Artist and curator Micah Silver is in residence to (re)activate and transform the site-specific loudspeaker arrangement designed by composer Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009) for the theater. This new work is commissioned for the exhibition Shifting Center. Silver was EMPAC’s founding curator of music (2006–10) and the commissioner of Amacher’s original EMPAC work.

Composer Maurice Louca is in residence in Studio 2 to spatialize a new composition for Shifting Center. An ensemble work for seven musicians recently recorded in Berlin, Louca’s work will be developed into an installation designed to highlight both individual instrumental parts of the work as well as larger ensemble pieces.

Antonia Barnett-McIntosh and Jessie Marino return to EMPAC to continue the development of their commissioned work Susceptible Chambers, a piece that combines sound, sculpture, light, projection, and movement in an exploration of the myriad possibilities of one of the most foundational instruments of electronic music: the microphone.

Artist Clarissa Tossin and composer Michelle Agnes Magalhães are in residence in Studio 1 to work with Wave Field Synthesis. This new work combines performances by Alethia Lozano Birrueta playing ceramic 3D printed versions of pre-Columbian flutes with poetry by Rosa Chávez and commentary by Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal. The installation utilizes audio recordings from Tossin’s moving image work Before the Volcanoes Sing (EMPAC, Fall 2022) and will be presented as part of the building-wide exhibition Shifting Center.

Sound artist Hugo Esquinca is in residence for production and research of a new site-specific multi-channel sound work. Amplifying EMPAC’s sound systems within its public spaces, Esquinca will make a work that explores sound at the edge of audibility. The artist’s work will be perceptible from outside EMPAC after the opening hours of Shifting Center and will culminate in a performance on the closing day of the exhibition. Esquinca will continue his sound research throughout the span of the exhibition.

Set to premiere in Manchester in 2024, ARK is an opera starring a host of mythical and contemporary figures. Anderson’s subjects—time, technology, and American history—are warped into a story that sometimes moves backwards. Apocalyptic climate events and information overload set the scenes for these stories, visual poems, and songs.

Laurie Anderson and her team are in the Theater in August for a final production residency for her opera ARK before it premieres in Manchester in November 2024.

To mark the release of his portrait album Wake Up the Dead (New Focus Recordings, 2023), composer-performer Christopher Fisher-Lochhead presents a lecture demonstration featuring the music on the album. A lecturer in the Rensselaer Arts Department, Fisher-Lochhead discusses his approaches to notation, instrumental technique, form, harmony, and collaboration. The demonstration will include musical examples from the album itself plus a full performance of grandFather played by the acclaimed bassoonist and long-time collaborator Ben Roidl-Ward. A question-and-answer session and reception will follow.

Wake Up the Dead showcases Christopher Fisher-Lochhead’s notated music and features performances by the JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ben Roidl-Ward, and Quince Ensemble. By turns raucous and tender, frenetic and still, the music on the album documents two fundamental pillars of Fisher-Lochhead's compositional process: intense and long-term collaboration with performers, and a thoroughgoing reimagining of musical materials and organization.

Elemental View is a musical work in six movements by pioneering composer Ellen Fullman for her Long String Instrument and the experimental music duo The Living Earth Show—guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson. The expansive installation inhabits EMPAC Concert Hall with its 136 strings, precisely tuned and configured for this multi-movement piece. Elemental View invites the listener to discover, as if with a magnifying glass, the details of the physics of string vibration itself. 

Invention and discovery are at the core of Fullman’s work. The artist brings her remarkable instrument to life using her fingertips, unfolding the physical sound spectrum of the strings as she walks, and producing undulating waves of continually shifting musical overtones. Additional tools developed and crafted by Fullman expand the possibilities of the instrument, allowing her to play three, six, or nine strings at once and to expand the timbre of the instrument while infusing its drone texture with rhythmic variation.

With their laser-focused precision and virtuosic ensemble playing, The Living Earth Show brilliantly executes the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of Fullman’s composition using specially-tuned instruments tailored to Andrews and Meyerson—a lap-steel guitar and hammered dulcimer.

Listening to the music of Fullman’s singular creation is akin to standing inside a giant musical instrument. The result is at once ancient and utterly new, environmental, and folk-like yet orchestral.

This presentation continues The Living Earth Show’s multi-season residency at EMPAC, offering engaging and exciting large-scale work from artists with whom they work closely. The Living Earth Show is a megaphone and canvas for the world’s most progressive artists, seeking to push the boundaries of technical and artistic possibility while amplifying voices, perspectives, and bodies that the classical music tradition has often excluded.

Salon Mondialité is an electro-acoustic musical performance and video installation by musician, producer, and vocalist Miho Hatori that explores themes of memory, identity, and colonialism through kaleidoscopic and expansive dream-pop atmospheres and hypnotic rhythms. Hatori combines composed and improvised music, experimenting with the structure of a “talk-show” to create a listening environment where nostalgia for the past and possibilities for the future co-exist. Hatori’s “talk show” substitutes traditional segments with “sound stories” and features onstage collaborations with Hatori's friends and invited guests.

For this performance at EMPAC, Hatori’s guests include musicians Patrick Higgins and Michael Beharie, and cross-media artists Steffani Jemison and Cole Lu.

A pre-show conversation between Miho Hatori and music curator Amadeus Julian Regucera begins at 7PM.

Inspired by the writing of Martinican poet-philosopher Édouard Glissant and his conception of an “interconnected identity,” Salon Mondialité ultimately takes on the mood of a funeral: laying to rest outdated and colonial ideas of “identity” and a “requiem” for those who died through forced or involuntary exile. 

Previously performed at venues such as The Broad in Los Angeles and The Kitchen in New York City, Hatori transforms the EMPAC Theater into the eponymous salon, welcoming audience members to a new version of this show.

Hatori is a Japanese-born and New York City-based vocalist, musician, and producer who performs widely and gained popularity in the 1990s with the legendary band Cibo Matto. Most recently, she released a solo album Between Isekai and Slice of Life and has recorded music under the pseudonyms New Optimism and Miss Information. Additionally, she produces music for soundtracks, films, commercials, and web content.

In this talk and open studio, composer-performers Antonia Barnett-McIntosh and Jessie Marino present an intimate look into their individual practices and discuss their recent work as Artists-in-Residence on their new collaboration Susceptible Chambers. Taking place amidst their workspace in Studio 1, attendees will have the opportunity to learn about an EMPAC commission in development directly from the artists.

Antonia and Jessie use elements of the mundane and quotidian as generative ways to disrupt traditional musical forms and performance practices. In Susceptible Chambers, Antonia and Jessie bring this sense of play to one of the foundational instruments of electronic music: the microphone.

Susceptible Chambers is an extension of Antonia and Jessie’s Extended Microphones Project (EMP), a sound-based research, development, and performance project in which the typical structure of a simple microphone is prepared using alternative materials. What would it sound like to embed a microphone capsule inside a terracotta pot with a grid made from dried-out pine cones? Or to cast a microphone enclosure completely out of agar-agar (a vegan alternative to gelatin)?

EMP will fabricate sonic relationships between home-built microphones, the objects they will amplify, and the speakers that disseminate this aural symbiosis into a network of analog sculptural filters which draw aural focus to unexpected features of the physical space.

Antonia and Jessie began work on Susceptible Chambers at EMPAC in August 2023 and will return for a final residency in March 2024, culminating in a premiere performance and installation in April 2024.

Work-in-progress events offer a window into the research, development, and production of new works by artists in residence at EMPAC. These free events open up a dialogue between our audiences, artists, and EMPAC staff.