21c Music: A Dialogue

Itsï Ramirez, Whitney Johnson, & Bret Schneider
The 20th century of culture appears to be a long century. This discussion explores the history of avant-garde music specifically over the last century, examining it’s changes, vicissitudes, and underlying ideas as it relates to both the creator & listener in the 21st century. What differs about the music experience today from 25 years ago? What kind of music forms are necessary to capture our present? What might be considered obsolete, & what generally is the 21st century music maker’s relationship with history? How do we listen to music today?From October 5 – November 30, Bret Schneider’s just-intoned player piano will be located at Comfort Station. The programming ranges from generative compositions running on afternoons, string ensemble concerts, and discussions on music experience in the 21st century.

Schedule:

6 Doors

6:30-7 Piano & Brooks Clarke on electric guitar

7-9 — Discussion

Bret Schneider is a composer, essayist, & poet. For the first quarter of the 21st century, Schneider has attempted to synthesize the outer limits of third ear music with modern beauty. Via novel formal experiments, his music cultivates dreamspace & reverie. Recent works include live-composing to a just-intoned player piano. Schneider is also a co-founder of Caesura Magazine.

Brooks Clarke (1991) is a guitarist, composer, and music educator from Jacksonville, Florida. A prolific and dynamic performer, Brooks is well known for the variety of styles and instruments he can be seen performing in musical pits throughout the United States. From 2015 – 2020, Brooks was music director of Crossroad Lutheran Church. From 2017 – 2020, Brooks was the Music Director and Director of Bands for Saint John’s Classical Academy, a Barney Charter Initiative tuition-free public school in Fleming Island, FL, where he oversaw the music department and taught theory and instrumental music.

Whitney Johnson uses sound to explore relationships between bodies and minds. She composes, performs, records, and installs multi-channel sound from the viola, sine waves, Max/MSP, organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording. Her latest recordings, Hav/Stena (2024, Drag City) adopt alter egos to approach sonic material from two sides, following the cult of Hermaphroditus through Cyprus and Greece and her own symbolic and biological ancestry in Sweden. Sonescent (2022, Drag City), recreated the experience of 10 days of silent Vipassanā meditation in Joshua Tree, CA where she heard “the last minutes in the life of music.” Recent performance-installations have considered the effects of sound on the body. FIAT (2023, Forecast Platform Berlin), The Tuning of the Elements (2023, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), Huizkol (2020, Lampo), and Fundamental 256 Hz (2019, Longform Editions) each consider the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique using binaural beats to induce relaxed or energized mental states. In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018 and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University in Sweden in 2022. She begins as Assistant Professor of Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in August 2024.

Itsï Ramirez is a Chicago based composer. Her 2024 album debut, New Animals, was released on No Rent Records. Stepping out of the naturalized preoccupation with sound as sound, she takes on the project of recovering a new music that has been forgotten.

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Tags: Bret Schneider, Brooks Clarke, Chicago, Comfort Station Logan Square, Itsï Ramirez, Logan Square, PPP — THE PREPARATOR'S PET PIANO: 21c Music a dialogue with Itsï Ramirez Whitney Johnson & Brooks Clarke, Whitney Johnson