Musical Ecologies Series

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 13, 2020, 8:00 PM, $10

PAULA MATTHUSEN: Discrepancies in Musical Space

The Old Stone House
in Washington Park, 3rd Street & 5th Avenue
Park Slope, Brooklyn – Map
718-768-3195 | BUY TICKETS

The 2019-20 season of Musical Ecologies continues Thursday, February 13th with composer Paula Matthusen. Splitting her time between New York City, and Middletown, CT where she is Associate Professor of Music at Weslayan University, Matthusen writes acoustic and electroacoustic music. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered. Tonight’s program will include a new work-in-progress for electric guitar performed by guitarist James Moore, an experimental piece for two resonating cymbals performed by Moore and Seth Cluett, and a solo work for electronics performed by the composer. The evening will begin with a conversation hosted by series curator Dan Joseph.

Now it its seventh season, Musical Ecologies is a monthly symposium on music and sound held at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Curated and hosted by composer Dan Joseph, each event typically focuses on a single artist who presents a work or project either in the form of a talk or lecture, a multimedia presentation, a performance, or combination thereof. Each presentation is preceded by an extended conversation between the artist and curator.

About the artist:

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. 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, and many others. 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 completed her Ph.D. at New York University. 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.

Facebook event page: facebook.com/events/519870995290177/

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 14, 2019, 8:00 PM, $10

BETSEY BIGGS: Music from “MELT”

The Old Stone House
in Washington Park, 3rd Street & 5th Avenue
Park Slope, Brooklyn – Map
718-768-3195 | BUY TICKETS

The 2019-20 season of Musical Ecologies continues Thursday, November 14th with Boulder, CO based composer and artist Betsey Biggs. Currently on a fellowship through the University of Colorado where she serves as Assistant Professor of Critical Studies, Biggs will perform a melodic, glitch-ambient soundtrack for her new evening-length multimedia opera and music-film, MELT: The Memories of Ice, weaving field recordings of the soundscapes of Greenland – rushing meltwater streams, crackling underwater krill, whale whistles and clicks, the thunderous boom of calving icebergs, the wails of sled dogs, noisy generator drones, and children’s voices — into a powerful sonic experience.The evening will begin with a conversation hosted by series curator Dan Joseph.

Now it its seventh season, Musical Ecologies is a monthly symposium on music and sound held at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Curated and hosted by composer Dan Joseph, each event typically focuses on a single artist who presents a work or project either in the form of a talk or lecture, a multimedia presentation, a performance, or combination thereof. Each presentation is preceded by an extended conversation between the artist and curator.

About the artist:

Betsey Biggs is a composer and interdisciplinary artist. Her body of work connects the dots between music, sound, visual art, place, storytelling, and technology. By slowing down, clarifying, and reworking sonic and visual fragments of her travels, she recreates her experience of place in poetic ways. Biggs has collaborated with Margaret Lancaster, Evidence, The Now Ensemble, The BSC, So Percussion, Tarab Cello Ensemble, the Nash Ensemble, Nick Hallett, Pamela Z, Luciano Chasso, and filmmakers Jennie Livingston and Amy Harrison, among others, and her work has been presented at venues as disparate as ISSUE Project Room, Abrons Arts Center, Roulette, the Conflux Festival, MASSMoCA, Sundance Film Festival, Hong Kong’s Videotage, and on the streets of Oakland, CA and Brooklyn, NY. She studied at Colorado College and Mills College, and holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University in Music Composition. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Facebook event page: facebook.com/events/2492190250862317/

THURSDAY OCTOBER 10, 2019, 8:00 PM, $10

JEN KUTLER: Thank You For Listening

The Old Stone House
in Washington Park, 3rd Street & 5th Avenue
Park Slope, Brooklyn – Map
718-768-3195 | BUY TICKETS

The 2019-20 season of Musical Ecologies continues Thursday, October 10th with New York-based multidisciplinary artist and performer Jen Kutler. An ingenious inventor of unique interactive electronic media systems, Kutler will present Thank You For Listening, a set of compositions and improvisations for a handmade vibrator synthesizer controlled by a keyboard. All sounds are produced while the instrument is inside of the performer’s body. The sounds are transduced and amplified through an electromagnetic guitar pickup just barely touching the skin on the performer’s abdomen. The evening will begin with a conversation hosted by series curator Dan Joseph.

Now it its seventh season, Musical Ecologies is a monthly symposium on music and sound held at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Curated and hosted by composer Dan Joseph, each event typically focuses on a single artist who presents a work or project either in the form of a talk or lecture, a multimedia presentation, a performance, or combination thereof. Each presentation is preceded by an extended conversation between the artist and curator.

About the artist:

Jen Kutler is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist and performer. She modifies found objects that are cultural signifiers of power, gender, queerness and intimacy to create atypical instruments and sculptures. Her performances feature many of her instruments incorporated with immersive field recordings to explore common and discrepant experiences of familiar social tones in immersive sound and media environments. She has released recordings through Flag Day Records, Never Anything Records, Urban Arts Berlin and others, and performs widely throughout the Northeast and has presented installations and workshops at Outpost Artist Resources, Fridman Gallery, EMPAC, Wave Farm, Cornell University and other venues.

Facebook event page: facebook.com/events/471049156782037/