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Amanda Lucier is a photojournalist whose work focuses on the American West and women in
ranching, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. She is the founder of Odeline, a
fund which brings access to land for regenerative land managers and is a partner in Square Mile
Ranch in Wallowa, Oregon.
Abigail Levine is an artist working between New York and Los Angeles. Rooted in dance but
moving across media—performance, text, drawing, sound—Levine focuses on the poetics of
our body’s work, how we record and value it. Levine has performed with both Marina Abramovic
and Yvonne Rainer in their retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and recently
collaborated with composer Alvin Lucier on a staging of his Orpheus Variations at ISSUE
Project Room. Her next work, Redactions, will premier at The Chocolate Factory Theater in
2022.
Born in Kamakura, Japan, Aki Takahashi began studying piano at the age of five with her
mother. Her landmark recording, Aki Takahashi Piano Space, with 20 contemporary piano works
including those by Berio, Boulez, Cage, Xenakis, Stockhausen received her the Merit Prize at
the Japan Art Festival in 1973. Her series of Erik Satie concerts (1975-77) triggered a Satie
boom throughout Japan. Her collaboration with Feldman from 1980 to his death has resulted not
only in performing his music around the world but also in many recordings. Her project “Hyper
Beatles” invited 47 composers to create works inspired by various Beatles tunes. Among the
composers were Cage, Takemitsu, Riley, Norgaard,Rzewski, Curran, Lucier, Saariaho, Oliveros,
Wolff and Sakamoto. Takahashi continues the Schubert recordings and the seventh CD has
been released in 2020.
Akiko Hatakeyama is a composer/performer of electroacoustic music and intermedia. Her
music focuses on realizing relationships between the body and mind into intermedia
composition, often in conjunction with building customized instruments and interfaces. In her
compositions and performances, she interacts with sound, light, and haptic objects, making the
dialogue between her inner self and environment perceivable. Akiko’s experience of embodied
time, including memories, emotions, and personal experiences, is communicated nonverbally to
the audience. Akiko obtained her B.A. in music from Mills College, M.A. in Experimental
Music/Composition at Wesleyan University, where she studied with Alvin, and Ph.D. at Brown
University. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Oregon.
Thank you for having me in the project. I look forward to seeing the information about the
exhibition.
Alec McLane retired in 2019 after 21 years as Music Librarian and Director of the World Music
Archives at Wesleyan University. He was educated at the Berklee College of Music and the
University of Illinois, where he received graduate degrees in music composition and library
science. He continues to pursue an active interest in the world music ensembles and
experimental music at Wesleyan. In the fall of 2012, following the retirement of Alvin Lucier from
Wesleyan, he helped to curate an exhibit of the composer’s works during a week-long
celebration of his career.
Andrea Miller-Keller was Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth
Atheneum from 1986 to 1998. With Jim Elliott, director of the WA at the time, she started the
MATRIX Gallery, a changing exhibition of contemporary art, at the oldest public museum in the
US. Among the artists who had their first one person museum shows in that gallery including
Richard Tuttle, Neil Jenney, Jon Borofsky, Daniel Buren, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Nancy Spero,
Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, Gerhard Richter, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and
Glenn Ligon. In 2011 Miller-Keller curated Alvin Lucier (An Artists and His Friends), a
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retrospective show at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, where Alvin is
the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, Emeritus.
Anna Pangalou is a voice soloist who explores the boundaries of classical vocal practices and
the new forms created by experimental sound practices with dark dramatic color. She has
studied classical singing in Cannes, Vienna, Rome, and Athens. Prizes and scholarships include
Alexandros Onassis Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, and International ‘Dimitri Mitropoulos’
Singing competition.
She has appeared as a soloist in Greece, Austria, Germany, Italy, France, Egypt, Turkey and
the United States, performing Opera, Lied, Oratorio, New Musical Theatre, and Contemporary
Music. She specializes in avant-garde contemporary music. Contemporary composers have
written works for her voice. She enjoys co-creating with people from different trajectories,
exploring new paths of perception as an art form.
Anthony Burr has worked with Alvin Lucier on realizations of his music for close to 20 years
now. He is Professor of Contemporary Music Performance at the University of California, San
Diego.
Barbara Bloom is a visual artist living in New York City. Her conceptual practice uses
photography, objects, and installation. Though enthusiastically visual, the work stems more from
the traditions of literature than from the fields of painting or sculpture. She has said: “I am
probably a novelist, but somehow ended up standing in the wrong line, and inadvertently signed
up to be a visual artist.” Her work has been shown internationally including exhibitions at MoMA,
New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; Gropius-Bau,
Berlin; ICP, New York; Wexner Center, Columbus; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The
Serpentine Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Bernhard Rietbrock is a musician and a research associate at the Institute for Music Research
at the Zurich University of the Arts. He is the founder and artistic director of the Ever Present
Orchestra, the head of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) research project “Hearing
the Other - an Aesthetic of the Real in Experimental Music and Sound Art”, editor of the Alvin
Lucier Illuminated by the Moon box set, and co-editor of the Alvin Lucier I am sitting in a room
box set.
Bob Bielecki has worked in electronic arts for over fifty years, creating unique instruments and
sound designs for installation and performance. He is known for his contributions to the work of
a long list of innovative artists. He’s currently involved researching sound localization,
psychoacoustics, and 3-D audio. Bob is a recipient of grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation
and the New York State Council on the Arts and serves on the faculty of the Bard College MFA
Program (1997-). He began working with Alvin Lucier in the mid 1970’s and is credited as “tape
editor” for the original version of “I Am Sitting in a Room.”
Cellist Charles Curtis has woven a unique career through the worlds of classical performance
and musical experimentation. Through regular performances and recordings Curtis has worked
closely with legendary avant-gardists La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, French composer
Éliane Radigue who created her very first work for a purely acoustic instrument for Curtis, artist
and performer Alison Knowles, composer Tashi Wada, and Alvin Lucier, who has composed
numerous works for Curtis, including pieces for cello and sine waves, cello and piano, cello with
large orchestra, and cello and wind. In February 2020, over multiple evenings at ISSUE, Curtis
collaborated with choreographer Abigail Levine and an intergenerational group of dancers, to
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present Lucier’s ‘Orpheus Variations’ with a wind ensemble featuring students from the
University of California San Diego, where Curtis is Distinguished Professor.
Christian Wolff is a composer. He has known Alvin Lucier and admired his work for about 55
years now.
Christina Kubisch, born 1948 in Bremen, belongs to the first generation of sound artists. She
has artistically developed multiple techniques based on electromagnetic induction, solar energy
and special light systems. Since 2003 she has started the series “Electrical Walks”, where the
public can listen by special custom made headphones to the hidden electromagnetic waves
around us. She has been a professor for audiovisual arts in Berlin, Paris, Saarbrücken and
Oxford. She is a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Her installations, compositions
and audio-visual works have been presented worldwide. Christina Kubisch lives and works in
Berlin.
Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the most important flutist of our time,” is a
soloist, collaborative artist, curator and advocate for new music. She has given the world
premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of composers, and in 2013 began a
24-year commissioning project called Density 2036. Chase founded the International
Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was
awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She is Professor of
the Practice of Music at Harvard University's Department of Music.
Cleek Schrey is a fiddler, composer, and filmmaker from Virginia, now based in NYC. He plays
folk and experimental music on a range of instruments including the hardanger d’amore, a violin
with sympathetic strings, and the daxophone, a wooden idiophone designed by Hans Reichel.
Frequent collaborators include electronic music pioneer David Behrman, the viol da gamba
player Liam Byrne, traditional fiddle icon Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, and composer Alvin Lucier.
He is currently Pioneer Works Sound Artist-in-Residence on Governors Island.
Violinist Conrad Harris has performed new works for violin at Ostrava Days, Darmstadt
Ferrienkürse für Neue Musik, Gulbenkian Encounters of New Music, Radio France, Warsaw
Autumn, and New York's Sonic Boom Festival. In addition to being a member of the FLUX
Quartet and violin duo String Noise, he is concertmaster/soloist with the S.E.M. Orchestra,
Ostravská Banda, STX Ensemble, Wordless Music Orchestra and Ensemble LPR. He has
performed and recorded with such artists as Elliott Sharp, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, David
Behrman "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Jean-Claude Risset, Rohan de Saram and Tiny Tim. His
recordings of the Lejaren Hiller Violin Sonatas with pianist, Joseph Kubera was released in 2018
on New World Records. He has also recorded for Asphodel, Vandenburg, CRI, and Vinyl
Retentive Records.
Daniel Fishkin, the composer and instrument builder, lives in Charlottesville, VA.
Dave Scanlon is a composer, guitarist, vocalist, and electronic musician. Scanlon is an active
member of the experimental rock band JOBS, pursues a practice of writing austere songs, and
continues a series of "counting" compositions focusing on intonation, numerology, and
measurement. Scanlon has released music on Ramp Local, New Amsterdam Records, Tzadik
Records, Hometapes, Clean Feed Records, and Whatever’s Clever Records. Scanlon has
performed with David Behrman, Chuck Bettis, Leverage Models, Alvin Lucier, Yamamoto Seiichi
(of The Boredoms), Otomo Yoshihide, and numerous others.