| Saturday Feb 28, 2015 8:00 PM - Saturday Feb 28, 2015 10:00 PM | $15.00 - $20.00 |
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Event
The Convergents - the string trio unlike any other string trio - at SGVCC
The Band
The CONVERGENTS are a trio of string musicians that specialize in the art of creating music spontaneously.
Greg Barnett (Cirque de Soliel), Julie Egger (Red Hot Chachkas) and Michele McCulloch (Philharmia Baroque) bring together their widely diverse musical experience, academic training, life, spirit, and love to explore the wide frontier of free improvisation.
Their music is by turns introspective, soaring, serene, playful, or intense, flowing seamlessly between tonality and raw textural sound. The Convergents" aim is to touch the inner thoughts of the listener, inviting them to travel along as they explore both the unknown and the familiar. All their compositions are in the moment, and impossible to clone.
Bios:
Greg Barnett (guitar) has given thousands of performances, in styles ranging from classical to jazz to folk to rock to new age. He has performed as a soloist and in all sizes of groups in concerts, dances, nightclubs, churches, yoga classes, kirtans, festivals, and theatrical productions. Some highlights include five seasons with the California Shakespeare Festival, shows at Davies Symphony Hall and Herbst Theater, and two years touring North America and Europe with Cirque du Soleil's Dralion. He received his Master of Music degree in Classical Guitar Performance from Florida State University in 1988 and did postgraduate studies in classical guitar and early music performance at the University of North Texas. Greg started improvising on the piano at the age of three, endlessly fascinated with the patterns available on the keyboard. He spent much of the ensuing 50 years improvising on the piano, guitar, theorbo, viola da gamba, bass, drums, and voice. He has contributed to many original music projects, including Plush Monkey, an art rock/world music project, Human Z, a San Francisco rap group, Thompson Barnett, an art pop recording project, and his own original recordings, including the jammy album, Monkeytown. He is thrilled to be the guitarist for The Convergents, a group of bold, accomplished, and subtle improvisors. Greg lives in Marin with his wife, Jeannie.
Julie Egger (violin) has played the violin since the age of seven. As a teenager, she performed with the Long Island Youth Orchestra, which traveled all over the world, playing music. She received a Bachelor of Music in Education from the Crane School of Music, where she studied with the Carnegie String Quartet and Ruth Iogha. Julie lived for nine years in Boston, where she performed classical, jazz, and liturgical music. She has performed with artists such as Stuart Brotman (of Brave Old World) in Finif and Joshua Horowitz of Veretski Pass. She currently performs with the Red Hot Chachkas and The Convergents. She performs and records freelance in the Bay Area as well. She teaches Klezmer music as well as classical and jazz to students of all ages and conducts workshops in Klezmer music. She also currently teaches at Marin School of the Arts. She is co-founder of KlezCalifornia, and received a 2003 individual Artist Grant and a 2007 Community Grant from Marin Arts Council to create a "Yiddish Folk Festival" in West Marin. She lives in West Marin with her husband and two teenage daughters.
Michele McCulloch (cello) began a life-long fascination with music at age four, upon hearing Beethoven and Burl Ives playing simultaneously. After endless years of being the pianist for school musicals, she threw herself into hot water by studying Composition at Sonoma State University, At SSU, she met two extraordinary teachers who inspired her in wildly divergent ways. Anne Crowden, founder of the Crowden School in Berkeley, brought passion, energy, hilarity, and class into every teaching moment. Anne's chamber music instruction was incomparable. I Wayan Suweca, founder of the gamelan orchestra Sekar Jaya, a Balinese drummer with great tenacity and devotion to his art, was also greatly influential. His teaching opened doors to new worlds of sound, and provided fuel for compositions. Michele had not counted on falling madly in love with the cello and the gamelan, but these things do happen. While continuing composition studies with David Sheinfeld (composer and violinist in the San Francisco Symphony), she discovered a group of eccentric characters playing Baroque music on original instruments, something her soul had longed for. She played under Laurette Goldberg in numerous baroque ensembles and Nicolas McGegan with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Since then she has played with various chamber groups, some locally and some abroad, focusing on early music, music from other cultures, or more recently, completely improvised music with The Convergents. She can be seen occasionally sitting in on Irish music pub sessions. Michele currently lives on a small farm in Corte Madera with her husband Michael, where they both play as much music as the neighbors will tolerate. Their son, Gabriel, who studies theater in New Orleans, joins them when he can, bringing the sounds of that lavishly musical hotspot back to the farm via his excellent guitar playing.
What is Improvisation?
Every style of music seems to include it on some level. The generally accepted definition is to play spontaneously, without a specific script or score. However, most improvisation requires guidelines for the performer, some structure which the players can adhere to and not get lost from each other. Often this is a key, like G major or C minor, and almost always a rhythm aligns players with each other. Some music allows lots of room for improvisation, other music has evolved to include very little.
What we are interested in as a group is exploring improvisation without conventional structures, or at least with the barest minimum of such structures. What we often use as scaffolding are visual images, patterns that occur in nature or patterns that are grow out of human behavior.
When we refer to a free improv, however, this has a special significance. In a free improv, we are starting from Nothing. There are no keys, no prearranged structure, no planned ideas, no leaders nor followers. We only listen and respond to each other. We don't know how these pieces will sound, any more than you do.. This is a mysterious process. Our hope is that you feel some of that mystery, too.
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LocationSan Geronimo Valley Community Center (View)
6350 Sir Francis Drake Blvd.
San Geronimo, CA 94963
United States
Categories
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
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