Biographies

Phil Kline | Theo Bleckmann | David Cossin | Todd Reynolds

PHIL KLINE, composer, guitarist

"Kline has graduated from 'experimental' to 'original'-he's one of America's most important compositional voices." - David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 13, 2006

PHIL KLINE is a unique artist whose work employs music in many mediums and contexts, ranging from experimental electronics, performance art and sound installations to songs, choral, theater and chamber music.

Raised in Akron, Ohio, he came to New York to study English Literature and Music History at Columbia College.  After graduating, he became part of the vital downtown New York arts scene: he founded the rock band The Del-Byzanteens with Jim Jarmusch and James Nares, collaborated with Nan Goldin on the ever-evolving soundtrack to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and for many years played guitar in the notorious Glenn Branca Ensemble.

His earliest compositions grew out of his work as a solo performance artist and often used boombox tape players as a medium.  Bachmans's Warbler for harmonicas and 12 tape loops was performed at the 1992 Bang on a Can Marathon, and the walking sound sculpture Unsilent Night debuted in Greenwich Village later that year. Unsilent Night is now performed annually in cities around the world.

The widely acclaimed Zippo Songs, a quasi-theatrical song cycle based on poems Vietnam vets inscribed on their Zippo lighters, had its first run at HERE in NYC in 2003.  Locus Solus, a suite of songs and chamber works based on the proto-surrealist novel of Raymond Roussel, was first presented at the bizarre Ryerss Mansion Museum in Philadelphia in 2006.

Among his chamber works, Exquisite Corpses was commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars and premiered by them in 1997; The Blue Room and Other Stories was premiered by the string quartet Ethel at the Kitchen in 2002; and The Last Buffalo was commissioned by the trio Real Quiet and premiered at the Music3 Festival in San Diego in 2004.

Recent works include the full-length choral Mass John the Revelator, written for the vocal group Lionheart, commissioned by WNYC and premiered at the World Financial Center Winter Garden in 2006; and scores for two evening-length dances by Wally Cardona: Everywhere and Site.  The large sound installation World on a String opened the season at the Krannert Center in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in September 2007.  The 2009 season will see the world premieres of SPACE for String Quartet, written for Ethel as part of the Alice Tully Hall reopening  festivities, The Long Winter, a sonata commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill, and Really Real, a collaboration with choreographer Wally Cardona, featuring the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.

Kline’s music has been heard in every imaginable type of venue, from the streets of Greenwich Village, CBGBs and the Knitting Factory, to the Kitchen and BAM, Alice Tully Hall, London’s Barbican Centre and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Major awards include grants from the Rockefeller New York State Music Fund, Meet the Composer, NYSCA, American Composers Forum and the Mary Flagler Cary Trust. Recordings of Unsilent Night, Exquisite Corpses, The Blue Room and Other Stories, Zippo Songs are available on the Cantaloupe label, with John the Revelator due in 2009.

 

THEO BLECKMANN, vocalist

Genre -bending, -skipping and -skirting, vocalist/composer Theo Bleckmann has been a steady force in the New York downtown music scene for over a decade. Recognized for his concert- and vocal/visual-work, Bleckmann has performed worldwide on some of the great stages including Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, the Sydney Opera House, L.A.'s Disney Hall, and the new library of Alexandria, Egypt. The New Yorker called him a "local cult favorite", the New York Times "excellent" and according to OUT Magazine Bleckmann is "a singer who has only recently fallen to earth. " His music and performances are at once tender and deeply grounded, merging the lyrical with the angular, the ethereal with the real never loosing touch with the audience.

Bleckmann's unusual vocal capabilities have inspired some of today's great composers such as Mark Dresser, John Hollenbeck, Phil Kline, Ben Monder, Meredith Monk, Kirk Nurock, Bob Ostertag, and Bang on a Can's David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, to create pieces especially for and with him. He also lent his voice to Bobby McFerrin's upcoming recording. Bleckmann has a long-standing track record of working closely with composer and performance artist Meredith Monk and her Vocal Ensemble since 1994 ["mercy' -ECM records].

Furthermore he has performed with such artists as Laurie Anderson, Anthony Braxton, Steve Coleman, Mark Dresser, Dave Douglas, Philip Glass, John Hollenbeck, Anthony Jackson, Sheila Jordan, Ikue Mori, Ben Monder, Michael Tilson Thomas, and the Bang On A Can All-stars and was a guest vocalist with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Estonian Radio Choir, Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Mark Morris Dance Group and contributed his unique vocal capabilities to the soundtrack to Spielberg's "Men in Black". Bleckmann's recent, ambient, solo vocal CD "anteroom" has been released on Traumton Recordings to rave reviews. His solo performance (a tribute to Meredith Monk) voted him into the "Culural Elite of 2005" by New York Magazine.

His newest recording "Las Vegas Rhapsody" for Winter&Winter, with Fumio Yasuda on piano and the Kammerorchester Basel, has just been released and he is currently working with Winter&Winter on a collection of German songs from the Weimar and post WWII eara. www.TheoBleckmann.com

DAVID COSSIN, percussionist

David Cossin (percussion) is a specialist in new and experimental music. Cossin has managed to stretch the boundaries of percussion performance by incorporating new media across a broad spectrum of musical and artistic forms.

David Cossin has recorded and performed internationally with composers and ensembles including Bang on a Can All-Stars, Steve Reich and Musicians, Philip Glass, Yo-yo Ma, Meredith Monk, Tan Dun, Cecil Taylor, Don Byron, Talujon Percussion Quartet, Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) and Bo Didley.. Numerous theater projects include collaborations with Blue Man Group, Mabou Mines, and the director, Peter Sellars. David was featured as the percussion soloist in Tan Dun's Grammy and Oscar winning score to Ang Lee's film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

David has performed as a soloist with orchestras through out the world including, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Radio France, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Sao Paulo State Symphony, Sydney Symphony, Gothenburg Symphony, Hong Kong Symphony, and the Singapore Symphony.

Through composition, inventing new instruments, and music production David has ventured into other art forms creating sonic installations that have been presented in the US, Germany, and Italy. This summer, he was invited to be the curator for the Sound Res Festival in southern Italy.

TODD REYNOLDS, violinist

Todd Reynolds (violinist) is a longtime member of Bang On A Can, Steve Reich and Musicians and Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project . His commitment to genre-bending and technology-driven innovation in music has produced innumerable collaborations with artists that regularly cross musical and disciplinary boundaries, regularly placing him in venues from clubs to concert halls around the world.

A forerunner in the expansion of the violin beyond its classical and 'wood-bound' tradition, Reynolds electrifies in concert, weaves together composed and improvised segments, and makes use of computer technology and digital loops to sculpt his sounds in real time, seamlessly integrating minimalist, pop, Jazz, Indian, African, Celtic and indigenous folk musics into his own sonic blend. As a cross-genre improviser and collaborator, he has appeared and/or recorded with such artists as Anthony Braxton, Uri Caine, John Cale, Steve Coleman, Joe Jackson, Dave Liebman, Yo-Yo Ma, Graham Nash, Greg Osby, Steve Reich, Marcus Roberts and Todd Rundgren, and has commissioned and premiered countless numbers of new works by America's most compelling composers, including John King, Phil Kline, Michael Gordon, Neil Rolnick, Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Evan Ziporyn and Randall Wolff. His interdisciplinary work includes ongoing collaborations with SoundPainter Walter Thompson as well as media artists Bill Morrison and Luke DuBois and sound artist Jody Elff.

Reynolds is a founder of the band known as Ethel, a critically acclaimed amplified string quartet (represented by ICM Artists), with whom he wrote and toured internationally. He has also produced Still Life With Microphone, an ongoing theater piece which incorporates his own written and improvised music, compositions written for him, and elements of video and theatrical arts. Nuove Uova [new eggs], new works for violin and electricity, another Todd Reynolds production is a 'new-music cabaret' of sorts, having as its home Joe's Pub in Manhattan. He is the recipient of ASCAP awards, an American Composers Forum Grant for Still Life with Mic and a 2003 Meet-the-Composer Commissioning Music/USA award.