It is needless to say we all are excited for what will hopefully be a rush of in-person activity for the Fall of 2021. The Jacobs Community Engagement Initiative and The Jacobs Office of Entrepreneurship and Career Development are working together to bring New Morse Code, a highly innovative, prize-winning ensemble, to the IU Bloomington Campus for a distinctive fall residency.
New Morse Code is comprised of two performers – percussionist Michael Compitello and cellist Hannah Collins. They will be joined by two nationally recognized composers, Andy Akiho and Chris Stark, for a two-week campus residency at Indiana University Bloomington to explore the intersections between environmental resilience and music – all COVID permitting. During this residency, the musicians will collaboratively collect sounds from the natural environment in Bloomington and use them as the aural foundation of a new composition. The group will spend two weeks collecting sounds and composing music, and at the end of these two weeks, they will share the new work through a performance for the Indiana University community. At the conclusion of their IU Bloomington residency, the musicians will travel to Salem, Indiana to replicate a shorter version of the same project. This will involve community engaged workshops where Salem residents can assist and observe in sound collection, and a public performance debuting another new musical composition based around Salem’s natural environment.
The New Morse Code project mounts an important conversation about the intersection between the arts and sustainability. Environmental resilience and sustainability continues to rise as a paramount concern for all people, and artists have a unique role in combating climate change and environmental degradation. Artists are one-of-a-kind storytellers, and possess unmatched potential to inspire action and awareness towards environmental initiatives. By modeling their new music around the environment of their audience members, New Morse Code highlights the often forgotten relationship we each have with our immediate natural surroundings. Much like music, the natural environment is a soundtrack that we continually digest. How we reflect and define this relationship with our natural environment ultimately determines its fate and resiliency.
The New Morse Code project offers exciting opportunities for interdisciplinary, cross-campus collaboration. It is the intention of the Jacobs OECD and Community Engagement Initiative to involve as many campus partners as possible. We hope to explore relationships with the Media School to document New Morse Code’s compositional process, Environmental Science and Sustainability faculty, the Grunwald Gallery, Themester, and others to make this project as impactful as possible. The group of visiting musicians will additionally work closely with Jacobs School of Music students in masterclasses and training sessions, sharing their successful insights and expertise with the young students on campus.
New Morse Code is also thrilled to build networks and relationships in the town of Salem. This project will be one of two audio engineering focused projects visiting Salem in the Fall of 2021, the other project being “Dynamic Equilibrium” created by Jacobs faculty Chi Wang and Dominick DiOrio. We are excited for this consistency and to provide continual exposure to the vast capabilities available when music, science, and math are combined. We plan to work with teachers on the ground in Salem to recruit a group of interested Salem students who can observe and experiment closely with the music ensemble as they collect sounds and create compositions. The final Salem performance will be open to the public and aim to unite rural community members around music, technology, and resilience. These events are slated to take place around the end of October and Early November of 2021.
Grand Prize winners of the recent Ariel Avant Impact Performance Competition, New Morse Code (Hannah Collins, cello; Michael Compitello, percussion) is the confluence of two magnetic personalities who have taken up the admirable task of creating a hub for the performance, commissioning, and promotion of new music. Hannah and Michael formed New Morse Code while they were students at Yale after returning to the United States from extended and informative study in Europe. Hannah teaches at the University of Kansas and Michael teaches at Arizona State University. They currently serve as assistant directors of Avaloch Farm Music Institute.
New Morse Code’s 2017 debut album Simplicity Itself described by icareifyoulisten.com as “an ebullient passage through pieces that each showcase the duo’s clarity of artistic vision and their near-perfect synchronicity,” while Q2 Music called the album “a flag of genuineness raised.” Their projects have received support from Chamber Music America and New Music USA. In 2019 they released the title suite of Matthew Barnson’s portrait album, “Vanitas”, on innova recordings and collaborated with Eliza Bagg, Lee Dionne, and andPlay on “and all the days were purple”, Alex Weiser’s Pulitzer Prize-finalist work on Cantaloupe music. In 2020, they released EPs of Thomas Kotcheff’s “then and then and then this” and George Lam’s “The Emigrants”.
Described as “trailblazing” (LA Times) and “an imaginative composer” (NY Times), Andy Akiho is a composer and performer of new music. Akiho has been recognized with many prestigious awards and organizations including the Rome Prize, Lili Boulanger Memorial Prize, Harvard University Fromm Commission, Barlow Endowment, New Music USA, and Chamber Music America. Additionally, his compositions have been featured on PBS’s “News Hour with Jim Lehrer” and by organizations such as Bang on a Can, American Composers Forum, The Intimacy of Creativity in Hong Kong, and the Heidelberg Festival. Akiho is also an active steel pannist and performs his compositions with various ensembles worldwide.
Christopher Stark (b. 1980, St. Ignatius, MT) is a composer of contemporary classical music deeply rooted in the American West. Having spent his formative years in rural western Montana, his music is always seeking to capture the expansive energy of this quintessential American landscape. Stark, whose music The New York Times has called, “fetching and colorful,” has been awarded prizes from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, Chamber Music America, ASCAP, and the Barlow Endowment. Named a 2017 “Rising Star” by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, his music has been performed by such ensembles as Alarm Will Sound, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, BIT20 Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Momenta Quartet, Unheard-of//Ensemble, No Exit New Music Ensemble, and New Morse Code. In 2012, he was a resident composer at Civitella Ranieri, a fifteenth-century castle in Umbria, Italy, and in June of 2016 he was awarded a residency at Copland House. Recent highlights included performances at the 2016 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the 2016 NY Phil Biennial. In 2018, he was in residence in Bergen, Norway where he worked with musicians from the Bergen Philharmonic, and in 2020, he was in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy as the Aaron Copland Fellow in Music. His score for the feature-length film, “Novitiate,” premiered at Sundance in January of 2017 and was theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics. His debut CD, Seasonal Music, was released in 2019 on Bridge Records.
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