Evento

Mobile Variations: Krzysztof Wolek and Ryan Ingebritsen

Composers and Electronic Performers Krzysztof Wolek and Ryan Ingebritsen met in 2001 at a week long composition workshop in Stuttgart. Ingebritsen was on a year of Fulbright study in Krakow, Poland and Wolek just finishing his studies in Katowice. They became fast friends and soon after both found themselves in Chicago, Ingebritsen starting his career in the Chicago underground and experimental music scene and Wolek attending the University of Chicago. It was often joked that with the distance between them in Chicago - Ingebritsen mostly living and working on the north side and Krzystof busily carrying out his studies on the U of C's South Side Campus - that they saw each other more often in Poland than they did in Chicago. Now they meet in Chicago for their first concert together in that city since 2006. Both have on their own carried on distinguished careers as composers producing works and receiving commissions and performances around the United Sates and Europe, also maintaining a close connection to the Polish avant-garde.

With this evenings concert they will explore the space of The Musical Offering for an evening of site specific spatialized and improvised electronic music. Using different configurations and different techniques, the duo will present a mix of pre-recorded tape and improvised electronic music that uses the space in unique ways with a sound system configured specifically for the concert hall at the Musical Offering. Starting off with Wolek's Mobile Variations and including a quasi improvised work by their friend and mentor Marek Choloniewski entitled Stuttgart Tunnel, the program will feature works meaningful to their long history as friends and colleagues as well as works appropriate to the setting of The Musical Offering.

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Short Bios

Krzysztof Wolek (b. 1976, Bytom, Poland) is a composer, improviser, and installation artist. He is currently working as an Associate Professor of Music Composition and a Director of Digital Composition Studies at the University of Louisville. He received commissions from the Warsaw Autumn Festival, the Siemens Foundation, SCI/ASCAP, among others, as well as awards, grants and stipends from the University of Chicago, University of Louisville, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Kentucky Arts Council and Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Krzysztof is a passionate advocate of contemporary acoustic and electronic music and multimedia compositions, serves on the jury of the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and is a Programming Committee Member of the Warsaw Autumn Festival. His compositions received various awards such as the Prix for Mobile Variations at the Concours Internationaux de Musique et d'Art Sonore Electroacoustiques- Bourges 2007. Krzysztofs works span a broad spectrum of works from purely acoustic, improvisational and electronic to various forms of multidisciplinary collaborations. They have been presented at various festivals of contemporary music and art in Europe, North America and Asia.

Ryan Ingebritsen (b. 1973, Farmington MO, USA) a composer, sound designer, sound artist, electronic musician, and sound engineer whose artistic activities spill over from one world to another. Through all of his artistic activities, he collaborates with musicians, dancers and live performers, and spaces to create interactive and site specific solutions that enhance expressive possibilities of utilizing spaces and sound systems as instruments in an ensemble. Ingebritsen has distinguished himself as an artistic partner and become an integral part of the new music scene in Chicago working with a myriad of groups such as eighth blackbird, International Contemporary Ensemble, Third Coast Percussion, and choreographers such as Erica Mott, Ginger Farley, and Sarah Shelton-Mann. His work has taken him to Europe, Asia, and Australia and he has worked and had his work presented in premier venues throughout the US such as the Park Avenue Armory in New York and the J Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago.