Aug. 14th at 1pm

<-- Go Back to the Schedule!

Concert

Studio Z | August 14 | 1:00 pm CDT

Amplified Percussion

Al Cerulo, percussion

Jude Traxler, sound design

*Prelude*

Al Cerulo - Filter3

-PROGRAM-

Jude Traxler - In Modifier Keys (2019) - for Snare Drum, Crotales, & Tuning Forks

Eve Beglarian - Until it Blazes (2001, 2019 ver.) - for Glockenspiel

Mathew Rosenblum - SOS [Shiny Object Syndrome] (2019) - for Cymbal

Paula Matthusen - For these things that can be told/until mystery becomes elegy (2019) - for Vibraphone

Randy Gibson - Expanding Rhythms in Harmonic Time (2019) - for Bass Drum

*Postlude*

Echo Artifact - Selections

Program Note:

Amplified Perception is a seventy-five minute soundscape sculpted through the music of five composers whose compositional styles are each uniquely beautiful. Writing for a single voice, each composer enhances the acoustic timbre of their instrument with live amplification and/or digital processing. Today's journey will take the listener through various sound worlds - from the ambient to periodic to unearthly. It is with humble appreciation that I thank Jude, Eve, Matthew, Paula, and Randy for writing such beautiful and memorable music.

Audience members are asked to please refrain from applause between pieces. Listeners should feel free to move about the room at any time throughout the show so long as they do not impede or distract from the performance experience. Photos and videos are welcome. Please ensure that all sound and flash are disabled. Thank you and enjoy the show.

Bios:

According to the Los Angeles Times, composer and performer Eve Beglarian “is a humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” A 2017 winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work,” she has also been awarded the 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Prize from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts for her “innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation.”

Beglarian’s current projects include a collaboration with writer/performer Karen Kandel and director Mallory Catlett about women in Vicksburg from the Civil War to the present, a piece about the controversial Balthus painting Thérèse Dreaming for vocalist Lucy Dhegrae, and a pieces for the Dessoff Choirs and Roomful of Teeth celebrating Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days: "a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress...an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.” (Los Angeles Times)

In 2009, "Ms. Beglarian kayaked and bicycled the length of the Mississippi River [and] has translated her findings into music of sophisticated rusticity... [Her] new Americana song cycle captures those swift currents as vividly as Mark Twain did. The works waft gracefully on her handsome folk croon and varied folk instrumentation as mysterious as their inspiration." (New York Times)

Al Cerulo was given his first pair of drumsticks by his father at the age of seven and has never looked back. He has been praised for his work as a musician and educator both nationally and internationally. Al is an advocate for the commissioning and performing of new works by both established and up-and- coming composers to help move forward and breath new life into the art.

Mr. Cerulo is a founding member of Mantra Percussion but has worked with a numerous ensembles and a plethora of composers throughout his career. As a recording artist, he can be heard on a variety of recording labels such as Nexus, UTF, Innova Records, Lock Step Records and Bridgewater.

Al holds a masters degree from the Manhattan School of Music and degree in music education from William Paterson University. He has studied under the great tutelage of Raymond DesRoches, Peter Jarvis, Tom Kolor, Chris Lamb, Duncan Patton, James Preiss and Steven Schick.

Randy Gibson is a Brooklyn-based artist composing with sound, time, light, and space. Through performances, objects, and installations Gibson aims to shift the experience of passing time and confront the edges of perception and memory.

"Luxuriantly unhurried, intensely focused" (Thought Catalog) and “offering a glimpse of time outside of time” (I Care If You Listen), Gibson is known for performances of extreme duration. His 3.5 hour piano work The Four Pillars Appearing from The Equal D under Resonating Apparitions of The Eternal Process in The Midwinter Starfield, praised by The New York Times for its “arresting overtone clouds” and “dreamy, meditative visual accompaniment,” was named 2017 classical album of the year by Textura. Commissions for performance, dance, film, installation, and fixed media include works for Transit New Music Festival, Erik Carlson, R. Andrew Lee, Albert Cerulo, Kim Olson/Sweetedge, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, Scott Worthington, and The Tapeworm. In 2016, Gibson was awarded a NYFA fellowship in Music and Sound.

A long-time student of seminal pioneers of Minimal art La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Gibson continues to refine his ongoing theoretical work The Four Pillars into sprawling performance environments and objects that rigorously explore the potential of a precise set of numerical relationships while inviting stasis and reflection.

Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. In addition to writing for a variety of different ensembles, she also collaborates with choreographers and theater companies. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered.

Her music has been performed by Dither, Mantra Percussion, the Bang On A Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), orchest de ereprijs, The Glass Farm Ensemble, the Estonian National Ballet, James Moore, Kathryn Woodard, Todd Reynolds, Kathleen Supové, Margaret Lancaster and Jody Redhage. Her work has been performed at numerous venues and festivals in America and Europe, including the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, the MusicNOW Series of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Ecstatic Music Festival, Other Minds, the MATA Festival, Merkin Concert Hall, the Aspen Music Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music at MassMoCA, the Gaudeamus New Music Week, SEAMUS, International Computer Music Conference and Dither’s Invisible

Dog Extravaganza. She performs frequently with Object Collection, and through the theater company Kinderdeutsch Projekts.

Awards include the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Grant, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Awards, First Prize in the Young Composers’ Meeting Composition Competition, the MacCracken and Langley Ryan Fellowship, the “New Genre Prize” from the IAWM Search for New Music, and recently the 2014 Elliott Carter Rome Prize. Matthusen has also held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, create@iEar at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, STEIM, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Matthusen completed her Ph.D. at New York University – GSAS. She was Director of Music Technology at Florida International University for four years, where she founded the FLEA Laptop Ensemble. Matthusen is currently Associate Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, where she teaches experimental music, composition, and music technology.

With diverse musical elements derived from classical, jazz, rock, and world music traditions, Mathew Rosenblum’s compositions offer “an ear-buzzing flood of sound, rich in unusual overtones” (The Boston Globe). A wide array of groups have commissioned, performed and recorded his music such as the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet, FLUX Quartet, as well as many others. Using a variety of tuning systems, his work does not live within traditional boundaries, creating a compellingly fresh landscape. His music has been performed throughout the world including at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Prince Mahidol Hall in Bangkok, the China-ASEAN Music Week in Nanning, the Tonhalle in Düsseldorf, Sala Nezahualcóyotl in Mexico City, and at Carnegie Recital Hall, Merkin Hall and Miller Theatre in New York City. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Fromm Foundation Commissions, and a Barlow Endowment Commission. He received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music and Princeton University and is Professor of Composition and Chair of the Department of Music at the University of Pittsburgh where he also co-directs the Music on the Edge new music series and directs the Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival. His works appear on the MODE, New World Records, Albany, New Focus Recordings, BMOP/sound, Capstone, Opus One, Blue Griffin, and CRI Emergency Music labels and is published by C.F. Peters Corporation and Plurabelle Music (distributed by Subito Music Corporation). www.mathewrosenblum.com

Jude Traxler is an experimental and conceptual artist living in NYC. Both as a composer and percussionist, Jude constantly creates new works that sift a familiar soundscape of pan-diatonic chord progressions through beats that push one’s rhythmic constitution to the brink. With strict structures and rules, chance operations are controlled and every fleeting melody comes out as if clean-distilled from sonic chaos.

A native of Baton Rouge, Jude completed his Bachelor of Music degrees in Composition and Percussion Performance at Louisiana State University and his Master of Music in Contemporary Performance at the Manhattan School of Music. He teaches 6th, 7th, and 8th-grade “rock band” classes at the Lower Manhattan Community School (a public middle school in the financial district), and co-directs the historic Manhattan School of Music Percussion Ensemble. An avid recording engineer and sound designer, Jude has been a Staff Recording Engineer at Myers Recording Studio in Harlem for over ten years. He has performed, conducted, and recorded works for Cat Crisis, Innova, New Amsterdam, Bourbon Thomas, Cantaloupe, and New World Records.