Author: Ralph Lewis, Composer

Many thanks to Urbana Free Library for hosting this year’s All Score Urbana workshops and to Chris Raymond, Garrett Jones, Elliot Cobb,  Molly O’Roark, Claire Taylor, Marcus Westbrook, Skylar Lipman, and Maddy Marsan for helping All Score cross the space from an idea to a program that hopefully inspires musical curiosity here in Urbana, Illinois.

Tonight Rogue Trio, Ileana Merary, Celso, Emanuel Olvera Centeno, and I are doing the first full broadcast of Fearless Reception. You can watch and listen to the online broadcast here. (It starts at 7:30 local time, so 8:30 Central and 9:30 Eastern).

In addition to the five movements of live performances and fixed media, Ileana and Celso will perform songs they each wrote, and Emanuel will perform a poem written for the event. I love their work and it is an honor to share works side by side with them. In addition to these live performances, the work will feature recordings from Ileana, Emanuel, Hector, and include voices from people from all over the United States in its opening.

Rogue Trio has also posted that link and the full concert program on their website.

I am so thankful to the many partners and supporters of this project, including Arizona State University, the Florence Project, Slate Arts Gallery, WGXC’s the Cutty Strange, and WOBC.

Come see the preview of Fearless Reception on January 21st at Slate Arts in Chicago at 8 pm! This is the first live performance of a collaboration with the Rogue Trio and Ileana Merary about creating awareness of immigration issues, raising immigrant voices, and supporting inclusivity and respect for others in a climate that does not welcome people who seem different.

I’ll be performing the electronics in person there with the Rogue Trio and live speakers will be performing telematically (over the internet) from Phoenix.

Also on this show:

• Annie Lyle Mason will be doing an electroacoustic mash-up of Drive to the Edge and I Was On the Side of the Highway!

• Monisola Gbadebo will be performing new and recent works!

(Design Credit: Liz Lewis)

This year taught me about how necessary and fun it is to work with other people. From planning performances of I Was On the Side of the Highway with Annie Lyle Mason to starting All Score Urbana with Standard Rep Bassoon Quartet and Molly O’Roark getting my back, all of these interactions reminded me that creativity thrives with the intelligence, sensitivity, and compassion of others. (Check out some of this year’s pieces and performances above).

I had the opportunity to do music around the US, as well as Scotland, this year with a number of really encouraging people. I want to acknowledge them:

• So many supportive University of Illinois friends and collaborators, including Annie Lyle Mason, Dakota Wayne, Tori Lupinek, Elliot Cobb, David Cyzak, Will Pearson, Kyle Shaw, Elisa Moles, M.O. Abbott, Molly O’Roark, Christopher Raymond, Garrett Jones, Skylar Lipman, Claire Taylor, Kerrith Livengood, Martha H. Stiehl, Kevin Zhao, Peter Tijerina, Ion-Alexandru Malairmare, Johnny Smith, Anjali Sivaainkaran, the University of Illinois Music Composition faculty, and so many more!
• New and old friends from around the country I worked with this year including Alfred Shaw, Thomas Carroll, Jack Alexander Madden, Cheryl Lewis, Liz Lewis, the Rogue Trio (Mary Price, Justin D. Rollefson, and Kathleen Schram), Zoltan Csikos, Jacob Barton, Connor Thummel, Robin Meiksins, Emily Mehigh, Eric Heidbreder, Parker Nelson, Mika Allison, Melissa Snoza, Eric Snoza, Alex Hoelzen, Jennifer Woodrum Hogg, Teil R. Buck, Dan Visconti, Stacy Garrop, Luis Brennan, Ben Chew, Elizandro Garcia-Montoya, Monisola Gbadebo, Charlene Kluegel, Michael Lieberman, Katherine Petersen, Driftwood Quintet (Alexis Mitchell, Melissa Malork, Fangyi Niu, Dominque Holley, and Ben Paley), Jenny Hargrave, Ben Kernes, and Mr. Danny Cohen.
• My All Score Urbana partners The Standard Rep Bassoon Quartet and Molly O’Roark

I also want to thank organizations and ensembles that made a big difference for me this year:

• The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Illinois Modern Ensemble (for so many, many things)
• WGXC 90.7-FM and The Cutty Strange (for inspiring Drive to the Edge and Penelope’s Endless Book of Magic, and helping me better understand where I was at artistically–tune into them often!)
• ENSEMBLE MISE-EN (who went above and beyond when they read and performed critical band-aid this April) 
• Fifth House Ensemble and its Fresh Inc Festival (for the hilarious times and fomenting experiences that have led to a number of partnerships and concerts, including Fearless Reception, an upcoming collaboration with the Rogue Trio) 
• Radiophrenia Glasgow 2016 (for including Drive to the Edge in its exciting international collection of transmission art)
• The Museum of Arts and Design (for access to the Bertoia sonambient sculptures!)
• Slate Arts Gallery, a sublimely supportive, inquisitive creative space in Chicago
• SEAMUS 2017 (which I am so excited to go to)

As this new year starts, I hope to keep these collaborative fires goings and finding new ways to support other people, their safety and expression. A big thanks to The Rogue Trio and Sonny Oram from Qwear for being part of this conversation and its many variations this year.

I’m proud to announce that Drive to the Edge was selected for the 2017 SEAMUS (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States) in at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota happening this April.

This weekend Tori Lupinek, Annie Lyle Mason, Connor Thummel, Dakota Wayne, and I got to play a show at the opening night of Slate Arts + Performance‘s PROTEST exhibition that included two Chicago premieres of my pieces (I Was On the Side of the Highway and Ruckus from the Quiet Zone).

Performing at Slate was everything we dream about as musicians: a warm, encouraging environment from Slate’s curators and a big, vibrant audience of people of all ages. (Apparently there was a girl in a dinosaur costume looking in the window at Annie during her solo performance of I Was On the Side of the Highway! Perfect first New Music experience!)

It also was an intriguing space with engaging, diverse works by artists including Soheila Azadi + Liz Cambron, Olga Guse, Gary Lehman, Chris Wanklyn (who I got to meet and was great!), Charity White, Chris Willie, and Jade Williams.

Annie and I found some great spots to do the different spatialized sections of Highway. The first part of it is always meant to be removed, distant and marginalized, which was in perfect contrast to Connor bringing the unfiltered thunder in Persichetti’s Parable no. 18.

Ruckus from the Quiet Zone centers around Chris Vaisvil’s canon, a homemade string instrument that we made available for the audience to try out afterwards. Tori, Dakota, and I joined Connor and Annie in contemplating the glacial ballet of the Green Bank Telescope and living in the National Radio Quiet Zone. See a bit of it in the video excerpt above!

So many thanks to Jenny and Ben for making it so easy to have a wonderful time at Slate!

I’m so happy to share the first episode of “Penelope’s Endless Book of Magic.” Join Penelope and her friend as they try to understand the hurdles of growing up and try to see if magic can make it any more fun and easy. Come for the laughs, revel in the weird!

Big ups to the talented performers in this project: David Cyzak, Zachary Bowers, Liz Lewis, and Alfred Shaw!

After such a lovely experience at WGXC’s Wave Farm, I went down to Manhattan to record the replica Bertoia Sonambient sculptures (made by Harry Bertoia’s son Val) at the Museum of Arts and Design as part of its Atmosphere for Enjoyment: Studio Sessions. Each month the exhibit is up different artists get a chance to record with the sculptures.

It’s neat that MAD continues its tradition of participatory exhibits: while the exhibit was shut down in some ways (all other audio turned off) so I could record without interference, MAD also offers times for the public to come try out the sculptures throughout the week.

Playing Bertoia’s sculptures was a strange experience: handling them felt foolproof but still full of sonic mystery. It was less how I activated the sculptures, and more that I (or someone did). That requisite (human?) touch and the resulting wandering, shimmering or vagrant reverberations were fascinating. More to follow once I have thought on this more.

Thanks for a great summer, WGXC and MAD!

(photo credits: Leila Zogby)

Today is the start of something for me and the people involved in this radio serial opera, and I am so happy to be sharing it with you. We’ve talked about, worried about it, laughed about it, and dreamed about a confluence of an engaging if silly narrative structure and emotional electroacoustic music. Something that aspires to live on radio, be transmitted and readily enjoyed. Something with some bitey teeth and silly smirks. This is the first episode and there are more on the way.

Tune in today from 4 – 6 pm EST on WGXC 90.7-FM or stream on www.wavefarm.org for Saturday Afternoon Show host Tom Roe and I discuss and play Penelope’s Endless Book of Magic, what’s in store for it, and play and discuss other music and transmission works I have been doing.

Two especially enormous thank you’s are required:

To Galen and Tom at Wave Farm for being excited by the idea behind this work and encouraging its creation with an artist residency. I have had such a wonderful time here and feel so encouraged!

To the MAGNIFICENT Alfred Shaw (The real Alfred the Great) who has taken the lead role to new heights of fun and awesomeness and has been such a generous, animated collaborator.

(Update: Episode 1 and future episodes can be heard here!)