RESONANCE & RESEMBLANCE: A SOUNDWALK AND LISTENING MEDITATION BY SUZANNE THORPE

Annual Performance - September 30, 2017

In 2017, composer Suzanne Thorpe presented Resonance & Resemblance, a sonic performance and meditation created for Manitoga and supported in part by grants from the MAP Fund and New Music USA. The performance featured recorders, electronics, trees, insects, birds, animals, water, wind, granite and the audience, Resonance & Resemblance began with a sound walk, followed by a listening meditation around the Quarry Pool, where four recorder players on boats weaved their sound into the soundscape, and activated its resonant features. Thorpe says, “In a time when difference is often used to instigate division from each other and our environment, it’s important to recognize that our boundaries are more porous than we think. Through sound and active listening, Resonance & Resemblance creates space to explore our interconnectedness and entanglement with each other, and our surroundings.” Sound has always been integral to Manitoga. Russel Wright designed the Waterfall to produce different sounds on either side, and from above and below. Speakers placed in the landscape once played a variety of recordings from opera to bird songs. Wright conceived "Days of Dance" and "Music in Nature" programs to celebrate creativity within Manitoga's landscape. In 2016, Suzanne Thorpe spent four days on-site to inform her work - hiking the trails, listening to the forest, and conducting electronic and acoustic sound experiments.

Performers: Katie Down, Madison Greenstone, Anne Guthrie, Adam Tinkle
Soundwalk Leaders: Lisa B. Kelley, Stephanie Loveless, Michelle Nagai

“Much of my attention these days is focused on musical expressions of human positioning in relationship to our environment. Questions arise, such as: do we situate ourselves as dominant, separate or singular in relationship to nature? Or do we locate ourselves as part of a milieu, entangled and flowing?”
– Suzanne Thorpe in Experimental Music Yearbook

THORPE’S PROCESS

Resonance and Resemblance in The Experimental Music Yearbook by Suzanne Thorpe

In Granite’s Echo in VORKURS by Suzanne Thorpe

PRESS
Suzanne Thorpe's Resonance & Resemblance At Manitoga interview by Sarah LaDuke (WAMC, September 2017)

The Saturday Afternoon Program Interview with Suzanne Thorpe by Tom Roe (WGCX / Wave Farm, September 2017)

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS

Katie Down: Katie Down is a multi-instrumentalist, creative arts therapist, deep listener, and sound meditation facilitator and teacher. She has created sound scores for theater and film for the past 15 years and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her composition and sound design. Katie is a member of the improvisational glass instrument group, NewBorn Trio and the ukulele

Madison Greenstone: Madison Greenstone is a contra/bass/clarinetist, improviser, and writer currently based in San Diego, California. As a practiced collaborator and soloist, she explores the embodied, expressive, and poetic potentials of clarinets+electronics, modified/ mechanized instruments, improvisation, contemporary music and performs in such a capacity in locations across the United States and Europe. 

Anne Guthrie: Anne Guthrie is an acoustician, composer, and French horn player based in Brooklyn, NY.  Her music combines processed field recordings and instrumental improvisation while exploiting architectural and psycho-acoustic phenomena to distort and obscure sonic identities. 

Adam Tinkle: Adam Tinkle is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar interested in immersion, transformation and the audio-visionary. Trained in music, he works in sound, intermedia, performance, and participatory/collaborative modalities, and his practice is grounded in reverence for the moment. He teaches at Skidmore College, where he has guided the development of its summer Storytellers’ Institute since its inception in 2015.

ABOUT SUZANNE THORPE

Suzanne Thorpe composes site-oriented sound works that use a variety of media and technology, and performs on the electroacoustic flute, expanded with digital and analog tools. She is also a Deep Listening instructor, having studied with American Composer and Deep Listening Founder Pauline Oliveros. Thorpe draws upon traditions of acoustic ecology, soundscape, land art, and improvisation, as well as research in phenomenology, ecological cognition and environmental ethics for her work. With sound, she works in conjunction with environments and their behaviors to yield compositions and performances that evolve with their surroundings. 

Thorpe’s work has been shown and performed internationally at venues such as The New Museum, Exit Art, and Issue Project Room in New York, and festivals such as All Tomorrow’s Parties in Europe. As an improviser, she has performed with a wide array of artists, from Pauline Oliveros to J Mascis. Her discography features over 20 recordings on labels such as Sony, V2, Beggars Banquet, Geffen, Specific Recordings, and Tape Drift. She was a founding member of critically acclaimed Mercury Rev, with whom she performed, recorded and toured from 1989 - 2001, earning a gold record for 1998's Deserter's Songs. 

Thorpe has received residencies and fellowships from Harvestworks Digital Media Foundation, Meet the Composer, New Music USA and the MAP Foundation. Having earned her MFA at Mills College, she is currently a PhD candidate in Music/Integrative Studies at University of California San Diego, and Co-Director of TECHNE, an organization that introduces young female-identified women to technology-focused art making, improvisation, and contemplative practices.

ABOUT THE SOUNDWALK LEADERS

Lisa B. Kelley: Lisa Barnard Kelley is a vocalist, performance artist, actor, priestess of Maat and student of Tao.  She received her BA in Performance Studies in 1999 at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and has been studying music and performance independently in the Hudson Valley for the last ten years, collaborating with local musicians, actors, puppeteers and visual artists. 

Stephanie Loveless: Stephanie Loveless is a Montréal-born artist who works with sound, video, film and voice. Loveless’ sound, video and performance work has been presented widely in festivals, galleries, museums and artist-run centers in North America, South America, Europe and the Middle East. 

Michelle Nagai: Composer Michelle Nagai creates site-specific performances, compositions, installations, radio broadcasts, dances and other interactions that address the human state in relationship to its setting. Her work has been presented throughout the US, Canada and Europe. She is a founding member of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology and holds a teaching certificate from the Deep Listening Institute.