Molly Jones
Emma Hospelhorn
For tonight’s concert, percussionist Erik Sowa has assembled a trio featuring some of the brightest lights in the next generation of Chicago improvisers. For the second set, Cellist and interdisciplinary artist Katinka Kleijn teams up with flutist and improviser Emma Hospelhorn for a set featuring the working duo’s co-constructions for instruments, homemade synthesizers, and loop pedals.
8:30 PM : JONES/HEINEMANN/SOWA
Molly Jones - reeds
Jakob Heinemann - bass
Erik Sowa - drums
9:30 PM : FLORIOGRAPHY
Emma Hospelhorn - flute/electronics
Katinka Kleijn - cello
ABOUT THE MUSICIANS :
Molly Jones’ practice incorporates improvisation, composition, and multimedia performance with saxophones, flutes, and electronic samples. Her work originates in a place of playfulness, listening, and attention.
Informed by her experiences in jazz, new music, Balkan brass, and Scottish country dance/contradance ensembles, her fascination with found sounds, and her work as a software engineer, she has created electroacoustic pieces, chamber pieces, experimental theater works, and video, in addition to maintaining an improvisational practice. She performs with Chicago improvising quartet Mad Myth Science.
She has been commissioned by organizations including the Detroit Composers’ Project, Detroit Fringe theater festival, Threeform, Verdant Vibes, and Carrie Morris Arts Productions, and has performed with artists including Saul Williams, Nicole Mitchell, Robert Ashley, Tyshawn Sorey, Jaribu Shahid, Ed Sarath, Kei Akagi, Alex Harding, Paul de Jong, Wadada Leo Smith, Andrew Bishop, Douglas Ewart, Joo Won Park, Elliott Sharp, Cheick Hamala Diabate, Marion Hayden, Matt Kiroff, and Angel Bat Dawid, along with many other friends and colleagues in Detroit and Chicago. In 2019, she premiered a collaborative multimedia opera Acting On Air featuring choreography, animation, text, electronic music, and an ensemble with all levels of experience. Her 2017 free jazz album Microliths was nominated for Debut Album of 2017 in NPR’s Jazz Critics’ Poll, and she was nominated for Best Classical Composer at the 2020 Detroit Music Awards. Her poetry can be found in Saul Williams’ Chorus: A Literary Mixtape and Matchbox Magazine. She works as a software engineer.
Jakob Heinemann is an Ashkenaz bass player and composer from Madison, Wisconsin. Now living in Chicago, his work is wide-ranging, but consistently centers around both intuitive and analytical investigations into sound and the many layers lying therein. As a composer, Jakob currently works with field recordings and spectral analysis to map the pitch content of natural systems onto instruments with augmented tunings. As a bass player, he plays frequently within Chicago’s improvised and creative music circles, and has several groups considering improvisation within preconceived structures and materials. He also can be found playing with the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble and other Jewish music groups. Outside of creating, Jakob enjoys teaching in several different environments, and maintains an ongoing private lessons studio. Beginning in December 2021, Jakob helps curate the Splice Series along with co-hosts Peter Maunu and Carol Genetti.
Erik Sowa is a drummer/percussionist currently living in Chicago. In recent years, Erik has performed live with singer-songwriter Thomas Comerford, and also with synth-pop artist Pete Cautious. He has self-released recordings and performed live with his improvised duo called Bearl, and he continues to perform live with the Lurker Bias label group Snek Trio. As an enthusiast of home recording, Erik is currently finalizing the release of an instrumentals solo album he has recorded over the past ten years in Ely, Minnesota.
Floriography: Katinka Kleijn and Emma Hospelhorn
Cellist and interdisciplinary artist Katinka Kleijn teams up with flutist and improviser Emma Hospelhorn for a set featuring the working duo’s co-constructions for instruments, homemade synthesizers, and loop pedals.
Since 2019, the duo’s ongoing collaboration has resulted in several compositions that will be included in tonight’s set: Floriography (2020) for cello, flute, notecards, and electronics; Inverted Mountain (2020) for solo flute and looper pedal; Logrus Voice (2020) for solo cello and looper pedal; The Body as Variable Resistor (2021) for modified cellosynth; and Florifroggraphy/ Field Synapse/ Porch Music (3000) for instrumentalists and homemade synthesizers.
Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Dutch-born cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has cultivated an exploratory, interactive creative practice at the fertile intersection of improvisation, composition, and collaboration. Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts (Water On the Bridge, The Body as a Variable Resistor, RESIDUUM). Her collaborations with composer Daniel Dehaan and the Chicago-based performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in the widely publicized Intelligence in the Human-Machine (2014), a duet between Kleijn’s cello and her own brainwaves which Time magazine called “a balancing act for Kleijn’s whole body.” Kleijn presents many of her conceptual projects as co-constructions with the performer(s) or audience, as in her situation-based composition Forward Echo, for 11 improvisers (2019), commissioned by the Instigation Festival, and her silent video project Screenplay in 4 (2021).
Kleijn is a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble. She has performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Hague Philharmonic, and the Chicago Sinfonietta, and presented solo multimedia presentations at the Library of Congress, North Carolina Performing Arts, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. Kleijn’s 2016 world premiere performance of Dai Fujikura’s cello concerto at Lincoln Center was released by SONY Japan. A Drag City recording artist, she has improvised with musicians like Bill MacKay, Ken Vandermark, Lia Kohl, Joe McPhee, Caroline Davis, Mark Feldman, and Du Yun.
Praised by the Chicago Classical Review for her “standout” and “joyful” playing, Emma Hospelhorn is a flutist whose creative practices resist easy categorization. As a member of Ensemble Dal Niente, she has premiered or recorded works by composers including George Lewis, Hilda Paredes, Tania León, Erin Gee, Jeff Parker, Igor Santos, Tomás Gueglio, Roscoe Mitchell, and hundreds more. As one half of The Machine Is Neither…, an electroacoustic collaboration with Ben Sutherland that uses motion capture technology and music to explore the relationships between people and machines, she has co-composed works including Terra Lingua (2019/2020) for dancers in motion-capture suits and live instruments, and Tree of Secrets (2018) for audience and listening lamp. She also records and performs with a number of rock and pop groups, and her theatrical collaborations include stints with the Neo-Futurists, Lookingglass Theater, and Silk Road Rising.
A versatile and magnetic performer, she has performed her solo improvised works at New Music New College, Big Ears Festival, the NC New Music Initiative; and collaboratively at the Palacio de Belles Artes, Museo Nacional del Arte, Omaha Under the Radar, Ravinia, Symphony Center, the Library of Congress, Walt Disney Hall, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and many more.
$15