Deprofundidio II by Pablo Chin
Camanchacas by Carolina Carrizo
estamos bien per tiemblo by Francisco Corthey
Die Kreutzung by Chaya Czernowin
Flesh by Rebecca Saunders
Performances by
Julia Williams, accordion
Kyle Hutchins, saxophone
Kathryn Schulmeister, double bass
soundarte showcase
The Church/Art House
November 23, 2024
7:00 pm
Pablo Chin
Chin’s recent music often draws inspiration from the narratives of film and literature, phonetic structures in text, and the use of idiosyncratic transcription methods that enable imaginative exploration of pre-existent musical sources.
His music has been performed in South, Central and North America, in Israel, Asia and in Europe. He has been commissioned to compose works for Ensemble Recherche, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), members of the Anubis Quartet, the MAVerick Ensemble, the Latino Music Festival of Chicago and Ensemble Dal Niente, among others. His music has also been performed by artists including Fonema Consort, Nina Dante and Dalia Chin, Ostravská Banda, Chicago Composers Orchestra, Donatienne Michel-Dansaq, Pierre-Stéphane Meugé, Marino Formenti, Claire Chase, Eric Lamb, Gan Lev and Marcuss Weiss.
Chin earned a DMA in composition and technology from Northwestern University under the guidance of Hans Thomalla, Jay Alan Yim, and Aaron Cassidy. His dissertation focused on the work of Mexican composer Julio Estrada, his graphication method, and parallels found with the dream mechanisms in Freud’s Dream Theory. Previous instructors include Alejandro Cardona in his native Costa Rica, and Orlando García in Miami.
Currently Chin is instructor of Theory at Montclair State University, NJ, and co-founder and artistic director of the Fonema Consort. In 2017 he released his first portrait album under the New Focus Recordings Label titled “Three Burials.” Ongoing projects include a piece for harpsichord and MIDI keyboards for Daniel Walden exploring the merging of early music and new technology, a piece for electric guitar and electronics for Jesse Langen based on recordings of Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman, and an ensemble piece for Ensemble Aventure of Freiburg inspired by Mesias Maigushca’s outlook on popular opposition to oil drilling in his piece …por el Yasuní…
Kate Soper
Described by The New Yorker as "one of the great originals of her generation," composer/performer/writer Kate Soper has been creating unique and uncategorizable musico-theatrical spectacles for over a decade. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and Rome Prize fellow, she has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Koussevitzky Foundations and the American Academy of Letters, and has been commissioned by Miller Theatre, Alarm Will Sound, and the New York Philharmonic. Her large-scale works include the monodramas Voices from the Killing Jar and IPSA DIXIT and the operas Here Be Sirens, The Romance of the Rose, and The Hunt.
Praised by The New York Times for her "lithe voice and riveting presence," Soper performs frequently as a new music soprano. She has premiered works by Sky Macklay, George Lewis, Alex Mincek, and Eric Wubbels, and has been featured as a composer/vocalist on the New York City-based MATA festival and Miller Theatre Composer Portraits series, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's MusicNOW series, and the LA Philharmonic's Green Umbrella Series. As a non-fiction and creative writer, she has been published by McSweeney's Quarterly, PAJ, the Massachusetts Review, Theory and Practice, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies.
Soper is a co-director and performer for Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries. She is the Iva Dee Hiatt Professor of Music at Smith College.
Carolina Carrizo
Professor and Graduate in music with a composition orientation trained at the Facultad de Artes – Universidad Nacional de La Plata. She has received recognition from the National University of La Plata as a Distinguished Graduate of the Bachelor’s Degree in Music Composition Orientation 2019.
She actively works as a composer focusing on productions that involve digital media in relation to both sound and video. She is currently professor at the Facultad de Artes and the Bachillerato de Bellas Artes (Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Argentina).
She has received commissions and regularly participates in various National and international new music festivals. His works have been performed in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Mexico, USA, Spain, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Israel and Iran.
Francisco Corthey
Francisco Corthey was born on August 6, 1991, in Entre Ríos (Argentina). From an early age, he participated as a percussionist in many different musical projects, especially Argentine folk music and rock. At the age of 18 he moved to La Plata, Buenos Aires, where he completed a degree in Music Composition tutored by Mariano Etkin among others, and Orchestral Conducting. By that time, he took violin lessons with distinguished violinists from the Teatro Argentino de La Plata Symphony Orchestra, and for three years he was a member of the Teatro Argentino Chamber Orchestra as principal second violin. He was also the percussionist of Tapeku’a, an Argentinian Littoral music band. In 2021 he received a Master’s degree in composition from the Georgia Southern University (USA), where he was tutored by Martin Gendelman. In Spring 2022, he completed an Artistic Diploma at the Grieg Academy – University of Bergen (Norway), tutored by Dániel Péter Biró. Since Fall 2022 he is a PhD candidate in composition at SUNY University at Buffalo under the supervision of Tiffany Skidmore. He actively participated in several composition conferences and festivals such as TACEC Generation (Argentina 2018), with Simon Steen Andersen, Trio Catch and cellist Séverine Ballon; CEME Festival (Online Israel 2020/21) with Mauro Lanza and Meitar Ensemble; Darmstadt Summer Course (Online Germany 2021) where he had lessons with Chaya Czernowin, Mark Andre, George Lewis, and Isabel Mundry; Sounding Philosophy, organized by Dániel Péter Biró (Bergen, Norway), where he presented new compositions and had lessons with Marta Gentilucci and Samir Odeh-Tamimi, as well as workshops with Neue Vocalsolisten, Schola Heidelberg and Ensemble Aisthesis; June in Buffalo (2023) where he had masterclasses with Ann Cleare, Robert HP Platz, Melinda Wagner, and Mathew Rosenblum, and worked on a new piece for the Arditti Quartet; ilSUONO (2023) where he had lessons with Carmine-Emanuele Cella and Sivan Eldar and worked on a new piece for bassist Giacomo Piermatti; Impuls (2023) where he had lessons with Franck Bedrossian and Pierluigi Billone.
Chaya Czernowin
Chaya Czernowin is a major, distinctive voice in new music on both sides of the Atlantic.—Andrew Clements 3/18/ 2021 The Guardian UK
One of the most fearless and most sensual composers of the present.— Christine Lemke-Matwey 11/21/2019 DIE ZEIT
Czernowin composes the negative beauty of disaster; it is the musical equivalent of Picasso’s “Guernica” or Anselm Kiefer’s “Margarethe.”— Alex Ross 8/27/2018 The New Yorker
Chaya Czernowin was born and brought up in Israel. After her studies in Israel, at the age of 25, she continued studying in Germany (DAAD grant), the US, and then lived in Tokyo, Japan (Asahi Shimbun Fellowship and American NEA grant), and in Germany (a fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude). Her music has been performed throughout the world, by the best orchestras and performers of new music, and she has held a professorship at UCSD and was the first woman to be appointed as a composition professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria (2006–2009), and at Harvard University, USA (2009 -to the present) where she has been the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music. Together with Steven Kazuo Takasugi and Jean-Baptiste Jolly, the director of Akademie Schloss Solitude near Stuttgart, she has founded the summer Academy at Schloss Solitude, a biannual course for composers, 2003- 2019. Takasugi and Czernowin also taught at Tzlil Meudcan, an international course based in Israel founded by Yaron Deutsch of Ensemble Nikel.
“Vital, visceral, wild and undefined as experience itself – can music be that? I have heard such music, rarely, but, it has changed my life. Attempting to work towards it, though, is a difficult balancing act: one must be as sensually sensitive as if one has no skin, while exercising the analytical clarity, precision and focus of holding a surgeon’s knife.”
— CHAYA CZERNOWIN
Czernowin’s output includes chamber and orchestral music, with and without electronics. Her works were played in most of the significant new music festivals. She composed 4 large scale works for the stage: Pnima...ins Innere (2000, Munich Biennale) chosen to be the best premiere of the year by Opernwelt yearly critic survey, and received the prestigious Bayerischer Theaterpreis; Adama (2004/5) with Mozart's Zaide (Salzburg Festival 2006) Adama has a second version written with Ludger Engles, with an added choir which was presented in Freiburg Stadttheater (2017). The opera Infinite Now was written in 2017, a commission of Vlaamse Opera Belgium, IRCAM Paris, and Mannheim Stadtheater. The piece combines/ superimposes materials of the first world war (Luk Perceval's theater piece "FRONT") with the short story Homecoming by Can Xue. This opera was chosen as the premier of the year in the international critics’ survey of Opernwelt. In 2018/2019 Czernowin Wrote the text and music to Heart Chamber which was premiered and commissioned by the Deutsche Oper Berlin, in the direction of Claus Guth to a strong critical and public acclaim. Czernowin was appointed Artist in residence at the Salzburg Festival in 2005/6 and at the Lucern Festival, Switzerland in 2013, and at Huddersfield Festival 2021.
Characteristic of her work are working with metaphor as a means of reaching and analyzing a sound world that is unfamiliar; the use of noise and physical parameters as weight, textural surface (as in smoothness or roughness, brightness or darkness); an inquiry of the handling of time; and shifting of scale. and perspective. These ways of working/thinking fuse her work with multi-sensory content and work to reach a sonic expression which includes the subconscious and goes beyond style, conventions, or rationality.
In addition to numerous other prizes, Czernowin represented Israel at Uncesco composer's Rostrum 1980; was awarded the DAAD scholarship ('83–85); Stipendiumpreis ('88) and Kranichsteiner Musikpreis ('92), at Darmstadt Fereinkurse; IRCAM (Paris) reading panel commission ('98); scholarships of SWR experimental Studio Freiburg ('98, '00, '01 and more); The composer’s prize of Siemens Foundation ('03); the Rockefeller Foundation, ('04); a nomination as a fellow to the Wissenschaftkolleg Berlin ('08); Fromm Foundation Award ('09); and Guggenheim Foundation fellowship ('11); Heidelberger Kunstlerinen Preis ('16); The WERGO portrait CD The Quiet (5 orchestral pieces) has been awarded the Quarterly German Record Critics’ Award ('16 ). She was chosen as a member of the Akademie der Kuenste in Berlin in 2017, and as a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Munich in 2021. In 2022 She was awarded the Gema Authors prize in the Musiktheater (new opera) category.
Czernowin's work is published by Schott. Her music is recorded on Mode records NY, Wergo, Col Legno, Deutsche Gramophone, Kairos, Neos, Ethos, Telos Naxos, and Einstein Records. She lives near Boston with composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi. Czernowin is an Israeli/ American Citizen.
Rebecca Saunders
With her distinctive and intensely striking sonic language, Berlin-based British composer Rebecca Saunders (b.1967) is a leading international representative of her generation. Saunders pursues an intense interest in the sculptural and spatial properties of organised sound and seeks a close collaborative dialogue with a variety of contemporary musicians and artists. Born in London, she studied composition with Nigel Osborne and Wolfgang Rihm. Saunders has received numerous prizes, including the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 2019, and most recently received the Golden Lion for Music from the Venice Biennale 2024. She received an Honorary Doctorate from the Universities of Huddersfield in 2018 and Edinburgh in 2023. She is a member of the Academies of Arts in Berlin, Dresden and Munich.
Kyle Hutchins
Kyle Hutchins is a visionary experimental performance artist, composer, improviser, and educator, forging new sonic frontiers with his saxophone, voice, cutting-edge technology, and an arsenal of unconventional instruments. Hailed as “epic” (Jazz Times) and “gripping” (Star Tribune), Kyle’s music has been showcased at prestigious venues like Carnegie Hall and The Walker Art Center, and featured at festivals across five continents, including the World Saxophone Congress, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, and the International Computer Music Conference. His artistry has earned him accolades from DOWNBEAT, New Music USA, The American Prize, and American Protégé, as well as recognition in The Roanoker Magazine’s “40 under 40” for 2024.
A leading figure in experimental performance and electroacoustic new music, Kyle has premiered over 350 new works and appears on more than thirty albums as both a leader and sideman. He regularly performs with 113 Composers Collective, Fonema Consort, and Strains Ensemble, and has worked with prominent composers and performers including Pauline Oliveros, George Lewis, Chaya Czernowin, Douglas Ewart, and Claire Chase. Kyle has also developed long-standing collaborations with many contemporary artists such as Ted Moore, Tiffany M. Skidmore, Joey Crane, Emily Lau, Elizabeth A. Baker, Charles Nichols, Eric Lyon, and many more wonderful artists and dear friends.
“Part of electroacoustic improv’s well-hewn dynasty” (Downtown Music Gallery), Kyle is an eminent improviser whose playing is described as “undoubtedly brave” (Issues Magazine) and “frankly unsafe” (I Care If You Listen). His work can be heard on labels such as Carrier, Lurker Bias, Noise Pelican, and Mother Brain, as well as at festivals and series like afterMAF, SKRONK, and CUSP. His ongoing projects, including Binary Canary, Kill All Kings, and Banshee, draw on influences from free jazz, noise music, and punk rock.
Since 2016, Kyle has been a faculty member at Virginia Tech, where he serves as Assistant Professor of Practice in the School of Performing Arts and Director of the New Music + Technology Festival and ArtX Program at the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts and a Master of Music degree from the University of Minnesota, and Bachelor's degrees in Music Performance and Music Education from the University of North Texas, studying under Eugene Rousseau, Eric Nestler, Marcus Weiss, and James Dillon.
Kyle is a Performing Artist for Yamaha, Légère, and E. Rousseau Mouthpieces.
Kathryn Schulmeister
Praised for her “expressive and captivating performance” (GRAMMY.com), bassist Kathryn Schulmeister brings radiant energy to her creative musical practice ranging from classical to experimental. With a fearless curiosity for collaborative environments, Kathryn’s enthusiasm for seeking opportunities to integrate improvisation, movement and theatre into her creative practice have led her to thrive as an active performer in festivals and venues around the world.
Kathryn is a member of several contemporary music ensembles including the renowned Australian ELISION Ensemble, Fonema Consort (NYC), and the Echoi Ensemble (LA). She has performed as a guest artist with various adventurous international ensembles such as Klangforum Wien, Ensemble MusikFabrik, Delirium Musicum, Ensemble Dal Niente, and Ensemble Vertixe Sonora.
Equally passionate and experienced as an orchestral musician, Kathryn served as a core member of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra for three consecutive seasons from 2014-2017 and has performed with the Ojai Festival Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony, New West Symphony, California Chamber Orchestra, Lucerne Festival Alumni Orchestra, Pacific Lyric Opera, Maui Chamber Orchestra, and Hawaii Opera Theater.
Kathryn received her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Contemporary Music Performance from the University of California San Diego, Master of Music degree from McGill University, and Bachelor of Music degree from the New England Conservatory of Music.
In Fall 2023, Kathryn joined the faculty of the University of the Pacific Conservatory of Music as Assistant Professor of Practice in String Bass.
Julia Williams
Accordionist Julia WIlliams performs as a soloist and with groups as a specialist in classical, swing musette, tango, and contemporary music. She studied piano accordion and chromatic button accordion as a youth with Dee Langley of Minneapolis. She has degrees in accordion performance from the University of Missouri, Kansas City and music literature/historical musicology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. In Kansas City she studied with Joan C. Sommers and was a featured soloist in master class with Friedrich Lips of Moscow’s Gnessin Institute of Music. Her performance competition prizes include the American Guild of Music’s North American Invitational Championship and the Accordionists and Teachers Guild United States classical solo championship.
Now a resident of Lincoln, Williams first cut her teeth as a performer in the lobby of the legendary Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. She has a keen interest in music for the theater and multi-disciplinary performance. Her theatrical credits include productions of ‘A Fiddler on the Roof,’ ‘A Three-Penny Opera,’ ‘The Doctor in Spite of Himself,’ and ‘The Government Inspector.’ She has played with the Basilica of St. Mary Choir in Minneapolis, the Tulsa Philharmonic chamber ensemble, and The Prairie Ensemble in Champaign, Illinois. Recently she was tapped by the Sioux City Symphony for its live music production of the film ‘The Godfather,’ and by the Omaha Symphony for its live music production of the film ‘Ratatouille.’