Laura Cocks, flute

Laura Cocks is a New York based flutist who works in a wide array of creative environments as a performer and promoter of contemporary music. Laura is the flutist and executive director of TAK ensemble, and a member of the Nouveau Classical Project and the Association of Dominican Classical Artists. She has performed across North and Latin America and Europe as a soloist and chamber musician in ensembles such as The London Sinfonietta, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Wet Ink Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, and Ensemble Dal Niente. Laura can be heard with TAK, International Contemporary Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, and others on labels such as Carrier Records, ECM, New Focus Recordings, Sound American, Denovali Records, Orange Mountain Music, and Gold Bolus.

She has been in residence at institutes such as Columbia University, New York University, Stanford University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of California San Diego, and Cornell University and given masterclasses in flute performance, chamber music, and professional development at Oberlin Conservatory, Williams College, Columbia University, and California Polytechnic Institute at Pomona. Her scholarly work revolves around building analysis practices in contemporary music that see the body of the performer as its primary parameter.

Natacha Diels, performance technician / composer

Natacha Diels’ work combines ritual, improvisation, traditional instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. Recent work includes the completion of a series of fairytales/nightmares for performers, and the construction of a Portal with her performance duo On Structure. 

Natacha founded the experimental music collective Ensemble Pamplemousse in 2003, and continues to be its director and flautist. In 2009 she co-founded the performance duo On Structure with Jessie Marino. Pamplemousse specializes in unique aspects of composition and new music, from complex virtuosic instrumental performance to experimental theatre to electronic and robotic performance. Natacha has taught courses in electronic and computer music at Columbia University and Parson’s School of Design; and has conducted numerous workshops or lectures in composition and computer music at schools such as the School at the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College, Wesleyan University, and University of Southern California. A devoted teacher of all ages, Natacha has also designed and taught workshops to children at the Montessori School of Raleigh, the Upper Catskill Community Center for the Arts, and a summer music camp in Léogane, Haiti. She holds degrees in flute performance and integrated digital media from NYU, in music composition from Columbia University, and currently teaches composition and computer music at the University of California, San Diego.

Dmitri Kourliandski, born 1976 in Moscow. Studied in Moscow conservatory with Leonid Bobylev. Winner of a number of composers competitions in Italy, The Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Austria, Russia. In 2008 he was artist-in-residence of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm and in 2010 – composer-in-residence of the 2E2M ensemble in Paris. Since 2012 he is invited to give master-classes and lectures in Austria, Italy, The Netherlands, Ukraine, France, Israel, Spain, Russia. Author of chamber, ensemble, orchestra and opera works performed worldwide at concerts and festivals by well known musicians and collectives. Portrait CDs were published at the FANCYMUSIC and Col Legno labels. Dmitri Kourliandski is the founder and artistic director of the International Young Composers Academy in Tchaikovsky city. Co-founder of the Structural Resistance group (StRes). Musical director of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre. ince 2016 performs together with sound artist Andrey Guryanov in an electronic open dance music duo KGXXX. His works are published by Donemus, Editions Jobert and Le Chant du Monde.

Ann Cleare is an Irish composer working in the areas of concert music, opera, extended sonic environments, and hybrid instrumental design. Her work explores the static and sculptural nature of sound, probing the extremities of timbre, texture, colour, and form. She creates highly psychological and corporeal sonic spaces that encourage a listener to contemplate the complexity of the lives we exist within, exploring poetries of communication, transformation, and perception. Ann studied at University College Cork, IRCAM, and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her scores are published by Project Schott New York. She is Assistant Professor of the Music and Media Technologies Masters at Trinity College Dublin and Associate Lecturer in Composition at the University of York. As an artistic collaborator with Dublin Sound Lab, she will work on developing their programming and production of electronic music over the coming years. Ann is Projects Officer with Sounding the Feminists (#STF), a collective championing principles of equality, fairness, inclusivity, and diversity in Irish musical life.

Bethany Younge is an American composer of both acoustic and electroacoustic works with extensive collaborative experience with artists from other disciplines. Many of her acoustic works seek to mimic both speech and sound poetry with instruments while also dissecting words to reveal individual phonemes, illuminating a world embedded with complex semiotical relations between the spoken word and what is interpreted to be "music." Her explorations in speech have led her to find her words, her voice, and create compelling situations where performers may do the same. Bethany’s notated scores seek to incorporate the performer's creative skills in an attempt to challenge current notions of authorship. The highly variable sonic outcomes of her notated works are what she finds to be most fruitful. She often designs pieces with a particular person or persons (as opposed to instruments) in mind. Her collaborations often demand a certain intimacy that serves as the compositional impetus for the work.

The music of Joan Arnau Pàmies is concerned with underlying issues related to text, notation, sound, and the distinction between composition and performance as categorically different activities. His most recent explorations investigate unconventional notational strategies to develop intricate formal processes. Born in Catalonia in 1988 and based in the United States since 2007, Pàmies’s works have been performed and workshopped throughout the Americas, Russia, and Europe by ensembles and individuals such as the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, ensemble recherche, Felix Del Tredici, JACK Quartet, Kathryn Schulmeister, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, New Morse Code, Nora Volkova Ensemble, and Vertixe Sonora Ensemble He is the recipient of numerous prizes and grants, such as the William T. Faricy Award for Creative Music and the Eckstein Fellowship from Northwestern University (Chicago), the Wallace Scholarship Fund from the New England Conservatory (Boston), and the Fellowship prize from the Darmstadt Summer Courses 2008.

FL [Falsa Lectio] #2 “represents a trip inside the interpreter. The physiology of the voice, articulation and breath…demand extreme concentration and physical efforts… A musician’s physical tension peeps out the sound surface and becomes one of the material’s layers of the pieces.” - D.K. 

For solo bass flute, this work paints oblique and intersecting walls of richly-textured sound, simultaneously creating permeable layers through which we glimpse each juxtaposing side and impassibly geometric blocks, airtight in their perimeter.

Oxygen and Reality—for piccolo, electronics, lights, and three balloons—builds four interconnected but separate geographies, implied through shifting lights and delineated by subterranean rivers of turbulent composure, as the performer generates quasi-electronic textures by swirling hardware materials inside of two large balloons. Each geographic space is united by its magnification of of the performer’s lungs, hands, mouth, and throat. As the work builds, the body is depleted and a secondary “lung” is attached to the end of the piccolo, as each tonehole is blocked, resulting in a bodily feedback loop of the air needed for playing. 

“Produktionsmittel I [for flute, electronics, tin foil, and empty bottle] employs a variety of notation-types in the hopes of triggering complex interpretive processes. Furthermore, the piece uses distinctive features that are often associated with other artistic traditions, such as performance art and theater… At points, the juxtaposition of different notational layers will inexorably create paradoxes during performance.” - J. A. P.

This epic work reaches deep into the components of the flute and of flute playing, and in breaking them down, creates a sound palette that is situated within the body, expressing itself as it spills out into the flute—the compression of lips, depth of air, vibrating vocal chords, and the physical limit of ingression all bridged together through overlapping and concentric understandings of time.

I dance in the morning until the sun finds me missing—for alto flute, electronics, lights, and video—constructs a rich and tenuous world that slips and stutters between lucidly educational, personally vulnerable, and chaotically manic. While controlling three lights and reciting text, the performer shapes shifting textures of delicate feedback multiphonics generated by a rope of microphones magnetically attached to the inside of the alto flute as video of the performer reciting the same text glitches in and out.