School of Music

View the full Music and Change series here. This event is open to the institute; RSVP using this form.

Nathan Young ( (Delaware/Pawnee/Kiowa, b. 1975, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist and composer working in an expanded practice that incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially engaged art and experimental and improvised music. Nathan’s work often engages the spiritual and the political, re-imagining Indigenous sacred imagery in order to complicate and subvert notions of the sublime and is described by the artist as American Indian Gothic. Nathan is a founding and former member of the artist collective Postcommodity (2007-2015) and holds an MFA in Music / Sound from Bard College’s Milton-Avery School of the Arts. Young is the recipient of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2016-2018) and the George Kaiser Family Foundation Arts Integration Grant (2019-23). In February 2018 Young’s performative lecture, Welcome to Lenapehoking was the inaugural performance for the grand opening of Performance Space New York and Young’s solo show, Night Music of the Southern Plains American Indian recently premiered at the Kansas City Arts Institute Crossroads Gallery in November, 2018. Nathan is the artist-curator of the multi-platform project Tulsa Noise and co-organizer of Tulsa Noisefest.

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Mixing performance with inspirational discards, assembled utilitarian objects, interactive technology, movement, and music, Opera Povera Director Sean Griffin has been active throughout the US, Mexico, Asia, and Europe, directing, designing, composing, arranging, recording, and conducting. Whether inventing a language, or composing hysteric choreographic and choral methodologies, concert music works, film scores, installations, operas, and devised music theater, or creating hundreds of numerically-conceived collages and drawings, intuitive and experimental music practices lie at the foundation of Griffin’s works.

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View the full Music and Change series here. This event is open to the institute; RSVP using this form.

A dynamic violinist and entrepreneur, Stephanie Matthews is a modern-day citizen artist championing artistic excellence and social consciousness. She is the co-founder of the Re-Collective Orchestra, an all-black orchestra dedicated to raising the visibility and profile of black musicians and to present culturally relevant work to engage diverse audiences. Matthews is the former director of artist development for the Sphinx Organization, cultivating the careers of some of the nation's top Black and Latino artists through professional development initiatives, including the Sphinx Competition, Sphinx Soloist Program, and the Sphinx Virtuosi tour. She has served as the assistant dean and violin faculty with the Sphinx Performance Academy and served as artist in residence at the National Academy of Performing Arts in Trinidad and Tobago.

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Laetitia Sonami is a sound artist, performer and researcher. Sonami's sound performances, live‐film collaborations, and sound installations focus on issues of presence and participation. She has devised new gestural controllers for performance and applies new technologies and appropriated media to achieve an expression of immediacy through sound, place, and objects. Best known for her unique instrument, the elbow-length lady's glove, which is fitted with an array of sensors tracking the slightest motion of her hand and body, she has performed worldwide and earned substantial international renown. Recent projects include the design of a new instrument, the Spring Spyre, based on the application of neural networks to real-time audio synthesis; an improvisation duo, Sparrows and Ortolans, with James Fei; and Le Corps Sonore, a fully immersive sound installation on six floors of the Rubin Museum, NYC in collaboration with Eliane Radigue and Bob Bielecki. Sonami has received numerous awards including the Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Awards. She is currently guest faculty at the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College and guest faculty at the Bard MFA program.

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William Parker is a bassist, improviser, composer, writer, and educator from New York City, heralded by The Village Voice as “the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time.” In addition to recording more than 150 albums, he has published six books and taught and mentored hundreds of young musicians and artists. Parker’s current bands include the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, In Order to Survive, Raining on the Moon, Stan’s Hat Flapping in the Wind, and the Cosmic Mountain Quartet with Hamid Drake, Kidd Jordan, and Cooper-Moore. Throughout his career he has performed with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Milford Graves, and David S. Ware, among others. 

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Asher Hartman is a transgender writer, director, and maker of live performances. His works, which combine strategies of theater and performance art, grapple with social and political issues in an era of chronic crisis, particularly themes of American violence. His works are dense, visual, poetic embodied texts, infused with clown and cringe humor, evidence of trance and psychic journeying, set in installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and dislodge deep feeling.

 

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View the full Music and Change series here. This event is open to the Institute; RSVP using this form.

Described as a “New Jazz Power Source” by the New York Times, cellist and composer TOMEKA REID has emerged as one of the most original, versatile, and curious musicians in Chicago’s bustling jazz and improvised music community over the last decade. Her distinctive melodic sensibility, always rooted in a strong sense of groove, has been featured in many distinguished ensembles over the years.  

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