Susan Alcorn/Simone Baron/Toshi Makihara trio & Senso di Voce

Susan Alcorn, Simone Baron & Toshi Makihara:

One of the world’s premiere exponents of her instrument, Susan Alcorn has taken the pedal steel guitar far beyond its traditional role in country music. Having first paid her dues in Texas country & western bands, she began to expand the vocabulary of her instrument through her study of 20th century classical music, visionary jazz, and world musics.

Though known as for her solo work, she has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Chris Cutler, the London Improvisors Orchestra, the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra, Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark, Nate Wooley, Ingrid Laubrock and Leila Bourdreuil, Evan Parker, Michael Formanek, Zane Campbell, and Mary Halvorson among others.

In 2016, she was voted "Best Other Instrument" by the International Critics Poll. In 2017 she received the Baker Artist Award, and in 2018, along with saxophonist Joe McPhee, she was the recipient of the Instant Award in Improvised Music.

The UK Guardian writes, “As an improvisor and composer, Alcorn has proven to be visionary. Her pieces reveal the complexity of her instrument and her musical experience while never straying from a very direct, intense, and personal musical expression.”

Simone Baron is a polyglot pianist, accordionist, improviser and composer whose work “ego-less, genre agnostic and without expectations” (JazzTimes) engages curiously and charismatically with a broad spectrum of idioms. Educated at Oberlin and Tel Aviv University and joyfully de-educated at festivals and performances across Europe and the Americas, Simone has won grants, fellowships and residencies from Chamber Music America, South Arts, Maryland State Arts Council, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Hambidge Center, Sacatar Foundation, iPark, Strathmore Foundation, ArtOMI, UMD, Avaloch Farm, the Banff Centre, and Spectrum Toronto. In 2016 Simone founded Arco Belo, a diasporic chamber music ensemble, and has shared the stage with luminaries such as Susan Alcorn, Tyshawn Sorey, Hermeto Pascoal, and the Conserere ensemble (Milan). Simone is a Victoria Artist and plays a Poeta XB Accordion, and is a founding member of the Boulanger Initiative.

Toshi Makihara’s performance utilizes traditional percussion with a variety of discovered sound media, everyday objects and toys. Through a rigorous, systematic, and practiced process of experimentation, Makihara seeks out sounds that have never been heard before, experimenting with touch, force, and speed, and always remaining aware of sound’s relationship to the body. Makihara studied drums and percussion with Sabu Toyozumi, a renouned improvising percussionist in Tokyo. He has also studied butoh with dance master Kazuo Ohno and others.

Senso di Voce:

Senso di Voce is: Megan Kyle on oboe and English Horn & Esin Gunduz on voice, tremolo harmonica, bass harmonica, harmonium, and composition. The duo focuses on the embodied experience of varying acoustical phenomena. Implementing the unique acoustic properties of their instruments and of the performance space, they create otherworldly performances that reveal the interconnected timbral threads among new music and early music from diverse cultural traditions. This, combined with improvisation and movement, brings audiences into an immersive experience that transcends expectations.

They have created multiple performances for Silo City, a collection of repurposed grain elevators in Buffalo, NY. In 2022, they curated a performance and talk in dialogue with a Renaissance print exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery (Rochester). They were commissioned to design and implement a six-channel surround installation for Play/Ground art festival (Buffalo) in 2021, which they later redesigned for Frontispace Gallery (Rochester) in 2022. Tierceron, an album of improvisations with collaborator Henry Birdsey, was released on Other Minds Records (San Francisco) in 2023. In August 2021, Senso di Voce was awarded a Classical Commissioning Grant from Chamber Music America to commission a new piece by Esin Gunduz inspired by the philosophical writings of the Sufi mystic Ibn ‘Arabî. The work was completed in summer 2023 and will be premiered in 2024.

venue is wheelchair accessible