www.cecilia-lopez.com

Shabaka Hutchings has established himself as a central figure in the London jazz scene. Hutchings has a restlessly creative and refreshingly open-minded spirit, playing in a variety of groups—most notably, Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka & the Ancestors—and embracing influences from the sounds of London’s diverse club culture, including house, grime, jungle, and dub.

Shabaka Hutchings’ Website

photo credits: Civitella Ranieri Foundation & Udoma Janssen

Harpist Marilu Donovan and violinist/vocalist Adam Markiewicz are NYC-based duo LEYA. The group works with and against the grain of tradition, mining intensity through alternate tunings, strange harmonies, and dream-state operatic-like vocals. Beauty underlies their sound but mixes with a sense of unease. LEYA has released a steady volume of work in several years.

LEYA on bandcamp

photo by Jessica Hallock

Sam Green joins composer Annea Lockwood for a conversation at the Center for Fiction on Sunday May 7.

Sam Green is a documentary filmmaker. He’s made many movies including most recently 32 SOUNDS, a live cinematic collaboration with electronic musician JD Samson. Previous “live documentaries” include A Thousand Thoughts (with the Kronos Quartet), The Measure of All Things and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (featuring the indie rock band Yo La Tengo). Sam’s documentary The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

Sam’s website

Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, director/choreographer and creator of new opera, music-theater works, films and installations. Recognized as one of the most unique and influential artists of our time, she is a pioneer in what is now called “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance.” Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound, discovering and weaving together new modes of perception. Her groundbreaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which there are no words.

Meredith’s website

Morton Feldman was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown.

Conrad Tao and Tyshawn Sorey perform Feldman’s Triadic Memories May 7 at 3:30pm.

Iannis Xenakis was born May 29, 1922, in Romania and died February 4, 2001, in Paris, France. He was a composer, architect, and mathematician who originated musique stochastique, music composed with the aid of electronic computers and based upon mathematical probability systems.

JACK Quartet performs Xenakis’ scratchy masterpiece Tetras on May 6 at 5:30p.

Learn more about Iannis Xenakis here.

Catherine Lamb  explores the interaction of tone, summations of shapes and shadows, phenomenological expansions, the architecture of the liminal (states in between outside/inside), and the long introduction form.

Catherine’s website

photo by Phillip Frowein

Christopher Otto is a composer and violinist living in the Bronx, New York. As a founding member of the JACK Quartet, he has performed contemporary music throughout the world. He studied composition at the Eastman School of Music and mathematics at the University of Rochester.

Christopher’s website

photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Described by WQXR as a “textural magician”,  Žibuoklė Martinaitytė is a New York-based Lithuanian composer whose works explore the tensions and longings of identity and place. She creates sonic environments where musical gestures emerge and disappear within transparencies and densities of sound layers. It’s music that slides on the very blades of emotions.

Žibuoklė’s website

photo by Tomas Terekas