Music Department Colloquium: Elliott Sharp - Feedback: Translations from the IrRational

Wednesday, November 12, 2025 at 4:30pm
Ring Family Performing Arts Hall

Free and open to the public.

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp will read selections from his new book from Wesleyan University Press, Feedback: Translations from the IrRational (2025), and employ creative digression to touch upon his current compositional strategies and projects.

The North American premiere of Entanglement Suite, Sharp's collaboration with graphic designer Janene Higgins, will be performed on Wednesday, November 12, 2025 at 8pm in Ring Family Performing Arts Hall.

Feedback is a wide-ranging meditation on music, sound, artificial intelligence, consciousness, contemporary culture and politics, and the life of the touring musician. In Feedback, Sharp engages in speculative thought about how consciousness might have arisen and what the future holds for humanity with the advent of an Artificial Intelligence that is certainly artificial but might not exactly be intelligent. The "Improviser's Mind" is discussed in the context of post-quantum physics, probability, socio-acoustics, and Butoh dance.

Elliott Sharp is a composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who leads SysOrk, Orchestra Carbon, Terraplane, and Tectonics and pioneered use of fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetics in musical composition and interaction. His opera Port Bou premiered October 2014 at Issue Project Room, and received its New England premiere at Wesleyan in 2016; and his suite Tribute:MLK Berlin '64 opened the 2014 Berlin Jazz Festival. Storm Of the Eye appears on violinist Hilary Hahn's GRAMMY Award-winning album In 27 Pieces, and Turing Test for the Neue Vocalsölisten Stuttgart premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2012. Sharp has been featured at festivals Big Ears, New Music Stockholm, Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, and Au Printemps and is the subject of the documentary film Doing The Don't. Sharp was awarded the Berlin Prize for Music Composition for 2015; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014; and a Fellowship from the Center for Transformative Media in 2014. In 2003, he received a Fellowship from the Foundation For Contemporary Art. Sharp’s collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; actor Steve Buscemi; Ensemble Modern; singer Debbie Harry; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pianist Cecil Taylor; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka.