“Instrument—Body:” Brandon Lopez and Cecilia Lopez
Friday, October 20, 2023 at 2:00pm
Joe Webb Peoples Museum of Natural History: Fourth Floor, Exley Science Center, 265 Church Street
FREE!
“Instrument—Body” is a series of performances, presented in conjunction with the seminar of the same name and curated by Visiting Assistant Professor of Music and cellist Ethan Philbrick, that will stage musical encounters in site-specific locations across the Wesleyan University campus this fall.
Read Music in Unexpected Spaces in The Wesleyan Connection.
The works by these visiting artists examine the tension between being and playing a body and an instrument through both improvised and scored compositions. What does it mean to make yourself an instrument? To be instrumentalized? Is the instrument an extension of the body or a body all its own, and what does it mean to play and be played by it?
This performance will feature bassist Brandon Lopez and musician and multimedia artist Cecilia Lopez MA '16 on synthesizers.
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Please note this event will require the audience to stand for approximately 45 minutes among the museum display cases.
Wesleyan University is committed to making its educational programs and facilities accessible to people with disabilities. If you plan to attend an event and will require reasonable accommodations, please call 860-685-3324. It is recommended that arrangements be made ten business days in advance of the event. Please visit the Accessibility website for more information.
Please notify the box office in advance if you have special needs.
Brandon Lopez is a New York City-based bassist and composer who’s work is a syncretism of disparate styles and musical processes used to extend and transgress the vocabulary of the double bass. The Cleveland Review of Books writes “This is virtuosity in the sense that we hear on this record countless textures from Lopez—extended techniques, bowed strings that unearth wild harmonics, plucked rumblings, and low funk rootings—each conjured from a deep sense of what is being called for in a moment. This is virtuosity as vocabulary, a total command of texture, subtlety, and a depth that can be reached into.” He has collaborated with an exhaustive list of great musicians and thinkers. He was a featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic, and has received numerous awards and fellowships (including a Van Lier Fellowship, a Jerome Residency at Roulette Intermedium, an Artist in Residence at Issue Project Room, the Doris Duke Charitable Trust, and The Robert D. Bielecki Foundation). His collaborations with Gerald Cleaver and Fred Moten were featured in The New York Times best of jazz in 2022.
Cecilia Lopez is a composer, musician, and multimedia artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina currently based in New York. She works across the media of performance, sound, installation, and the creation of sound devices and systems. Lopez holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College and an MA from Wesleyan University in composition (2016). Her work has been performed and exhibited at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina, Center for Contemporary Arts (Vilnius, Lithuania), Roulette Intermedium, Issue Project Room, Ostrava Days Festival 2011 (Ostrava, Czech Republic), MATA Festival 2012, Experimental Intermedia, Fridman Gallery (New York), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo, Norway), and the XIV Cuenca Biennial, among others. She was a Civitella Ranieri fellow in 2015, and has participated in various international residency programs. In 2019, Lopez curated the Intermedia Festival Folly Systems coproduced by Roulette Intermedium and Outpost Artists Resources, which featured eleven international artists. Her collaborators have included Carmen Baliero, Aki Onda, John Driscoll, Carrie Schneider, and Lars Laumann, among others.