Jupiter Nights: Lea Bertucci & Ben Vida / Maeve Schallert / Sarah Hennies
DOORS 7 PM / MUSIC 8PM
At the Basilica Gallery Building
108 South Front Street, Hudson, NY 12534 (right next to the main building on our campus)
Food by Local 111
Visual art exhibit by Hudson artist Louise Smith
JUPITER NIGHTS – Basilica Hudson’s weekly series of arts events in our Gallery Building – continues with local experimental artists Lea Bertucci & Ben Vida, Maeve Schallert and Sarah Hennies.
Lea Bertucci & Ben Vida
For their performance at Jupiter Nights, Lea and Ben will present “My Words Came Out Slow and Odd”, a text-based composition for voices and electronics, trumpet and reeds. This work pushes the boundaries of language and intelligibility and extends the human voice through the aid of creative electronic processing while exploring the threshold between sense and nonsense. What new modes of communication emerge when language is in a constant state of morphology? How quickly can we recalibrate to allow for complex meaning to be projected onto abstraction? “My Words Came Out Slow and Odd” is a clattering, psychedelic whirl of heteroglossic smears and stutters.
MORE ABOUT LEA & BEN
Long standing figures in the New York City experimental music scene – both noted for pushing electroacoustic music into highly individualized realms – Ben Vida and Lea Bertucci began collaborating during the Summer of 2021, while living on opposite sides of the same mountain outside of Woodstock, NY. What began as a series of conversations between friends, slowly formed into the development of a unique form of nonhierarchical improvisation that challenged and rethought the nature of dialog and language itself; intertwining their respective practices into a series of fluid compositions where the identities and locations of each artist become progressively obscure. The duo has released one full length LP, played shows in the US and UK and have been Guest Artists at the Tulsa Foundation of Art.
Maeve Schallert
Maeve Schallert is an improviser using violin, lapsteel, voice, and max/msp as an extension of their limbs to translate momentary experience through sound. Accessing understanding, they want to capture the audience by providing a blank canvas for the listeners own projection. Their sound focuses on feedback, honing and shaping it into melody.
Sarah Hennies
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. Sarah will perform solo vibraphone for her Jupiter Nights performance.
More about Sarah Hennies
She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Festival Cable (Nantes), send + receive (Winnipeg), O’ Art Space (Milan), Cafe Oto (London), ALICE (Copenhagen), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has worked with a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Claire Chase, ensemble 0, Judith Hamann, R. Andrew Lee, Talea Ensemble, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Two-Way Street, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.
Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.
She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received additional support from New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.
Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.