The Sounds of Women’s Work

Friday, Sept. 18 · 12:30pm-1:30pm
von Kuster Hall, Music Building

Part of the Don Wright Faculty of Music’s Fridays @ 12.30 Concert Series, this chamber music concert will offer a musical exploration of traditional women’s textile work.

• Omar Daniel's^* Oli enne nel’l’ä neittä... (once upon a time there were four maidens), Movement II
• Ann Southam's Stitches in Time
  
• Cecilia Livingston's slow disclosure: songs for Paula Rego, excerpts

With introductory remarks from Cecilia Livingston and Omar Daniel^*

Performers:

Martha Guth, soprano
Patricia Green^*, mezzo-soprano
Erika Switzer, piano

with Music alumni and students:

Helen Faucher, violin (Western BMus)
Tasman Tantasawat, viola (Western DMA)
Abi Greenland, cello (Western MMus)
Theodore Chow, piano (Western DMA)

Amelia Yates (DMA, 2021)

Community Gathering - Stitching Music and Craft

Friday, Sept. 18 · 3:30pm-5:30pm
artLab, Visual Arts Building

In this drop-in event for the community, participants will be able to view the exhibition “Stitching & Rhythm: Textiles and Music Inspired Artwork from McIntosh Gallery’s Permanent Collection,” listen to craft-inspired music in live performance, and stitch images representing musical analyses of craft-inspired compositions.

The Stitching and Rhythm: Textiles and Music-Inspired Artwork from McIntosh’s Permanent Collection exhibition, curated by Tricia Johnson, runs from September 3-24.

between systems and grounds 

Saturday, Sept. 19 · 10:00-4:00pm
Sunday, Sept. 20 · 9:00am-4:00pm
Room 114, Music Building 

Paula Matthusen, bobbin lace
Olivia Valentine, electronics

This performance will represent v.4.0 of an ongoing collaboration between Matthusen (composer) and Valentine (visual artist), drawing on a mutually developed practice combining textile construction and electronics in real-time.

between systems and grounds began in 2016, with a live performance in Budapest. The system has since evolved through a series of residencies and collaborative work sessions where the durational aspects of the system were developed and site-specificity added. The project grows with each iteration and performance, integrating field recordings, radio signals, feedback, and a system of cues that all contribute to the slowly-growing textile.

The textile lives and grows in handmade foamcore furniture that acts as a work surface, sculpture, and music box that slowly plays back accumulated recordings triggered by the textile. As the project continues, all of the systems will continue to grow and change in response. The project includes loops and feedback chains that translate between sound and textile, crafting action and music, and data and textile.
 

• 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. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing.” 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, Brooklyn Rider, Metropolis Ensemble, Loadbang, New York New Music Ensemble, Splinter Reeds, the Scharoun Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), orchest de ereprijs, The Glass Farm Ensemble, the Estonian National Ballet, James Moore, Terri Hron, Dana Jessen, Kathryn Woodard, Todd Reynolds, Kathleen Supové, Margaret Lancaster, Anna Svensdotter, Nina De Heney, and Jody Redhage. Her work has been performed at numerous venues and festivals in America and Europe, including the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, the Caramoor Festival, the MusicNOW Series of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Ecstatic Music Festival, Other Minds, the MATA Festival, Merkin Concert Hall, the Aspen Music Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music at MassMoCA, the Gaudeamus New Music Week, SEAMUS, International Computer Music Conference and Dither’s Invisible Dog Extravaganza.
  
  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, a Van Lier Fellowship at Roulette Intermedium, the “New Genre Prize” from the IAWM Search for New Music, and the 2014 Elliott Carter Rome Prize. Matthusen has also held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Hambidge, ACRE, create@iEar at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, STEIM, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, VCCA, CMMAS, Konstepidemin, Copland House, Composers NOW Residency at Pocantico, the Hambidge Center, and Loghaven. Matthusen completed her Ph.D. at New York University – GSAS and has taught at Columbia University, the TU-Berlin as the Edgard Varèse Guest Professor (through DAAD), the Slee Visiting Professor at University at Buffalo, and Florida International University. Matthusen is currently Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, where she teaches experimental music, composition, and music technology.
   
• Olivia Valentine is a Des Moines, Iowa based visual artist working in textile construction, drawing, photography, and installation, as well as collaborative projects that span a variety of media and disciplines. Through her work she examines the edges and boundaries of spaces, often beginning with the close examination of the edges of fabrics and textiles.
  
  Her work has been exhibited and performed across the US and internationally at museums and galleries including a solo exhibition at the Des Moines Art Center (Iowa) and other venues such as The Round Tower (Copenhagen), Museum of Arts and Design (New York), The Kohler Art Center (Wisconsin), Heaven Gallery (Chicago), The Constance Art Gallery (Iowa), White Space (Atlanta), The Danish Royal Academy (Copenhagen), The Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), The American Academy in Rome (Italy), The Wilton House Museum (Virginia), The Rijswijk Museum (The Netherlands), Palazzo del Broletto (Italy), Womanmade Gallery (Chicago), The Arlington Arts Center (Virginia), Madison-Morgan Cultural Center (Georgia), and The Powerhouse Museum (Australia). Her work is represented by Olson-Larsen Gallery and is held in museum and private collections in the US and Europe.
  
  Awards include a Fulbright Fellowship in Installation Art (Turkey), A 2020 Iowa Artist Fellowship The Fountainhead Fellowship from Virginia Commonwealth University, and The Founding Presidents Award and the Brandford/Elliot Award from the Textile Society of America. Grants include an American Rescue Plan Grant and a Resiliency Grant from the Iowa Arts Council and a number of research grants. She has had residencies at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, The Jentel Foundation, Florida State University, The Hambidge Center, I-Park, ACRE, The American Academy in Rome (Italy), Illinois State University, Sculpture Space, Babayan Kulture Evi (Turkey), Ox-bow, and Ragdale.

winter harvest

Saturday, Sept. 19 · 3:30pm
von Kuster Hall, Music Building

Erin Konsmo and Melody McKiver

Métis visual artist, Konsmo, and Anishinaabe musician/composer, McKiver, practice land-based traditional harvesting, such as ice fishing, together, while both maintain art practices deeply influenced by the land. For the first time, the two have been invited to present their art and music in collaborative dialogue incorporating projected visuals and a live performance.

• Erin Konsmo (they/she) is a Staff Research Scholar in Indigenous Science, Technology and Environment at the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto. Erin is an Alberta-raised Métis (citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation and registered Métis harvester) fisher, mixed-media artist and scholar. With a background in environmental studies, Erin's research interests include climate justice, Indigenous harvesting practices, fishing, arts-based methodologies, feminist and queer theories, and politicized healing and embodiment.
  
  Their arts practice currently focuses on fish scale art, a land-based arts practice that includes harvesting fish, processing and cleaning the scales, as well as the vertebrae and bones to create intricate florals.
  
  Erin is also a somatic practitioner and educator in climate and social justice movement spaces and believes in the body as a place for transformation towards what we care about.
   
• Melody McKiver’s (they/them) musical work integrates electronics with Western classical music to shape a new genre of Anishinaabe compositions. A proud member of Obishikokaang Lac Seul First Nation, Melody is currently Assistant Professor of Indigenous Music (tenure-track) with the Desaultels Faculty of Music at the University of Manitoba and a member of the Mizi'iwe Aana Kwat (LGBTQ2S+ Council) within the Anishinaabe Nation of Treaty #3. They are the 2020 recipient of the Canada Council's Robert Flaming Prize awarded annually to an exceptionally talented young Canadian composer, and a recurring invited participant in the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Indigenous Classical Music gatherings.
  
  Melody holds an MA in Ethnomusicology from Memorial University and a BFA in Music and Indigenous Studies from York University.

^*Western Music faculty member