Music for Handball Courts at Riis Beach
Featuring the following musicians:
Lea Bertucci (Alto Sax)
Chris Pitsiokos (Alto Sax)
Ben Bennett (Percussion)
Shayna Dunkelman (Percussion)
Pack your beach bag and experience the music of extraordinary composer/musician Lea Bertucci, who has garnered acclaim in recent years for her experiments in sound and music. The performances at the handball courts at Jacob Riis Park will consist of three improvised sets that take place throughout the day at 2 pm, 4 pm and 6 pm. Bertucci's aim is to excite the acoustic conditions within the handball courts. The ensemble will consist of acoustic woodwinds and percussion, and include a portion with audience participation.
Tickets: $10, available here.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. Her discography spans over a decade, with eight releases of full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2018 and 2019, she released the critically acclaimed solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes and has since gone on to found her own imprint, Cibachrome Editions, with 2021’s A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release.
Her collaborations extend to other chamber-noise projects, including a recently formed duo with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi. This collaboration finds new territory in extending the sonic possibilities of the human voice through electronic manipulation with tape and free improvisation. Their debut album Phase Eclipse was released on Astral Spirits Records in 2019 and followed up with End of Softness EP in 2020.
She has performed and exhibited extensively across the US and Europe with presenters such as The Museum of Modern Art New York, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery NYC, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, The Walker Museum, PS1, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, Sound of Stockholm Festival, and Unsound Festival Krakow. She has attended residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and ISSUE Project Room, among others. In 2018, she was awarded a Jfund for New Music grant from the American Composers’ Forum and a commission for a brass octet from the Levy Gorvy Gallery in New York. She is currently working on a number of commissions from the INA GRM in Paris, Quartetto Maurice in Turin and by ARS Nova Workshop in Philadelphia for new compositions that are forthcoming in 2021/22.
Chris Pitsiokos is an alto saxophonist and composer based in Brooklyn, NY. Aesthetically, his work combines the lyricism of jazz and the intensity of extreme rock forms and noise with the attention to detail and abstraction of contemporary classical music. Known for expanding the vocabulary of the saxophone through extended range, circular breathing, nuanced articulation, and other extended techniques, his recent work also commands considerable cathartic, emotive, and lyrical power. His compositions often function as a platform for performers to express a unified aesthetic vision without subjugating their individual voices as musicians in their own right. In this way his work contrasts with more traditional modes of composition in which the composer or band leader is the sole, or primary arbiter, of a singular vision. Pitsiokos has worked with Weasel Walter, Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Evans, Joe Morris, Philip White, Guerilla Toss, C Spencer Yeh, Nate Wooley, Brandon Seabrook, Lydia Lunch, Paul Lytton, Miya Masaoka, Mick Barr, and many more. He has appeared at major festivals and toured throughout Europe, the United States and Japan as a solo artist, with his own bands, and as a side man. A prolific artist, Pitsiokos is the leader or co-leader of ten commercial recordings on record labels Clean Feed, Astral Spirits, UgExplode, One Hand, Carrier, New Atlantis, and his own imprint, Eleatic. http://www.chrispitsiokos.com/
Percussionist Ben Bennett has developed a commanding and highly personal synthesis of both traditional and extended techniques which takes the lineage of jazz, free-improvisation, and experimental music as its foundation. In searching for an expanded sonic palette, and fluid movement between disparate timbres, he has distilled the drumset into a compact assortment of drumheads, stretched membranes, and other objects which become multi-functional when placed in different physical relationships to each other, and activated by striking, friction, circular-breathing, and other techniques. Bennett’s music often sounds electronically-generated, although it is produced entirely through bodily interaction with acoustic materials. The versatility of his approach combined with the simplicity of his setup allows for a high degree of responsiveness in improvisational situations, as well as unencumbered portability. Bennett has been performing and touring actively for the past 12 years, playing across the US and abroad as a soloist, in long-running groups with Zach Darrup, Michael Foster, Evan Lipson, and Jack Wright; and with many other collaborators including Pascal Battus, Leila Bordeuil, Tashi Dorji, Sandy Ewen, Travis Laplante, Ingrid Laubrock, Charmaine Lee, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Brandon Lopez, Weston Olencki, Jacob Wick, and Nate Wooley.
Shayna Dunkelman is a musician and percussionist based in Brooklyn, NY. Dunkelman is known for her versatile and unique techniques, and use of electronics to access a sonic pallet not found in acoustic percussion. In addition to solo performances, Dunkelman tours with the Puerto Rican band Balún, multi-instrumentalist Emily Wells, electro-acoustic duo Peptalk, Pakistani singer and author Ali Sethi, and her percussion duo Nomon with her sister Nava Dunkelman. Dunkelman was recently a soloist in the latest orchestral piece by Pulitzer Award-Winning and Grammy nominated composer Du Yun, titled Where We Lost Our Shadows (2019) along with Ali Sethi and vocalist Helga Davis. The piece premiered at Ultima Festival (Oslo), Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and Southbank Centre (London). It is also scheduled to tour worldwide and to be recorded with the Peabody Orchestra and conductor Marin Alsop in 2020. Dunkelman became increasingly active in the alternative music scene as a member of the band Xiu Xiu, touring the world for 6 years. As part of Xiu Xiu, Dunkelman premiered a multimedia performance art piece at the International Summer Festival in Hamburg, Germany (2013) and Donaufestival in Krems, Austria (2014). As a composer, Dunkelman collaborated with choreographer Amanda Piña to present work at the Presidential Palace of Austria as part of the opening ceremony of ImpulsTanz with the presence of President Heinz Fischer. For this performance, she was awarded a grant from Foundation of Contemporary Arts in NYC. Since then, Dunkelman and Ms. Pina collaborated on several pieces and toured them internationally.
These concerts are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.