Join us in the STUDIO at 6PM on Friday February 23rd for Artist Conversation 2: Finding Transcendence with Wojtek Blecharz with Amy Cimini as part of the Weekend Symposium: Body Doubles, co-created by Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh (CMU Music) and Whitney Laemmli (CMU History). 

This event is made possible with support of the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University Borderlines Initiative

Please reach out to Prof. Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh for further information.

Bios

Born in Gdynia (Poland) in 1981, in 2006 Wojtek Blecharz graduated with honors from Frederic Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw (Master of Arts), in 2015 received a Ph. D. in music composition at University of California San Diego, living in Berlin since 2015. Between 2012-2019 Blecharz had been curating the Instalakcje music festival at Warsaw’s Nowy Theater, featuring non-concert music: sound installations, performance installations, sound sculptures, music videos, music theater and others. Blecharz has directed three of his opera-installations: Transcryptum (2013) commissioned by Grand Theater National Opera in Warsaw; Park-Opera (2016) commissioned by Theater Powszechny in Warsaw and Body-Opera commissioned by Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (2016). In 2018 composed opera FIASKO, commissioned by Staatstheater Darmstadt; in 2019 Rechnitz.Opera for 6 actors and 4 cellos, based on Elfriede Jelinek’s text, commissioned by Warsaw Autumn Festival and TR Warszawa. Blecharz’s music often redefines the traditional concert format and proposes different relations between the listener/viewer and the sound. His music involves site specific projects, participatory audience, elements of music and instrumental theater as well as immersion and embodiment of sound. His performative-music installations and music theater pieces include: Soundwork for 8 actors (commissioned by TR Warszawa, 2016); House of Sound for 40 instruments and participatory audience (commissioned by Słowacki Theater, Cracow, 2017); Manifesto for orchestra (for any type of instruments and participatory audience, commissioned by Eklekto, Geneva, 2019); a cycle of 8 Fields for various instrumental (spatial) set-ups; Symphony No.1 for orchestra in 4 groups and moving audience (commissioned by Szczecin Philharmonics, 2019), Symphony No.2 for orchestra open to any type of musician (commissioned by Theater &TD, Zagreb, 2019), Symphony No.3 for 200 wireless speakers (commissioned by Donaueschinger MusikTage 2021/23).

Amy Cimini is musicologist, violist, teacher and Associate Professor of Music at UC San Diego. Her research committed to understanding intersections between politics, community and technology in 20th & 21st century experimental music, sound art and auditory culture. For the last few years,  the work and musical thought of composer Maryanne Amacher have guided her inquiries across listening, gender and histories of US technoscience.  Spanning the early 1960s through the turn of the millennium, her book,Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (Oxford 2021)  discerns frameworks for life that emerged from Amacher’s multidisciplinary study of auditory experience and engages, broadly, with how conceptualizations of sound can attach social value unevenly to bodies, materials and relations that has relevance across civic and environmental contestation, telecommunications and science and technology in the late 20th century U.S. In other work, she explores race and digital art curation; social reproduction and feminist music studies; sound, surveillance and abolition and other topics.I Amy also co-edited Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (Blank Forms Editions 2020) with composer and theorist Bill Dietz and engage with Amacher’s  legacy through public presentation, performance and exhibition  as a member of the Supreme Connections Working Group and the Maryanne Amacher Foundation.

As a violist, she plays with composer Katherine Young in the duo Architeuthis Walks on Land and the San Diego-based  experimental rock band Necking. Her solo music works with archives and soundscapes in the San Diego-Tijuana borderlands and her first solo record is forthcoming on the Relative Pitch label. Amy is a founding member of the Music and Philosophy Study Group of the American Musicological Society, serves on  the editorial board of the journal Women and Music as well as the Maryanne Amacher Foundation. In San Diego, she is happy to work with the arts organization Space Time and well as LIBROS, a cross-border librarianship and artistic collective.