School of Music

Born in Tokyo in 1980, Rei Jin is the grandson of Nyodo Jin, a famous compiler of traditional shakuhachi honkyoku music, and as such has been intimately connected with classical Japanese arts from childhood. He studied the shakuhachi first with his father, Nyoshou Jin, and then with masters Reibo Aoki, Junsuke Kawase, Hozan Yamamoto, and Jumei Tokumaru. His education includes completing a course in modern Japanese music, graduating with a major in the shakuhachi from the Department of Traditional Japanese Music, Tokyo University of the Arts, and completing a Master’s course from the Graduate School of Music at the same university. He has served as an education research assistant at the Faculty of Music, Tokyo University of the Arts between 2007 and 2009 and from 2015 to the present.

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John Bischoff (b. 1949, San Francisco) is a composer known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis and the pioneering development of computer network music. He was a founding member of The League of Automatic Music Composers (1978), considered to be the world’s first computer network band. He is also a founding member of The Hub (1987), a network band that continues to expand on the network music form today. Recordings of Bischoff’s work are available on Artifact, 23Five, Tzadik, Lovely, and New World Records. In 1999, he was a recipient of a prestigious $25,000 Artist Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (NY). As a member of the Hub, he was awarded a GigaHertz Prize for life-time achievement in Electronic Music in 2018 by ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. He is an emeritus professor of music at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.

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

Veteran DJ Jahi Sundance is known for making inspired selections from varied genres and fashioning bold and imaginative soundscapes for audiences from clubs to concert halls. Sundance was the tour DJ for a number of recording artists: Talib Kweli, Mos Def, M’eshell Ndegeocello, and has performed as an integral part of ensembles led by Christian McBride, and Robert Glasper, among others. A producer in his own right, Jahi has produced tracks for Chris Brown, Danity Kane, and for the 2010 World Cup in Los Angeles.

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CHRIS BROWN, composer, pianist, and electronic musician, makes music with self-designed sonic systems that include acoustic and electroacoustic instruments, interactive software, computer networks, microtonal tunings, and improvisation. His compositions are designs for performances in which people bring to life the musical structures embedded in scores, instruments, and machines.
Early pieces featured instruments he invented and built including a prepared electric piano in the orchestral piece Alternating Currents (1983) and a digitally-controlled analog signal processor for the environmental piece for brass, percussion, and electronics Lava (1992). Talking Drum (1995-2000) was a MIDI network installation exploring polyrhythm, distance, and resonance in large architectural spaces. He is a founding member of the pioneering computer network band The HUB, which received the 2018 ZKM Giga-Hertz Prize for Electronic Music. Throughout his career he has composed solos for computer and for acoustic instruments with interactive electronics using self-authored software. Since 2005 he writes music in Just Intonation, also integrating rhythmic structures that parallel the proportions used in their tunings.
 

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Japan Ensemble continues its Guest Artist Lecture Demonstration Series with Oguri, Butoh artist. Butoh is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques, and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, Butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The art form is known to be difficult to define; common features of the art form include playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments, and it is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion. Over time, Butoh groups have been formed around the world, with various aesthetic ideals and intentions. 

Please join us. This series is open to the Institute, and is free and open to the public. Feel free to invite your friends!!

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

Haitian-born Val Jeanty is a Brooklyn-based Afro-electronic (VodouElectro) music composer, drummer, and turntablist. Her installations have been showcased at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and Lincoln Center in New York City, and internationally at Jazz a la Villette in France, the Venice Biennale in Italy, and SaalFelden Jazz Festival in Austria. She was a 2019 NYSCA Artist Fellowship recipient and has worked with a diverse array of artists including Anthony Braxton, Andrew Cyrille, and Geri Allen. Other highlights include Fascinating Her Resilience, a Wesleyan University-commissioned multimedia performance collaboration with professor Gina Ulysse and work with Afro-Cuban saxophonist Yosvany Terry on his Grammy-nominated album, New Throned King.

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This event is sponsored by the Nick England Intercultural Arts Project

Maria Maea is a multidisciplinary artist working in production, installation, and performance. Through film, sculpture, and movement she deepens her connection to source. She explores shadow and play through a range of meditative, durational, theatrical, and actionist modes. Maea builds structures across mediums and creates games to open herself up to participation. She investigates the ways we engage and view ourselves within the realities constructed for us and by us. As Samoan-Mexican American straddling different layers of identity. Maea's work operates as an illumination on the brown body’s (dys)function as capitalist commodity, as a resistance to somatic fixity, an examination of the multiplicities of consciousness, and survival as immigrants and first-generation Americans.

Micaela Tobin is a soprano, sound artist, and teacher based in Los Angeles, Calif. who specializes in experimental voice and contemporary opera, composing under the moniker White Boy Scream. Within this project Tobin dissects her operatic and extended vocal techniques through the use of electronics. Tobin’s most recent full length release, BAKUNAWA (Deathbomb Arc) is part sonic ritual, part diasporic storytelling. Of the album, Steve Smith of The New Yorker Magazine asserts that “opera would do well to pay attention.” Tobin is turning the album into a cinematic opera entitled BAKUNAWA: Opera of the Seven Moons. It will have its virtual premiere at REDCAT on May 1, 2021.

All are welcome! Please RSVP here to join!

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