07/22 @ 8:00pm - Barry Seroff + Barbara Held

Barry Seroff was born in Flushing, Queens on July 4, 1978. He earned his Bachelors at the Aaron Copland School of Music where he studied with some of the great minds of the twentieth century; theory with Joe Strauss, composition with Paul Alan Levi, Jeff Nichols, and Bruce Saylor, and musicology with Henry Burnett. At the same time outside of school, he studied classical flute with Michael Laderman and Petina Cole, modern and traditional jazz guitar with Joe Giglio and Bern Nix, and shakuhachi with Ronnie Nyogetsu Seldin.

Improvised music developed into one of his deepest musical passions through regular performances with musicians including William Parker, Anthony Braxton, Marc Ribot, Daniel Carter, Merry Fortune, and Ken Schalk, among others. It was in this setting that his musical voice matured, leading to the release of the critically acclaimed 27 New York Antisonnets’ with Little Ricky’s House of Chankletas, and the upcoming release A Pass Toward Solace with pianist Stefan Paolini, both on OKS Recordings of North America. He also runs an improvised music podcast, featuring a wide variety of top notch musicians from NYC to New Haven.

Aside from being an accomplished musician, Barry Seroff has also earned high accolades as a composer. His compositions range from traditional chamber ensembles and orchestras to more modern settings featuring electric guitar and drumset. His collaborations with poet Merry Fortune were performed at St. Marks Church, and eventually led to recordings with legendary guitarist Marc Ribot. He is also the winner of the Hubert Sukoff Award for Composition in 2006 and was awarded the AMC Composers Assistance Grant in 2009 for his cantata Democracy, which was premiered at Issue Project Room in March of 2010. His work has been premiered by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Second Instrumental Unit, New Haven Improvisers Collective, ThingNY and Anti-Social Music.

Barbara Held is a flutist, composer and sound artist, whose current focus is the rhythmic relationship between music and image. She has commissioned and performed an idiosyncratic body of new repertoire for flute by both Spanish and American composers, and was the creator and producer of “Music at Metrónom”, a series of concerts of experimental music that gave special support to collaboration between musicians and visual artists, co-curator of “Possibility of Action; the life of the score” for the Documentation Center and Archive of the Barcelona MACBA museum of contemporary art during the 2008-09 season, and “Lines of Sight”, a series of 7 programs of experimental music and radio art for radio web macba. Current projects include a duo with Barcelona composer Ferran Fages who uses camera flash apparatus to subvert and create ephemeral, musical interferences in the transmission of shortwave radios, and a performance piece for video and sound, in collaboration with painter Francesca Llopis, called “The Time in Tokyo”.