Chaos Cultures IV

Cranks and Cactus Needles was inspired by the sound of ancient 78 RPM records, and the pops, scratches, skips, and warps that occur as they deteriorate. As to the title, “Cranks” refers to the crank handles of old record players that had to be wound up before a 78 could be played, and “Cactus Needles” are the sharp cactus spines that were sometimes used as cheap phonograph needles. The musicians are instructed to play the piece “distant and ghostly, like a victrola down the hall”, and use uneven vibratos, imperfect repeats, and unpitched scrapes to evoke the decaying music of this anachronistic technology. The piece was commissioned for a premiere at ISCM World Music Days in Luxembourg by the Swedish ensemble “The Pearls Before Swine Experience”, and developed with violinist George Kentros. – Annie Gosfield

Composer Annie Gosfield, whom the BBC called “A one woman Hadron collider,” lives in New York City and works on the boundaries between notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds, refined timbres and noise. Her music is often inspired by the inherent beauty of found sounds, noise, and machinery. She recently worked with Sigourney Weaver, Yuval Sharon, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic on her multi-site opera “War of the Worlds.” This innovative project incorporated three defunct air raid sirens that were repurposed into public speakers, to broadcast a free, live performance to the streets of L.A. from Walt Disney Concert Hall. Annie has composed site-specific music for factories; researched jammed radio signals; led a band driven by vacuum, machine, and analog synth sounds; composed a large-scale work inspired by Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” murals; and developed two orchestral pieces during a 2016 residency sponsored by the League of American Orchestras. She received a 2021 award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2017), American Academy in Rome (2015), American Academy in Berlin (2012), and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2008). Gosfield’s discography includes four portrait CD’s on Tzadik, and compositions on Sony Classical, EMI, Innova, CRI, Mode, ReR, Harmonia Mundi, Wergo, CRI, and ECM. She has worked with The L.A. Philharmonic, Bang on a Can All-Stars, JACK Quartet, MIVOS Quartet, FLUX Quartet, Talujon Percussion, So Percussion, Joan Jeanrenaud, Kathleen Supové, Lisa Moore, Felix Fan, FrancesMarie Uitti, Stephen Gosling, Anthony DeMare, James Ilgenfritz, String Noise, and Jennifer Choi. Active as a writer and teacher, she contributes to the New York Times series “The Score,” and has been the Milhaud Professor of composition at Mills College, a visiting lecturer at Princeton University and U.T. Austin, and a visiting artist at CalArts. She has taught composition at Columbia University, most recently as a Visiting Lecturer.

“Sacrifice Zones” is a nine-piece chamber work written as a meditation on the 85-mile corridor that stretches from Baton Rouge down to New Orleans known as Cancer Alley. It holds the most densely concentrated collection of petrochemical and fossil fuel operations in the western hemisphere. Residents of the some eleven parishes suffer the health effects of industrial pollution. Parts of this area have the highest risk of cancer from air pollution in the United States. Cancer Alley is but one area, albeit a critical one, of many classified as a sacrifice zone, a geographical area that has undergone permanent environmental change due to locally unwanted land use.

This work blends elements of violence and despair with glimpses of hope and a call to action across eleven distinct sections embodying the eleven parishes of Cancer Alley and the residents thereof. -Philip Schuessler

Philip Schuessler’s music, ranging from soloists to orchestra, often has sense of delicate urgency and rhythmic energy that is characterized by intricate instrumental writing and subtle timbral design. He takes inspiration from a variety of sources, including popular and rock music traditions, experimental improvisation, spectralism, natural and scientific processes, and countercultural political theater.

He is currently an instructor of music theory and composition at Southeastern Louisiana University where he was honored with the President’s Award in Artistic Excellence. His music is published by his own Pendula Music publishing company, as well as Society of Composers, Inc., Alea Publishing, T.U.X. People’s Music, Murphy Music Press, and Potenza Music, and recordings of his compositions can be found on the Aucourant, New Focus, Centaur, Navona, Janus, Curvepoint Media, and Capstone labels. Most recently Glow in the Dark Valu-Pak, an album of psychedelic-tinged synth music, was released on Bandcamp.

In addition to being a composer and teacher, Schuessler is also assistant director, co-founder, pianist, and conductor for Versipel New Music. Based in New Orleans and now in its tenth year, Versipel presents contemporary music concerts throughout the southern Louisiana region.

Like much of Hennies’ work, [Everything Else] is an effort of raw materiality, but here, in the spirit of Fluxus and Dada, she reminds us to find beauty and emotion beyond encounters where we expect them, and that compositional structure is not always what we think. -Bradford Bailey

Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Warsaw Autumn, Ruhrtriennale (Essen), Archipel Festival (Geneva), Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Time:Spans (NYC), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Ensemble Dedalus, The Living Earth Show, Mivos String Quartet, Sarah Saviet/Joe Houston, Talea Ensemble, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.

Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.

She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, fellowships in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2025 and 2016, a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and the Composer In Residence at the 2025 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. She has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Creative Work Fund.

She works collaboratively in a duo with double bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause and in the percussion trio Meridian. As a scholar and performer she is engaged with ongoing research about the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and a recording project to document music by the American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta. Sarah is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.

Nightshade (2021) Nightshade, also known as Deadly Nightshade, is a beautiful plant that often appears in my garden, usually growing in and among other plants, as though it is hoping not to be noticed. It takes me a while to pull it out as it has such lovely purple flowers.   I often find it in the dark side of my garden, in and among the ferns and ivy, and I leave it in until it flowers, but as it is known to be poisonous, I eventually pull it out.  I called this piece Nightshade, thinking about how each instrument has its own special qualities, while being able to match closely with the others, just like the nightshade tries to fit with the other garden plants. The work was composed for Prague Quiet Music Collective. -Linda Catlin Smith

Linda Catlin Smith grew up in New York and lives in Toronto. She studied music in NY, and at the University of Victoria. She taught composition for many years at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario (1999-2020) and continues to teach privately. Her music has been commissioned, performed and/or recorded by: Goeyvaerts Trio, Psallentes, Tafelmusik, Victoria, Kitchener-Waterloo and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras, Arraymusic, Thin Edge Collective, Continuum, Tapestry New Opera, Via Salzburg, Evergreen Club Gamelan, Exaudi, and the Penderecki and Bozzini string quartets, as well as by soloists including Eve Egoyan, Philip Thomas and Elinor Frey. She has had performances at the Tectonics Festival in Glasgow (2017), Huddersfield Festival (2017), Principal Sound Festival (London, 2018) and Louth Contemporary Music Festival in Ireland (2019, 2023). The BBC Proms commissioned a new orchestral work (Nuages) premiered in 2019 by the BBC Scottish Orchestra. Several solo discs of her music have been released: Thought and Desire, with Eve Egoyan, Ballad(Eve Egoyan and Andrew Smith), Meadow with Louth Contemporary Music Society; and five recordings: Dirt Road, Drifter, Wanderer, Among the Tarnished Stars (with Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time) and Ballad, on the ‘another timbre’ label. Some of her works are now available through Composers Edition.

Julius Eastman was a member of the Creative Associates ensemble at SUNY Buffalo in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He wrote Stay On It for that group in 1973, and toured and recorded it (in a live performance) with them. Eastman’s notation was often casual, and details of his scores have been created posthumously from recordings. Stay On It was a structured improvisation that could be performed with varying instrumentation, including a voice repeating the title words. Eastman’s brother Gerry notes a Caribbean influence in it.  -Hollywood Bowl

In the 2016 article “Minimalist Composer Julius Eastman, Dead for 26 Years, Crashes the Canon”, New York Times music critic Zachary Woolfe writes:

At the core of “Stay on It” (1973) is a bright, relentless riff over which a vocalist merrily sings the title. But improvised, wheezing, almost trippy passages emerge; the tight rhythmic order dissolves. When the opening riff returns, it’s slower and warmer, proceeding through chromatic transformations that are sometimes queasily dissonant, sometimes hopeful. By the end, there’s just a single piano playing, and, finally, the constant vibrating pulse of a tambourine.