CalArts

Artist in Residence Cory Smythe (2022 Herb Alpert Award Winner in Music) plays a solo piano concert in the Roy O. Disney Concert Hall on the CalArts campus.

Smythe has worked closely with pioneering artists in new, improvisatory, and classical music, including multi-instrumentalist-composer Tyshawn Sorey, violinist Hilary Hahn, and transdisciplinary composers from Anthony Braxton to Zosha Di Castri. His own “perplexingly perfect” (The Wire) music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader).

Smythe has been featured at the Newport Jazz, Wien Modern, and Tectonics festivals, as well as at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival, where he premiered new work created in collaboration with Peter Evans and Craig Taborn. He has received commissions from Present Music, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the Wiener Festwochen, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which he is a longtime member.

Smythe’s recent albums on the Pyroclastic label have been made with the support of a grant from The Shifting Foundation. He received a Grammy Award for his work with Hahn and, in 2022, a Herb Alpert Award in Music.

The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts launches its second annual Artist in Residence (AIR) Week, running from Monday, Nov. 6 through Friday, Nov. 10, 2023!

The second annual AIR Week includes acclaimed artists Ela Orleans, Pamela Z (1998 Herb Alpert Award Winner in Music), Attah Poku, Yosvany Terry and the Modern Afro Cuban Quartet (2023 Charlie Haden Artist in Residence), Cory Smythe (2022 Herb Alpert Award Winner in Music), and Tomeka Reid (2022 Herb Alpert Award Winner in Music).

The on-campus, resident activities will include a panel discussion, presentations and workshops, and in-studio and live ensemble collaborations between residents and students. While the week’s activities are primarily intended for the CalArts community, select presentations and all resident concerts are free and open to the public.

Artist in Residence Ela Orleans presents her piece ‘Apparition’ in the Roy O. Disney Concert Hall on the CalArts campus.

'Apparition' considers hundreds of sketches made by Gustave Moreau exploring the character of Salome, as portrayed in his painting L’Apparition. The main inspiration and starting point for this practice-based research is the investigation of music and visuals in the form of a contemporary “composed novel”, exploring syntax of found footage pattern, texture, colour, text, gesture and electroacoustic composition. The composition’s multi-layered stages will rely on methods associated with appropriation and remix and will be informed by the work of contemporary artists such as Peter Tscherkassky, Vicki Bennett and Martin Arnold. Musically, scored for vocals, violin and octotrack it is inspired by the opera piece Salomé by Richard Strauss, Massenet’s Hérodiade The compositions will be analysed, dissected, sampled and transformed with variety of interpretations using electronic orchestration and Artificial Intelligence. The found footage, music and sound will be treated as a path to restoration, in which alteration (including extraction, reframing and deformation) becomes a prelude to the new. Sampling, overexposure and original composition will be merged to create a contemporary portrait of Salome based on so far male interpretations of the legend. Appropriation and transformation of stereotyped femininity will aim to create a path to reframe the cliché of objectified female body using appropriation, caricature, embellishment and illumination.

The live solo performance will be accompanied by the video projection – a collage including fragments of literature, painting, sculpture, ballet and film.

The project’s future development inspired by Heinz Emigholz​’s D’Annunzio’s Cave and following his architectural films, the work could be juxtaposed over interiors from archival sources onto interiors of art galleries and museums.

Orleans is an electronic sound artist, performer, academic, and cinematic composer based in Paris and London. Her sample-driven songs, often featuring Casio keyboards and reverb-caked vocals, recalled ghostly memories of ’50s and ’60s pop. Her work fuses elegant, noirish laments, lush, and atmospheric fractured narratives with influences ranging from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to the Éthiopiques series and Bernard Herrmann film scores. Since her solo debut Low Sun/High Moon in 2008, Orleans has received international critical acclaim for her growing catalog of work.

Subsequently, Orleans has toured across the UK, Europe, USA, and Canada, and her work was presented at MoMA PS1, New York; MoCA, Massachusetts; The Venice Biennale; and TATE Britain. She has worked on several albums, film soundtracks, theater, and opera works.

In October 2013, her double album Tumult in Clouds received The Dead Albatross Music Prize voted for by the finest record shops, radio presenters, listeners, writers, and record collectors from across the UK and Ireland. Her tracks have been played frequently on major and independent radio stations across Europe, America, and Japan. She has also completed a remix of work by new age sound pioneer Laraaji, and her album Circles of Upper and Lower Hell was shortlisted for Scottish Album of the Year in 2017.

Artist in Residence Yosvany Terry (2023 Charlie Haden Artist in Residence) brings his Modern Afro Cuban Quartet to the Roy O. Disney Concert Hall on the CalArts campus.

Born into a musical family in Camaguey, Cuba, Terry went on to classical music training in Havana at the prestigious National School of Arts (ENA) and Amadeo Roldan Conservatory. After graduating, Terry worked with major figures in every realm of Cuban music, including pianists Chucho Valdes and Frank Emilio, and the celebrated nueva trova singer/guitarist Silvio Rodriguez. From his earliest days in New York, Terry has been welcomed by a broad range of artists in the jazz and contemporary music community, playing with Steve Coleman, Rufus Reid, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Roy Hargrove, Vijay Iyer, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Avishai Cohen, Baptiste Trotignon, Eddie Palmieri, and Gerald Clayton.

Terry continued his music education in New York, where he studied composition, orchestration and counterpoint with Leo Edward, Rudolph Palmer. Terry has received a number of commissions as well as grants to support both his performance and composition work. He is a recipient of the prestigious Doris Duke Artist Award of the class 2015. His New Throned King album received a Grammy Award Nomination for Best Latin Jazz Album.

A key aspect of his work is educating the next generation of musicians both in the US and Cuba. He has taught at prestigious institutions across the United States and Canada. He regularly visits his alma maters in Cuba to give workshops and master classes. In 2015, Terry joined the full time faculty at Harvard University as senior lecturer and director of jazz ensembles in the Department of Music.

Artist in Residence Tomeka Reid (2022 Herb Alpert Award Winner in Music) improvises with faculty members Vinny Golia and Eyvind Kang in the Roy O. Disney Concert Hall on the CalArts campus.

Cellist and composer, Reid has emerged as one of the most original, versatile, and curious musicians in Chicago’s bustling jazz and improvised music community. A 2022 Herb Alpert awardee and MacArthur Fellow, 2021 USA Fellow, and a 2019 Foundation of the Arts and 2016 3Arts recipient, Reid received her doctorate in music from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2017. From 2019 to 2021 Reid held a teaching appointment at Mills College as the Darius Milhaud Chair in Composition.

Resident artists Attah Poku, Cory Smythe, Ela Orleans, Pamela Z, Tomeka Reid, and Yosvany Terry present a group concert to celebrate the second annual Artist in Residence (AIR) Week at CalArts.

On Friday, November 10th at 8:00PM, resident artists Attah Poku, Cory Smythe (2022 Herb Alpert Award Winner in Music), Ela Orleans, Pamela Z (1998 Herb Alpert Award Winner in Music), Tomeka Reid (2022 Herb Alpert Award Winner in Music), and Yosvany Terry (2023 Charlie Haden Artist in Residence) present a group concert to celebrate the second annual Artist in Residence (AIR) Week at CalArts.