Evan Ziporyn & ContaQt
Biographie Evan Ziporyn & ContaQt
Evan Ziporyn
(b. 1959, Chicago) makes music at the crossroads between genres and cultures, east and west. He studied at Eastman, Yale & UC Berkeley with Joseph Schwantner, Martin Bresnick, & Gerard Grisey. He first traveled to Bali in 1981, studying with Madé Lebah, Colin McPhee's 1930s musical informant. He returned on a Fulbright in 1987.
Earlier that year, he performed a clarinet solo at the First Bang on a Can Marathon in New York. His involvement with BOAC continued for 25 years: in 1992 he co-founded the Bang on a Can All-stars (Musical America's 2005 Ensemble of the Year), with whom he toured the globe and premiered over 100 commissioned works, collaborating with Nik Bartsch, Iva Bittova, Don Byron, Ornette Coleman, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Thurston Moore, Terry Riley and Tan Dun. He co-produced their seminal 1996 recording of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, as well as their most recent CD, Big Beautiful Dark & Scary (2012).
Ziporyn joined the MIT faculty in 1990, founding Gamelan Galak Tika there in 1993, and beginning a series of groundbreaking compositions for gamelan & western instruments. These include three evening-length works, 2001's ShadowBang, 2004's Oedipus Rex (Robert Woodruff, director), and 2009's A House in Bali, an opera which joins western singers with Balinese traditional performers, and the All-stars with a full gamelan. It received its world premiere in Bali that summer and its New York premiere at BAM Next Wave in October 2010.
As a clarinetist, Ziporyn recorded the definitive version of Steve Reich's multi-clarinet NY Counterpoint in 1996, sharing in that ensemble's Grammy in 1998. In 2001 his solo clarinet CD, This is Not A Clarinet, made Top Ten lists across the country. His compositions have been commissioned by Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road, Kronos Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, Maya Beiser, So Percussion, Wu Man, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, with whom he recorded his most recent CD, Big Grenadilla/Mumbai (2012). His honors include awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2011), The Herb Alpert Foundation (2011), USA Artists Walker Fellowship (2007), MIT's Kepes Prize (2006), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Goddard Lieberson Fellowship (2004), as well as commissions from Meet the Composer/Commissioning Music USA and the Rockefeller MAP Fund. Recordings of his works have been been released on Cantaloupe, Sony Classical, New Albion, New World, Koch, Naxos, Innova, and CRI.
He is Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT and Inaugural Director of MIT's Center for Art Science and Technology.
ContaQt
combines 21st Century classical/experimental music with the sensibilities of rock and jazz to form a hybrid chamber ensemble that defies genres. ContaQt is dedicated to interdisciplinary collaborations, nurturing and facilitating the creation, production, presentation and engagement with new music. In addition to concerts, recordings and touring, ContaQt hosts Music From Scratch, a music creation workshop for everyone.
Andrew Noseworthy
is a multidisciplinary artist whose music reflects upon the acceptance/rejection of “locality” while drawing from lived experiences of isolation within his hometown of Labrador West and the tight-knit arts community of St John's (Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada), along with the expansive post-genre scenes of New York City. His work addresses ideas of post-regional spaces and questions of accessibility for the musical voices within them.
Andrew’s creative work coalesces wide-ranging styles and distinct artistic practices. His genre-fluid projects include compositions for contemporary music ensembles (often with electronics); performing with hardcore and experimental rock bands in DIY venues; commissioning and premiering new works involving the electric guitar; music for dance and experimental film; pop music production and audio engineering; and integrative work that combines seemingly disparate elements from any number of these settings. His artistic intentions are focused on building sustainable relationships through communal collaboration. This includes previous and ongoing collaborations with artists and organizations such as The Metropolis Ensemble, The 21C Guitar Conference, Angie Moon Dance Theatre, Saman Shahi, India Gailey, Yang Chen, Tim Brady/Bradyworks, Phong Tran, Adam Cuthbért, SlowPitchSound, Greg Bruce, The St John’s International Sound Symposium, Bekah Simms, Tanea Hynes, Andrea Lodge, Din of Shadows, The Tuckamore Chamber Music Festival and NA2 Dance Theater.
With Yaz Lancaster, Andrew is the co-founder of laydøwn, a post-genre project that creates new works for violin and electric guitar with electronics as well as original pop songs and covers. With Aeryn Santillan, he is the co-founder of experimental hardcore duo this place is actually the worst and independent digital label people | places | records; both projects that connect communities existing in the “new music” and “hardcore/electronic” realms. In 2019 Andrew joined the Toronto-based ensemble Contaqt in time for performances that included Brian Eno's Discreet Music at the Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend, as well as new arrangements of music by Bowie/Eno/Fripp/Budd with Evan Ziporyn at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Intersection in Toronto.
Through his work as an educator, Andrew strives to foster equitable spaces for community and collaboration. His engagements span over a decade of private guitar, theory, and composition teaching; distance and outreach learning; adjudicating; university-level theory, ear-training, and electronic music positions; and frequently guest lecturing at festivals, workshops, and academic courses. Focusing on transparent and open communication among students, Andrew provides them with support, guidance, and relevant skills to pursue their own interests or goals. In 2020, Andrew was an instrumental and composition tutor for Go Compose! North America. In 2021, he joined the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music in teaching courses on the electric guitar in contemporary classical music. He has been a faculty member at Community Music Schools of Toronto since 2022.
Andrew’s previous mentors include Paul Frehner, Michael Gordon, Andrew Staniland and Sylvie Proulx. He holds degrees from Western University (PhD), NYU Steinhardt (MM), and Memorial University (Bmus, honours). His PhD dissertation work involved the creation of a new electric guitar concerto with modular performance settings, while his research examined the transference of experiences between composer-performer roles and genre concerns regarding the electric guitar in contemporary music.
