sfSoundSalonSeries: Séverine Ballon and Dan Joseph & Andrea Williams Duo

French cello virtuoso Séverine Ballon presents solo works in her first visit to the West Coast as part of a collaboration with the Poto Festival. The program includes music by Australian composer and Stanford graduate Kristian Ireland;Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s great Sonata from 1960; and the American premiere of Erik Ulman’s L’Extase de M. Poher, after the poem by Jeremy Prynne.

Séverine Ballon studied cello at the Hochschulen für Musik in Berlin and Lübeck with Joseph Schwab and Troels Svane. In 2004-2005 she was a participant in the International Ensemble Modern Academy. She has also undertaken further studies in contemporary cello technique with Siegfried Palm, Lukas Fels and Rohan de Saram. In 2006-2007, she was a solo cellist in the Toulouse Chamber Orchestra, before deciding to specialise in contemporary music performance. Séverine is a member of the ensembles ELISION (Australia), Ensemble Sillages and multilatérale (Paris) and works regularly with such ensembles as Klangforum Wien, musikFabrik (Cologne), Ictus, Ensemble Inytercontemporain… In 2008-2009 she was at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart) for a six-month residency. She attaches particular importance to working directly with composers (Helmut Lachenmann, Liza Lim, James Dillon, Jonathan Harvey…) and has premiered several solo works (Liza Lim, Erik Ulman, Stefano Bulfon, Alex Sigman…). She has recently collaborated with composer David Coll on his multimedia work 68 at IRCAM, and on an installation project with photographer Evi Keller. She regularly performs in a duo with electronic artist Sébastien Roux. Séverine Ballon has been a prize-winner of the 2004 international contemporary music performance competition Gioia del Colle (Italy) and of the Marie-Luise Imbusch Foundation.

Dan Joseph is a composer based in New York City. He began his career as a drummer in the vibrant punk scene of his native Washington, DC and was later active in the experimental tape music underground, producing works for independent labels in the U.S. and abroad. Moving to California in the early ‘90s, he completed his academic work at CalArts and Mills College, where his principal teachers included Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, Mel Powell and Terry Riley. Since the late 90s, the hammer dulcimer has been the primary vehicle for his music and he is active as a performer with his own chamber ensemble, The Dan Joseph Ensemble, as well as in various improvisational collaborations and as a soloist. He also the curator of Musical Ecologies, a monthly symposium on music and sound in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Andrea Williams is a sound artist and composer currently living in Oakland, CA. She utilizes site-specific elements and perceptual cues to reveal the unseen connections between people and their environment. Her compositions make use of field recordings, instruments, computer technologies and the sound of the performance space itself. She has led soundwalks in New York and the Bay Area, and has shown and performed both solo and with various musicians at galleries and alternative spaces internationally, such as the Whitney Museum, Headlands Center for the Arts, Children’s Creativity Museum, NPR, Miami Art Fair, and the Mamori sound artist residency in the Amazon rainforest. Andrea is a founding member of the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology and is the Co-Director of the sound art non-profit, 23five, in San Francisco.