Talking Gong featuring Claire Chase, Susie Ibarra, and Alex Peh

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Talking Gong, featuring Claire Chase, Alex Peh and Susie Ibarra, perform solos, duet and trio compositions and conducted improvisations by Ibarra from their recently released album, Talking Gong on New Focus Recordings.

Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. She creates immersive experiences through sound to invite people to connect to their natural and built environments. Susie is a 2020 National Geographic Explorer Storyteller, a 2019 Doris Duke United States Artist Fellow in Music, Senior TED Fellow and 2019 Asian Cultural Council Research Fellow in working to preservation and support Indigenous music and culture, Musika Katatubo, in the Philippines, and sound recording on glaciers and water rhythms in the Himalayas. Recent commissions include Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change installations with glaciologist and geographer Michele Koppes for Fine Acts Foundation and TED Countdown on Climate Change Oct 2020, Rhythm Cycles solo drumset commissioned by Bagri Foundation and released on OTOROKU Digital UK Nov 2020; Digital Sanctuaries Harvard an urban soundwalk for iOS and iPAD commissioned and created with Claire Chase’s Freshman Seminar: Community Building and Social Justice Through Music Dec 2020; Pulsation for Kronos String Quartet’s 50 for the Future Feb 2020, and a participatory performance game piece Fragility Etudes for her band DreamTime Ensemble for Asia Society Triennial 2021. From 2012 to 2020, Susie was a faculty member at Bennington College where she taught percussion, performance, improvisation, and art intervention.

Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the most important flutist of our time,” is a soloist, collaborative artist, curator, educator and advocate for new and experimental music. Chase founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She teaches at Harvard University and is a Creative Associate at The Juilliard School.

Alex Peh is a contemporary pianist and teacher whose work explores the intersection of classical, contemporary and world piano traditions. He collaborated with Burmese master percussionist Kyaw Kyaw Naing to create the first Burmese Hsaing Waing ensemble in America that features the piano in traditional Burmese Sandaya style. This project received major funding from New Music USA, Asian Cultural Council and Arts Mid-Hudson. As a 2019 Asian Cultural Council fellow, he travelled to Yangon Myanmar to study Burmese piano style with Dr. U Yee Nwe and taught at the Gitameit Music Institute. Alex has performed widely nationally and internationally, sharing special partnerships with artists Susie Ibarra, Claire Chase, Kyaw Kyaw Naing, and Phyllis Chen. Alex has attended the Banff, Aspen and Tanglewood music festivals where he worked with Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Paul Lewis Emanuel Ax, and Peter Serkin. He has studied with major artists such as Arnaldo Cohen, Menahem Pressler, Sylvia Wang, Evelyne Brancart, and Kyaw Kyaw Naing. He is an associate professor of piano at SUNY New Paltz.

More info at Susie Ibarra's website.

Photo credit: Tony Cenicola