SOUNDING SPACES + Carlos Cotallo Solares and Chris Burns
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Sounding Spaces is an improvised solo show by composer and musician, Barry Sharp. Sharp performs using various acoustic instruments such as his voice, violin, and trumpet with industrial ambiences recorded in airports, bathrooms, building vents, power generators, trains, beer coolers, and more. Recorded and remade into “drones,” each sound has its own resonant flavor and reflects both Sharp’s enthusiasm for discovering sounds in the urban landscape and—as anyone close to him would know—his tendency to sing with them. These sounds follow anyone living in a city on a daily basis and through this performance are transformed into something alive, cathartic, and even psychedelic.
He will be joined by performers Carlos Cotallo Solares and Chris Burns in their own opening act duo.
----ARTIST BIOS----
Barry Sharp is a Philadelphia-based composer and musician with a love for industrial ambiences and sounds in stretched time. His improvised solo-show, Sounding Spaces, integrates drone versions of these sounds with acoustic instruments in a cathartic and psychedelic performance experience. He is a founding member of the Song Sessions Collective, a group of four improvisors who perform an ever-changing work based on the structure of whale songs. The collective won a grant from New Music USA in 2019 and a residency at MISE-EN_Place, Bushwick in 2018. His accolades include a New Music USA Project Grant, Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial Grant, ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, The American Prize, Cornell Council for the Arts, New Music on the Point, Henry and Parker Pelzer Award in Composition, and the Barbara Cochran Breazeale Fellowship. Barry has been performed by ensembles including JACK Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, TAK Ensemble, Amalgama, Bienen Early/Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, [Switch~ Ensemble], sTem, The Princeton Singers, OSSIA Ensemble, Un/Pitched, Ithaca New Music Collective, Cornell Orchestras, Cornell Wind Symphony, and Cornell Chamber Singers.
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Carlos Cotallo Solares is a Spanish composer and improviser currently living in Philadelphia. His work deals with subjects like improvisation, musical quotation, meter and tempo polyphony, and the relationship between music and language. His pieces often focus on a single concept or technique that is interpreted in multiple ways.
His music has been performed in festivals in the US (Oh My Ears Festival, MOXsonic, Seamus National Conference, NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, SCI National Conference, National Student Electronic Music Event, Electronic Music Midwest) Germany (International Summer Courses for New Music Darmstadt, Mehrklang, Crescendo), Spain (Ciclo de Música Contemporánea Museo Vostell Malpartida,Ciclo de Música Actual), and Finland (Time of Music). He has worked with ensembles such as the JACK Quartet, handwerk, Accroche Note, Duo Contour, Ensemble Chronophonie, POING, Ensemble Container, Ensemble Alarm, Ensemble Kuraia, and Black Forest Percussion Group.
His audiovisual collaborations with the filmmaker Timothy David Orme have been presented in film festivals in the US, Colombia, the UK, and Greece. He is also a member of the free-improvisation trio Wombat and produces and performs experimental rock music under the name Black Stork.
In 2019, Carlos finished a PhD in composition at the University of Iowa, completing previously a Master's degree at the Universität der Künste in Berlin and a Bachelor's degree at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg.
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Christopher Burns is a composer, improviser, and music technologist. His current projects revolve around the creation and performance of new software-based musical instruments, designed to facilitate the layering and combination of patterns and gestures using a kaleidoscopic range of synthetic sounds. These instruments systematize Christopher’s favored compositional logics - approaches to variation, trajectory and form - and enable dynamic and expressive interactions with other musicians in the heat of collaborative improvisation.
Collaboration is a key part of Christopher’s practice; he performs electronics regularly in neural goldberg (with J. Soliday) and Bridges of Königsberg (with Peter J. Woods and David Collins), and records a weekly improvisation for the LV2MKRT podcast with bassist Scott Worthington. Ensemble work as an electric guitarist includes Tanngrisnir (with percussionist Trevor Saint), Scrawl (with instrument-builder Hal Rammel), and Minor Vices, a Milwaukee-based sextet he led from 2012-2015.
Christopher has extensive experience as a concert producer. He co-founded and produced the strictly Ballroom contemporary music series at Stanford University from 2000 to 2004, directed the Unruly Music series at UW-Milwaukee from 2006 to 2016, and has served as a contributing director for the sfSound ensemble in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2003. Christopher completed a doctorate in music at Stanford University and its Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA); his mentors in composition include Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, Jonathan Berger, Michael Tenzer, and Jan Radzynski. He lives and works in Philadelphia, PA