FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Jonah Kappraff, [email protected] 862-205-9563

Cambridge, MA- April 22, 2013

PILGRIMAGE a project of Lorelei, unPLUGGED

Friday, May 10 BU, Marsh Chapel 735 Commonwealth Avenue , MA 8pm

Purchase Tickets at: www.loreleiensemble.com $20 General Admission/$12 Students/Seniors

The eight women of Boston’s Lorelei Ensemble announce the third concert series of their 2012- 13 season featuring music of Hildegard von Bingen and Guillaume Du Fay alongside the premiere of two new multimedia works by composer/videographer collaborators Reiko Yamada/Sibylle Irma and Isaac Schankler/Chris O’Leary. The program will be presented on Friday, January 10 at ’s Marsh Chapel (8pm).

Pilgrimage, a project of Lorelei’s new unPLUGGED multimedia series, explores concepts of spirituality and pilgrimage from ancient and contemporary perspectives. Consistent with Lorelei’s commitment to programming early and new music side-by-side, small ensembles set the stage for each half of the program with the music of Hildegard von Bingen and Guillaume Du Fay. Selected responsories from Hildegard’s Scivias portray some of the composer’s earliest visions. Hildegard’s transcendent melodies elevate the already rich symbolism in her deeply rooted poetry. The strength and optimism of Guillaume Du Fay’s motet Rite Majorem reflect its ties to the service for St. James the Greater, patron saint of pilgrims. His shrine at Santiago de Compostela in Northwest Spain continues to be a destination for Christian pilgrims from around the world.

The World Premiere of two new works commissioned by the ensemble explore both secular and sacred concepts of spirituality:

The Familiar Spirit (2013) turns the first recorded instance of "spirit-rapping" communication into a series of poetic vignettes that explore the spiritual and social significance of the medium in the 19th-century. Working together with poet Amaranth Borsuk and artist Christopher O’Leary, Isaac Schankler’s work tells the story of Margaret and Catherine Fox, sisters who launched the Spiritualist movement in 1848. Through permutation, iteration, and wordplay, Borsuk's text captures the essence of the sisters’ super-natural experiences, while Christopher O'Leary's video evokes the spirit world conjured up by the imaginations of the witnesses. Isaac Schankler's score imagines the event as a bizarre religious ritual, with meditative drones, dense clustered textures, and percussive, propulsive chanting.

A Field Guide to Pilgrim Tracks (2013) was created collaboratively, an ocean apart, by composer Reiko Yamada (Japan, Montreal) and artist Sibylle Irma (). Yamada’s wordless and ever-evolving vocal landscape is punctuated by highly-intimate and subtle vocal effects, utilizing both manipulated electronic tracks and live amplification. Irma’s stark yet deeply personal abstract images are projected on an original installation, combining drawings, photography, and sculpture to deliver a universally relevant narrative of spiritual imperfection.

Lorelei Ensemble Beth Willer, Artistic Director, conductor Margot Rood, soprano Jessica Petrus, soprano Emily Culler, soprano Sarah Moyer, soprano Clare McNamara, alto Hilary Walker, alto Stephanie Kacoyanis, alto Emily Marvosh, alto

Founded in 2007 by music director Beth Willer, Boston’s Lorelei Ensemble is dedicated to the performance of new and early music for women’s voices. In an effort to enrich this body of repertoire, Lorelei collaborates with established and emerging composers from the and abroad, while continuing to highlight standard and lesser-known repertoire of the Medieval, Renaissance and early-Baroque periods.

Beth Willer, Lorelei Ensemble Founder and Artistic Director Noted for her “directorial command," "technical expertise” and work with women's vocal ensembles, Founder and Artistic Director Beth Willer has led Lorelei Ensemble since its founding in 2007 to become recognized one of Boston's up-and-coming vocal ensembles. Committed to the expansion of repertoire for the advanced women’s vocal ensemble, Ms. Willer has collaborated with composers from the U.S. and abroad, delivering numerous World, U.S. and regional premières, while working to expose lesser-known works of the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods for women’s voices. Ms. Willer currently holds positions as Resident Conductor of the Radcliffe Choral Society at and Interim Director of Choral Activities at the Boston Conservatory where she conducts the Women’s Chorus. Recently, Ms. Willer served as chorus master for the Boston Modern Orchestra's production of Michael Tippett's opera A Midsummer Marriage. In the summer of 2013, she will conduct the chorus at the Boston Universtiy Tanglewood Institute.

A candidate for the D.M.A. in conducting at Boston University, Ms. Willer holds degrees from Boston University and Luther College, studying with Ann Howard Jones, David Hoose, Bruce Hangen and Weston Noble. During the summer of 2007 she studied conducting with Mark Shapiro of Mannes and counterpoint with Phillip Lasser of Juilliard at the European American Music Alliance in Paris, . As a member of the Boston music scene, Ms. Willer has conducted ensembles at The New Conservatory Perparatory School, The Walnut Hill School and The Boston Arts Academy. Ms. Willer directed choirs at First Church in Wenham, from 2006-2008 and has sung with the BU Marsh Chapel Choir. Previous to her career in Boston, Ms. Willer served as a conductor of the Memorial High School Choirs and the Chippewa Valley Youth Choirs in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Composer Reiko Yamada was born in Hiroshima, Japan. She holds a B.A. in Jazz Composition from the Berklee College of Music and a M.A. in Classical Composition from Boston University, having studied under Vuk Kulenovich, Theodore Antoniou, Samuel Headrick, Lukas Foss and others. Her compositions include chamber, orchestral and electroacoustic music, as well as collaborative projects with jazz musicians, dancers, visual artists and writers.

Works by Reiko Yamada have been commissioned by the City of Montreal (for the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony, 2011), Roger Tapping (Takacs Quartet, 2010) and McGill University's Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (2011) and many others. She is also the founder (2005) and artistic director of the JYUGOYA Ensemble, which she led on a three-city tour of Japan in 2008.

Yamada was selected for artistic residencies at Wildacres (NC, 2006), the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (NM, 2007) and the Millay Colony for the Arts (NY, 2008). After residing in Boston for 11 years, she has relocated to Montreal, Canada in 2009, where she is a lecturer and doctoral student in composition at McGill University, working under the supervision of Brian Cherney. She is currently working on a collaborative work for dancers, percussion and electronics, to be performed at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (Paris) in June, 2013.

Artist Sibylle Irma was born in Lucerne, Switzerland. Her interest in fine art developed quickly while studying for one year in Art and Design at the University of the Arts in Camberwell, London. She has a B.A. in Art and Art Education from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland. In her work, Sibylle Irma uses variety of mediums, such as drawing, photography, sculpture, Installation and words. Collaborating with other artists is essential part of her life as an artist, as it pushes her and connects her to the life outside her art studio. Thus she has been working with a writer, filmmaker, painter and composer. Irma was selected for Artist- in-Residencies at Artfarm, Nebraska (2007), the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, New Mexico (2008) and Arteles programm, Finland (2012). Irma lives and works in Lucerne, Switzerland. Every now and then she teaches art and handcraft at secondary schools.

Isaac Schankler is a composer, pianist, accordionist and electronic musician living in Los Angeles. Described as "extraordinarily eclectic" and "masterfully composed" by the Boston Musical-Intelligencer, Isaac's music is inspired by improvisation, indeterminacy, spoken language, narrative, and puzzles. As a composer for video and interactive media, Isaac has worked with Christine Love (Analogue: A Hate Story), Quintan Ana Wikswo (Sonderbauten), Christopher O'Leary (Blocking the Exits), and Sandra Powers (The Nomad Song).

Isaac maintains a weekly blog at NewMusicBox, a multimedia publication from New Music USA, where his long-form articles have been praised by Scientific American and The New Yorker's Alex Ross. His writing has also appeared in the International Journal of Arts and Technology, Computer Music Journal, and the proceedings of international conferences including MCM (Mathematics and Computation in Music), ISPS (International Symposium of Performance Science), and ICME (International Conference on Multimedia & Expo).

Isaac is co-director of People Inside Electronics, a concert series for live electroacoustic music, and a resident artist with the interdisciplinary arts organization Catalysis Projects. In May 2010, Isaac completed his doctoral studies in composition at the USC Thornton School of Music. He also holds degrees in composition (MM, BM) and a degree in English (BA) from the University of Michigan.

Amaranth Borsuk is a poet working across media platforms. She is the author of Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012); Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010), a chapbook; and, with programmer Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012), a book of augmented-reality poems. Her intermedia project Abra, a collaboration with Kate Durbin, Ian Hatcher, and Zach Kleyn recently received an Expanded Artists' Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago and will be issued as an artist's book and iPad app in fall of 2013. She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and recently served as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT. She currently teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell and is at work on a critical book, The Upright Script: Modernist Mediations and Contemporary Data Poetics. http://www.amaranthborsuk.com/

Christopher O’Leary is an artist who works in video, animation, photography, and installation. His work explores the intersection of art, technology and narrative as depicted in science fiction, popular culture and history at large. His works in media conflate these genres with the conventions of video art, photography and performance. He recently collaborated with physicists at Montana State University, where he produced a dynamically generated model of a black hole. Christopher has shown his work in Seattle, Los Angeles, Belgrade, Istanbul, Rome and Torun, . He recently exhibited in the show Spaceship Earth at the Center for Contemporary art in Torun, Poland. He was co-curator of the exhibition Speculative at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and Dark Matter at Machine Project. Christopher received his MFA from UCLA and his BFA from the University of Washington.