Faculty percussionist Bonnie Whiting celebrates the release of Through the Eye(s), her new CD out now on Neuma Records. Documenting a cycle of pieces for solo speaking and singing percussionist developed in collaboration with nine incarcerated people at the Indiana Women's Prison, Through the Eye(s) is a collaboration with composer Eliza Brown, who facilitated the project. The program includes a short performance followed by a question-and-answer session.
Project Background
PROGRAM
Through the Eye(s)
1. Calm and Storm
Text by Whittney (CoCo) Bales-Malone
Music by Eliza Brown
2. Nightly Storm
Music and text by Ashley Strong
3. Lost in the Fog
Text by Marjorie Woods
Music by Eliza Brown
4. My Tunnel
Graphic score and text by Ingrid Swinford
5. Violent Passion
Music and text by Char’Dae Avery
6. Fortitude
Music and text by LaDawn Johnson
7. Who’s That?
Improvisatory score and text by Dawnetta Taylor (Shelton)
8. HER
Music and lyrics by Lara Campbell
9. Emergence
Music and text by Amaris Rose Bunyard and Joyce (Potter) Hawkins
Biographies
The music of composer Eliza Brown, described as “delicate, haunting, [and] introspective” by Symphony Magazine, has been performed around the world by leading new music ensembles including Ensemble Dal Niente, ensemble recherche, Network for New Music, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, ICE, Wet Ink Ensemble, Wild Rumpus New Music Collective, and PRISM Saxophone Quartet. Eliza’s work is frequently intertextual, opening dialogues with existing pieces of music, historical styles, and other cultural artifacts. Deeply interested in the relationships between music and the other arts and humanities, Eliza has also engaged in interdisciplinary collaborations with practitioners of theater, dance, architecture, painting, and film, frequently taking on other artistic roles in these collaborations in addition to composer and facilitating intentional, project-specific collaborative processes. Eliza is currently an Associate Professor of Music at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. elizabrown.net
Bonnie Whiting performs, improvises, and creates new music for percussion. Exploring intersections of storytelling and experimental music, her work integrates text, movement, and technology. Her debut album, featuring a solo-simultaneous realization of John Cage's 45' for a speaker and 27'10.554 for a percussionist was released by Mode Records in 2017, and her second album, Perishable Structures, launched on the New Focus Recordings label in 2020. Her original music with James Falzone (clarinets) and Lisa Cay Miller (prepared piano) can be heard on Six Artifacts (Allos Documents, 2024.) Recent projects include collaboration with composer Wang Lu on the expansive solo theatrical work Stages, the world premiere of Jonathan Bingham’s percussion concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra, and performances on the original Harry Partch instrumentarium. She is the on-stage percussionist in The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist, a multimedia opera featured at Lincoln Center, The Hopkins Center at Dartmouth, and Stanford Live. Her collaboration with multimedia artist Afroditi Psarra generated <null_abc> (Zero Moon records.) Their project with designer Audrey Desjardins transcoding data from IoT devices as performance received a Mellon Creative Fellowship, lives as an interactive net art installation, and was explored in workshop at the 2020 Transmediale Festival. She is co-Artistic Director of Seattle Modern Orchestra, and has performed with Ensemble Dal Niente, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, and red fish blue fish percussion group. She is the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Associate Professor of Music and Chair of Percussion Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. More at www.bonniewhitingpercussion.com