Biographies

Phil Kline | Theo Bleckmann | David Cossin | Wilbur Pauley | 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

From vast boombox symphonies to chamber music and song cycles, Phil Kline's work has been hailed for its originality, beauty, subversive subtext, and wry humor.

He fields a wide variety of commissions. Recent and upcoming premieres include: * JOHN THE REVELATOR, an evening-length choral mass for the early music vocal group Lionheart, to premiere November 2006 at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden in New York City. * CHINOOK, an outdoor boombox spectacle for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. * EVERYWHERE, an evening-length dance score for the Wally Cardona Quartet, which premiered at Portland's TBA Festival and BAM's Next Wave Festival. * SYMPHONY for 21 iPods installed at ArtMetro for the Ingenuity Festival in Cleveland. * LOCUS SOLUS, a surrealist music-theater work featuring vocalist Theo Bleckmann, violinist Todd Reynolds, and the Talujon Percussion Ensemble at the Ryerss Mansion Museum in Philadelphia. * PARTITA for string orchestra. Commissioned by EOS, premiered by Ethel and Red{an orchestra} in Cleveland. * THE LAST BUFFALO for Real Quiet (cello, piano, percussion) at the Muzik3 Festival in La Jolla, CA. * AROUND THE WORLD IN A DAZE, a 5.01 surround-sound DVD commissioned by the Starkland label.

In addition to alternative spaces, Kline's compositions have been performed at Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Miller Theatre, the Whitney Museum, MASS MoCA, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Philadelphia's Kimmel Center, and London's Barbican Centre. ZIPPO SONGS, a song cycle based on poems that American GIs inscribed on their cigarette lighters in Vietnam, was one of the most-talked-about CDs of 2004 (Cantaloupe Music). Besides news coverage by CNN, NPR, The London Guardian, and many others, the CD was named "Best of the Year" by The New York Times, Newsday, Time Out, and Gramophone. The New Yorker called ZIPPO SONGS "one of the most brutally frank song cycles ever penned." The Philadelphia Inquirer described it as "Some of the most disturbing and compelling songs I've heard in ages." The recording of ZIPPO SONGS also featured Three Rumsfeld Songs, with texts taken verbatim from Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon briefings (eliciting comment from the Defense Secretary himself). Kline's signature boombox composition UNSILENT NIGHT debuted on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village in 1992 and is now a cult holiday tradition. It has also spread to cities like Atlanta, Cleveland, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Tallahassee, Tucson, as well as Vancouver, Berlin, Middlesborough (UK), Sydney, and the Yukon. A public parade of hundreds of boomboxes carried through city streets during the Christmas season, UNSILENT NIGHT builds a peaceful multi-dimensional sound environment out of other-worldly voices and bells. Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times: "It immerses a listener in suspended wonderment, as if time itself had paused within a string of jingling sleigh bells." Bang on a Can released the CD of UNSILENT NIGHT on its Cantaloupe label in 2001. The famed new music collective has championed and toured Kline's music ever since his breakthrough piece BACHMAN'S WARBLER (for tape loops and 12 harmonicas) premiered at the 1992 Bang on a Can Marathon. In 1997 Kline wrote his sextet EXQUISITE CORPSES for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who featured it on the debut Cantaloupe CD Renegade Heaven. His string quartet THE BLUE ROOM was also featured on Ethel's self-titled Cantaloupe CD. Bang on a Can plans to release its third all-Kline disc in 2007.

Phil Kline was raised in Akron, Ohio. He graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English Literature before embarking upon a musical career. A figure in the downtown New York rock scene in the 1980s, he founded the band the Del-Byzanteens with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and painter James Nares, collaborated with photographer Nan Goldin on the soundtrack to her Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and toured the world as a veteran of Glenn Branca's legendary guitar ensemble. He also produced and curated unique events such as the acclaimed "Alternative Schubertiade." Kline's achievement has been recognized with grants and awards from the American Composers Forum, Mary Flagler Cary Trust, Meet The Composer, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the Virgil Thomson Foundation. In 2004 he was the only classical composer nominated for the ShortList Music Prize, which honors the most creative records of the year.

THEO BLECKMANN, vocalist - Zippo Songs

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.

WILBUR PAULEY, vocalist - Fear and Loathing

In three decades as a professional entertainer, Wilbur Pauley has accumulated credits in a variety of musical and theatrical disciplines. His work in classical music extends from medieval liturgical dramas to contemporary operatic premieres, including roles in The Ghosts of Versailles at The Met, McTeague and Amistad at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Atlas and Where's Dick? at Houston Grand Opera, Haroun and the Sea of Stories at NYCity Opera, and Red Rubber at the Antwerp Festival.

He has appeared internationally at Teatro Nacional in Lisbon, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Triennale in Cologne, and other European festivals in Edinburgh, Spoleto, Ravenna, Ilmajoki and Salzburg. Some of his numerous North American engagements have included Santa Fe Opera, San Francisco Symphony, Glimmerglass Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra, Edmonton Opera, St.Paul Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, Brooklyn Philharmonic and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Locally, in addition to frequent appearances at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Mr. Pauley has appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Opera Theater, and the Chicago Cultural Center, and in the 1980s he often sang with Chicago's first period-instrument orchestra, The City Musick.

Outside the classical music world, Wilbur Pauley has appeared twice on Broadway: in the Peter Hall production of The Merchant of Venice (with Dustin Hoffman), and in the musical Band In Berlin. His voice can be heard on the following film soundtracks: Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Dead Man Walking, Prince Of Egypt, and Home On The Range.

In 1992 Wilbur Pauley founded the male vocal ensemble Hudson Shad. He has arranged almost 300 pieces for Hudson Shad, including an entire Kurt Weill program, two programs devoted to the repertoire of the Comedian Harmonists, Schubert songs incorporating the Reger orchestrations, a Christmas program featuring Spike Jones' vocal version of Nutcracker, a cowboy/country/western program, and the most recent "Magic Moments" highlighting crooner mega-hits from Sinatra, Crosby, Jolson and thers. He has appeared with Hudson Shad in over 100 worldwide performances of Weill's Seven Deadly Sins and has twice recorded the work, once with Radio Symphony Orchester Wien and Marianne Faithfull, and once with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur. His arrangements have also been recorded by the late cabaret artist Nancy LaMott and by the rock group They Might Be Giants. Upcoming on Wilbur Pauley's calendar are: the American premier of Thomas Ades The Tempest at Santa Fe Opera, Salome and Romeo and Juliette at Lyric Opera of Chicago, the American premier of Phillip Glass' Waiting for the Barbarians at Austin Lyric Opera, and the 2007 release of the Disney feature film Enchanted (Mr.Pauley will provide the voice for The Troll).

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.