For its season finale concert, Seattle Modern Orchestra is thrilled to perform the West Coast premiere of British composer Jonathan Harvey’s 50-minutes epic work Bhakti (devotion) for chamber ensemble and quadraphonic tape (1982), centered around sanskrit hymns from the Rig Veda toward a transcendent consciousness. Pre-concert talk with SMO co-Director Jérémy Jolley at 7:30.

As a composer and performer of electroacoustic music, Canada-born Sarah Davachi‘s projects are primarily concerned with disclosing the delicate psychoacoustics of intimate aural spaces, utilizing extended durations and simple harmonic structures that emphasize subtle variations in overtone complexity, temperament and intonation, and natural resonances. The instrumentation she employs is varied, including analog synthesizers, piano, electric organ, pipe and reed organ, voice, analog samplers, orchestral strings, and woodwinds, with mutual idioms often layered in textural and timbral counterpoint. Similarly informed by minimalist tenets of the 1960s and 1970s, baroque leanings toward slow-moving chordal suspensions, and experimental production practices of the studio environment, in her sound is manifest an experience that lessens apprehension of consonance and dissonance in likeness of the familiar and the distant.

Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit, Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improviser, producer, writer, teacher, and Seattle treasure. Her voice as a cellist, amplified or acoustic, is full, textured, committed and original. A relentless inquirer, she wanders recklessly across borders that separate genre, discipline, time and geography, performing in clubs, cafes, galleries, arenas, concert halls, sheds, ceremonies, barbecues, and stadiums.

Presented by Nonsequitur.

Ramen Trio plays composed and improvised music that’s informed by jazz though not bound by it. The three musicians, James DeJoie (clarinet, bass clarinet), Doug Lilla (bass guitar), Jay Weaver (drums) constantly search for “spines” in the music whether it’s written or improvised and revel in making music live and breathe. Listening to each other is a crucial element of the band’s chemistry as they seek to discover new paths through the musical topography they find themselves in, while finding balance in keeping off balance and by taking risks that let the music proceed rather than stagnate.

Their new recording will be available on Bandcamp as of May 1. A limited number of CDs will be available at the concert.

Gift Tapes/DRAFT presents Arun Chandra and Scott Goodwin for its second installment of its 2018 program at the Chapel Performance Space, in association with the Wayward Music Series.

The work of Arun Chandra is not often presented outside of academic circles, but offers an extremely unique perspective on composition and computer music, having studied under Herbert Brün and recorded and performed works by Brün, Barry Traux and Xenakis. He will present four works, including a recent composition for 32 channels, down-mixed for 8 channels.

Scott Goodwin will perform live, drawing on his niche somewhere between new techno and experimental composition, employing his ever-rotating set of electronic instruments (currently Eurorack synthesizers, outboard effects, and computer) to craft a set specifically designed for the Chapel “inspired by rhythmic minimalism, club music, video game soundtracks and the science fiction works of Greg Egan and Liu Cixi”.

Kestrel is the musical duo of trumpet player Greg Kelley and guitarist Bill Horist. Both artists push the tonal and sonic possibilities of their instruments with extended techniques and improvisation. They will be joined by local butoh dancer Vanessa Skantze.

Olympia’s long-running experimental guitar and synthesizer duo, LA LUNGS, combine ethereal tones and airy textures enough to refresh anyone’s senses. They have released albums on Debacle records and have preformed around the region.

Blessed Blood – Seattle’s Rachel LeBlanc – carefully and meticulously weaves vocal layers together with her modular synth to create expressive pieces that are full, uplifting, and haunting.

Kole Galbraith and Matt Pollack will exhibit recent microtonal compositions for prepared guitar and bass.

Melissa Heath and Christian Asplund will perform an eclectic mix of American, European, and Canadian works for soprano with piano and viola by Cage, Ligeti, Ives, Messiaen, Webern, Lutosawski, as well as a new work by Asplund and a song by Seattle’s Jarrad Powell.

The Heath-Asplund duo has performed a fair amount of the standard lieder and operatic repertoire as well as Asplund’s sacred music. They have lately been investigating lesser known solo vocal works by well-known composers, especially those not known for song.

The program will include mysteriously lyrical songs by Ligeti and Lutoslawski, an early cycle by Messiaen, characteristically laconic selections from Webern’s Op. 12 cycle, and a Javanese tinged-song by Powell. Asplund’s piece will be a characteristically eclectic mini-opera.

University of Washington DMA candidate Daniel Webbon presents an evening of recent compositions and collaborations. His work ranges from traditionally notated modern classical composition to freely improvised experimental music and draws on ideas from contemporary literature and continental philosophy.

The concert will feature works for piano and voice, solo flute, and string quartet, as well as a collaboration between drummer Matt Carr and dancer Alethea Alexander. The evening will conclude with the premier of Daniel’s most recent work, This vast southern empire; a sprawling improvisational score for mixed ensemble and voice that draws on academic and historical texts dealing with Southern reconstruction and identity.

Inverted Space Ensemble presents works that feature the Cimbalom and Beyond. The concert will feature works by György Kurtág for the cimbalom, including Scenes From A Novel. The concert will also include Lou Harrisons’s Music for Violin and Various Instruments, European, Asian, and African. Finally, the concert will explore James Tenney’s Quintext, a work that pays homage to many of Tenney’s influences, including Morton Feldman and Harry Partch.

* Seating will be limited, so advance purchase is recommended. Any remaining seats will be available at the door for a $5 – $15 suggested donation.

A Sonic Lighthouse is a one of a kind device invented by Jimmy Johnson that spins a highly focused beam of sound around a horizontal plane. The experience of sound emitted from this device depends entirely on the space you are in, the speed of rotation, and the type of sound input. At slow rotation speeds in a rectangular room, it sounds like there is an invisible speaker sliding itself around the surfaces of the room and then suddenly loud when pointed at you. As you speed it up it becomes an enveloping cloud with a rhythmic pulse. The end result is spatially mesmerizing and phenomenologically paradoxical. Favorite comment so far “..I think you’ve broken sound”

This performance of The Synchronized Rotations of Sounds in Spaces is tailored to the unique acoustics and geometry of the Chapel. It will feature live musicians, synthesized sound and field recordings played through several sonic lighthouses, a second type of rotating reflector (also invented by Jimmy), and traditional multi-speaker holographic sound system for virtual rotations. These three systems will be networked together in ways that make musical tempo-based sense and can interact with each other, FX parameters, synths, MIDI, and of course the musicians. The performance will feature improvisations by Cristin Miller, Eric Muhs, and special guests. Original compositions and interpretations of the music of Billie Holiday, Emily Howell, Maryanne Amacher, Bette Midler and the original NBC TV series Knight Rider will be heard.

Jimmy Johnson is a composer, artist, scientist and engineer; in that order, both chronologically and vocationally speaking. He has composed music for feature film, television, dance, new media installation and has had music released on Astralwerks, Moonshine, Virgin, Domestic and Fragrant Music. His artwork has been installed in the Getty Center, LACMA, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Henry, the EMP and is included in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art. As a scientist he studied the role social learning plays in the developmental and echolocation calls of E. fuscus, the big brown bat. Most recently employed as a research scientist/engineer at the University of Washington, he graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts where he studied classical guitar with Aaron Shearer, earned a Bachelor’s degree in Sonic Creation and Perception from the University of Washington, and a Bard MFA.

Multi-instrumentalist and modern music rabblerouser Peter Nelson-King presents an eclectic program of individualist piano music from the 1980’s. The international cadre of composers presented wrote these works in a time of unprecedented pluralism and freedom in classical music, and whether they were beginning their careers or nearing the end each work speaks from a personal and vital musical language. Featuring works by Robert Beaser, George Benjamin, Fulvio Caldini, David Chaitkin, Edmund Rubbra, Peter Sculthorpe, John Tavener, Augusta Read Thomas and Charles Wuorinen.

Peter Nelson-King is the founder of Cursive, a modern chamber ensemble specializing in performing hidden gems of 20th- and 21st-century classical music with a modular ensemble. A King County native, he got degrees at University of Puget Sound and Boston University before returning to the Seattle area to perform in a variety of groups and capacities. He is a trumpet player, pianist, vocalist and composer, and is a regular member of Brass Band Northwest, the Lake Washington Symphony Orchestra, the Ensign Symphony and the Paper Puppet Opera.

(artwork: “Blossom”, by Sandford Biggers)