The Covid-19 pandemic has shuttered concert venues all across the world. During the lockdowns many artists and organizations took to the internet to express their creativity and to connect with their audiences. Even as things slowly reopen packed concert halls are still far off on the horizon. We wondered, given the limitations of social distancing, might this be a moment to reimagine what a concert could be? Perhaps we might even discover creative formats that remain in practice post-pandemic.
This online event will feature short presentations and a roundtable discussion with composers Emily Bate and Natacha Diels, curator Zach Blackwood, and musicologist Thomas Patteson.
FREE, REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED. SPACE IS LIMITED. PLEASE RESERVE ONE SPOT PER HOUSEHOLD. A Zoom link will be sent to you the day of the event.
Emily Bate is a harmony fanatic: a composer and performer moving freely between music performance, theater, film, and choral music. Emily founded and conducts a queer community chorus called Trust Your Moves, which focuses on performing new work by LGBTQI composers. Since 2018, Trust Your Moves has grown into a 75-member group, and premiered half a dozen new pieces. Recent projects include: the score for the film Queer Genius by Chet Catherine Pancake; several shows with frequent collaborator Erin Markey, including the anarcho-musical A Ride on the Irish Cream, featuring “accessible, often punchy pop-rock” (New York Times), and “soaring musical numbers” (Artforum) that were “startlingly gorgeous, and packed with heavenly harmonies” (New York Post); and a composing collaboration with installation artist Patrick Costello.
Natacha Diels’ work combines choreographed movement, improvisation, video, instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. Recent work includes Papillon and the Dancing Cranes, for construction cranes and giant butterfly (Borealis Festival 2018); and forthcoming is a 6-part TV-style miniseries with the JACK quartet (TimeSpans Festival 2020) and a collaborative work for shadowed audience with Ensemble Pamplemousse (Darmstadt 2020). With a focus on collage, collaboration, and the ritual of life as art, Natacha’s compositions have been described as “a fairy tale for a fractured world” (Music We Care About) and “the liveliest music of the evening” (LA Review of Books). Natacha is a founding member of the composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse (est. 2003). She will begin teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in Fall 2020.
Thomas Patteson is a scholar and musician who studies experimental and electronic music and their connections to intellectual history, technology, and society. Thomas is Professor of Music History at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2013. He has studied at New College of Florida, the University of Cologne, and at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Instruments for New Music (University of California Press, 2016), a study of the musical, social, and political ramifications of experimental sound technologies developed in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Beyond his scholarly work, Thomas is actively involved in the Philadelphia music scene. He is an associate curator at Bowerbird, where he helped launch the Arcana New Music Ensemble in 2016, and has also collaborated extensively with the experimental art platform <fidget>.
Zach Blackwood is an artist and performance curator based in Philadelphia since 2010. In both his curatorial work and personal practice, Blackwood seeks to privilege access, play and discovery. As an Artistic Producer at FringeArts, he is dedicated to supporting work that both reflects the community we live in, and is accessible to those populations among us most vulnerable to systems of oppression and suppression. Blackwood also serves as Events Chair for Voicemail Poems, an online magazine that highlights the intimate and raw voices of new and established writers of all styles. Poets submit to the magazine by reading their work to a voicemail box. Voicemail Poems is open for rolling submissions now at (910)-703-POEM.