You, My Mother is up and running

Concert Reviews, News, Shows

Beth Griffith, Laryssa Husiak, Mike Mikos, Joshua Modney, Mariel Roberts

Very excited to be joining Yarn/Wire (+ Mariel Roberts, cello) and Theater of the Two Headed Calf for a premiere run of operas by Rick Burkhardt and Brendan Connelly.  The show is up this week through Feb 20, please see my performance calendar or click here for details.  We already got some nice feedback from the Village Voice after opening night.

I’m especially excited to be taking a spoken text + violin solo by Rick Burkhardt up and about with the actors on stage (pictured above).

This is captivating new work, I’m really looking forward to our remaining performances!

Wet Ink in the New York Times

Concert Reviews, News

Soper and Modney perform "Cipher"

Wet Ink got a nice review in the New York Times for our recent concert as part of Issue Project Room’s Gaudeamus Muziekweek.  I was fortunate to perform some great new works by Kate Soper, Ted Hearne, and Chris Trapani.  A short excerpt is shown below.  Please click here to see the full review.

“Another of the ensemble’s composer-performers, Kate Soper, sang her own “cipher,” an exotic score in which her vocal settings of text fragments from Wittgenstein, Freud, Jenny Holzer, Michael Drayton and Sara Teasdale closely matched, in timbre and gesture, a brash violin line played energetically by Joshua Modney. Sometimes Ms. Soper ran a hand along the fingerboard.”

Concert Review: Wet Ink @ FeNAM

Concert Reviews, News, Shows

Wet Ink Septet

Wet Ink got a nice review in the San Francisco Classical Voice for our concert at the Festival of New American Music at Sacramento State University. Here are the highlights:

“No group was more bracingly thought-provoking and expansive than the Wet Ink Ensemble. These seven New York musicians/composers are fearless in testing the limitations of what instruments or musical forms can be. Best of all, they don’t shy away from integrating the spoken word as a tasty and dramatic counterpoint to the music. That played out powerfully in the unnerving but entrancing two movements from Voices From the Killing Jar, written by vocalist Kate Soper. Here hypnotic music was defined by start and stop rhythms punctuated by Soper’s sung text and finger-caress of a cymbal. In one of the movements the text was an incantation mining the Iphigenia tale, wherein the words exclaim Clytemnestra’s wish for bloodshed.  Later, sax player Alex Mincek’s Nucleus bloomed in a set of short movements in which saxophone and drum interchanged musically stark exclamations.”

For the full review, please click here.

Week of Teaching @ Ithaca

Education, News

I’m back at my Alma Mater once again this coming week for some substitute teaching (Apr 17-23).  I’m extremely honored to be filling in for Prof. Nick DiEugenio.  In addition to covering teaching responsibilities for the week, I’ll be doing a series of lectures during Nick’s Violin Yoga Class time (topics will include acoustics and contemporary violin techniques as related to inner pulse awareness and other kinesthetic aspects of music making).

I’m going to finally make a legitimate effort to do some blogging, and will be posting resources for students on this webpage throughout the week.