Arun Chandra is a composition professor and director of the Evergreen Experimental Ensemble. Chandra’s works challenge the social and political contexts of music creation and performance. He was most recently commissioned by Seattle Modern Orchestra for his new piece, Ways of Resisting, which explores contradictions of individual identity versus collaboration. In his own words “Every phrase in this composition is an attempt to be a verbal utterance, in the guise of a musical gesture, made by an individual, within a context of others also asserting themselves. Each person (each instrument) is attempting to articulate what they think is going on, and should be done.”
Tag: experimental music
Ann Warde is an experimental composer, sound artist, and independent scholar, and a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Music/Sound from The New York Foundationfor the Arts. Following her doctorate in music composition and ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois, and a Mellon Fellowship in music at Cornell University, her work with sound shifted, focusing for the next decade on applications of audio technology to the analysis of whale sounds at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology.
Subsequently, as a 2015-16 US-UK Fulbright Researcher at the University of York, she worked on music and bioacoustics projects and developed interests in American philosophy. Linking this philosophical inquiry to music led to her recent presentation at the Women in Pragmatism International Conference (Barcelona), and to her participation as co-convener and presenter at the Experience :: Music :: Experiment events sponsored by the Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium. Her sound installation Hidden Encounters was featured as part of the 2019 Tone Deaf Festival in Kingston, Ontario, and last August she was an artist-in-residence with the European Interfaces project in Cyprus. zsonics.org
Bonnie Whiting is Chair of Percussion Studies at the University of Washington. She performs and commissions new experimental music for percussion, seeking out projects that involve non-traditional notation, interdisciplinary performance, and the speaking percussionist. Recent work includes a series of performances at the John Cage Centennial Festival in Washington DC, solo appearances with the National Orchestra of Turkmenistan, and as a soloist in Tan Dun’s “Water Passion” under the baton of the composer himself.
In 2011, she joined red fish blue fish percussion group in premiering the staged version of George Crumb’s “Winds of Destiny” directed by Peter Sellars and featuring Dawn Upshaw for Ojai Festival. Her debut album, featuring an original solo-simultaneous realization of John Cage’s “45′ for a speaker” and “27’10.554″ for a percussionist”, was released on the Mode Records label in April.
Whiting has collaborated with many of today’s leading new music groups, including the International Contemporary Ensemble (American premiere of James Dillon’s Nine Rivers at Miller Theatre), Ensemble Dal Niente (the Fromm Concerts at Harvard), Bang on a Can (Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians for the LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series), and eighth blackbird (the “Tune-in” festival at the Park Avenue Armory). She received her DMA in Contemporary Music Performance from the University of California San Diego, and also holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory, the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and Interlochen Arts Academy.