Renowned Dutch vocalist and sound poet Jaap Blonk is unique for his powerful stage presence and almost childlike freedom in improvisation, combined with a keen grasp of structure. With the use of live electronics, the scope and range of his concerts has acquired a considerable extension.

Dr Voxoid’s Next Move is Blonk’s current voice and electronics performance. It is in constant development, new possibilities being added frequently. He prefers to choose a specific program on the spot and may even change it during a performance. It may contain:

– sound poetry (his own works and possibly an occasional ‘classic’ from this tradition)
– pieces in invented languages, for instance in “Onderlands” (the language of the Underlands, a variation on Netherlands)
– phonetic etudes and processes
– live soundscapes
– improvisations, both for solo voice and in dialogue with his live electronics
– and more…

Jaap Blonk is a self-taught composer, performer and poet. He went to university for mathematics and musicology but did not finish those studies. In the late 1970s he took up saxophone and started to compose music. A few years later he discovered his potential as a vocal performer, at first in reciting poetry and later on in improvisations and his own compositions. For almost two decades the voice was his main means for the discovery and development of new sounds.

From around the year 2000 on Blonk started work with electronics, at first using samples of his own voice, then extending the field to include pure sound synthesis as well. He took a year off of performing in 2006. As a result, his renewed interest in mathematics led him to research the possibilities of algorithmic composition for the creation of music, visual work and poetry.

Besides working as a soloist, he has collaborated with many musicians and ensembles in the field of contemporary and improvised music, such as Maja Ratkje, Mats Gustafsson, Joan La Barbara, The Ex, the Netherlands Wind Ensemble and the Ebony Band. He premiered several compositions by the German composer Carola Bauckholt, including a piece for voice and orchestra. A solo voice piece was commissioned by the Donaueschinger Musiktage.

Seattle Modern Orchestra is pleased to host composer Orlando Jacinto Garcia with a new piece, the clouds receding into the mountains, written for violist and University of Washington faculty Melia Watras and SMO. The title refers to both the spectacular cloud formations as well as the continually receding aural materials heard throughout the work. The concert also features Swiss composer Beat Furrer’s Aria, and Melodien for chamber orchestra by the 20th century master, György Ligeti.

At 7:30 PM there will be a pre-concert conversation with SMO’s co-artistic director Jérémy Jolley and guest composer Orlando Jacinto Garcia

Composer/percussionist Adam Briggs presents an immersive musical landscape with the premier of his first string quartet as well as a large work for split percussion and orchestra, both aimed at the exaltation of unity and the expulsion of the past and future.

His music stems from the friction between his early training as a percussionist and his more recent experiences as a classical composer. While he plays regularly in a variety of groups ranging from Balkan brass bands to experimental drone ensembles, his personal compositions are consistently reflective and apocalyptic.

All donations go to supporting the Wayward Music Series.

At The Sound Ensemble, we take great pleasure in introducing you to works and composers you may have never heard before. In this concert we will share great compositions by musicians known for their pop and indie careers. This will be a fun opportunity to learn about the depth of training that many great popular artists have experienced.

You won’t want to miss Murder Ballads by Bryce Dessner of the National, or three world premieres by James McAlister of Sufjan Stevens and the Album Leaf, who just performed at the Oscars. We’ll also play Stephen Rush‘s Woodwind Quintet and selections from Beck’s Song Reader.

THINGS THAT BREAK is a multidisciplinary concert experience in the realms of new music, stop-motion animation, storytelling, visual art, and theatrical performances centered around the theme of “breaking”. Jessi Harvey, composer; collaborated with Becky Joy Aitken, animator; Sonya Harris, storyteller and photographer; and Aimee Hong, performer. This group of Seattle-based female artists combined their abilities to create this unique presentation of world premieres with an intent to find the connections and unity between people; in this case, the connection of common fragmentation. These connections, in today’s continually more polarized society, are important to find to start a dialogue between opposing viewpoints and a re-opening for common ground.

This project is sponsored, in part by a grant from 4Culture.

With Special Guest Julian Priester – Mr. Priester will play a short solo set and guest with Tiny Ghost

Tribute to Muhal Richard Abrams – Seattle musicians pay tribute to the founding father of the AACM, who passed in 2017. Muhal’s vision of creativity was widely diverse, and he supported and nurtured young musicians from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds. His influence was broad and profound.

Tribute to John Carter & Bobby Bradford featuring James Falzone, Alex Cline, Ray Larsen and Troy Schiefelbein. – John Carter and Bobby Bradford both lived and made their entire careers based in LA. This may be in part why they are lesser known than many of their contemporaries, such as Ornette Colemen, Don Cherry, David Murray and many others. But ask musicians in the know, and they stand as giants in creative music. John Carter’s clarinet has set the standard for many who have followed, not the least of all James Falzone.

Tiny Ghost w/ Ray Larsen, Ivan Arteaga, Katie Jacobson, and Greg Sinibaldi – Four of Seattle’s new generation of creative musicians present this unique ensemble incorporating written material, electronic processing, voice and improvisation.

Ancient to Future* was conceived in 2017 as a 3-day festival to celebrate the great revolution in jazz and improvised music associated with the mid 60s – and that continues to this day. This music found its earliest expression in the music of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor, and continued with the innovations of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the Black Artists Group (BAG) and onward.

This year’s festival features the music of Sonny Sharrock, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, the solo work of Steve Lacy, a tribute to John Carter & Bobby Bradford, and the large ensemble music of Henry Threadgill, plus a tribute to Muhal Richard Abrams, the founding father of the AACM who passed away last October.

The featured artist this year is Alex Cline, a master percussionist who has performed in a career spanning forty years with a myriad of great artists in creative music, including Julius Hemphill, Myra Melford, Joseph Jarmen, his twin brother Nels Cline, Charlie Haden, Charles Lloyd, Tim Berne and John Carter and Bobby Bradford just to name a few.

In addition, this year’s festival will focus on local artists whose work pays homage to the tradition and its many evolutions. Ivan Artega’s Tiny Ghost, Crystal Beth’s Boom Boom band, and a Cornish College of the Arts-based band lead by drummer Ruby Dunphy (currently the drummer in Seattle’s own “Thunderpussy”) in a tribute to the music of Eric Dolphy.

The 2018 festival will be presented at the Royal Room and at the Good Shepherd Center Chapel in a partnership between The Royal Room, Nonsequitur and the Cornish College of the Arts.

Other Ancient to Future performances will be at the Royal Room on Thursday March 29 and Saturday March 31.

* Ancient to Future comes from the phrase the Art Ensemble of Chicago used to describe their music – “Great Black Music: Ancient to Future.”

Seattle composer/pianist Keith Eisenbrey will present the first 11 parts of his large-scale work-in-progress Études d’exécution imminent, including the complete Second Thoughts, Corollaries and the three sightings of Ghosting Doubles (after Amy Denio). In this work, which he began in 2013 and which at one point precipitated a year-long sabbatical from writing music down, Keith seeks to re-imagine the notion of keyboard virtuosity as a means of temporal inquiry, a pick with which to crack open seams in our experience of time, in order to more closely approach the limn of the present moment.

Keith Eisenbrey brings to his pianism a composer’s imaginative musical understanding, and to his composition a remorselessly speculative spirit, cerebral and sensuous at once. His music seeks to illuminate those most intimate of our personal spaces: the silences across which, in which, and out from which music, thought, and utterance unfold. A native of the Puget Sound area, he studied composition with Dell Wade, Ken Benshoof, John Rahn, and Benjamin Boretz, and piano with Victor Smiley, Joan Purswell, and Neal O’Doan. He is a co-founder of Banned Rehearsal, an ongoing argument in creative musical expression, now in it’s 34th year. His critical and theoretical work has appeared in Perspectives of New Music, News of Music, and Open Space, and he assisted in the editing of Boretz’s Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought for its republication. His oeuvres includes solo pieces for various keyboards, songs, and chamber works. He opines weekly at Now Music in New Albion.

Polytope by Los Angeles composer Daniel Corral is a multimedia microtonal performance for MIDI quartet. Performed entirely in darkness, four live musicians operate colorful glowing MIDI controllers. It’s a mesmerizing dance of silhouettes, captured on live feed video and projected large and bright as a moving, visual score.

Polytope is rhythmically charged in the vein of musical minimalists such as Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, or Arnold Dreyblatt, but harmonically inspired by the microtonal explorations of James Tenney, Erv Wilson, or Harry Partch. The multimedia style of presentation is somewhere between a string quartet, Kraftwerk, James Turrell, and an Indonesian dhalang (master shadow puppeteer).

Onstage, four MIDI controllers sit on a small square table. A single video camera captures the view from above. The controllers are not traditional keyboards; they are glowing grids of 8×8 buttons, rotated 45° to create tonality diamonds. One musician stands before each controller. In the dark, the overhead camera captures the colorful, changing patterns of grid lights and the fast-moving silhouettes of the musician hands. The live feed video is projected in the space, creating a larger than life, colorful multimedia experience inspired by Light and Space art that also acts as an evolving, visual score.

Polytope is performed by Erin Barnes, Cory Beers, Daniel Corral, and Andrew Lessman.

Presented by Nonsequitur.

New music multi-instrumentalist and rabble-rouser Peter Nelson-King presents the world premiere of The Magpie’s Shadow, a large-scale cycle of piano miniatures inspired by the poetry of Yvor Winters. Winters’s poem sequence The Magpie’s Shadow is a gem of early American modernist verse, assembling 28 aphoristic poems to create an effect of dreamlike mystery and wonder, and Nelson-King’s piece sets all 28 in microcosmic delight for solo piano, using a rich pantonal palette and extended techniques. Also featured is Hans Erich Apostel’s Kubiniana, a stunning 10-piece cycle based on the arresting drawings of Alfred Kubin. Rounding out the program are Fulvio Caldini’s rarely-heard Iblis Suite and Ernest Bloch’s enchanting Five Sketches in Sepia.

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.

The Janus Switch v.2 (2016) is a digital performance work merging live cinema and electronic sound in a poetic exploration of generative audio-visual feedback structures. Janus, the two-headed Roman god, was notable for his ability to look in two directions at once. He was known as the god of doorways and passages. The Janus Switch is a techno-poetic realization of these ideas, where signal streams are switched rapidly back and forth to create a wide range of sonic and visual interactions. The system software, created by Cory Metcalf in collaboration with David Stout, allows for real time mixing of mathematic data to create an evolving array of hybrid audio-visual forms and aesthetic behaviors. While the technical methods can be interesting in and of themselves, the work is driven by the visceral experience produced by the fleeting imagery that emerges in the process of navigating the system. The work is paradoxically, highly composed and thoroughly improvisational. The image vocabulary, like music, reveals its source as a kind of fluid state of transitory becoming. What emerges for the viewer is a dynamic subjectivity, as the audience must actively complete the circuit to co-create the meaning or apparent “thingness” of what the mind and body is confronting. In this process of “Janus Switching” many things, places and ideas come and go, including allusions to landscape, cellular life, plant forms, mechanistic structures, gateways, glyphs and vessels, just to name a few. All of the resulting sound comes from the direct sonification of the image processes. The sonification methods allow for working in both tonal/atonal and/or timbre oriented modes including a wide array of subtractive noise-based soundscapes.

David Stout is a visual artist, composer and performer exploring cross-media synthesis and interdisciplinary approaches to hybrid genres bridging the arts. He holds an inter-arts MFA from the California Institute of the Arts where he studied with Ed Emshwiller, Jim Pomeroy, and Bill Viola. His award-winning works include live cinema performance, interactive video installation, electro-acoustic music composition and immersive performance events that integrate emerging technologies and multi-screen projection as an extension of performer, audience and architecture. Since 2002 he has worked closely with creative partner, Cory Metcalf to examine the aesthetic possibilities for evolutionary generative systems, artificial life networks and simulation environments. The pair, who began their seminal collaboration in Santa Fe, New Mexico, are renowned as founding members of the critically acclaimed visual music ensemble, NoiseFold. Their performances, which have included the UNESCO Creative Cities Summit, the New York Electronic Arts Festival, Interactive Futures in Victoria, BC, “Chinati Weekend” in Marfa, Texas and REDCAT in Los Angeles, have garnered enthusiastic reviews and a growing international audience. Stout is currently founder and director of the Hybrid Arts Laboratory at the University of North Texas, where he coordinates the Initiative for Advance Research in Technology and the Arts (iARTA) and holds joint positions in Music Composition and Studio Art/New Media.

Presented by Nonsequitur.