Reading Lee Todd Lacks
Performed by: Olga Berar (RO), Constantin Basica (RO/US), Alex Chechile (US), Adrian Ciglenean (RO) and Lee Todd Lacks (US).
Please email cobasica@ccrma.stanford.edu by May 29 to reserve a seat in the performance.
The artists would like to thank CCRMA for the invitation and the Romanian Cultural Institute New York for making this event possible. Also a warm thank you goes to Gibraltar Editions for support. The event is supported by the Billie Achilles fund and the Bechtel International Center.
Lee Todd Lacks seeks to blur the distinctions between rants, chants, anecdotes, and anthems by incorporating spoken word with experimental music. He has performed as a soloist and as a member of various ensembles at venues throughout the United States. His poetry and fiction have been published in The Monarch Review, The Quarterday Review, Bop Dead City, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Liquid Imagination, Crack The Spine, and elsewhere. In 2016, Fermata Publishing released his first chapbook of poetry and short fiction, entitled Underneath. He holds an MA in Ethnomusicology from Tufts University and an MA in Expressive Therapies from Lesley University. Lee Todd is a board-certified music therapist and a licensed clinical counselor. He and his family currently reside in Southern Maine.
Olga Berar is a violinist and performer with a master in violin performance (1st Class Honours) at CIT Cork School of Music, including courses on Music Therapy and Music in Society.
She studied under the guidance of Adrian Petcu.
She played with Neuen Internationalen Philarmonie Orchestra Munich and Sommer Oper Bamberg European Orchestra, Wexford Opera and had a solo performance in 2014 accompanied by the Romanian National Radio Chamber Orchestra. She is a founding member of the artistic laboratory Citit În and co-founder of SE8TEMBR10 – music seen/theatre unseen micro-festival.
Adrian Ciglenean is an actor and artistic coach formally trained in the Acting/Drama Department of Spiru Haret University Bucharest and graduate of Moving Academy for Performing Arts Amsterdam Curriculum.
Founder of interdisciplinary laboratories in Bucharest, Cluj and Porto, he is pursuing a decade-long informal research on poetics of senses and performative concepts with an immersive, site-specific and syncretic character, coaching over 60 workshops and performances across Europe.
He performed under direction of Nona Ciobanu at Teatrul Foarte Mic BucureČ™ti, Siegmar Zacharias at Sophiensaele Berlin, Jan Langedijk at Mozgás-Teátrum Debrecen and Ursula Mawson Raffalt at Arts Council Dublin.
In 2016 he co-founded SE8TEMBR10 – music seen/theatre unseen micro-festival.
Alex Chechile is an artist and composer whose work develops in parallel with research in neuroscience, psychoacoustics, and the biomechanics of hearing. His electroacoustic compositions and installations bring transparency to otherwise invisible processes in biology and technology.
His work has been shown across the United States, Europe, and Asia. His projects have been supported by The New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Harvestworks (NYC), Issue Project Room (NYC), the Experimental Television Center (NY), the Deep Listening Institute (NY), and the American Embassy. His work has been presented at MoMA, The 2011 New York Electronic Arts Festival, and SIGGRAPH San Diego. Alex performs in the SideLObe chamber laptop ensemble with Ge Wang, was a founding member of Pauline Oliveros' Tintinnabulate ensemble, collaborated with Mercury Rev, and opened for Primus.
Chechile is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), and holds an MFA in Electronic Art from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a BA in Music from Tufts University. He currently studies with Chris Chafe and Brian Ferneyhough, and previously with Pauline Oliveros, Curtis Bahn, Maryanne Amacher, and John McDonald.
Constantin Basica is a composer living in the San Francisco Bay Area, whose current work explores perceptual illusions in the context of audiovisual performance. His compositions include pieces for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra. In recent years, he has been composing multimedia works for acoustic instruments, electronics, and video, which have been performed in Europe and in the United States by artists such as Séverine Ballon, Tony Arnold, Carola Schaal, Olga Berar, Bogdan Popa, ELISION Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ensemble Liminar, JACK Quartet, Spektral Quartet, Now Hear Ensemble, kallisti ensemble, Splinter Reeds, and Rage Thormbones.
Constantin is the Alice Wilber Chapman graduate fellow at Stanford University, where he is working with Jaroslaw Kapuscinski and Brian Ferneyhough toward a DMA in Composition. He is also studying with Mark Applebaum and Erik Ulman. His previous mentors were Georg Hajdu, Manfred Stahnke, Fredrik Schwenk, and Peter Michael Hamel during his MA and Erasmus Scholarship at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre in Germany, as well as Dan Dediu, Nicolae Coman, Doina Rotaru, Bogdan Voda, and Cristian Brancusi during his BA studies in Composition and Conducting at the National University of Music Bucharest in Romania.
In 2016, Constantin was one of the lecturers at the Sound and Music Computing Summer School in Hamburg. As a teaching assistant in the Department of Music at Stanford University, Constantin received the Department of Music Chair’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2015. Between 2008-2009, he was appointed Professor of Orchestra at the "George Enescu" National College of Music in Bucharest.