Ravenshead
Artist Biographies
RINDE ECKERT, Librettist/PerformerRinde Eckert is internationally renowned as a writer, director, actor, composer, movement artist and singer. He conceives, writes the music and libretto, and performs his own staged work. Blessed with a remarkably flexible and inventive singing voice, he performs and tours extensively throughout North America and Europe.
Long celebrated for his writing and performances in multi-media theatre, Eckert has scripted Ravenshead in collaboration with composer Steve Mackey and the Paul Dresher Ensemble. Previous Dresher collaborations include Slow Fire, Power Failure, Pioneer and Awed Behavior. His acclaimed collaborations with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company include Shelf Life, which received an Isadora Duncan Award for Eckert’s score, Woman Window Square, Shorebirds Atlantic, a dance duo with Jenkins, which was adapted for the PBS Alive From Off Center video series, and The Gates (Far Away Near). Other major collaborations have been with videographer John Sanborn, sound designer Jay Cloidt, mime/actor Leonard Pitt, and ODC/San Francisco. A classically trained singer, Eckert created the lead roles in contemporary operas by Frank Lewin and Gina Leishman. He was also the featured performer in Bruce Nauman’s video installation Anthro/Socio at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Eckert’s solo staged work includes The Idiot Variations, Dry Land Divine and Quit This House, the radio musical Shoot the Moving Things, and the radio opera Four Songs Lost in a Wall. Eckert also created, wrote the music and script, and performed in the two-person theatrical work The Gardening of Thomas D., which has been performed throughout the United States and Europe. His most recent solo for the theatre, Romeo Sierra Tango, was commissioned by The Public Theatre in New York and premiered in January 1998. During the past few seasons he has conducted a series of acting workshops for Theatre Arche in Czechoslovakia, and is currently composing commissioned works for New York’s Foundry Theatre and for Opera Piccola in California.
Ever expanding his vocabulary to reflect a wide range of contemporary music styles and vocal effects, Eckert and record producer Lee Townsend assembled the band The Compleat Strangers to perform his original music. Their albums Finding My Way Home, Do the Day Over and Story In, Story Out are now on the Intuition label out of Köln, Germany. Rinde Eckert lives in New York.
STEVE MACKEY, Composer
Composer and guitarist Steve Mackey was born in Frankfurt, Germany to American parents in 1956. He is currently Professor of Music at Princeton University where he has been on the faculty since 1985.
Trained as a classical guitarist, lutenist and electric guitarist, Mackey frequently plays his own music. He has toured extensively with the Kronos Quartet, playing music he composed for the group. In 1997, Mackey appeared at the San Francisco Symphony’s summer festival in performances of his guitar quintets Physical Property and Troubadour Songs and in 1998, the Kronos Quartet premiered his work String Theory in San Francisco.
Mackey’s concerto for electric guitar and drum set, Deal, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was premiered in 1995 by Esa-Pekka Salonen with soloists Bill Frisell and Joey Baron, and has since been performed throughout the US, with both Mackey and Frisell as soloists. In September, Mackey performed the European premiere of Deal in Manchester, England. Mackey’s large-scale orchestral work, Eating Greens, was commissioned and performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1994, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. In 1997, Eating Greens was performed during Tanglewood’s Contemporary Music Week, and in the 1998 season, it will be performed by the Baltimore Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by David Zinman.
Upcoming commissions include a piece for organ and orchestra for the San Francisco Symphony and a work for guitar and orchestra for the New World Symphony, as well as a piece for the New York New Music Ensemble and the Borromeo Quartet.
Past commissions include works for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and Los Angeles Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet, soprano Dawn Upshaw, cellist Fred Sherry, and others. Mackey’s music is published by Boosey & Hawkes and Margun Music.
TONY TACCONE, Director
Tony Taccone joined the staff of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 1988, serving for one year as Resident Director then as Associate Artistic Director. He worked with Sharon Ott for nine years in that capacity, developing the company’s eclectic and progressive aesthetic. He has directed over twenty plays for Berkeley Rep including Pentecost, Macbeth, Slavs! The Caucasian Chalk Circle, End Game/Act Without Words, Volpone, The Convict’s Return, Major Barbara, The Virgin Molly, Serious Money, Waiting for Godot, The Birthday Party and Execution of Justice (with Oskar Eustis). Before coming to the Rep, Taccone served as the Artistic Director of the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco, collaborating for seven years with Oskar Eustis, Lorri Holt, Susan Marsden, Richard Seyd, Abigail van Alyn, and Sigrid Wurschmidt. His favorite directorial projects there included Road, Boomer!, Fen, Still Life, and Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Taccone has been honored to direct at other theatres around the country. His work has been frequently seen at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where he recently directed Pentecost, Coriolanus, and The Cure at Troy. He has also worked at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Arizona Theatre Company, San José Rep and Yale Rep. He is most proud of having co-directed the word premiere of Angels in America at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Taccone has served on the faculty of UC Berkeley, the board of Theatre Communications Group, and is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, for which he has been a regional representative. At one time he was a decent softball player.
PAUL DRESHER, Artistic Director, Electric Guitar (for performances 1998 — 1999)
Paul Dresher is an internationally active composer noted for his ability to integrate diverse musical influences into his own coherent and unique personal style. He is pursuing many musical forms, including experimental opera and music theater, chamber and orchestral composition, live instrumental electro-acoustic chamber music performances and scores for theater, dance, and film.
He has received commissions from the Library of Congress, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Spoleto Festival USA, the Kronos Quartet, San Francisco Symphony, Walker Arts Center, Meet the Composer, University of Iowa, and American Music Theater Festival. He has performed or had his works performed throughout North America, Asia and Europe. Venues have included Munich State Opera, New York Philharmonic, Festival d'Automne in Paris, Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, Minnesota Opera, Arts Summit Indonesia ‘95, Festival Interlink in Japan, and five New Music America Festivals. His evening-length collaboration with choreographer Margaret Jenkins, The Gates, premiered at Jacob’s Pillow and opened the 1994 Serious Fun Festival at Lincoln Center.
In 1993, Dresher premiered his new Electro-Acoustic Band, an ensemble that performs the work of a broad range of contemporary composers utilizing a hybrid orchestration combining both acoustic and electronic instrumentation. The group has commissioned many works from some of the most innovative of today’s composers and has toured the U.S. and to Europe and Indonesia.
As Artistic Director of the Paul Dresher Ensemble, he has guided the creation of the "American Trilogy," a set of experimental operatic works comprised of Slow Fire, Power Failure, and Pioneer. These works, created in collaboration with writer/performer Rinde Eckert, address different facets of American culture.
Born in Los Angeles in 1951, Dresher received his BA in Music from UC Berkeley and his MA in Composition from UC San Diego, where he studied with Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros and Bernard Rands. He has had a long time interest in the music of Asia and Africa, studying Ghanian drumming with C.K. and Kobla Ladzekpo, and Hindustani classical music with Nikhil Banerjee, as well as Balinese and Javanese music. Dresher recently completed two years as a Fellow in the Asia Pacific Performance Exchange at UCLA, where he collaborated with Chinese director and singer Chen Shi Zheng and Indian actor/movement artist Vinay Kumar in the creation of an experimental opera/dance theater work The Myth of The Hero.
Recordings of his works are available on the Lovely Music, New World, Music and Arts, O.O. Discs, BMG/Catalyst, Starkland and New Albion labels.
ALEXANDER V. NICHOLS, Set & Lighting Designer
Alex Nichols’ design work spans dance, opera and theater to sculpture and installation art. As Resident Designer for the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, he has created scenic and lighting designs for nine works including The Gates and Fault. Nichols has also served as Resident Lighting Designer for the Pennsylvania Ballet under the direction of Christopher d’Amboise, the Hartford Ballet under the direction of Kirk Peterson, and as Lighting Director for American Ballet Theatre. Among his recent credits are the scenic design for Invisible Wings with Zaccho Dance Theatre and the scenic and lighting design for Garden Tour with ODC/San Francisco. He has also created design work for such companies and artists as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Hong Kong Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Singapore Dance Theater, BalletMet/Columbus, the Joe Goode Performance Group, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Rinde Eckert, Magic Theatre and National Theater of Taiwan, as well as on the stage of the Greek Theater in Berkeley, California for Aid and Comfort II, an AIDS benefit featuring Laurie Anderson and Herbie Hancock. He has received two Isadora Duncan Awards for the visual Designs of Georgia Stone and Age of Unrest with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.
CRAIG FRY, Violin (1998 — 2000)
Craig Fry is a second generation violinist, whose interest has been primarily in exploring serious contemporary music, both live and recorded, beginning in the late 1970s with Cartoon, an instrumental "Euro-rock" band that he joined in his native Phoenix. Fry joined the Paul Dresher Ensemble in 1990 and has been part of virtually every major work of the company since then, and has toured with the Ensemble to Japan, the Czech Republic, and Indonesia, as well as throughout the United States. He performs regularly with Bay Area world music and jazz groups, and frequently plays with several orchestras including the Berkeley Symphony, Sacramento Symphony, Napa Symphony, and Santa Cruz Symphony. Fry toured with the San Francisco Opera’s Western Opera Theater for three years, and performs with the Merola program for their summer concerts at Villa Montalvo and in San Francisco.
KAREN BENTLEY — Violin (2001 — 2002)
Karen Bentley is active as a violinist, violist, conductor and pianist. She has concertized throughout Europe, Asia, the United States and Canada, and Russia where she performed Vivaldi's Four Seasons and the Beethoven Violin Concerto. She was in the Bay Area progressive rock band Tesseract and has several recordings of original music including Electric Diamond, Weeping Angel, Konzerto and Succubus by Stuart Diamond, and Ariel View . She collaborates with percussionist Ian Dogole of Global Fusion in a variety of musical styles merging violin, viola and Norwegian hardingfele with African talking drum, udu, dumbek, mbira and other percussion instruments from around the globe. A champion of contemporary music, she has premiered numerous compositions for violin and piano, solo violin, and violin with electronics. Ms. Bentley has toured with Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, Barbra Streisand's 1994 concert tour, the New York Philharmonic and the Bolshoi Ballet. She attended Indiana University where she studied with Josef Gingold and Yuval Yaron. Other teachers include Camilla Wicks, Nathan Milstein, Glenn Dicterow and Jean Jacques Kantorow.
She has been concertmaster of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie Kammerorchester as well as the New York String Orchestra under Alexander Schneider. During the summers she has participated in the June in Buffalo Composers Seminar, the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Olympic Music Festival, the Tanglewood Festival, and the Next Generation Festival in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Recently, she has performed with Paul Dresher’s Electro-Acoustic Band and was Associate Concertmaster of the Monterey County Symphony as well as conductor of the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra Preparatory Orchestra. She has conducted the San Francisco Concerto Orchestra on numerous occasions. Ms. Bentley received a grant from the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley for the world premiere of Swedish composer Ole Saxe’s Dance Suite for Solo Violin, and will perform the world premiere of Mr. Saxe’s Dance Suite for Solo Violin and Orchestra with the Redwood Symphony in April 2002.
PAUL HANSON, Bassoon & Saxophone
Paul Hanson is the 1996 Grand Prize Winner of Jazziz Magazine’s Woodwinds On Fire Contest, and recipient of a 1995 NEA Jazz Fellowship Grant. He is a Bay Area native who is gaining international recognition as a progressive modern woodwinds instrumentalist. His repertoire includes jazz, rhythm and blues, Eastern European folk music, contemporary classical and electronic music, and his festival performances include both the Leverkuzen and Berlin Jazz festivals, Cambridge Folk Festival in England, and Monterey Blues Festival.
Hanson’s first compact disc for Windham Hill Records is slated for a summer 1998 release. The Last Romantics, his first compact disc recording as a solo artist, was released in Japan by Midi records in 1993 and received Best Jazz Recording for January 1994 from Audiophile Magazine. Hanson has collaborated with Turtle Island String Quartet violinist Tracy Silverman on a recording for Windham Hill Records, and co-composed and performed a composition with vocalist Gino Vannelli for Vanelli’s 1997 Verve release. His other recordings include work with South American guitarist Enrique Correa for David Grisman’s Acoustic Disc label, and Cuban jazz piano sensation Omar Sosa for Tonga records.
AMY KNOLES, Electronic Percussion
Amy Knoles is one of the foremost percussionists of the new music world. She tours globally, performing interactive computer music as a soloist with a program of computer assisted electronic drums and the KAT MIDI Mallet Instrument, as well as with Morton Subotnick, Tod Machover, Basso Bongo, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, and the California EAR Unit. In addition, Knoles has commissioned a repertoire of pieces that thoroughly explore the diversity of today’s new music world. Composers have written pieces for her that involve live interaction with computer, laser beams triggering MIDI computer sequences, and theatrical performance.
She performs regularly with the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, The Cyber Arts Festival and the Ojai Festival; and she was the 1996 ASCAP Composer-in-Residence at the Music Center of Los Angeles County. Knoles recently recorded the music of Edgar Varese with Ensemble Modern of Frankfurt, produced by Frank Zappa, to be released on Barking Pumpkin. She has also recorded on New Albion, Nonesuch, CBS, RCA, Relativity, and Crystal Records.
MARJA MUTRU, Keyboard
Marja Mutru recently moved to the Bay Area from Finland where she frequently worked in association with the main symphony orchestras, the National Opera, and the Sibelius Academy, where she received her Master’s degree in piano performance. Also, Mutru was a keyboard player for the European premiere of the John Adams/June Jordan/Peter Sellars opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, which toured through festivals in Edinburgh, Helsinki, Paris, and Hamburg. She recorded the piece with the Finnish ensemble Avanti! for Nonesuch Records in 1996.
Since settling in the Bay Area, Mutru has been working on various projects, including the West Coast premiere of John Adams’ Road Movies for violin and piano with Stuart Canin, and the 1997 recording with Kronos Quartet, Early Music, on Nonesuch Records.
GENE REFFKIN, Electronic Percussion
Gene Reffkin has performed with contemporary and classical music ensembles in New England, New York and California. After receiving a BA in music from New York University, he moved to the San Francisco area, where he has played with new music groups as well as many country & western, blues and rock bands.
Reffkin has been a core member of the Paul Dresher Ensemble since its inception in 1984 and his works with the Ensemble include "The American Trilogy," Was Are/Will Be and Awed Behavior. In 1984 Reffkin performed in the George Coates Performance Works production SeeHear and in 1990 with Philip Glass in the "Aid & Comfort Benefit" in Berkeley, California. Reffkin has performed with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, the Wendy Rogers Dance Company, and with ODC/San Francisco. In February 1997, he was part of the San Francisco performance of the Rock and Roll musical, FAB!
JOHN SCHOTT, Electric Guitar — 2000-2001
John Schott is active as a guitarist, composer and educator, working in the boundaries between composition and improvisation. His recordings include "In These Great Times," (Tzadik) "Shuffle Play" (New World), and, with Junk Genius, "Ghost Of Electricity" (Songlines). He has also produced recordings of music by Fred Frith and Bun-Ching Lam. His compositions have been commissioned and performed by the Rova Saxophone Quartet, the Taneko Ensemble, the San Francisco Jazz Festival, Merkin Hall/Lincoln Center, and Meet The Composer. This year Schott will contribute music to an ACT production of Mac Wellman's Girl Gone, and a UC Berkeley production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Mr. Schott also works with the organization VALA to bring music into the public schools of Berkeley and Oakland.
GREGORY KUHN, Sound Engineer/Main House Mix
Gregory Kuhn has been an independent sound engineer and designer for theater, multimedia, dance, and experimental and contemporary music performances since 1987, and this is his fifth season with the Paul Dresher Ensemble. Other recent projects include concerts with the California EAR Unit, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Upcoming projects include new pieces by Joe Goode Performance Group, Robert Henry Johnson Dance Company, Joanna Haigood/Zaccho Dance, Shadowlight, and Steve Mackey and Rinde Eckert’s music theater work Ravenshead.
Kuhn has also designed for Isadora Duncan Award performances by Joe Goode Performance Group, June Watanabe In Company, and Remy Charlip. He is a researcher and developer for electro-acoustics and digital signal processing for the Good Sound Foundation and t.c. electronic of Denmark.
MARK GREY, Sound Engineer/Monitor Mixer/MIDI Technician
Mark Grey develops and executes technical environments for composers, performers, and music presenters. In addition to his work with the Paul Dresher Ensemble, he is c urrently an engineer for John Adams; synthesizer technician for Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers; and sound designer/engineer for Kronos Quartet.
Grey’s work has led him through festivals in Edinburgh, Helsinki, Paris, Hamburg, Vienna, Canada, and Norway; and his various sound design/engineer tours to Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, and Chicago Orchestra Hall have kept a balance to design synthesizer/sampler packages for most large orchestras, new music ensembles, major opera companies, and festivals throughout North America and Europe. He has also engineered recordings for Nonesuch Records, and annually teaches a one-month intensive in composition and electro-acoustic music at CalArts.
MELISSA WEAVER, Production Director (1998 — 2000)
Melissa Weaver has worked as Production Director with Paul Dresher since 1981, creating new music theater pieces including The Way of How, are/are, SeeHear, Slow Fire, Power Failure, Pioneer, and Awed Behavior. She is also Artistic Director and co-founder, with tenor John Duykers, of Agape Performance Group, and has conceived and directed several Bay Area productions, including Last Stand, and Trespass Knot, an operatic fable created with composer Miguel Frasconi and choreographer Jess Curtis. In 1997, Weaver premiered The Winchester Rosary with writer/performer Amanda Moody, composer Joël Lindheimer and designer Alex Nichols. She directed Rinde Eckert’s The Gardening of Thomas D., which was performed at On the Boards in Seattle, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, The Kitchen in New York, and at the Festival Creteil in Paris, Mons and Strasbourg. She also directed Eckert in Dry Land Divine at DTW in New York in 1988, and designed and directed John Duykers in Henze’s El Cimarron, featuring guitarist David Tanenbaum, which was given the Los Angeles Times Beckmesser Award for Outstanding Contemporary Performance of 1983.
