The Center For Deep Listening

LOVE SONG TO THE OCEAN, by Livia Schweizer

The idea for this little simple score came last December, from a beach in West Africa. The Ocean every morning was bringing to the sunlight on the beach a countless amount of seashells. Each walk on the beach I could not resist the temptation to put few of them in my pocket. Every shell has its own shape, some are beautifully showing on the surface how the erosion changed their shape. Shells are a beautiful reminder of the passing time and of the transformation of things. Every shell makes its own sound and this is a love song for the seashells, and from them.

Livia Schweizer is a flutist, improvisor, educator and curious listener. Born and raised in Italy, she is now based in Helsinki. At the moment Livia is especially interested in how improvisation and new and ‘non-conventional’ scores can be a medium to encourage interdisciplinary connections and create intercultural dialogue. She is member of the new music group Earth Ears Ensemble, and as improviser she is member of the E.C.I.O. and of the Helsinki based Septad-ensemble. Livia has a master in flute from Sibelius Academy and she studied as exchange student in 2019 at USC in Los Angeles. Hummingbirds, seashells, and old stories are among her favorite things, and in the free time she walks a lot around with her dog, Nina.

INSTRUCTION NO. 18, by Emma Mehta

BE THE SEA is a collaboration between artist Louise Mackenzie, composer Hayley Jenkins, Durham Wildlife Trust and a growing community of participants based along the coast between the rivers Tyne and Tees in the North East of England, UK. BE THE SEA foregrounds listening strategies to ask how we can live with the coast in ways that are mutually sustainable.

COLLECTIVE MIND, by Alexis Porfiriadis

The verbal piece ‘Collective Mind’ is part of the collection of verbal scores ‘Words for Sounds’ (2010-19).

PhD in Composition at Bath Spa University/UK, master’s degree and postgraduate diploma in Composition at the University for Music and Performing Arts Graz/Austria. Since 2008 his compositions consist mainly of verbal/graphic open form scores or combinations of conventional notation with verbal and/or graphic notation. Selected prizes and awards: 1st Prize in the Franco Evangelisti International Composition Competition 2020, 3d Prize in the Second International Composition Competition for String Quartet by Molinari Quartet 2005, State grand for Composition of the Republic of Austria 2003-04. http://alexisporfiriadis.blogspot.com/

ONE, by Matthew Lee Knowles

Matthew Lee Knowles is a prolific composer, poet, pianist and teacher.

MINDFUL SINGING, by Jim Dalton

American composer Jim Dalton is a professor of music theory at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. His works are performed throughout the US, Canada, and in Europe, including venues such as Musique Nouvelles, Lunel, France; the Kansas Symposium of New Music; Sound: Scotland’s Festival of New Music; and Akademie der Tonkunst (Darmstadt, Germany). He has recent premieres by Aaron Larget-Caplan, Carson Cooman, Sharan Leventhal, Stephen Altoft, Transient Canvas, and Scottish Voices.
Dalton is a frequent guest lecturer in microtonality/just intonation.

HEAR THE SOUND OF YOUR PRESENCE IN THE WORLD, by Tristan Partridge

Tristan Partridge is a social anthropologist and photographer exploring how experiences of sound and intersubjectivity shape critical approaches to art, activism, and humanistic research. Working with the concept of aural anthropology, these explorations attend to sound as a medium that generates, complicates, and sustains relationality. Solo and collaborative projects include A Wake of Starry Tongues, In Posterface, and Coagulars; works have been performed internationally including at Echo Park Rising (Los Angeles, California) and //BUZZCUT// (Glasgow, Scotland).

BODILY LISTENING IN PLACE, by Ellen Waterman

Pauline Oliveros taught us that listening is not hearing. In consultation with Deaf artist collective SPiLL PROpagation, I created this score to develop a more expansive, intersensory and inclusive concept of listening beyond audition. Full score including video with ASL is available at https://naisa.ca/media-archive/sound-art-text-scores/bodily-listening-in-place/ 

A music and sound studies scholar and a flutist specializing in creative improvisation, Ellen Waterman is Professor and Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada at Carleton University. With Gillian Siddall, she is co-editor of Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity (Duke). Ellen is founder and director of the Research Centre for Music, Sound, and Society in Canada, dedicated to exploring the complex and diverse roles that music and sonic arts play in shaping Canadian society. www.carleton.ca/mssc Her current research interests include community-engaged research-creation methodologies, and the sociality of listening.

ECHOLOCATION, by Kathy Kennedy

Kathy Kennedy is a sound artist with formal training in visual art as well as classical singing based in Montreal, Quebec. Her art practice generally involves the voice and issues of interface with technology, often using telephony or radio transmission. Her work engages with public space and physical space through voice. She is also involved in community art, and is a founder of the feminist digital media center in, Studio XX (now Ada-X), as well as the innovative choral group for women, Choeur Maha. Her large-scale sonic installation/performances for many singers and radio, called “sonic choreographies,” as well as the HMMM series have been performed internationally. Ms. Kennedy currently teaches music at Concordia University in Montreal. She frequently gives lectures and workshops on listening skills, acoustic ecology and vocal improvisation, and brings people together to sing in old and new ways.

WITHNESSING, by Hana van der Kolk

Hana van der Kolk is a dancer, artist, educator, writer, counselor/coach, and facilitator of community events and spaces. They see creative body-based work as a conduit for knowing/unknowing what is here and now, for remembering intimacy at many proximities, and are committed to ritual, ceremony, and celebration in many forms as a way of life. Hana is currently based on unceded Mohican land in upstate New York/the Hudson Valley and her practice straddles art and performance, socio-political inquiry, celebration, and personal and collective restoration and transformation. It manifests as workshops, one-on-one body-based Internal Family Systems counseling and sex and gender expansion work, performances, events/curation, writing, videos, and the making of gifts, sites, and costumes. Hana has taught and performed internationally, co-facilitates FlagSSS Day and Club SPA spa, and recently completed a practice based PhD focused on queer friendship, bodies as sites of magic and multiplicity, entanglement with the more-than-human, and possibilities of dismantling cultures of supremacy with and through bodies and complex intimacy.

MUSIC FOR WIND AND VOICE MEMO, by Yifeng Yvonne Yuan

Wind is when air breathes.

Yifeng Yvonne Yuan is 25 years old. She converts the frequency of herself losing socks into the frequency of the pitches; she weighs raindrops to decide the weight of her noteheads. She is a composer, born and raised in China, and currently lives in Los Angeles.  Yvonne graduated from UCLA with a Masters’s degree in Music Composition. She studied with Richard Danielpour, Ian Krouse, Kay Rhie and David Lefkowitz. Her works are performed in the U.S, Europe, and Asia.