Event Detail

Night and Day
Berk Schneider, trombone - DMA Recital

Program:
Catch (2022)
for unaccompanied Trombone
Erin Graham

Music for Trombone, Piano and Percussion (2011) Mike Svoboda
Shaoai Zhang, Piano Michael Jones, Percussion

BRIEF PAUSE
please prepare your wireless headphones

Seg (2020)
for Trombone, Mechanical Metronomes and Live Electronics Sang Song
Michael Jones, Metronomes

Ilha Grande (2022)
for Live Graphic Score and Spatial Audio
Nasim Khorassani and Berk Schneider
Nasim Korassani, Visuals Berk Schneider, Electronics

Improvisation for Trombone, Percussion, and Electronic Synth Concatenations (2022)
Joseph Bourdeau, Percussion Douglas Osmun, Electronics

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Catch evokes images of snagging, getting momentarily stuck or caught, a zipper getting trapped on fabric and moving in abrupt, jerky bursts, or a marble spiraling downwards in increasingly smaller and tighter circles, its patterns becoming smaller and more restricted until it becomes motionless and trapped.


Seg—a shorthand for “segregation”—is prison slang referring to solitary confinement. While it is considered torture by experts, solitary confinement is frequently used in U.S. prisons as a means to punish and discipline inmates. If subject to this punishment, an inmate is placed in an 8ft.x10ft. cell—equipped with a bed, sink, toilet and virtually nothing else—for months, years and sometimes decades. The absence of meaningful social contact and interaction with others is known to cause adverse psychological effects, including mental illnesses ranging from anxiety, clinical depression, and self-mutilation to suicidal thoughts.

Seg is more a reflection on the human condition than a call for prison reform, however. It would be not too far off to assume that, during the pandemic, pretty much every individual on earth experienced isolation in one form or another. It would be preposterous to compare those experiences to the inhumane treatment the prisoners in seg are subject to, of course. But to the extent we have never been so acutely aware of what isolation does to the human psyche, Seg may be viewed as an invitation to reflect upon the fragility of our existence.


Ilha Grande is an island nestled in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro ringed by beaches, vibrant rainforests, waterfalls, and caverns supporting Atlantic birds, amphibians, and cicadas. This fragile ecosystem depends on its diversity of life in order to survive. The improvisation duo Broken Calligraphy has collected binaural and ambisonic recordings from the island, sending the sounds through electronic resonators, spatializing them in synchronicity with a live graphic score. There is no hierarchical form in this collaborative work, which means the score can also follow or react to the sonic elements, providing an equitable creative space during performance.

As improvisatory musicians we actively engage contingency plans in order to balance feedback loops between ourselves and our instruments. Douglas Osmun has taken this idea a step further by developing an AI hub that analyzes socially embodied cognition, creating a sort of symbiotic animism that unites participating improvisors and machine.

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Berk Schneider, trombone (berkschneider.com), serves as an advocate for the arts by cultivating research-creation projects that incorporate an interdisciplinary approach to technology and analysis of social meaning-making devices, promoting prescriptive methods that bring communities of musicians closer together. His collaborations are varied, having worked with musicians such as Joshua Bell, Josh Groban, conductors Valery Gergiev, Brad Lubman, Enno Poppe, Carlos Miguel Prieto, Helmuth Rilling, Robert Spano, composers Beat Furrer, Philip Glass, Helmut Lachenmann, Alvin Lucier, actor Alexander Fehling, the Akron, Firelands, and Houston symphonies, Ensemble Modern, Schauspiel Frankfurt, as well as creative director Heiner Goebbels. He is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory, Rice University, Frankfurt University of Music, and has been a finalist and honorably mentioned in numerous international trombone competitions, including the Robert Marsteller Competition and Lewis Van Haney Philharmonic Prize.