Soft Series nº4 Miolina

Title: Soft Series nº4 Miolina
Date: 160617
Venue: Flower Cat HQ
City: New York
State: NY
Zip: 10001
Event Description: Miolina was formed in 2012 when artistic director/violinist Mioi Takeda decided to form a violin duo with longtime collaborator, violinist/composer Lynn Bechtold. To date, the duo has had successful performances in NYC at The Church of the Transfiguration, City Lore, Gallery MC, Greenwich House Music School, (le) Poisson Rouge, The Morbid Anatomy Museum, Parsons School of Design, Queens Library, Spectrum, St. Mark’s Church, and Turtle Bay Music School, as well as at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, at Monk Space in Los Angeles, and at the Cité Internationale des Arts and l’Institut Finlandais in Paris, France. In addition, they have performed on series and festivals such as Circuit Bridges, Composers Concordance, and Electronic Music Midwest. Miolina specializes in violin duo music that employs the natural beauty and sound of the instruments, with or without electronics and video. They enjoy collaborating on new compositions with composers, as well as discovering hidden gems of the past. In the last three years, they’ve premiered eleven new works. Some of their recent collaborators include cellist Jennifer DeVore and percussionists Ian Ding and Eric Millstein. Miolina’s future productions include creating music for silent Japanese films of the 1920s, and an educational program about immigration and its influence on composers. Both violinists are longtime advocates of new music, and have performed with various new music groups, including the American Symphony Orchestra, Composers Concordance, Glass Farm Ensemble, North/South Consonance, SEM Ensemble, & VIA. They are recipients of a 2015 grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and a 2014 grant from New York Women Composers, and were recently granted 501(c)3 non-profit status. They will be recording their first album in late summer 2016.

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Since she settled in NYC, Japanese violinist Mioi Takeda earned her reputation as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestral player, and as a seasoned new music specialist in town. As Miolina’s artistic director, her mission is clear: encourage composers to write music for violin duo employing the natural beauty and sound of the instruments, without limitations. She also hopes to expand the violin-duo repertory for future generations. Mioi wants to help rediscover neglected violin-duo compositions by old masters, and to share the joy of current violin-duo music with her audiences.

In addition, Ms. Takeda has performed with new music groups, including North/South Consonance as concertmaster, SEM Ensemble, and Composers Concordance, giving countless premieres. She has also performed with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, American Symphony Orchestra, Washington Square Festival, Scandia Symphony, Stamford Symphony, Strathmere Orchestra, The Japan Philharmonic, and The New Japan Philharmonic. Ms. Takeda’s performances can be heard on North/South and Naxos Recordings.
Mioi was a scholarship student of Dorothy DeLay and Masao Kawasaki at The Juilliard School, and she earned a Doctorate of Musical Arts from The City University of New York under the guidance of Itzhak Perlman. She also enjoys doing yoga and watching The Big Bang Theory when she is not playing the violin.

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Violinist Lynn Bechtold has appeared in recital throughout the U.S., Canada, France, Holland, and Switzerland. An advocate of contemporary music, she has worked with composers such as Carter Burwell, Gloria Coates, George Crumb, John Harbison, and Morton Subotnick, and has premiered works on the NWEAMO Festival, Princeton Composers’ Series, and the TriBeCa New Music Festival. In 2001, she gave the premiere of “Violynn,” a work for violin and electronics written for her by Alvin Lucier. Called ‘up-and-coming’ by TimeOut and noted in All About Jazz for her ‘virtuosity and technical expertise,’ she performs with Miolina, Zentripetal, Bleecker StQ, CompCord Ensemble, North/South Consonance, SEM Ensemble, and the disco band Escort, and has been a member of groups that have included the Grammy-nominated East Village Opera Company (rock/opera band). San Diego Story recently called her “unapologetically dominating.”

She has been heard on CBC Radio, CBS-TV, NBC-TV, NHK-TV, and WNYC, and on TV shows such as 30 Rock & Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Recent programs have been with Catalyst Dance, DJ Spooky, VisionIntoArt, and Pablo Ziegler. In addition, she’s performed with entertainers such as Boyz II Men, Willie Colon, Sheryl Crow, Dead Can Dance, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society Band, Roberta Flack, Left Banke, Smokey Robinson, J-Pop band SMAP, Donna Summer, and Stevie Wonder. An active performer, she has performed at diverse venues from Carnegie Hall & Lincoln Center to Joe’s Pub & Madison Square Garden.

She received her M.M.from Mannes-The New School for Music, where she was a student of noted violinist Felix Galimir. Prior to that, she received a double-degree in Violin and English from the New England Conservatory and Tufts University in Boston. In addition, she likes to compose electroacoustic works, and to write articles about food/music/life. Her compositions have been performed on festivals such as Circuit Bridges, Composers Concordance, and Music With a View. She is on the faculty of The Dwight School and Greenwich House Music School in NYC, and the Norwalk Youth Symphony in CT.

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Ken Butler is an artist and musician whose Hybrid musical instruments, performances, installations, and other works explore the interaction and transformation of common and uncommon objects, altered images, sounds and silence.
He has been featured in exhibitions and performances worldwide including The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Prada Foundation in Venice, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Mass MoCA, The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, as well as in South America, Thailand, and Japan.
Ken recently won first prize in the Guthman Musical Instrument Design Competition at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, in addition to the People’s Choice awards for Best Performance and Most Unusual Instrument.
His works have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, Smithsonian, and Sculpture Magazine and have been featured on PBS, CNN, MTV, and NBC, including a live appearance on The Tonight Show. Awards include fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pollack/Krasner Foundation.

Ken Butler studied viola as a child and maintained an interest in music while studying visual arts in France, at Colorado College, and Portland State University, where he completed his MFA in painting in 1977.
He has performed with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, David Van Tieghem, Butch Morris, The Soldier String Quartet, Matt Darriau’s Paradox Trio, The Tonight Show Band, and The Master Gnawa musicians of Morocco. His CD, Voices of Anxious Objects, is on Tzadik records.

Works by Ken Butler are represented in public and private collections in Portland, Seattle, Vail, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, Washington, Paris, Tel Aviv, and New York City, including the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón writes music for accordions, toys and electronics as well as chamber ensembles and orchestras. Her music has been described as “wistfully idiosyncratic and contemplative” (WQXR/Q2) and “mesmerizing and affecting” (Feast of Music) while The New York Times noted her “capacity to surprise” and her “quirky approach to scoring”. Her music has been performed at the Bang on a Can Marathon and the Ecstatic Music Festival and she has collaborated with artists like Sō Percussion, janus trio, American Composers Orchestra and Face the Music, among others. Angélica is currently a doctoral candidate at The Graduate Center (CUNY), where she studies composition with Tania León. She’s a teaching artist for New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers Program and Lincoln Center Education working with learners of all ages on creative composition projects. Angélica was the 2014-2015 Van Lier Fellow at American Composers

Orchestra and is currently working on a commission for the NYC based quartet Loadbang and on the score for the documentary “Memories of a Penitent Heart” by director Cecilia Aldarondo.

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Mari Kimura is at the forefront of violinists who are extending the technical and expressive capabilities of the instrument. As a performer, composer, and researcher, she has opened up new sonic worlds for the violin. Notably, she has mastered the production of pitches that sound up to an octave below the violin’s lowest string without retuning. This technique, which she calls Subharmonics, has earned Mari considerable renown in the concert music world and beyond. She is also a pioneer in the field of interactive computer music. At the same time, she has earned international acclaim as a soloist and recitalist in both standard and contemporary repertoire.

As a composer, Mari’s commissions include the International Computer Music Association, Harvestworks, Music from Japan and others, supported by grants including New York Foundation for the Arts, Arts International, New Music USA/Meet The Composer, Japan Foundation, Argosy Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts. In 2010, Mari won the Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition, and invited as Composer-in-Residence at IRCAM in Paris. In May 2011, Mari was presented in a solo recital at the Bohemian National Hall in NYC by the Vilcek Foundation, in recognition of her groundbreaking work as a foreign-born artist; subsequently she was named one of 2011’s “Immigrants: Pride of America” by the Carnegie Corporation, published in the New York Times. Mari’s latest CD, The World Below G and Beyond, is devoted entirely to her own compositions and focuses on works using Subharmonics and interactive computer music. In 2011, Mari presented her “I-Quadrifoglo”, her first string quartet with interactive computer at New York’s Symphony Space, commissioned by the Cassatt String Quartet through 2010 Fromm Foundation Commission Award from Harvard. Mari’s work has been featured in major publications including the New York Times written by Matthew Gurewitsch, and in Scientific American written by Larry Greenemeier. In October 2014, Mari received the Inaugural Award Of Composers Now Creative Residencies at The Pocantico Center of The Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

As a violinist, Mari has premiered many notable works, including John Adams’s Violin Concerto (Japanese premiere), Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIII (US premiere), Tania Léon’s Axon for violin and computer (world premiere), and Salvatore Sciarrino’s 6 Capricci (US premiere), among others. In 2007, Mari introduced Jean-Claude Risset’s violin concerto, Schemes, at Suntory Hall with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. The cadenza she wrote for the concerto, incorporating advanced Subharmonics, was subsequently published in STRINGS magazine. In November 2010, Mari appeared as a soloist with the Hamburg Symphony performing John Adams’ Dharma at the Big Sur, under the direction of Jonathan Stockhammer, conductor.

In 2013, Mari inaugurated a new summer program as the Director of the Future Music Lab at the Atlantic Music Festival in collaboration with IRCAM. The program focuses on high-level performers using the latest technology. Since 1998, Mari has been teaching a graduate course in Interactive Computer Music Performance at Juilliard.

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Composer Melissa Grey’s works have been described as “elegantly diabolical…strikingly eerie and captivating” (furtherfield.org). Her recent projects include blur (after blue hour), a kinetic score based on Renaissance combinatorial memory wheels, created for Payton MacDonald’s Sonic Divide project. She is currently developing a soundscape that will broadcast in the gallery space for the exhibition curated by artist Angela Grauerholz, Michèle Lemieux | The Whole and Its Parts, From drawing to animated films, to be shown at the Centre de design, Université du Québec à Montréal in September 2016. With artist and animator Nicole Antebi, she has ongoing animation-sound projects that include live performance and processing with Grey performing a vintage Merlin music machine: Procrustean Bed, composed for violinist Lynn Bechtold, premiered at the New West Electronic Arts and Music Organization Festival in San Diego; and Magic Square, a triple collaborative effort with Antebi and synthpop pioneer, Vince Clarke, premiered at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, New York. Grey is an Associate Director of Composers Concordance and a Member of the Board of Directors for Miolina, the violin duo of Lynn Bechtold and Mioi Takeda. She teaches Sound Studies at the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York City.

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Nicole Antebi works in non-fiction animation, motion graphics, installation while simultaneously connecting and creating opportunities for other artists through larger curatorial and editorial projects such as Water, CA and Winter Shack. Her work has been shown in many unusual places including Hive House Los Angeles, High Desert Test Sites, The Manhattan Bridge Anchorage, Teeny Cine’s converted trailer, Portable Forest, a Texas Grain Silo and in the cabin of a capsized ship at Machine Project in Los Angeles. She was the 2015 animator-in-residence at Circuit Bridges, New York and was recently awarded a Jerome Foundation Grant in Film/Video for a forthcoming animated film about El Paso and Ciudad Juàrez set in the early 90’s. She teaches part time at CUNY Staten Island and Parsons The New School for Design.

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Procrustean Bed, a performance for violin, Merlin, and live processing, with animation by the artist Nicole Antebi, is a collaborative work based on the myth of Procrustes, the subduer, the stretcher, the rogue metalworker who either cut or stretched his guests’ legs to fit the specific size of an iron bed. The phrase is used in several disciplines to convey an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced. Merlin, performed by Melissa Grey, is a handheld computer game from the late 1970s that was one of the earliest digital sequencers. In Music Machine mode, there is a limit of 48 pitches. This constraint will be subdued or stretched to fit our procrustean bed. Procrustean Bed was composed for violinist Lynn Bechtold.

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Monroe Golden is a composer from rural Alabama, now living in New York City, whose overtone-informed music has been called “delightfully disorienting,” “lovely, sumptuous, yet arcane,” and “irresistible…, full of wit and beauty.” He received the Alabama Music Teachers Association/MTNA Commissioning Award, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and commissions from solo performers and groups. His work “Incongruity” (piano/fixed media) was the first prize entry in the 2011 UnTwelve Competition. Beyond his own artistry, Golden has actively encouraged and promoted the innovative arts in his resident community. A founding member of the Birmingham Art Music Alliance, he served as President from 2003-2005 and 2014-2015, and also led the Birmingham Art Association, Birmingham Improv, Artburst performance series, and the New Arts Stage. He co-founded and implemented the Birmingham New Music Festival in 2014. He graduated from the University of Montevallo and earned a doctorate in Music Composition from the University of Illinois. There are three complete audio releases of his music: A Still Subtler Spirit (Living Artist Recordings, 2003), Alabama Places (innova Recordings, 2007), and Incongruity (self-published, 2011). His microtonal piano piece “I’m Worried Now” — written for Aron Kallay’s “Beyond 12” project — is scheduled for release on MicroFest Records in late 2016.

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Karen Tanaka is a versatile composer and pianist. Her works have been performed by distinguished orchestras and ensembles worldwide including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, among many others. Born in Tokyo, she started formal piano and composition lessons as a child. After studying composition at Toho Gakuen School of Music, she moved to Paris in 1986 with the aid of a French Government Scholarship to study with Tristan Murail and work at IRCAM as an intern. In 1987, she was awarded the Gaudeamus Prize at the International Music Week in Amsterdam. She studied with Luciano Berio in Florence in 1990-91 with funds from the Nadia Boulanger Foundation and a Japanese Government Scholarship. In 1998, she was appointed as Co-Artistic Director of the Yatsugatake Kogen Music Festival, previously directed by Toru Takemitsu. In 2012, she was selected as a fellow of the Sundance Institute’s Composers Lab for feature film and mentored by Hollywood’s leading composers. Her music is published by Chester Music in London, Schott Music in New York (PSNY), and Editions BIM in Switzerland. Karen Tanaka lives in Los Angeles and teaches composition at California Institute of the Arts.

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Shibuya is one of the busiest railway stations in Tokyo. There are almost three million passengers that move through the station every day. The place is famous for its scramble crossing that stops vehicles in all directions to allow pedestrians to swarm the entire intersection. Shibuya Tokyo was inspired by this hectic, sleepless and chaotic place.

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David Morneau is a composer of an entirely undecided genre. Described by Molly Sheridan as a “shining beacon” of inspiration, his diverse work illuminates ideas about our culture, issues concerning creativity, and even the very nature of music itself. His eclectic output has been described variously as “elegantly rendered”, “happily prissy”, “impressive”, “unusual, esoteric, and offbeat”. His chiptune album, Broken Memory, “absolutely wrecks shop.… For that, David Morneau wins.” His current projects include Not Less Than the Good, a secularized morning prayer service based on Henry Thoreau’s Walden, which is being composed for New Thread Quartet (a New York based saxophone ensemble) and will include field recordings made at Walden Pond and read excerpts from Thoreau’s book; and Vintage Machines, a series of pieces utilizing vintage video game systems to make music. Morneau is composer-in-residence with Immigrant Breast Nest, a New York City netlabel.

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Established in January 2016, l’Artiste ordinaire (l’Ao) is a collaborative partnership between composer-performers Melissa Grey and David Morneau that has launched electronic performances and Soft Series, a concert series dedicated to presenting soft premieres. Live electronic performances include 7^3 [M] (Benjolin synthesizer, Game Boy), Gadget Berry Dimple: A Glossary of False Translation (Benjolin, Merlin, Spoken Word) for Hans Tammen’s Rakete bee bee? Rakete bee zee! 100th Anniversary of Dada at Spectrum NYC, and Hyperlocal 2.0 for Thomas Piercy (Bass Clarinet, Sine Waves, Beats). l’Ao is developing Photon Ecstasy, a concert-length performance project that engages music, sound, and science fiction to address the hubris of certainty, which will premiere at the University of Pennsylvania Special Collections Library in conjunction with the exhibition of artist Dan Rose’s DNA-Photon Project (October 2016).

Soft Series is a concert series dedicated to presenting soft premieres of new music in an intimate environment with lively pre- and post-concert conversation.
Program: 7^3 [M] / Melissa Grey & David Morneau / Melissa Grey [Benjolin synthesizer], David Morneau [Nintendo Gameboy]; Tres insultos para dos violines [I) Burlesco II) Secco III) Insistente] / Angélica Negrón / Miolina (Lynn Bechtold & Mioi Takeda) [violins]; Sarahal for Two Violins & Interactive Computer / Mari Kimura / Miolina (Lynn Bechtold & Mioi Takeda) [violins]; Procrustean Bed / Melissa Grey (music) & Nicole Antebi (animation) / Miolina (Lynn Bechtold & Mioi Takeda) [violins], Melissa Grey [Merlin Music Machine & laptop]; Funshallbehad / Lynn Bechtold / Miolina (Lynn Bechtold & Mioi Takeda) [violins], Ken Butler [Hybrid instruments]; Winona’s Lesson / Monroe Golden / Miolina (Lynn Bechtold & Mioi Takeda) [violins]; Shibuya Tokyo / Karen Tanaka / Miolina (Lynn Bechtold & Mioi Takeda) [violins]
Composition: 7^3 [M]
Collaborator: Lynn Bechtold; Mioi Takeda
producer: Melissa Grey & David Morneau
Is Part Of: Soft Series