Photo: Maria Baranova
MUSICAL ECOLOGIES – ON THE AIRWAVES
THURSDAY MARCH 18, 2021, 8:00 PM – 10:00 PM
–A LIVE RADIO EVENT–
GELSEY BELL: Music at a Distance
Musical Ecologies continues on the airwaves Thursday, March 18th for a live radio event featuring singer, songwriter and scholar Gelsey Bell. The event will be broadcast live from the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM Radio for Open Ears in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, and online at wavefarm.org/listen and on the Wave Farm Radio App (iOS). Due to Covid-19 there will be no in-person audience attendance.
Described by the New York Times recently as “one of New York’s most adventurous musicians”, Bell is an active performer as a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist in a variety of settings. She is currently a HARP Artist at the HERE Arts Center, where she is developing a new opera called mɔːnɪŋ (pronounced as “mourning”/ “morning”) inspired by Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, a book that imagines the natural world without humans. Other recent projects include Meander (2021), a site-specific soundwalk created with Joseph White for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and a new multi-disciplinary collaboration with thingNY. For tonight’s program, Bell will perform new and recent songs and compositions for vocals, daxophone, synthesizer, and other instruments.The program will begin with a conversation hosted by series curator Dan Joseph.
Now it its extended 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:
Gelsey Bell is a singer, a songwriter, and a scholar. She performs regularly as a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, culling from a wide range of techniques and styles to create her own performance works, to literally voice those of contemporary composers, and to explore improvisation. Her sound walk Cairns (2020), created with composer Joseph White, was listed on the New York Times Best Theater of 2020 list. She is currently a HARP Artist at the HERE Arts Center, developing a new opera called mɔːnɪŋ. Gelsey is a core member of new music ensemble thingNY and performance collective Varispeed. With thingNY, she has collaboratively written and arranged music for multiple projects including SubtracTTTTTTTTT, A Series of Landscapes, This Takes Place Close By, and IN HOUSE, TIME: A Complete Explanation in Three Parts. Gelsey is also a member of the improvisation trio the Chutneys with Chris Cochrane (guitar) and Fast Forward (percussion). They released their debut album Home in 2019. In January of 2015, Gelsey received her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Her dissertation, Voice-Acts: Performance and Relationality in the Vocal Activities of the American Experimental Music Tradition, traces the stories of five experimental composers writing music for their own performing voices during the 1970s. She is currently on the part-time faculty in the College of Performing Arts at the New School.
Tonight’s event is being broadcast live on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM Radio for Open Ears in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, made possible by Wave Farm’s Transmit Partner Program; tune in online at wavefarm.org/listen and on the Wave Farm Radio App (iOS).
Facebook event page: facebook.com/events/420053842562814
