Body Doubles

Born in Gdynia (Poland) in 1981, in 2006 he graduated with honors from Frederic Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw (Master of Arts), in 2015 received a Ph. D. in music composition at University of California San Diego, living in Berlin since 2015. Between 2012-2019 Blecharz had been curating the Instalakcje music festival at Warsaw’s Nowy Theater, featuring non-concert music: sound installations, performance installations, sound sculptures, music videos, music theater and others. Blecharz has directed three of his opera-installations: Transcryptum (2013) commissioned by Grand Theater National Opera in Warsaw; Park-Opera (2016) commissioned by Theater Powszechny in Warsaw and Body-Opera commissioned by Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (2016). In 2018 composed opera FIASKO, commissioned by Staatstheater Darmstadt; in 2019 Rechnitz.Opera for 6 actors and 4 cellos, based on Elfriede Jelinek’s text, commissioned by Warsaw Autumn Festival and TR Warszawa. Blecharz’s music often redefines the traditional concert format and proposes different relations between the listener/viewer and the sound. His music involves site specific projects, participatory audience, elements of music and instrumental theater as well as immersion and embodiment of sound. His performative-music installations and music theater pieces include: Soundwork for 8 actors (commissioned by TR Warszawa, 2016); House of Sound for 40 instruments and participatory audience (commissioned by Słowacki Theater, Cracow, 2017); Manifesto for orchestra (for any type of instruments and participatory audience, commissioned by Eklekto, Geneva, 2019); a cycle of 8 Fields for various instrumental (spatial) set-ups; Symphony No.1 for orchestra in 4 groups and moving audience (commissioned by Szczecin Philharmonics, 2019), Symphony No.2 for orchestra open to any type of musician (commissioned by Theater &TD, Zagreb, 2019), Symphony No.3 for 200 wireless speakers (commissioned by Donaueschinger MusikTage 2021/23).

https://wojtekblecharz.com/

Amy Cimini is musicologist, violist, teacher and Associate Professor of Music at UC San Diego. Her research committed to understanding intersections between politics, community and technology in 20th & 21st century experimental music, sound art and auditory culture. For the last few years,  the work and musical thought of composer Maryanne Amacher have guided her inquiries across listening, gender and histories of US technoscience.  Spanning the early 1960s through the turn of the millennium, her book,Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (Oxford 2021)  discerns frameworks for life that emerged from Amacher’s multidisciplinary study of auditory experience and engages, broadly, with how conceptualizations of sound can attach social value unevenly to bodies, materials and relations that has relevance across civic and environmental contestation, telecommunications and science and technology in the late 20th century U.S. In other work, she explores race and digital art curation; social reproduction and feminist music studies; sound, surveillance and abolition and other topics.I Amy also co-edited Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (Blank Forms Editions 2020) with composer and theorist Bill Dietz and engage with Amacher’s  legacy through public presentation, performance and exhibition  as a member of the Supreme Connections Working Group and the Maryanne Amacher Foundation.

 As a violist, she plays with composer Katherine Young in the duo Architeuthis Walks on Land and the San Diego-based  experimental rock band Necking. Her solo music works with archives and soundscapes in the San Diego-Tijuana borderlands and her first solo record is forthcoming on the Relative Pitch label. Amy is a founding member of the Music and Philosophy Study Group of the American Musicological Society, serves on  the editorial board of the journal Women and Music as well as the Maryanne Amacher Foundation. In San Diego, she is happy to work with the arts organization Space Time and well as LIBROS, a cross-border librarianship and artistic collective. .

https://music-cms.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/regular_faculty/amy-cimini/index.html

Praised by The New York Times for her “appealingly melancholic sound” and “entertaining array of distortion effects,” Alexandria Smith is a multimedia artist, audio engineer, scholar, trumpeter, and educator who enjoys working at the intersection of all these disciplines. Her research interests focus on integrating feminist methods of making and scholarship into music technology. To explore how electronic music is embodied through practice, she has been experimenting with ways to integrate biofeedback training and sensor observation into her music and designing interactive media applications and environments for performers. Alexandria Smith is an active performer-composer in New York City, California, New Orleans, and Atlanta. Recent performances include performing in the premiere of Alvin Lucier’s Orpheus Variations for solo cello, seven wind instruments, and seven dancers, David Behrman’s "Open Space with Brass" with Ed Bear & Ensemble, San Diego Symphony’s Hearing the Future Festival, Tulane’s Music at Midday Series, Instigation Festival, and the Instant Opus Series. She has also performed with Marina Orchestra at French Quarter Fest, Congo Square Fest, and opened for Red Baraat with Marina Orchestra at Tipitina's. As an improviser/multi-media artist, Smith has had a residency at the Stone NYC and feature recitals on the Future of New Trumpet (FONT) Festival West, Dartmouth’s Vaughan Recital Series, the VI Semana Internacional de Improvisación in Ensenada, Baja California, and Tulane University. She has been a performer at the FONT Festival NYC, Improv Night at the Stone, Chosen Vale Seminar for Advanced Musical Studies, Either/OR Spring Festival. Alexandria is an Assistant Professor of Music Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

alexandriarsmith.com

Molly Joyce has been deemed one of the “most versatile, prolific and intriguing composers working under the vast new-music dome” by The Washington Post. Her work is concerned with disability as a creative source. Her work is concerned with disability as a creative source, and her most recent album, Perspective, featuring voices and viewpoints of disabled interviewees, was praised by Pitchfork as “a powerful work of love and empathy that underscores the poison of ableism in American culture.” Molly’s creative projects have been presented and commissioned by Carnegie Hall, GM Europe, TEDxMidAtlantic, SXSW:EDU, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Bang on a Can Marathon, Americans for the Arts, National Sawdust, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, National Gallery of Art, and Classical:NEXT. She is a graduate of Juilliard, Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Yale, and alumnus of the YoungArts Foundation. She holds an Advanced Certificate and Master of Arts in Disability Studies from City University of New York, and is a Dean’s Doctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia in Composition and Computer Technologies. She has served on the composition faculties of New York University, Wagner College, and Berklee Online. 

www.mollyjoyce.com