Chicago-based composer, clarinetist, and interdisciplinary artist Alejandro T. Acierto showcases new improvisations off his newly released EP of works for contrabass clarinet as well as other works for clarinets and electronics. His works for contrabass clarinet, developed over a period of several months in Chicago, demonstrate the limits of the body in relationship to the instrument. Creating polyphonic textures and layers that feature shocking collisions between breath, instrument, and body, these works expand the performer into multiple levels of sonic abstraction. In his other works for clarinets and electronics, he utilizes field recordings, memories, and other recorded sounds to build and process complex sonic textures that further push the body’s capabilities in relation to the digital soundscape.
Alejandro T. Acierto is a clarinetist, composer, and multimedia artist whose innovative work in contemporary music, performance art, and art installation has led Time-Out New York to call him a “maverick” and was recently hailed as “magnificent” by the Chicago Classical Review. He employs a multi-media aesthetic integrating music, sound, performance, and installation that explores notions of fluid identities and the slippages of cultural definitions. His musical and performative works have been performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, thingNY, Loadbang in New York, and Vox Humana in Montreal. He has exhibited installations at the Arts in Bushwick SITEFEST in Brooklyn and as part of the New Voices In Live Performance show at the Center for Performance Research. He had his first solo exhibition at Untitled Gallery at Marwen in Chicago and his work stolen synthesis no. 1 has also been distributed by Trifecta Publishing for their premiere art box edition. Acierto has attended residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Banff Centre in Canada, and High Concept Laboratories in Chicago. An avid performer of contemporary classical music, he is also a founding member of Ensemble Dal Niente with whom he was awarded the Kranichsteiner Music Prize for Interpretation at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt. Acierto holds a Masters’ degree in Contemporary Performance from Manhattan School of Music and received Bachelors’ degrees in clarinet performance and composition from DePaul University. He currently works and resides in Chicago where he is completing his MFA in New Media Arts at University of Illinois at Chicago.