Composers Now presents

Composer Curator with Miya Masaoka

Monday, June 27, 7pm on YouTube with live chat

Get the inside story through performance and conversation with host composer & sound artist Miya Masaoka for a peek into her creative process and that of composers she has invited to join her - Patricia Alessandrini, James Fei and Guillermo Galindo. Performance examples, insightful questions and compelling comments stimulate deeper listening and expand horizons for composers, performers and audiences.

Tune in for the YouTube presentation on Monday, June 27 at 7pm (NYC) for her Composer Curator event and chat live with Miya, Patricia, James and Guillermo.

Miya Masaoka is an American composer and sound artist. Her work explores bodily perception of vibration, movement and time while foregrounding complex timbre relationships. In 2018 she joined the Columbia University Visual Arts Department as an Associate Professor, where she is the director of the Sound Art Program, a joint program with the Computer Music Center. A 2019 Studio Artist for the Park Avenue Armory, Masaoka has also received the Doris Duke Artist Award in 2013, a Fulbright Fellowship to Japan in 2016, and an Alpert Award in 2003. Her work has been presented at the Venice Biennale, MoMA PS1, Kunstmuseum Bonn, and the Park Avenue Armory. She has been commissioned by and collaborated with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Glasgow Choir, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Bang on a Can, Jack Quartet, Del Sol, Momenta and the S.E.M. Ensemble. She has a 2019 commission for an outdoor installation at the Caramoor, Katonah, New York.

CREATORS

Patricia Alessandrini’s works actively engage with the concert music repertoire, and issues of representation, interpretation, perception and memory, often in the context of social and political issues. These works are often multimedia, theatrical, and collaborative, involving live electronics, resonating objects, and interactive video.

She studied composition and electronics at the Conservatorio di Bologna, Conservatoire de Strasbourg, and IRCAM, and holds two PhDs, from Princeton University and the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) respectively. Her principal composition teachers were Ivan Fedele, Paul Koonce, Tristan Murail, and Thea Musgrave.

Her works have been presented at Agora, Archipel, Ars Musica, Musica Strasbourg, Musiques Démesurées, Mostly Mozart, Sonorities, and Miso Music (Lisbon), and performed by ensembles including Accroche Note, Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Aleph, Ensemble Alternance, Ensemble InterContemporain, l’itinéraire, Nicolas Hodges, and Ensemble Vortex. She has collaborated with institutions including le centquatre (Paris), Elektromusikstudion (EMS-Stockholm), the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), IRCAM, and La Muse en Circuit (Paris). She is also a performer and improvisor of live electronics. She was composer-in-residence at the 2010 soundSCAPE festival, and with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) in 2012. She was awarded first prize in 2009 in the Sond’Arte Composition Competition for Chamber Music with Electronics, and a Förderpreis in Composition by the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 2012.

She previously taught at the Accademia Musicale Pescarese and Bangor University, and is currently a part-time Lecturer in Sonic Arts at Goldsmiths.

James Fei (b. Taipei, Taiwan) moved to the US in 1992 to study electrical engineering. He has since been active as a composer and performer on saxophones and live electronics. Works by Fei have been performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, MATA Micro Orchestra and Noord-Hollands Philharmonisch Orkest. Recordings can be found on Leo Records, Improvised Music from Japan, CRI, Krabbesholm and Organized Sound. Compositions for Fei's own ensemble of four alto saxophones focus on physical processes of saliva, fatigue, reeds crippled by cuts and the threshold of audible sound production, while his sound installations and performance on live electronics often focus on electronic and acoustic feedback. Fei received the Grants for Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2014 and he is president of Anthony Braxton's Tri-Centric Foundation. Fei has taught at Mills College in Oakland since 2006, where he is Professor of Electronic Arts, Director of the Center for Contemporary Music and Head of the Art and Technology Program.

The extent of the work of experimental composer, sonic architect, performance artist and visual media artist Guillermo Galindo, redefines the conventional limits between music, the art of music composition and the intersections between art disciplines, politics, humanitarian issues, spirituality and social awareness.

His acoustic work includes two commissioned orchestral compositions by the OFUNAM (Mexico University Orchestra) and the Oakland Symphony Orchestra and Choir, solo instrumental works, two operas, sonic sculptures, visual arts, computer interaction works, electro-acoustic music, film, instrument building, three-dimensional immersive installations and live improvisation.

Galindo’s graphic scores and three-dimensional sculptural cyber-totemic sonic objects have been shown at major museums and art biennials in America, Europe and Asia including (amongst others) documenta14 (2017), Pacific Standard Time (2017) and it is now part of the permanent collections of The Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, The Cornell Fine Arts Museum in Florida, LACMA in Los Angeles, California and The National Gallery in Washington DC.

In 2011 Galindo embarked on a unique collaboration with lauded American photographer Richard Misrach which became a traveling exhibit and an award-winning book published by Aperture Foundation. Border Cantos features Misrach’s photographs of the U.S./ Mexico border and Galindo’s sonic devices and graphic musical scores created from detritus left behind by immigrants and the border patrol apparatus.

In 2017 the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time biennale included Galindo’s solo exhibit Sonic Botany, an installation commenting on genetics and colonization and the environment in a post-apocalyptic world, was shown at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California.

MORE INFO

A URL to the event will be sent in a reminder email the day of the event. You can also access the stream from the event page on Eventbrite.

Composers Now empowers all living composers, celebrates the diversity of their voices and honors the significance of their artistic contributions to the cultural fabric of society.