Artistic Collaborators
Founded in 2006 to identify and support the work of emerging and established composers and their multi-media collaborators, Beth Morrison Projects encourages risk-taking, creating a structure for developing new work that is unique to the artist and where artists feel safe to experiment and push boundaries. Current and past artistic collaborators include the following:
Bill Morrison, filmmaker
Bill Morrison’s films have been screened at festivals, museums and concert halls worldwide, including the Sundance Film Festival, the Tate Modern, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. He has collaborated with numerous renowned composers, including John Adams, Gavin Bryars, Dave Douglas, Richard Einhorn, Bill Frisell, Michael Gordon, Henryk Gorecki, Vijay Iyer, David Lang, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, Todd Reynolds, and Julia Wolfe. “Decasia”, his feature length collaboration with composer Michael Gordon, is described by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice as “the most widely acclaimed American avant-garde film of the fin-de-siècle.” Morrison is a Guggenheim fellow and has received the Alpert Award. As a projection designer, his work with Ridge Theater has been recognized with two Bessie awards and an Obie award. Recent work includes the world premiere of Wallace Shawn’s “Grasses of a Thousand Colors” at the Royal Court in London.
view some of Bill Morrison's work on Vimeo.
Brooklyn Youth Chorus
Now in its nineteenth season, the GRAMMY® Award-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus (BYC), under the direction of Founder Dianne Berkun, is one of the country’s leading children’s choruses and the ensemble of choice for collaborations with renowned orchestras and artists. BYC choristers have toured in Russia, the United Kingdom, Austria, Canada and Germany. The New York Times wrote “it can sometimes be hard to think of this group as anything but a polished ensemble of mini professionals.” BYC’s orchestral highlights have included the NY Premieres of Louis Andriessen’s La Comedia and John Adams’ El Nino, and the World Premiere of Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls, for which the Chorus won a GRAMMY® Award in 2005. The Chorus has performed under the batons of Valery Gergiev, Lorin Maazel, Marin Alsop, Robert Spano, Reinbert de Leeuw, James Levine, Charles Dutoit, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Other performance highlights include Elton John’s 60th Birthday Concert at Madison Square Garden, Lou Reed’s Berlin at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Wally Cardona’s Really Real at BAM’s Next Wave Festival, and most recently, Nico Muhly’s Tell the Way at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Other recording credits include Grizzly Bear’s Veckatamist, and William Brittelle’s Television Landscape.
learn more at brooklynyouthchorus.org
Cerise Jacobs, librettist
Cerise Lim Jacobs was born in colonial Singapore into a traditional Chinese family. She grew up at the confluence of many disparate influences stemming from Singapore’s multicultural environment. When she was sixteen, her family emigrated to Australia to escape the turbulence created by the end of the Vietnam war and the bankruptcy of the British Empire. She dropped out of school at the age of nineteen to follow her heart and began a sojourn that took her from Melbourne, Australia, to Oxford, England, East Lansing, Michigan, Vancouver, Canada, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania until she finally settled in Boston, Massachusetts.
Cerise is a lifelong student of living creatively and imaginatively as a means of achieving success across many disciplines. In her meanderings, she has pursued an eclectic array of interests ranging from ancient Chinese porcelains at the Ashmoleum Museum to modern British theater. She graduated, summa cum laude, in English with a specialty in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. She was a trial partner at Goodwin Procter LLP, one of the largest law firms in New England, where she specialized in criminal defense and patent litigation. She also served for five years as a federal prosecutor at the US Attorney’s Office in Boston as part of her commitment to public service. Cerise garnered much of her theater skills in the hurly burly of the courtroom where she learnt to capture the hearts and minds of her juries.
Cerise is now retired. Since she resigned her law partnership, she has returned to her major passions in life – food, art and music.
David Little, composer
Composer/Librettist David T. Little is actively committed to music of dramatic intensity and direct expression. A two-time BMI Student Composer Award Winner Little's composition Screamer! was chosen by Maestro David Zinman as the winner of the 2004 Jacob Druckman Award for Orchestral Composition from the Aspen Music Festival, whereLittle was a Schumann Fellow during the summer of 2003. He is a 2003 recipient of the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and served as the 2001 ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Fellow in Composition at the Tanglewood Music Center. Little was awarded the 2004 Harvey Gaul Prize from the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, which resulted in the commissioning of his Soldier Songs, and was most recently awarded an ASCAP Morton Gould Award. A composer of great diversity, Little's music has been concurrently praised as "smoothly euphonious...with tonal yet original harmonies" (American Record Guide), and "clanking, almost industrial" (The Stage). Alex Ross of The New Yorker was "completely gripped" by Little's Sunday Morning Trepanation, proclaiming: "every bad-ass new-music ensemble in the city will want to play him." Holding a Bachelor's degree in Percussion Performance, Little holds a Master of Music degree in Composition from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Princeton University, where he is currently a doctoral candidate.
Elliott Sharp, composer
New York city composer/producer/sound artist Elliott Sharp leads the ensembles Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and biological metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His compositions have been performed by the Symphony of the Hessischer Rundfunk, The Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Rezonanz, Continuum, Meridian Arts Ensemble, Flux Quartet, Sirius Stirng Quartet, and Zeitkratzer. His collaborators have included qawaali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Meredith Monk; blues legend Hubert Sumlin; playwright Dael Orlandersmith; cello innovator Frances-Marie Uitti; sci-fi writers Pat Cadigan and Lucius Shepard; jazz greats Sonny Sharrock, Jack deJohnette, and Oliver Lake; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jahjoukah.
Sharp's orchestra piece Calling was commissioned by the Hessischer Rundfunk to open the 2002 Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, and the CD won the January 2004 German Critics' Prize. His composition Quarks Swim Free was premiered at the Venice Biennale in September 2003, and his chamber opera EmPyre was premiered at the 2006 Biennale. Sharp's most recent CD releases include Quadrature, a collection of solo acoustic guitar compositions; Calling with the Radio-Symphony of Frankfurt; Terraplane's Secret Life; and the string quartet Dispersion Of Seeds.
He founded the ongoing zOaR Records in 1978 both for his own productions, including the critically-acclaimed compilations Peripheral Vision and State Of The Union, and for other radical music. He has recently completed the scores to the feature-films What Sebastian Dreamt, Commune by Jonathan Berman, and Spectropia by Toni Dove. Installations include: Suspension, a video and audio work in collaboration with video artist Janene Higgins at the Chelsea Art Museum, NYC, 2003; Fluvial, computerized multi-channel audio-work commissioned by Engine 27 gallery, NYC June 2002; and Chromatine, an interactive string sculpture/audiowork created for the Gallery of the School of Museum Of Fine Art, Boston, 2001.
International Festival of Arts & Ideas
Every year in June, New Haven sparkles as the International Festival of Arts & Ideas displays a rare collection of gems: stunning music and dance, brilliant theater, bright and emergent thinkers gathered from around the world. From the New Haven Green to the courtyards of Yale University, New Haven becomes a Festival city with something for everyone, featuring world-class culture, award-winning dining and eclectic shopping, delighting guests from near and far.
Now entering its fifteenth year, the Festival is firmly established as one of the world's most significant arts festivals. It has the distinction of fusing arts and ideas programs to present a broad array of offerings within and across genres. The Festival showcases hundreds of international events each summer, from over 75 countries, with an impressive scale and scope unmatched in the Northeast.
The International Festival of Arts & Ideas was established in 1996 by Anne Calabresi, Jean Handley and Roslyn Meyer. The founders envisioned an annual celebration in New Haven - a small city rich with diversity and steeped in strong cultural and educational traditions - distinguished from established arts festivals by its fusion of ideas events. Their aim was to gather world-class artists and pre-eminent thinkers from around the globe, showcasing the city and the state as a major arts destination.
The Festival offers hundreds of events each June, over 80% of them free. The Festival has presented dozens of U.S. premieres, unforgettable evenings of opera on the New Haven Green, performances as traditional as Shakespeare and as edgy as inner-city slam poets. Internationally recognized names - Savion Glover, Little Richard, Michael Feinstein, Salman Rushdie - and dynamic new artists from all corners of the Earth are invited to share their unique talents and world views, reflective of the Festival's signature inclination for brilliance, controversy, social cohesion, and fun.
At the 15-year mark, the Festival continues to attract a diverse audience of thousands, and the best performers, speakers and leaders from around the world, to a city that revels in welcoming them. The dramatic growth of the Festival in size, duration and range of offerings parallels its growth in reputation as a major cultural event in America and a premiere international artistic enterprise.
Galapagos Art Space
From Galapagos Art Space:
"Galapagos Art Space strives to cultivate and develop arts and culture while enabling audiences to engage in intellectual and social dialogue. We present a range of unique and regular flagship productions that embrace the wonderful diversity of dance, music, design, science, technology, and thought. All of our performances impart artists and audience members alike to meaningfully participate within New York City’s cultural ecosystem while also being entertained.
We maintain a stable of resident artists, in whose development we actively participate by offering guidance on marketing, programming, and production details. We are also constantly on the lookout for artists, producers, or groups who share a new vision for unique concepts. Of course, we certainly recognize the inherent value of amusement and fun!
Most of our activities take place within our headquarters based in DUMBO, Brooklyn. The space itself is on target to become New York City’s first LEED certified ‘green’ cultural venue. Besides its repurposed and recycled structure and materials, we are very proud of our 1600 square foot lake inside the building, which wicks heat away in summer and transfers the warmth of the ground beneath our building up in the winter.
Galapagos is also working to bring our vision to audience outside its walls. We have distinguished partnerships with BAM, St’ Ann’s Warehouse, and the International Exchange and Studio Program of the Canton of Basel, Switzerland. Moreover, we sponsor and support collective performances throughout the city, with aims to expand.
The most basic function of the arts is to be relevant in the advancement of society. Galapagos aims to present and foster this relevance. We hope that you will join us."
Garrett Fisher
Known for its unique ability to conjure austerely sensual worlds, the Fisher Ensemble is a Seattle-based performance troupe led by composer Garrett Fisher. The Ensemble's eclectic mix of vocalists, movers, actors and musicians harness ritual and myth to bridge ancient and modern forms.
Considered to be "a star of Seattle's new music scene" by The New Yorker, Garrett Fisher grew up in Michigan and Maine, and as part his parents' sabbaticals, lived in Istanbul, London and Paris. He studied at Oberlin College and Conservatory, and in 1995 he moved to Seattle, where he formed the Fisher Ensemble and studied classical Indian singing with Shujaat Khan.
With frequent collaborators Christy Fisher, AC Petersen, Ken Cerniglia, and Louise McCagg, the Fisher Ensemble has created several performance pieces that have been presented at The Chapel, Consolidated Works, the Nippon Kan Theater, and On the Boards in Seattle, WA; HERE Arts Center and Judson Memorial Church in New York City; and several venues in between.
Highlights of the last ten years include the release of The Passion of Saint Thomas More on BIS, which is included in the label's 30-CD/30-year commemorative edition, and the production of Psyche designated "Best of '08" by The Seattle Magazine.
Garrett Fisher and the Ensemble have received support from 4culture, the Allied Arts Foundation, the ASCAP Foundation/Morton Gould Young Composer Award, Bossack Heilbron Foundation, Centrum Arts Colony, City Artists, the King County Arts Commission, Puffin Foundation, the Seattle Arts Commission and the Wiggly World Foundation.
Jay Scheib
Maya Beiser
Maya Beiser, hailed by The New Yorker as a “cello goddess,” has captivated audiences worldwide with her virtuosity, eclectic repertoire, and relentless quest to redefine her instrument’s boundaries. She has collaborated with artists across a wide range of musical styles, including Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Mark O’Connor, Steve Reich, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and Tan Dun (Crouching Tiger Concerto), among many others.
Maya is a truly global artist: raised on a kibbutz in Israel by her French mother and Argentinean father, she received her advanced training at Yale. She is a featured performer on the world’s most prestigious stages, from Lincoln Center to the Sydney Opera House and the Taipei International Festival. Appearances in Barcelona, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, and San Francisco have brought her acclaim worldwide. Collaborating with renowned film composer James Newton Howard, Maya is the featured soloist on his soundtracks to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters, and Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond. Earlier this year, she appeared with the Boston Pops in the premiere of a new orchestral suite based on Howard’s score to Shyamalan’s The Village. She has drawn widespread praise for her multimedia concerts, including World To Come, presented as part of the inaugural season of Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall; Almost Human, chosen by The New York Times as among the “Best of 2006” musical events; and most recently, Provenance, a 70-minute presentation incorporating music by young composers from Israel, Palestine, Algeria, Morocco, Iran and the U.S.. Says Maya, “Provenance outlines a musical landscape in which cultural differences are brought together for the artistic energy they release with each encounter. It embraces coexistence not as an abstract ideal but as a creative necessity.” Provenance will be released on CD early in 2010, joining her four previous solo releases, Oblivion, Kinship, World To Come and Almost Human, on the Koch International label.
“The hot, young, cello-diva of the avant-garde” — The Washington Post
“Exceptional…Gorgeous…Haunting… Not only does her warm, golden sound permeate even the most searing and challenging passages of music she plays, but she appears to have the ease of a hip-hop turntable spin-meister when it comes to interacting with technology, so the music consistently remains the most crucial message…” – The Chicago Sun-Times
“Maya Beiser has striking, powerful presence… she is an exceptional cellist… A virtuoso. Her deeptoned, concentrated playing can always be counted on to enhance the mystical effect of whatever she performs.” – The Los Angeles Times
“Sensual…with rock-star magnetism… It was an important night!” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Missy Mazzoli
Nico Muhly, composer
Born in Vermont in 1981 and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, New York-based composer Nico Muhly graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English Literature. In 2004 he received a Masters in Music from the Juilliard School, where he studied under Christopher Rouse and John Corigliano. A former boy chorister, Muhly has composed extensively for choir, including commissions from the Clare College Choir and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. New York’s Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue commissioned and performed his Bright Mass with Canons, later recorded on their American Voices CD.
His orchestral works have been premiered by the American Symphony Orchestra, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Orchestra (It Remains to Be Seen, a 2006 commission celebrating their 40th anniversary), the Boston Pops (Wish You Were Here), the New York Philharmonic, and the Chicago Symphony (Step Team).
Film credits include Muhly’s scores for Joshua (2007), Best Picture nominee The Reader (2008), and the Argentine drama Felicitas, and he has worked extensively with Philip Glass as editor, keyboardist, and conductor for numerous film and stage projects. With designer/illustrator Maira Kalman, Muhly composed a vocal work based on Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, and he has worked with choreographer Benjamin Millepied to create new pieces for the American Theater (From Here On Out) and the Paris Opéra ballet (Triade), as well as for the Nederlands Ballet’s 2010–2011 season. His 2009 collaboration with American choreographer Stephen Petronio (I Drink the Air Before Me) was presented at the Joyce Theater in New York and will be remounted at the Barbican Centre in London in 2010. Muhly has also lent his skills as performer, arranger, and conductor to other musicians, including Antony and the Johnsons (The Crying Light), Sam Amidon (All is Well, I See the Sign), Björk (Medúlla, Drawing Restraint 9, Volta), Bonnie “Prince” Billy (The Letting Go), Doveman (The Conformist), Grizzly Bear (Veckatimest), and Jónsi from Sigur Rós (Go). Muhly co-composed fourteen songs with Faroese singer Teitur Lassen (Confessions), and presented them in a week of concerts with the Holland Baroque society.
Among his most frequent collaborators are his colleagues at Bedroom Community, an artist-run label headed by Icelandic musician Valgeir Sigurðsson and inaugurated by the release of Muhly’s first album, Speaks Volumes (2007). Leading up to Speaks Volumes’ American release, Muhly was invited to present concerts of his chamber music at both Carnegie Hall and the Whitney Museum. Since then, Muhly has released a second album, Mothertongue (2008), and worked closely with labelmates Valgeir, Ben Frost, and Sam Amidon on their respective solo releases. Valgeir collaborated with Muhly and perfumer Christophe Laudamiel to create the “scent opera” Green Aria (2009), which premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Carnegie Hall commissioned his song The Adulteress for soprano Jessica Rivera’s 2009 Carnegie debut, and that same year, countertenor David Daniels and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields performed his Vocalise and Drones on arias by Handel. 2010 will see the premiere of a new orchestral song cycle for tenor Mark Padmore, violinist Pekka Kuusisto, and the Britten Sinfonia; and Muhly’s first full-scale opera, with a libretto by Craig Lucas, has been co-commissioned by the English National Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, and Lincoln Center Theater Commissions Program.
Opera On Tap
Opera On Tap's mission is to bring opera to new audiences by performing in bars, rock concert halls, and other alternative spaces, and at the same time to promote young professional singers and instrumentalists in their artistic development. At OOT the artist is given an opportunity to communicate the joy and exuberance they feel in the music by getting away from the stuffy atmosphere of the concert hall or educational institution. Born in the backroom of a Brooklyn divebar in 2005, OOT has gained national press recognition, several performance residencies across the city, and regional Chapters in New Orleans, Chicago, Ann Arbor, MI, and most recently Atlanta. In addition to 21c Liederabend, OOT hosts a new music concert series called New Brew at Barbes in Brooklyn the first Friday of every other month and quarterly co-produces the critically acclaimed Opera Grows in Brooklyn in collaboration with longtime partner American Opera Projects.
Paola Prestini/ VisionIntoArt
Paola Prestini is a composer, director and a co-founder of VisionIntoArt, an interdisciplinary collective/production company based in NY. Her 2009 Tzadik release Body Maps has been featured on WQXR and Q2 and showcases new music’s great soloists. She has been commissioned and performed by ensembles such as New York City Opera, MATA, Ensemble ACJW, the Kronos Quartet, ETHEL, Carnegie Hall, WNYC, and Concert Artist Guild in venues and festivals worldwide. Her current projects include works for Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Now, a residency at the Krannert Center, De Deo, an opera with librettist Donna Di Novelli that will inaugurate New York City Opera’s Word First Program, and large scale works for soloists Maya Beiser and Cornelius Dufallo. Paola has received awards from ASCAP, NYSCA and the LMCC and is a Paul and Daisy Soros fellow, and a Sundance Fellow. A graduate of the Juillard School, she studied with Robert Beaser, Samuel Adler, and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.
Phantom Limb
The New York City-based Phantom Limb Company has been critically acclaimed for its reinvention of traditional theatrical forms, such as marionette puppetry, in order to probe issues of contemporary life and modern consciousness. Erik Sanko and Jessica Grindstaff are founders, co-creators and directors of PLC.
Jessica is an installation artist, painter and set designer whose work ranges from tiny Victorian taxidermied music boxes to wax and chalk paintings to 15 ft. tall puppets built out of barn lumber. Over the course of the past few years she has collaborated with such diverse artists as Ping Chong Company, Ulrike Quade, Geoff Sobelle of Pig Iron and Rainpan, and Mark Z. Danielewski.
Erik Sanko is a lifelong musician having played with The Lounge Lizards, John Cale, Yoko Ono, and his own band Skeleton Key. Additionally Erik was a closet puppet maker making marionettes for art collectors.
In the fall of 2006 Jessica and Erik created their first marionette play together called The Fortune Teller. A two-week run was extended to a three month sold-out run and more recently it was brought to the UCLA LIVE Festival for a 17-show sold-out run.
Subsequently, this emerging company was approached by David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet and commissioned to create a new marionette/music piece to open B.A.M.'s Next Wave Festival 2007. That piece was called Dear Mme., and its success encouraged the foundation of PLC and our next collaboration, tentatively titled The Shackleton Project.
Robert Woodruff, director
Robert Woodruff has directed over 60 productions across the U.S. at theatres including Lincoln Center Theater, Public Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Conservatory Theater, Guthrie Theater and Mark Taper Forum, among others. Most recently, he directed Battle of Black and Dogs at Yale and Madame White Snake for Opera Boston which premiered in Beijing in October 2010. Recent work includes Notes from Underground (Yale, La Jolla and Baryshnikov Center NYC) Ifigeneia in Aulis with Toneelgroep Amsterdam and Philip Glass’s Appomattox for the San Francisco Opera. Internationally, his work has been seen at the Habimah National Theatre in Israel, Sydney Arts Festival, Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, Edinburgh International Festival, Hong Kong Festival of the Arts, Jerusalem Festival and Spoleto Festival USA. Early work includes many premiere productions with Sam Shepard including the Pulitzer Prize winning Buried Child. Mr. Woodruff has taught at the University of California campuses at San Diego and Santa Barbara, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and Columbia University. He is currently on the faculty of The Yale School of Drama. In 1976 he founded The Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, a forum for new american drama which still flourishes in the San Francisco area. From 2002 to 2007, Mr. Woodruff was the Artistic Director of American Repertory Theatre. He was named a 2007 USA Biller Fellow by United States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America’s top living artists.
St. Ann's Warehouse
St. Ann's Warehouse is celebrating its 30th Anniversary Season! For 30 years, St. Ann’s Warehouse has commissioned, produced, and presented a unique and eclectic body of innovative theatre and concert presentations that meet at the intersection of theatre and rock and roll. Since 2000, the organization has helped vitalize the Brooklyn Waterfront in DUMBO, where St. Ann’s Warehouse has become one of New York City’s most important and compelling live performance destinations.
Through its signature multi-artist concerts and groundbreaking music and theatre collaborations, St. Ann’s continues to celebrate the panoramic traditions of American and world cultures, with forays into a variety of contemporary forms, including new commissions and multi-disciplinary theatrical presentations. Among the many acclaimed St. Ann’s productions are Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs for Drella, Marianne Faithfull’s Seven Deadly Sins, Artistic Director Susan Feldman’s Band in Berlin, Charlie Kaufman and the Coen Brothers’ Theater of the New Ear, The Royal Court Theatre’s 4:48 Psychosis, The Wooster Group’s Hamlet, The Emperor Jones, House/Lights, To You, The Birdie! (Phèdre), The Globe Theatre’s Measure for Measure, Daniel Kramer’s Woyzeck, Antony’s Turning, Mabou Mines DollHouse, Lou Reed’s Berlin, Cynthia Hopkins’ Accidental Trilogy, Les Freres Corbusier’s Hell House, Druid's The Walworth Farce and The New Electric Ballroom, TR Warszawa's Macbeth, The National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch, and Kneehigh Theatre’s Brief Encounter.
In 2004, founding Artistic Director, Susan Feldman, and St. Ann’s Warehouse were awarded the Ross Wetzsteon Award for the development of new work and for “inviting artists to treat their cavernous DUMBO space as both an inspiring laboratory and a sleek venue where its superinformed audience charges the atmosphere with hip vitality.”
Ted Hearne, composer
Ted Hearne is an active composer, conductor and performer of new music in New York and Chicago. His music was recently praised by Allan Kozinn of the New York Times as “fresh and muscular”. Ted is Artistic Director of Yes is a World, a nonprofit organization working to promote peace and social change through musical diversity and the collaboration of young artists. He was the music director for the premiere of David Lang’s opera Anatomy Theatre (performed by ICE), and the premiere of Michael Gordon’s Lightning at our Feet as part of the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2008. He was also musical director and keyboardist for an October 2006 production of The Carbon Copy Building in Liverpool, UK, the Obie-winning opera co-composed by Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe and produced by Ridge Theatre. Ted is the resident conductor of New York’s Red Light New Music. He will be conducting the American premiere of Constantine Koukias’s Prayer Bells with Opera IHOS and the world premiere of a new ballet by Bryan Senti in Fall 2009.
Ted was the recipient of the 2008 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and will be in residence at the MacDowell Colony in Fall 2009. He was chosen for participation in the 2008 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, during which the Minnesota Orchestra performed his work Patriot on a subscription concert. Performances in 2009 include new works for Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion and San Francisco’s Volti Choral Arts Laboratory, as well as a performance by The Knights at New York’s MATA Festival. His music will be featured at the 2009 Gaudeamus Festival in Amsterdam, the 2009 Bang on a Can Marathon, and by the New York City Opera at their VOX: Showcasing American Composers series. Upcoming commissions include a 45-minute work for DITHER electric guitar quartet, a trumpet concerto for the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, and a new work for the Yale Glee Club and Yale Symphony Orchestra to be premiered at Carnegie Hall. Also a singer, Ted recently premiered the role of Justin Timberlake in Jacob Cooper’s twisted rock opera Timberbrit. He has received degrees from Manhattan School of Music and Yale School of Music, and has studied with Julia Wolfe, Martin Bresnick, Nils Vigeland and Aaron Jay Kernis among others.
Thomas O. Kriegsmann, ArKtype
ArKtype was established in 2006 under the direction of producer Thomas O. Kriegsmann to support the finest in emerging and established international artists in the strategic development, production and touring of innovative new work. ArKtype's work has grown to encompass renowned artists from ten different countries, multiple genres and commercial and non-profit support structures resulting in new work for a variety of spaces. Realizing the infrastructural demands of the artist in an environment of limited funding and financial support for creative endeavors, ArKtype aims to balance infrastructural support with creative growth, allowing the artist a long-term relationship with a producorial entity based in establishing the artist’s continued presence in the international arts presenters community.
ArKtype's acclaimed work has been seen across Europe, South Africa, East Asia, North and South America and Australia, and is very proud to continue relationships with the finest theaters in the world, including Performance Space 122, The Market Theatre, Oxford Playhouse, Barbican Centre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Victoria Arts Centre (Melbourne), Place des Arts (Montreal), Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Hartford Stage Company, Actors Theater of Louisville, New York Theater Workshop, Mark Taper Forum, Apollo Theater, The Joseph Papp Public Theater and The Culture Project. The company proudly began its work in the production and development of emerging ensembles and is currently represented off-Broadway and on several tours in the US and beyond, as well as programming the annual Spiegeltent season at South Street Seaport, New York City.
Tod Machover, composer
Tod Machover (b. 1953 in New York) has been called "America's most wired composer" by the Los Angeles Times. He is widely recognized as one of the most significant and innovative composers of his generation, and is also celebrated for inventing new technology for music, including Hyperinstruments which he launched in 1986. Machover studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions at The Juilliard School and was the first Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM in Paris. He has been Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, USA) since it was founded in 1985, and is Director of the Lab's Hyperinstruments and Opera of the Future Groups. Since 2006, Machover has also been Visiting Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Tod Machover's music has been acclaimed for breaking traditional artistic and cultural boundaries, offering a unique and innovative synthesis of acoustic and electronic sound, of symphony orchestras and interactive computers, and of operatic arias and rock songs. Machover's compositions have been commissioned and performed by many of the world's most prestigious ensembles and soloists, including the Ensemble InterContemporain, the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, Speculum Musicae, BBC Scottish Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Pops, Houston Grand Opera, Bunkamura (Tokyo), Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Carnegie Hall, Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Collage New Music, Speculum Musicae, Ars Electronica, Casa da Musica (Porto), American Composers Orchestra, Tokyo String Quartet, Kronos Quartet, Ying Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, Kim Kashkahian, David Starobin, Matt Haimovitz, and many more. His work has been awarded numerous prizes and honors, among others from from the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the German Culture Ministry, and the French Culture Ministry, which named him a Chevalier de l'Order des Arts et des Lettres. In 2007 he was awarded the Steinmetz Prize from the IEEE.
Machover has been particularly noted for his operatic compositions, which include: VALIS (1987), a science fiction opera – called 'the first opera of the 21st century" by The New York Times – commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Centre Georges Pompidou; Media/Medium (1994), a "magic" opera for magicians Penn & Teller; the audience-interactive Brain Opera (1996/8), commissioned for the first Lincoln Center Festival, toured worldwide, and permanently installed at the Haus der Musik in Vienna since 2000; and Resurrection (1999), based on Tolstoy's last novel and commissioned by Houston Grand Opera. In addition, Machover has created numerous large-scale music installations for the general public, including the building-size underground art experience Meteorite (2000-2005) in Essen, Germany, a collaboration with media entrepreneur Andre Heller. He is currently working on a "robotic" opera, Death and the Powers, with an original libretto by U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky and directed by Diane Paulus, that premieres in Monaco in September 2010. His latest opera, Skellig, based on the award-winning novel by David Almond and commissioned by the Sage Gateshead (UK), received its world premiere there to public acclaim and rave reviews in November 2008.
Tod Machover has invented many new technologies for music, most notably his Hyperinstruments that use smart computers to augment musical expression and creativity. He has designed these hyperinstruments for some of the world's greatest musicians, from Yo-Yo Ma to Prince, as well as for the general public and for children, as in his Toy Symphony project (www.toysymphony.net) – called "a vast, celebratory ode to the joy of music and its power to bring young and old together, diversity into unity (Boston Globe)" – which has been touring worldwide since 2002. Machover's Hyperinstrument research has long been supported by major companies such as Yamaha, and several of his Music Toys have recently been made commercially available by Fisher-Price and others. In addition, the music composition software Hyperscore – originally developed by his team at the MIT Media Lab for children in the context of Toy Symphony – is fast gaining worldwide recognition as a popular creative tool for people of all ages and backgrounds. In awarding Machover the first Kurzweil Prize in Music and Technology in 2003, celebrated inventor and entrepreneur Raymond Kurzweil wrote: "Tod Machover is the only person I am aware of who contributes on a world-class level to both the technology of music creation and to music itself. Even within these two distinct areas, his contributions are remarkably diverse, and of exquisite quality."
Machover's music is published by Boosey & Hawkes and Ricordi Editions, and has been recorded on the Bridge, Oxingale, Erato, Albany and New World labels. Much of his music is also available via iTunes.
Yale Institute for Music Theatre (YIMT)
YIMT was established to identify distinctive and original music theatre works by emerging composers and writers, and match them with collaborators who can help them further develop their work in an un-pressured workshop setting. In particular, the Institute seeks to provide the human resources to support writers in their own processes, including professional directors and music directors, and a company of actors and singers that includes professionals from NYC and current Yale students.
Produced by Beth Morrison
Readings of New Work: June 16-18 at Yale University, New Haven, CT
Yuval Sharon, Director
Yuval Sharon’s directorial work has been described as “magical” (The Village Voice), “ingenious” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “having a keen eye to mythology in the modern world” (Theatermania, New York). With experiments in the collision of music, text, movement, and visual imagery, Yuval searches for new ways to unleash the unexpected in the theatrical event.
Yuval’s eclectic tastes have led him to direct a variety of projects such as a chamber-scale production of Verdi’s Aida, a carnivalesque mash-up of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, entitled Celebrate Good Times (Macbeth), a three-hour adaptation of Wagner’s Die Mesitersinger von Nürnberg, a fusion of Odissi dance and pop songs based on the classic Indian text Gita Govinda, human beatbox Yuri Lane’s one-man show Soundtrack City for New York, a collaborative riff on the themes of Schoenberg’s expressionistic opera Erwartung, the West Coast premiere production of William Finn’s musical A New Brain, and the American premiere of Falk Richter’s underground phenomenon God is a DJ in a production Theatermania called on of the 10 best performances in New York in 2004. He has worked with San Francisco opera, New York City Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Komische Oper Berlin, Berkeley Opera, The Asia Society of new York, The Deitch Projects, the New York Hip Hop Theater Festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Shotgun Players, and Prospect Theater Company. He is co-founder of the New York based group Theater Faction.
