Judith Berkson is a vocalist, pianist and composer living in Los Angeles, California. Her multi-disciplinary work explores tuning by navigating the small differences in pitch that alter perception and activate memory. She received her undergraduate from New England Conservatory, a masters in composition from Wesleyan University and a doctorate from California Institute of the Arts. Judith has collaborated with Kronos Quartet, Wet Ink, Yarn/Wire and City Opera and has presented work at Picasso Museum Malaga, Roulette, Le Poisson Rouge, Joe’s Pub, Roulette, Barbès and the 92 Street Y. She has received a Six Points Fellowship, a Jerome Foundation grant, Meet The Composer grant, New Music USA funding and support from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has released a record on ECM and has written two operas. Her latest opera Partial Memories premiered at the NODO Festival in Ostrava in 2022. It was dedicated to forgotten female artists Janet Sobel and Mary Gartside and featured the Ostravská Banda.
“For this performance I will explore sixthtone tunings using my voice. I have a pre-recorded track of my voice in equal temperament and will be singing the altered tunings live with the fixed media alternating between through-composed and improvised sections along with electronics. I am exploring the fringes of vocal performance, and dealing with the issue of how to hold such small intervals that can be heard within a critical bandwidth while also positing the idea that many more gradations of tone have the potential to be heard, perceived, and felt.”
Described by the Irish Times as “a musician at one with his instrument and his music,” Cleek Schrey is a fiddler, composer, and filmmaker from Virginia, now based in NYC. He plays a range of instruments including the hardanger d’amore, a violin with sympathetic strings, and the daxophone, a wooden idiophone designed by Hans Reichel. Recent engagements include the Big Ears Festival (TN), the Kilkenny Arts Festival (IR), SuperSense Festival of the Ecstatic (Aus) and Issue Project Room (NYC). 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. The journal Sound Post has noted that Schrey “possesses a rare combination of traits: deep respect for traditional music and the people who make it, and an unbounded curiosity about new directions for sound.” Tonight, Cleek will explore melodies and harmonies inspired by different scordatura (re-tunings) of his 10-stringed Hardanger D’amore, a violin with sympathetic strings.
Curated by Ha-Yang Kim for Nonsequitur’s NonSeq series.