competition and the Jesse Kneisel Lieder Competition.
In addition to her artistry as a singer, Ms. Burgos is passionate about education and outreach through art, holding a degree and certification in Music Education. Spanish folk song and dance are her earliest musical influences as she and her family celebrate their strong Puerto Rican heritage. She is vegan, and deeply interested in animal rights. Ms. Burgos currently studies with Edith Bers and looks forward to returning to the Tanglewood Music Center this June for her second fellowship.
Thank so much to HumidiFlyer, the sponsor of Resonant Bodies Podcast season one!
Many thanks to TIGUE for the use of their music on our podcast. Check them out at TigueMusic.com.
Bass-baritone Dashon Burton discusses his upcoming set for the 2016 Resonant Bodies Festival with RBF director Lucy Dhegrae. Burton's set on September 7th at Roulette includes pieces by David Hurd, Jake Endris, Georges Aperghis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and new original works by Burton for voice and electronics. For more information about this episode, as well as links to more artist videos, please visit our Show Notes here!
SHOW NOTES
Biography
The 2015-16 season for Bass-Baritone Dashon Burton includes performances of the title role in Elijah, two subscription weeks of Belshazzar's Feast with the Charleston Symphony, Mozart's Requiem in a return to Boson's Handel and Haydn Society, Bach's Mass in B Minor with the Baltimore Symphony and the Bach Society of St. Louis, and the role of Jesus in Bach's St. Matthew Passion at the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival in Berea, Ohio.
In recent seasons, Burton debuted with the Cleveland Orchestra in Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen led by Franz Welser-Möst; also with Boston's Handel and Haydn Society in their production of Handel's Samson. He has toured Europe in Bach's St. John Passion with Christoph Pregardien's Le Concert Lorrain, and he sang the role of Jupiter in Les Talents Lyrique's production of Castor and Pollux with Christophe Rousset in Toulouse, France.
Burton is also an avid performer of new music, and has premiered works of Christopher Cerrone, Caroline Shaw, William Brittelle, and Judd Greenstein. He is a founding member of the internationally touring chamber ensemble Roomful of Teeth. Devoted To performing new compositions using the fullest possible range of vocal techniques, the group received a Grammy Award for "Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance" in 2014.
Burton earned his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, and his master's degree from Yale University.
See Dashon on Night Two of the 2016 Resonant Bodies Festival, 7:30-10:30pm at Roulette.
Julia Bullock has been hailed as an “impressive, fast-rising soprano… poised for a significant career.” (The New York Times) Equally at home with opera and concert repertoire, she has captivated audiences with her versatile artistry and commanding stage presence. This season she appears with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Alice Tully Hall in the Young Concert Artists Gala Concert, and with the Mobile Symphony and Sinfonia Gulf Coast, as well as in recital at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Kennedy Center, to name a few. Ms. Bullock also appears on The Song Continues series at Carnegie Hall. In November, she sings the lead role in the Berlin Philharmonic’s presentation of Kaija Saariaho’s La passion de Simone, in a world premiere staging directed by Peter Sellars, which she will reprise at the Ojai Festival in June 2016.
Ms. Bullock made her debut with the New York Philharmonic in summer 2015 performing Bernstein’s West Side Story Concert Suite No. 1 with Alan Gilbert in New York City parks, at Bravo! Vail, and in Santa Barbara. She made her San Francisco Symphony debut in concert performances of West Side Story conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas; an album of the concert was released on the orchestra’s label in June 2014. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “The evening’s most remarkable showstopper, Julia Bullock, appeared out of nowhere to deliver a full-voiced stunningly paced account of ‘Somewhere’—for just a moment, it seemed as though nothing Bernstein ever wrote was quite as magical as that one song.”
A frequent collaborator of Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, Julia Bullock has appeared numerous times with the New York Festival of Song, recently in their Harlem Renaissance program. Additionally, she performed the title role in Henry Purcell’s The Indian Queen at the Perm Opera House, Teatro Real, and the English National Opera, as well as the title roles in the Juilliard Opera productions of Massenet’s Cendrillon and Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, to rave reviews. Opera News wrote of the latter, “Julia Bullock as the titular vixen led the way in terms of clarity of delivery and beauty of sound. Her broad range of expression allowed her to be impetuous and demonstrative… then opulent and glorious.” Ms. Bullock has performed in South America as Pamina in Peter Brook’s award-winning A Magic Flute; and toured China, singing with the Bard Music Festival Orchestra. Other opera roles include Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro, Monica in The Medium, and the title role in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges.
Ms. Bullock’s accolades include a 2015 Leonore Annenberg Arts Fellowship, the 2015 Richard F. Gold Grant from the Shoshana Foundation, Lincoln Center’s 2015 Martin E. Segal Award, First Prize at the 2014 Naumburg International Vocal Competition, and First Prize at the 2012 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. A prolific recitalist, she has given performances and conducted educational outreach programs at the University of Florida Performing Arts, Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center, the Levine School of Music, and Music for Youth, as well as at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, San Francisco Performances, Rockefeller University, the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, and Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concerts.
The soprano enjoys the collaborative process with both established and up-and-coming composers. In 2011, she attended SongFest in California as a Stern Fellow, where she worked with pianist Roger Vignoles and composers John Musto and Libby Larsen. Ms. Bullock has sung in master classes with bass-baritone Eric Owens at Juilliard, soprano Jessye Norman at Zankel Hall, and José van Dam at Opéra Bastille in Paris. She also performed in the Dawn Upshaw / Donnacha Dennehy Workshop at Carnegie Hall, premiering pieces written for her by composer Shen Yiwen.
From 2003 to 2005, Ms. Bullock participated in the Artists-in-Training program with the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and graduated with the prestigious Marielle Hubner Award. She earned her Bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music, and her master’s degree at Bard College’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, where she was the first recipient of the Mimi Levitt Scholarship, and won Bard College’s 2010 Concerto Competition. She received her Artist Diploma from the Juilliard School, where she worked with Edith Bers. She holds the Lindemann Vocal Chair of Young Concert Artists, and also is supported by the Barbara Forester Austin Fund for Art Song.
Originally from Saint Louis, Missouri, Ms. Bullock integrates her musical life with community activism. She has organized benefit concerts for the Shropshire Music Foundation and International Playground, two non-profits that serve war-affected children and adolescents through music education and performance programs in Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Uganda, and St. Louis. She also participated in the Music and Medicine Benefit Concert for New York’s Weill Medical Center.