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[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/51620619[/vimeo] MANUAL CINEMA is a collaboration between puppeteers/graphic artists Julia Miller, Drew Dir and Sarah Fornace, with musician/composers Kyle Vegter and Ben Kauffman. Our process combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic motifs, and live sound manipulation to create immersive theatrical stories. Our tools are paper, acetate, ink, light, air pressure, and ...

[vimeo]20252277[/vimeo] Pierrot lunaire is a defining work for eighth blackbird. The ensemble’s instrumentation derives from this seminal work, the premiere of which is often regarded as the beginning of the new music milieu we still operate within. Our dear friend Lucy Shelton sent around some wonderful ideas for how to celebrate the centennial, reposted below

If the Curtis I attended not so long ago was 1.x, where the x changed when the guard desk moved from the front door to the front of the fireplace (!), and again when the handrail on the front steps was suddenly removed (a veritable outrage!), the Curtis I saw last week has resoundingly made the leap

I wrote the following blog entry for the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center, in advance of their Philip Glass Festival, running until next week. Picture me as a tall, gawky 15-year-old, on family vacation. There is a patch of open road near Barcaldine, in the famous “red center” of Australia. A truck (a “ute”) bumps

I don’t know what we’ve done to anger the gods, but we are now 2 for 2 in extreme weather at Millennium Park. A couple months ago we played our show on the hottest day in Chicago since 2007, and yesterday it had to have been one of the wettest. It certainly was the wettest

Being a lover of the performing arts is to enter a relationship, not only with the creators and performers whose passions and talents you bear witness to, but with the entire community in which you move, view, listen and hold your breath.  Over time you see the rise and fall of ensembles, the emergence of

Thanks to all who ignored the warnings to stay inside and came out to our Millennium Park concert on Thursday! Not the smartest move, but we love you for it.  It was literally the hottest day in Chicago since 2006 – great day for an outdoor concert. On top of that, our intrepid audience got

So when I went to return Andrew’s chinrests, he (and Chris) told me that they were quite riled up by my last post on pain and injury. I offered him to do a guest post about his disagreements, but he said he preferred to have a conversation. He discusses his own injury – to his tailbone, of all places – and methods for preventing injury. I think we did a good job not getting too distracted by his cat, Odin, who sat between us grooming his own, er, tailbone the entire time.

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We musicians accept that there’s a certain amount of discomfort involved in playing our instruments. Whether it’s blisters for cellists doing a lot of pizzicato, repetitive motion stress for pianists, wrist problems for flutists, shoulder and neck pain for violinists, the list goes on and on.

What we don’t quite accept is that this leads to a fair amount of injury. There’s a great deal of avoidance of the topic, as if it might be cancer or mental illness. In conservatory, getting injured is viewed as a consequence of improper technique. In the professional world, it is seen as a career-killer. This stigma on playing-related injuries is apparent in the strange and alternative ways we often deal with them. Where an ...

(Pictured: Tim Munro, composer Andy Akiho, and Michael Maccaferri, during rehearsals for last night’s performance)

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, hosted the final round of eighth blackbird’s first composition competition.

The performance was the culmination of a year-long process. An initial pool of 504 applicants was winnowed to three finalists, who were each given a cash prize and invited to write a work for eighth blackbird. These three new works were workshopped in an intense, two-day period earlier this week. Last night saw the public premiere of the three pieces, in front of a crowd that included representatives of the competition’s generous partners, MakeMusic and the American Composers Forum.

The ...