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Shanna Pranaitis
Shanna Pranaitis fearlessly expands the realm of sonic possibility for her instruments through innovative performances and educational projects, in which she integrates new and historically reimagined works with electronics, movement, and other multi disciplinary elements to create seamless, immersive concert experiences. She is interested in exploring ways to engage and involve a wider community in the process of experiencing music.
She travels the world regularly to perform and teach as a solo guest artist and with the chamber ensembles Memoria Nova and Collect/Project. She has performed and taught as a guest artist in Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, The Netherlands, South Korea, Mexico, Colombia, and the United Kingdom. An important part of this work is the close cooperation with living composers, poets, movement artists, and other interdisciplinary artists, around the world on the development of new work. She is the artistic director and co-founder of FluteXpansions, the first comprehensive e-learning platform for composers and performers to explore contemporary flute music and techniques.
Shanna has presented premiere performances of pieces written for her at such festivals as the Gaudeamus Muziekweek (NL), Sonic Fusion Festival (UK), Darmstadt Ferienkurse (DE), International Computer Music Conference, and Omaha Under the Radar, among others. She has received numerous accolades for her performances including, prizes at the Stockhausen Courses, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and New Music USA project grants. In 2017, she co-curated and co-organized the first multi-day festival of Galina Ustvolskaya’s music (Power In Sound) in the United States. She was previously a founding member of Chicago-based Ensemble Dal Niente, with whom she received the 2012 Kranichstein Prize for Interpretation. Her debut solo recording Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf Flute Music was just released on NEOS. Previous releases include the album Mobile with guitarist Jesse Langen, featuring world premiere recordings of music by Fredrick Gifford, and the album SORI featuring works by Kyong Mee Choi for instruments and electronics.
Current recording projects also include a solo disc of works for her Kingma open-hole bass flute. Shanna has studied contemporary music under Matthias Ziegler, Camilla Hoitenga, Eva Furrer, Philippe Racine, and Kathinka Pasveer. Such has served as indispensable enrichment to her performance studies at the University of Michigan (Amy Porter) and Northwestern University (Walfrid Kujala), where she received her masters and bachelors degrees, respectively. Her formative training was guided by Monty Adams and Dolores Humberg, to whom she is deeply grateful. She was also a former fellow of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble at the Aspen Music Festival. A passionate educator, Shanna is on faculty of the Music Institute of Chicago, and maintains an active private studio in the Chicago area. She is also certified to teach the Suzuki method having
received her training from David Gerry and Kelly Williamson.
Shanna performs on a Burkart flute and piccolo and Kingma bass and alto flutes. -
Raphael Radna
Raphael Radna is a composer of acoustic and electronic music whose works embrace unconventional compositional strategies and new technologies. His music has been performed in concerts, festivals, and conferences across the United States and in Japan, including at the International Computer Music Conference, the New York Electroacoustic Music Festival, the California Electronic Music Exchange Concerts, the UCSB Summer Music Festival, and the Osaka University of Arts Electroacoustic Music Festival. Raphael is currently pursuing a PhD in Music Composition at UC Santa Barbara, where he studies with João Pedro Oliveira and Curtis Roads. -
Five Songs
In Five Songs, analyses of the flute performance drive the electroacoustic music, modifying various parameters that affect its realization in a way that is closely related to the flutist’s sound and gesture. Each part complements the musical capabilities of the other: sometimes they fuse into a compound voice that is simultaneously narrative and abstract, and at other times they oppose one another in stark relief. Inspired by the poetry of Stephen Crane, the five brief sections of the work manifest contrasting moods, interaction strategies, and approaches to material. -
Kerrith Livengood
Composer Kerrith Livengood’s music has been described as "an escapade of wild effusions" (Bloomington Herald-Times) and "sketchy-seeming" (New York Times). Her music has been performed at KISS 2018, ACO’s SONiC Festival, June in Buffalo, Bargemusic, CCM’s MusicX festivals, the North American Saxophone Alliance annual conference, the Atlantic Music Festival, the Contemporary Undercurrent of Song series, the Cortona Sessions, the Charlotte New Music Festival, and Alia Musica Pittsburgh’s Conductors Festival. She has composed works for the JACK Quartet, Third Angle Ensemble, Duo Cortona, Altered Sound Duo, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Beattie and pianist Adam Marks, soprano Amy Petrongelli, Harry Partch's Adapted Guitar I performed by Charles Corey, and the h2 Quartet. Kerrith’s music features unexpected musical forms, complex grooves, lyricism, improvisation, noise, and humor. Kerrith is a flutist and experimental improviser who has played bird songs while sitting in a tree, worn a towel as concert attire, and performed in concert with Anthony Braxton and Renee Baker. She is a native of Springfield, Missouri; graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied with Eric Moe, Mathew Rosenblum, Amy Williams and Marcos Balter; and currently teaches at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). Kerrith is also Assistant Director of the New Music On The Point Festival, an annual summer festival for young composers and performers. Since the pandemic began, Kerrith has spent much of her time learning to create music in SuperCollider and collaborating with her friends and colleagues remotely. She looks forward to fire pit hangouts and the return of karaoke someday soon. -
Bambuchla Shadows
Bambuchla Shadows is a short exploration of colorful responsive sounds and live sound processing, for homemade bamboo flute and SuperCollider. It's my first fully realized piece for SuperCollider and live performer. The computer-generated sounds create a sparkling, shifting cloud in response to the very rustic and woody flute melodies, punctuated sometimes by live granulation and triggered samples from an ancient Buchla. I am an intermediate SC user, and I worked out the coding for this piece over several months; moreover, I also made the (admittedly rather crude) bamboo flute myself. It took several attempts to figure out how to cut and bore the finger holes and mouth hole correctly, and also how to cure the bamboo in the oven without setting the flute on fire. (That did happen on a previous attempt.) I like the contrast between high-tech computer sounds and low-tech flute I've painstakingly created in this piece, as both the digital and physical musical elements required experimentation and attention to detail. This piece is largely improvised, with scored cues for improvisation popping up as images triggered by the performance code. -
Dreaming in its Shadow
""To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall..."" Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
Inspired by the collaboration with the commissioning flutist, this work incorporates elements from Franz Schubert’s ""Der Lindenbaum"", Deep Listening© movement practices and acoustic-ecology-inspired field recordings. The piccolo player must follow a series of choreographic steps and movements that correspond to the sounds and patterns of the fingerings as well as to the ways trees and forests are formed. This work invites the player to become part of the pre-recorded sounds and to inhabit the space in a way that embodies and sonifies the performer’s mythical transformation from human to tree. The work is designed to elicit memory, dreamtime and imagination to bring us closer to the elements of what make up the material of the instrument being played, and to remind of us of our dear old friends, trees."