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Kamala Sankaram

Miranda

Pop-opera meets Reality TV. Miranda is a multi-media chamber opera where the audience becomes detective, judge, and jury for an unsolved murder. An innovative mix of original music inspired by hip-hop, tango, Baroque counterpoint, and Hindustani classical ragas, Miranda is set during the live taping of a hit Court TV show. Miranda explores the way that we spin our own stories about ourselves and others, and the devastation that can result when we discover those stories aren't true.

Photo: Carl Skutsch

>>Listen to the interview on WPS1: Art Radio 

As someone who grew up studying classical piano, hearing Indian music at home, and listening exclusively to Pink Floyd, the boundaries between musical genres have always seemed rather arbitrary. My music is an attempt to synthesize my classical operatic and compositional training with my love of rock and electronica.

It was Andrey Tarkovsky, the great Russian filmmaker, who most succinctly describes the nature of music: the life force of music is materialized on the brink of its own total disappearance. In other words, the life force of music is bound up in its relationship to time. As such, the most powerful experience of music comes from watching it enfold in time, through live performance. For this reason, my current work places an emphasis on creating pieces that must be seen live in order to be fully experienced. This is accomplished through the use of video. The added visual component of the live performance serves to heighten the experience of the music. The music itself synthesizes my classical training with my love of rock through the combination of counterpoint with pop song structures, strings with samples of industrial machines, and notated music with improv.

Squeezebox is a multi-media chamber electronica ensemble, and the brainchild of Kamala Sankaram, a New York composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist.

As a composer, Kamala Sankaram has written music for concert, theater, and film. She is currently bandleader and composer for the multi-media ensemble Squeezebox. Her multi-media song cycle "Noir" was featured as part of the Composer's Collaborative Serial Underground Series. Her most recent song cycle, "Bloodletting" was chosen for the Music with a View series at the Flea Theater and featured as part of Spaceworks at the Tank.  She composed the score for Signe Baumane's award-winning short film "Dentist". She is currently an artist-in-residence with the Flexible Orchestra, commissioned to write a symphony for 12 flutes.  Kamala was featured in the article "More Song, Less Art(ifice): The New Breed of Art Song" in New Music Box magazine. As a singer and multi-instrumentalist, Kamala Sankaram has collaborated with artists as diverse as the Philip Glass Ensemble (Einstein on the Beach), the Wooster Group (La Didone), Dan Zanes and Friends, Phil Kline, and Eve Beglarian, among others. She is featured as a singer on Around the World in a Daze, available from Starkland Records, and as a sitar player on The Sick Generation, from Hymen Records.  Upcoming, she'll reprise her roles as Juno, Anna, and Ascanius with the Wooster Group, and will create the role of Ming Song in Fred Ho's new opera Mr. Mystery: The Return of Sun Ra to Save the Earth!

Rounding out the ensemble is a cast of talented players spanning the rock, classical, and avant-garde music scenes in New York:

Since being trained at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, Kenyon College in Ohio and Edinburgh University in Edinburgh, Scotland, Adam Levine has been a fixture on the downtown Music scene in New York for several years. In addition to Squeezebox, Adam has recently performed with the Waterwell Theater Company in "Marco Millions (Based on Lies)" and with the Singer-Songwriter, Greta Gertler. His resume spans the gamut from Jazz to Rock, Hip-Hop to Opera, Blues to Classical and he is currently working on a project showcasing his original Chamber-Pop compositions.

Joseph Keady graduated in 2000 from with the Aaron Copeland School of Music at Queens College in New York City, where he earned a bachelors degree in music composition and theory.  He has composed numerous chamber ensemble pieces (with a particular focus on brass quintet) and music for several plays, the most recent being 'Les Petites Morts' by Clay McLeod Chapman.  Mr. Keady has also been a sousaphone player and composer for the Hungry March Band since 1999, and in the past year founded another brass band called 'The Praise of Folly'.

Pat Muchmore is a real stand-up guy, a bon vivant, a cellist/ pianist/ trombonist/ guitarist/ composer, and an incurable romantic. His hobbies include skiing, writing sentences with ridiculous amounts of comma-delimited lists, and playing his various instruments in avant-garde shows, rock/hip-hop shows, and numerous recording projects. He is a performer/composer member of NYC's Anti-Social Music and loves every second of it. Pat has also played with Forecast Music, Come Down, World/Inferno Friendship Society, the CUNY Graduate Center Contemporary Ensemble, Dälek, John Guilt, Squeezebox and the Dan Neustadt Group. He likes compound words with slashes in them, and he has studied/composed with Brian Shepard, Carolyn Bremer, David Olan, John Corigliano, and David Del Tredici. Oh yeah, and he has been awarded a Commissioning Music/USA grant from Meet The Composer with trombonist Jen Baker and an Aaron Copland Fund grant to record an album of his work.  For more info, please check out http://www.patmuchmore.com, operators are standing by. (se habla español)

Jessie Nelson is an actress, singer & violinist who plays in orchestras, chamber groups & lots of fun bands in NYC.  She is a Lyricist in the BMI Musical Theater Workshop & also writes personalized songs for kids ages 0-150.  Jessie is thrilled to be a part of Squeezebox!