Musicians David Bernabo, Trē Seguritan Abalos, Marina López, and SONIC MUD (NYC) will present new music with scores created from the forms, shapes, practice, and sonic landscape of Beate Kuhn.
There will be two performances: one at 1 p.m. and the second at 2:10 p.m., both taking place in the Scaife Lounge.
David Bernabo is a musician, artist, and independent filmmaker. He performs in the bands Watererer, How Things Are Made, and Else Collective. His film work documents western Pennsylvania food systems, climate change, the studio practices of composers and artists, and the histories of iconic arts institutions like the Mattress Factory. He is most noted for Moundsville, a documentary co-directed with former Wall Street Journal writer John W. Miller, which screened on PBS for three years, and the biographical documentary Just For The Record about avant-garde composer “Blue” Gene Tyranny.
Trē Seguritan Abalos is a Filipina-American sound artist based in ancestral land of the Seneca, Adena, Haudenosaunee, Lenape, Shawnee, and many other indigenous peoples. Trē creates soundscapes with improvisation, breath, field recordings, silence.
Marina López is a Pittsburgh-based composer, educator, and budding writer. She has a deep interest in challenging boundaries between musical genres and art forms in order to craft immersive experiences that subvert audience’s preconceptions. Born and raised in Mexico City, her music often explores the psychological, ethnomusicological, and physical roots of her heritage.
Her music has been performed by the Transient Canvas, the Chamber Orchestra of Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Mellon University Contemporary Ensemble, Counter)inductions ensemble, the Carnegie Mellon University Philharmonic, Kamratōn ensemble, and Bosto’’s White Snake Project, among others. She has participated in orchestral reading sessions with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin, as well as an Earshot reading with the Houston Symphony Orchestra under Yue Bao.
In pursuit of activating her sculptures with sound, Julia Elsas started SONIC MUD, a band of professional musicians that showcases her ceramic instruments. She considers her sculptures to be fully realized only when they are being played. In her initial research into creating sonic sculptures, she looked to the shape and sonority of traditional udu drums made by the Igbo women of Nigeria and to the ancient indigenous ceramic water whistles, flutes, and horns from Mexico and South America.
SONIC MUD musicians play a range of ceramic flutes, drums, natural trumpets, shakers, clayrimbas, rain machines, water whistles and more, all hand-built by Julia. The performances are unique and one-of-a-kind. The music is improvisational while they bring to life the richly resonant and earthy sounds of clay.
Beate Kuhn (1927–2015) was a German sculptor known for her rhythmic ensembles of deconstructed, ceramic forms such as discs, cylinders, cones, and spheres. She also channeled beautiful and sublime aspects of nature with formal allusions to succulents, seeds, mushrooms, and invertebrate animals.