All concerts are streamed via our YouTube channel. Event link will be emailed to ticket holders before the show.
Flutist Jessie Nucho and composer Brett Austin Eastman present the second of their three-part series exploring the nature of feedback in our lives. This program investigates the feedback systems that permeate our daily lives at the most intimate level: our relationships with ourselves and others. Most personal is our relationship to self and our emotional processes. Chelsea Loew’s “deep breaths” depicts invasive anxious thoughts and explores the role of breath in both calm and panicked states. Anxiety also surfaces in Brett Austin Eastman’s “Passover,” inspired by poetry written by Jessie Nucho. Here, the piece itself is also the result of a feedback process: the words of a personal struggle, when transformed through another’s lens, lose their original meaning and become something new.
Covid-19 has affected all of us in deeply personal ways and has had repercussions on our relationship to ourselves. In Jen Wang’s “…for each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone,” the flutist plays along with seven other versions of herself, a reminder of the loneliness and isolation of shelter-in-place life. Phoebe Bognár’s “Vanishing Points” is about arrival and departure, a consideration of the evanescence of place, being, and identity.
In counterpoint to this self-reflection is Evan Williams’ “if/else.” Inspired by programming logic and conditional statements, the piece creates the illusion that the computer has the agency to make a “choice,” thus allowing flutist and computer to respond to one another in real time.
See the full concert program here.
The Artists
San Francisco-based flutist Jessie Nucho is passionate about sharing both traditional and contemporary music as a chamber musician, soloist, and educator. She performs regularly with the new music ensembles After Everything and Ninth Planet, where she also serves as Co-Artistic Director. She is a founding member of Siroko Duo, a flute duo dedicated to commissioning and presenting new works in creative spaces. As a soloist, Jessie has performed at San Francisco’s Center for New Music, the Berkeley Arts Festival, the Hot Air Music Festival, and the Legion of Honor. Jessie holds an MM from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Tim Day. Previous instructors include Alberto Almarza and Jeanne Baxtresser at Carnegie Mellon University.
Brett Austin Eastman is a composer, producer, teacher, and performing musician. Brett has recently composed works for pianist Tingyuan Luo, Slow Wave, Keyed Kontraptions and Siroko Duo, as well as a quartet he put together for a concert he produced titled “Punk in Times of War.” In 2019, he co-produced and curated a concert with the ensemble Slow Wave, featuring new music for viola, clarinet, and piano. In January 2020, he co-produced a concert with Jessie Nucho entitled “FEEDBACK: In Response,” featuring music for flute and electronics literally and conceptually inspired by different forms of feedback. He is co-founder and co-producer of the sci-fi punk band Andy Human and the Reptoids. He did sound design for and co-wrote (with Jon Raskin) the score for the feature-length film, “The Murder of Hi Good,” by filmmaker Lee Lorenzo Lynch. He studied composition with Richard Festinger, Josh Levine, and Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez.