Princeton Sound Kitchen Presents

Black Box Project

Performed by:

• Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade

• Florent Ghys

• Wally Gunn

• Dave Molk

• Josh Quillen

• Jason Treuting

Location: Class of 1970 Theater, Whitman College
Ticketing: Free admission
Date: Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Start time: 8:00 pm

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PSK presents composers Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, Florent Ghys, Wally Gunn, Dave Molk, Josh Quillen and Jason Treuting showing newly devised performance works in a black box theater with director Laura Sheedy on Tuesday, September 16, 2014 at 8:00pm.

Dan Trueman, Director

Michael Pratt, Resident Conductor

THE BLACK BOX PROJECT

Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, Florent Ghys, Wally Gunn, Dave Molk, Josh Quillen and Jason Treuting showing newly devised performance works in a black box theater.

Director: Laura Sheedy

Producer Manager, Princeton Sound Kitchen: Wally Gunn

Production Manager, Department of Music: Henry Valoris

PROGRAM

NINFEA CRUTTWELL-READE

Marionettes

Spencer Evans, performer

SPENCER EVANS, WALLY GUNN & LAURA SHEEDY

It’s me, me, pistol optional

Spencer Evans, performer

Wally Gunn, composer

Laura Sheedy, performer

Sō Percussion

FLORENT GHYS

Brandi Loves Todd

Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, cello

Florent Ghys, double bass

Wally Gunn, voice

Dave Molk, guitar

DAVE MOLK

More Time For Coffee

Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, performer

Spencer Evans, performer

Florent Ghys, performer

Wally Gunn, performer

Dave Molk, performer

Ryan Sarno, performer

Sō Percussion

JOSH QUILLEN

Redacted Interludes 1, 2, 3

Sō Percussion

DANIELLE AUBERT, KATY DIDDEN & JASON TREUTING

BASED ON DOUBLE MUSIC BY JOHN CAGE & LOU HARRISON

Continuously Festive

Katy Didden, text

Danielle Aubert, images

Sō Percussion

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Danielle Aubert is a graphic designer and a Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the Lewis Center

Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade is a second-year graduate student in Composition at Princeton University. She studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, where she produced music for theater, and later completed postgraduate studies in cello performance at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Spencer Evans is very pleased to be a part of the Princeton Black Box Project. As a company member of Nothing To See Here, he very much enjoys creating work with Ms. Sheedy and Mr. Gunn. He was recently seen in San Francisco based BrickaBrack’s production of Never Fall So Heavily Again.

Florent Ghys is a French composer and double bass player from Bordeaux, France. His music has been described as “post-minimal chamber music” by John Schaefer. The label Cantaloupe has released two albums of Florent’s music, and a third one Télévision is in the works for November 14. Florent likes collecting hair dryers and would like to be a weather man.

Wally Gunn is from a rural town in Australia’s southeast. He first began making music in his early teens, writing on a Casiotone for his electronic dance band, which never played a gig. After high school, he moved to Melbourne to join rock bands, and spent several years writing songs and gigging around the country, then enrolled in the Victorian College of the Arts composition program. After graduating, Wally worked with friends and fellow composers Kate Neal and Biddy Connor in Dead Horse Productions to stage concerts of their own and other composers’ new music in warehouses, underground parking lots, cinemas, and other unusual spaces. He also composed original music for several Melbourne theatre companies, including The Eleventh Hour, The Shrimp Company, Itch Productions and Platform Youth Theatre, and contributed songs to cabaret star Wes Snelling’s autobiographical show Kiosk. Wally moved to New York in 2008 to begin a masters degree in composition at the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Julia Wolfe. Since relocating, Wally has composed original music for Manhattan company The Actors Company Theatre and has become a company member of the Brooklyn-based Nothing To See Here, under the artistic direction of Laura Sheedy. Wally’s concert music has been performed in Australia by Atticus String Quartet, The Dead Horse Ensemble, Silo String Quartet, Speak Percussion, and Three Shades Black, and in the US by Mobius Percussion, Red Shift, Roomful of Teeth, and Sō Percussion. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. www.wallygunn.com

Dave Molk is in his 4th year at Princeton. He writes mainly for pitched and non-pitched percussion, combining an energized rhythmic propulsion, sinuous chromaticism, and a love of glitch. His current research efforts are in software coding and EDM. He previously studied composition at Berklee College of Music under John Bavicchi and at Tufts University under John McDonald.

Josh Quillen has forged a unique identity in the contemporary music world as all-around percussionist, expert steel drum performer (lauded as “softly sophisticated” by the New York Times), and composer. His collaborations with other composers frequently incorporate the steel drums as a core element. A member of the acclaimed ensemble Sō Percussion since 2006, Josh has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Lincoln Center Festival, Stanford Lively Arts, and dozens of other venues in the United States. In that time, Sō Percussion has toured Russia, Spain, Australia, Italy, Germany, and Scotland. He has had the opportunity to work closely with Steve Reich, Steve Mackey, Paul Lansky, David Lang, Matmos, Dan Deacon, and many others. Josh started performing on the steel drums at Dover High School in Ohio, an interest that continued at the University of Akron, where Dr. Larry Snider founded one of the first collegiate steel bands in the United States. He traveled to Trinidad & Tobago in 2002, performing with the Phase II Pan Groove ensemble under Len “Boogsie” Sharpe. This interest in the traditional steel drum music of Trinidad ran in parallel with Josh’s education in western music, first at Akron, and then at the Yale School of Music with marimba soloist Robert Van Sice, where he received his Masters degree in 2006. These parallel interests led Josh to break ground in the use of the steel drums in contemporary classical music. To date, he has commissioned over a dozen pieces for steel drums from composers such as Stuart Saunders Smith, Roger Zahab, Dan Trueman, and Paul Lansky. In 2010, Steven Mackey’s quartet It Is Time—commissioned for Sō Percussion by Carnegie Hall and Chamber Music America—featured Josh on a new microtonal lead pan in its Carnegie Hall premiere, receiving rave reviews in the New York Times. Josh’s compositions for Sō Percussion are featured in Imaginary City, an evening length work that appeared on the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2009 Next Wave Festival, as well as the site-specific Music for Trains in Southern Vermont. Other ensembles to play his pieces and arrangements include Matmos, PLork, The Janus Trio, Adele Meyers and Dancers, The University of Akron Steel Band, and the New York University Steel Band. An avid educator, Josh is co-director of the Sō Percussion Summer Institute, an intensive workshop for college-aged percussionists on the campus of Princeton University. He is also co-director of a new percussion program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, where Sō Percussion is ensemble in residence beginning fall of 2011, and is the director of the New York University Steel Band.

Ryan Sarno is a musician, DJ, and more famously, a coffee maker at Small World in Princeton. You can follow his projects on Ananalog Records’ bandcamp and tumblr pages.

For over a decade, Sō Percussion has redefined the modern percussion ensemble as a flexible, omnivorous entity, pushing its voice to the forefront of American musical culture. Praised by The New Yorker for their “exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam,” Sō’s adventurous spirit is written into the DNA passed down from composers like John Cage and Steve Reich, as well as from pioneering ensembles like the Kronos Quartet and Nexus Percussion. Sō Percussion’s career now encompasses 13 albums, touring throughout the USA and around the world, a dizzying array of collaborative projects, several ambitious educational programs, and a steady output of their own music. When the founding members of Sō Percussion convened as graduate students at the Yale School of Music, their initial goal was to present an exciting repertoire of pieces by 20th century luminaries such as Cage, Reich, and Iannis Xenakis. An encounter with David Lang, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and co-founder of New York’s Bang on a Can organization, yielded their first commissioned piece: the 36 minute, three movement the so-called laws of nature. Since that first major new work, Sō has commissioned some of the greatest American composers of our time to build a new repertoire, including Steve Reich, Steve Mackey, Paul Lansky, Martin Bresnick, and many others. Over time, an appetite for boundless creativity led the group to branch out beyond the composer/interpreter paradigm. Since 2006 with group member Jason Treuting’s amid the noise, the members of Sō Percussion have been composing in their own right within the group and for others. In 2012 their third evening-length work Where (we) Live premieres at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, travelling to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 30th Next Wave Festival and the Myrna Loy Center in Helena, MT. Where (we) Live follows on the heels of 2009’s Imaginary City, a fully staged sonic meditation on urban soundscapes. In 2011, Sō was commissioned by Shen Wei Dance Arts to compose Undivided Divided, a 30-minute work conceived for Manhattan’s massive Park Avenue Armory. Sō Percussion’s artistic circle extends beyond their contemporary classical roots. They first expanded this boundary with the prolific duo Matmos, whom The New York Times called “ideal collaborators” on their 2010 combined album Treasure State. Further projects and appearances with Wham City shaman Dan Deacon, legendary drummer Bobby Previte, jam band kings Medeski, Martin, and Wood, and Wilco’s Glenn Kotche drew the circle even wider. In 2011, the rock band The National invited Sō to open one of their sold-out shows at New York’s Beacon Theater. Sō’s recording of the so-called laws of nature became the cornerstone of their self-titled debut album on Cantaloupe Music (the record label from the founders of Bang on a Can) in 2004. In subsequent years, this relationship blossomed into a growing catalogue of exciting records. In 2011, Sō released six new albums, ranging from their definitive recording of Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet¾composed for them in 2009¾on Nonesuch Records, to Steve Mackey’s epic quartet It Is Time on Cantaloupe, to their collaborative album Bad Mango with jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas on Greenleaf Music. The BBC raved of Sō’s performance of Mallet Quartet that they “have it nailed, finding both the inner glow and the outer edge, and never letting the tapestry lapse into the flat or routine.” Sō Percussion is heavily involved in mentoring young musicians. Its members are co-directors of a new percussion department at the Bard College Conservatory of Music. This top-flight undergraduate program enrolls each student in a double-degree (Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Arts) course in the Conservatory and Bard College, equipping them with elite conservatory training and a broad liberal arts education. In 2009, they created the annual Sō Percussion Summer Institute on the campus of Princeton University. The Institute is an intensive two-week chamber music seminar for college-age percussionists featuring the four members of Sō as faculty in rehearsal, performance, and discussion of contemporary music for students from around the world. During the 2011-2012 academic year, Sō was an ensemble-in-residence at Princeton University, teaching seminars and collaborating extensively with talented student composers. Sō has been featured at many of the major venues in the United States, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Stanford Lively Arts, Texas Performing Arts, and many others. In addition, a recent residency at London’s Barbican Centre, as well as tours to Western Europe, South America, Russia, and Australia have brought them international acclaim.

Laura Sheedy is a director from Melbourne, Australia, now living in New York. Laura has directed work for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, Melbourne Fringe and Adelaide Fringe, La Trobe and Princeton Universities and Manhattan School of Music. Laura has directed solo works by Miss Behave, Captain Frodo, Amy G and Kurt Braunohler. She has been a directorial advisor to such companies as Circus Oz, La Clique, Suitcase Royale and composers Kate Neal and Wally Gunn. In February 2012, along with SITI Company’s Barney O’Hanlon, she presented a creative development showing of a new work, The Weight of Distance, for the World Theatre Festival, Australia. Most recently, Laura directed Charles Mee Jr’s, Big Love, was Anne Bogart’s Assistant Director on the SITI Company’s Steel Hammer for the Humana Festival of New American Plays, and created two new works for the Princeton Sound Kitchen with her theatre company, Nothing To See Here.

Jason Treuting is a performer and composer. He plays with and writes most often for his quartet Sō Percussion and now lives in Princeton as one of two inaugural Lewis Center Fellows in the Arts.