Resonant Bodies Festival 2018

About

Resonant Bodies Festival was founded to catalyze the creation of new vocal music, to expand the audience for new vocal music, and to challenge and transform the role of the vocal recitalist. Since its inception in 2013, RBF has been greeted with sustained critical acclaim and the delight of audiences and vocalists alike. For three nights every September in New York City, nine vocalists are given curatorial carte blanche over a forty-five minute set. This freedom—rarely granted to vocalists in the contemporary music world—gives each show a “happy zealousness, where the singers’ enthusiasm for their repertoire [is] contagious” (Sequenza 21). 

Opening night features Paul Pinto premiering a set of 15 songs for extended vocal technique and drone, designed as a companion piece to Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King; Helga Davis will present a project with her closest NYC-based collaborators; and Resonant Bodies Festival director Lucy Dhegrae will premiere a multimedia project that explores the neurological aftermath of trauma, with new works by Jessie Montgomery, Du Yun, Katherine Young, Eve Beglarian, Angélica Negrón, and Osnat Netzer, directed by Alison Moritz.

The second night of the Resonant Bodies Festival opens with composer/performer Jen Shyu presenting her solo work Nine Doors and Pulitzer Prize-winner Caroline Shaw (of Roomful of Teeth) will perform works of her own composition.

Closing night of the Resonant Bodies Festival begins with German soprano Sarah Maria Sun collaborating with International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) on works by Georges Aperghis, Rebecca Saunders, Thierry Tidrow, and Màtyàs Seiber; the legendary San Francisco-based Pamela Z will perform a number of her compositions for voice and electronics; and renowned composer/soprano and 2014 Resonant Bodies Festival performer Gelsey Bell returns.