SATURDAY, MAY 31st - 7PM - CENTER FOR PERFORMANCE RESEARCH

SECOND SIGHT

Featuring visual works by Christian Quiñones, Aliayta Foon-Dancoes, Jessie Marino, and Bethany Younge
with incidental music by Madison Greenstone
& opening solo set from id m theft able

ABOUT THE COMPOSERS:

Christian Quiñones is a Puerto Rican composer who explores personal and vulnerable stories through the lens of cultural identity. From sampling to auto-tune, interactive multimedia, Christian is interested in interacting with existing music to create intertextual narratives.

His music has been performed by leading ensembles such as Alarm Will Sound, Jack Quartet, the New York Youth Symphony, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire, American Composer Orchestra, Nois~, Yarn-Wire, TAK Ensemble, the icarus Quartet, the Bergamot String Quartet, Hub New Music, and Dal Niente.

Recently Christian was selected as a fellow for the 2024 MATA Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, and as a composer in residence at the Copland House. Other fellowships include Cabrillo Festival, the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, Earshot Underwood Orchestra Readings and the Eight Blackbird Creative Lab.

He has received commissions from the New York Youth Symphony, Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire, Transient Canvas, the icarus Quartet, the Bergamot String Quartet, and the Victory Players where Christian was the 2018-2019 composer in residence.

Christian graduated from the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico (B.M.) and the University of Illinois (M.M), where he was the recipient of the Graduate College Master’s Fellowship. Currently, Christian is a Ph.D. President’s fellow at Princeton University.

Jessie Marino is a Berlin-based composer, performer, and media artist. Her compositions and solo performances abstract ideas drawn from all stripes of popular culture and political discourse, girded by a definitively humanistic sensibility rife with equal doses of wit and pathos. Marino’s pieces score out sound, video, story, lighting, and staging, treating each of these elements as expandable musical materials. She transcends the conventional materials of composition to help audiences locate music in the most commonplace activities and relations.

Bethany Younge is currently serving as the Technical Director and Lecturer at Dartmouth College. Her works have been featured in the 2020 National Sawdust New Works Commission, the Long Beach Opera Songbook, the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, Resonant Bodies Festival, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, The 16th International Young Composers Meeting, the Frequency Festival, Ear Taxi, and many other festivals. She has worked with many ensembles including JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble, TILT Brass, KLANG, Ereprijs Orkestra, Fonema Consort, AndPlay, Chartreuse, Gyre Ensemble, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, Mocrep, and others throughout Europe and the USA. She has been awarded the Stipend Prize at the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, the Kanter/Mivos Prize, the Barcelona Festival Mixtur Commission award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives scholarship award, a Fromm Commission award, and was nominated for the Gaudeamus award.

Aliayta Foon-Dancoes is an award-winning Canadian violinist, composer and interdisciplinary collaborator. Until last Fall, she lived in London, England, working with the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC, and 12 Ensemble. She has performed at the Musikverein, Wigmore Hall, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Philharmonie de Paris and the BBC Proms.

As a composer, Aliayta has written work for performers including SŌ Percussion, Hub New Music, TAK Ensemble and Nathan Meltzer. Her work has been performed at Christie’s New York (USA), October Gallery (UK), Princeton University (USA), Sub Tei (DE), Espacio Gallery (UK) and Bermondsey Project Space (UK). In 2024, Aliayta will be writing pieces for Attacca Quartet and Sputter Box, and will be delivering a commission for the SALT Festival in Victoria, Canada.

Collaboration is central to Aliayta’s practice. She is a co-founder of the commissioning project Orbit Duo and the interdisciplinary collective THIRTYMINUTES. Through these projects, Aliayta has composed for new instruments designed by sound sculptor Marla Hlady, commissioned and performed pieces by Olivia Shortt, Cris Derksen and Robyn Jacob, premiered work at the Canadian Opera Company, and exhibited experimental audiovisual pieces Sub Tei (Berlin) and Espacio Gallery (London).

Aliayta has recorded on Esmerine’s Juno award-winning album Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, and, with her sister, Rebecca Foon, co-wrote the soundtrack for One & One Other - a film commissioned by the Baryshnikov Arts Centre. Other work includes a collaboration with Patti Smith and Pathway to Paris, performances alongside Patrick Watson at Live At Lost River, and a tour of Phases, a live violin and multi-channel sound performance co-created with London-based new media design studio Kai Lab.

Aliayta holds a BA from the University of Victoria, an MA from the Royal Academy of Music and has held Chamber Music Fellowships at both the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music (London). She is currently undertaking a PhD in Composition at Princeton University.

ABOUT I D M THEFT ABLE:
id m theft able performs within and without the realms of noise, avant-improvisation, sound poetry, performance, etc. using voice, found objects, electronics, and whatever else is available. He has given hundreds of performances across four continents in various settings.
~ more info here ~

ABOUT TAK ENSEMBLE:
Regarded as “one of the most prominent ensembles in the United States practicing truly experimental music” (I Care If You Listen), TAK delivers energetic performances "that combine crystalline clarity with the disorienting turbulence of a sonic vortex” (The WIRE), and “impresses with the organicity of their sound, their dynamism and virtuosity” (New Sounds, WQXR).

TAK is a mixed-quintet committed to musical exploration and experimentation and dedicated to commissioning new works and direct collaboration with composers and other artists. They have premiered hundreds of works to date since its founding in 2013. Recent highlighted collaborations include large-scale works by Eric Wubbels, Michelle Lou, Brandon López, Tyshawn Sorey, and Weston Olencki. The group has performed internationally at IntACT Festival (Thailand), Music Current Festival (Ireland), Cluster Festival (Canada), Harpa Concert Hall (Iceland), and the Delian Academy (Greece), among many others, and enjoys an active schedule of domestic touring in the U.S.

The quintet has released seven albums to critical acclaim; recent records have been described as “sublime art… a masterpiece,” (AnEarful), and “one of the most distinct and eclectic releases of the year” (I Care If You Listen). Their recorded output fosters a “deep sense of connection and communication” (Bandcamp Daily), and features collaborations with Mario Diaz de Leon, Taylor Brook, Erin Gee, Brandon López, Ann Cleare, Tyshawn Sorey, Seth Cluett, Natacha Diels, Scott L. Miller, David Bird, and Ashkan Behzadi. Their most recent release, Love, Crystal and Stone, brought together composer Ashkan Behzadi, scholar Saharnaz Samaienejad, painter Mehrdad Jafari, and design-house Sonnenzimmer to fuse poetry, visual art, original essays, and music into an experience-based hybrid publication. The ensemble’s 2019 album Oor launched their in-house media label, TAK editions, that aims to support recorded musical endeavors from across the experimental music communities, highlighting direct conversations with artists through the TAK editions Podcast. Recent TAK editions releases have included those of Ensemble Interactivo de La Habana, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Nina Dante + Bethany Younge, and several of TAK’s own recordings.

Deeply committed to educational collaborations, TAK has conducted residencies at dozens of higher educational institutions including Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, University of Chicago, and many others. The ensemble has also collaborated with younger musicians and composers at the Walden School, the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers Program, and Juilliard’s Music Advancement Program. TAK served as the Long-term Visiting Ensemble in Residence at University of Pennsylvania from 2022-23.

TAK is: Laura Cocks, flute; Madison Greenstone, clarinet; Charlotte Mundy, voice; Marina Kifferstein, violin; Ellery Trafford, percussion.