ARTICLES and INTERVIEWS
Echoes of Echoes: Memory, Perception and Contemplations on hcmf//
Article written for Wet Ink Ensemble Archive — Read it HERE
Article written for Wet Ink Ensemble Archive — Read it HERE
Experiments in Adaptability: Parenting and Sourdough
Article written for Tertulia's Tuck In series — Read it HERE
Jason Eckardt in Conversation with Alice Teyssier
Interviewing the composer of "Tongues"
Read it HERE and listen to the International Contemporary Ensemble recording of Movement II below
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Repetition: It Makes the Difference
View syllabus
View syllabus
The act of listening musically requires imaginative participation. This course deals with the simple act and yet complex concept of repetition, which invites a more direct confrontation with the sensory attributes of sound. Students will explore the impact of repetition—and its important counterpart, difference—through introductory texts and a wide array of sounds and musics. Students will study the role of musical and music-like repetition in rituals, in speech, in establishing influence as well as repetition's pervasiveness in different cultures and eras. Becoming aware of the patterns and differences in music will become a practice applicable to daily life, wherein messaging, learning, propaganda, and individuation are exposed and analyzed.
Equally welcoming to trained and untrained musicians, this ensemble/course focuses on the interpretation of graphic and text-based scores as well as situation works, emphasizing the spirit of fun, spontaneity, and collaborative decision-making. As a basis for interpretive learning, we will study and perform scores by Victor Adan, Mark Applebaum, Earle Brown, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Carolyn Chen, Julius Eastman, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Miya Masaoka and Pauline Oliveros. The mid-term concert will feature performances with projections of the score and engaged discussion about the composers’ idiosyncratic approaches and the ensemble’s interpretations. The second part of the term will focus on the composition and elaboration of experimental ensemble works, which will focus on personal style and the sonic resources available from within the ensemble. The final concert will feature performances by members of the ensemble of their colleagues’ work, similarly projected and described for the benefit of the audience.
This highly participatory course invites students to engage deeply with the primary source of resonance in their bodies: the voice. The class will teeter at the limits between corporeal and conceptual logics and theorize conscious awareness. Singing, which arguably predates spoken language, is addressed in multiple levels and studied both as the result of a deliberate gesture and as a pillar in the elaboration of the sovereign Self. How can the awareness of our embodied response to the world yield more agency and power in our own lives? How do voices and human sounds participate in the development and division of community, security, unity and opposition within and across the cultural and socio-political field? Through the study of biomusics, vocal anatomy and physiology, corporeal philosophies and technological liminalities, students will generate new critical frameworks for health, communication, improvisation and community building.
All New York’s a stage, in which “the audience is the object of its own contemplation” (Luc Sante). In this three-week January term course, the class will participate in a collective mapping of music histories, geographies and communities in the five boroughs of New York City. Students will learn about the sounds, correlations and development of New York’s variegated musical scene through their primary and secondary research on musical spaces, artists, performance rituals, ethnic and cultural communities, economic implications, etc. Data will be collected, compared and systemized onto a dynamic, interactive map, working to create both an online resource and an invitation to develop one’s own relationship with New York and her musical riches.
Expressive Culture: Sounds | Beyond the Protest Song: Resistance through Musical Experimentation
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"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent."
-Victor Hugo
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"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent."
-Victor Hugo
Moments of social and political progress throughout history have been linked with musical and artistic sites of resistance. In this course, we study musical and poetic techniques used by artists who fearlessly combat oppressive regimes through their creative contributions. Music, through its distinctly abstract language, has the ability to transform how we see, hear or read – truly perceive – the world; through experiencing new perceptions, we are confronted by a need for new perspectives. We will focus on how different approaches and methodologies of experimentation and subversiveness allow something new to emerge in the social, artistic and political discourse. We will reflect on our engagement in the world through listening, analysis, and a group-elaborated final performance project, while learning ways of discussing experimentation and socio-political resistance through new sensory forms.
DISSERTATION
Voice of Being, Voice of Perpetual Becoming:
Embodied Rituals for Transformation
Defended May 2017, University of California—San Diego
Read full text here
Embodied Rituals for Transformation
Defended May 2017, University of California—San Diego
Read full text here
This dissertation positions the professional performer of contemporary music in her contemporary socio-economic landscape, the intangible economy of immaterial production, in order to investigate the intellectual, social and conceptual responsibilities that come with her deep corporeal privilege. The production of affective labor is inextricably connected to the body; knowledge and skill is acquired through the body, assimilated inside the individual and shared between bodies. A brief history of the rise and pervasiveness of neoliberalism and its implicit ability to transform all human relations into capital allows for an outline of the forms of immaterial value that stem directly from the human—her physical capabilities, her knowledge, her morals and taste, her social being. Turning the discussion of value and quality into an ethical one, the second part of the dissertation revolves around the performer's experimental practice as a ritual of progressive self-transformation; analyses of deep corporeal experiences through newness are first analyzed in terms of their impact on the performer's body, then on the subject's outlook on her social situation. A theory of value through the transformation of understood "private property" in contemporary music is proposed with two specific examples of open-source, community-based, collaborative projects. The discussions in this dissertation position the performance of contemporary music as the site of optimistic potential social, ecological and economical transformation, inciting performers to engage deeply, thoughtfully and ritualistically with their individual practice to discover new and innovative ideas for leveraging equality, justice and a positive outlook on the world.