​Jocelyn Zelasko - Soprano

Thursday, August 24 @ Glen Lake School, Maple City, MI 7pm

Friday, August 25 @ The Cathedral Barn, Traverse City, MI 7pm 

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IPR presents two intimate performances by New Music Detroit featuring works by Katherine Balch, Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, Thomas Osborne, Maxim Shalygin, Richard Reed Perry, and Aart Strootman based on luminous resonance, pulse, and unfurling growth.

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 For more information, click here!

July 7, 2023 @ Lincoln Park Conservatory, Chicago, IL 3pm

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Eighth Blackbird's “Place, Tree, Breath” features the music of ecoacoustic composer Matthew Burtner, whose body of work is generated entirely from ecologically-derived source material. Nature Performers: 8BB founder Matthew Duvall with featured guest artist, soprano Jocelyn Zelasko.

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For more information, click here!

July 5, 2023 @ Steppenwolf 1700, Chicago, IL 8pm

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Eighth Blackbird presents stories told through a syntax created by water, voice, stone, tree, shell and snow. Performed by soprano Jocelyn Zelasko and percussionist Matthew Duvall, these are stories both immutable and impermanent, and told through composition.

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This performance is a continuation of The Chicago Artists Workshop [CAW] initiative created during the pandemic by the Grammy award-winning Chicago-based arts organization Eighth Blackbird. The mission of CAW during the pandemic was to support local artists with performance fees and streaming production support. This initiative, continuing the mission to support local art and artists in Chicago, is relaunching with this program.

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For more information, click here!

June 17, 2023 @ Bloomfield Township Public Library 11am

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Looking for a chamber music show that’s fun for the whole family? Search no longer! At Classical Family: Little Red Riding Hood, all ages are encouraged. Multiple activities will be available for children to engage with during the performance. This enchanting performance will tell the story of this classic fairy tale through newly-composed music by Jordyn Davis. The whole family will be captivated by the whimsical and evocative sounds of the instruments as they journey through the beloved story.

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ARTISTS Hesper Quartet with narration by Jocelyn Zelasko

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Admission is free, all ages are welcome, registration is required.

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For more information, click here!

April 22, 2023 @ Great Hall: St. John's College, Sante Fe 6pm

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In 2023 we are moving climate change activism past the alarm of impending loss, and past preemptive mourning for that loss. We are now listening for points of hope, for places where human restorative efforts are making a difference, even identifying symbiotic relationships between humans and the Earth. Going forward, let’s focus on the good we can do. Let’s celebrate the efforts of those finding success in restoration and sustainability. Let’s be brave and turn away from cynicism, depression, and nihilism, and rather seek out soundscapes of hope. Through music, Alaskan composer Matthew Burtner expresses a post-humanist philosophy based on listening to the natural world as music. His work advocates for being outside, for feeling the animism in the environment, and for listening to the many geophonic and biophonic voices of the world. EcoSono Ensemble was formed in 2012 for the premiere of the world’s first climate change opera, Auksalaq. Since then the group has performed around the world and been featured on several albums of climate change music. This concert spotlights music from EcoSono’s forthcoming album, Soundscapes of Restoration (Ravello Records/Parma/Naxos) including the album single, The Dreams of Seagrasses which will be released worldwide on Earth Day 2023. The concert also highlights Burtner's songs from Auksalaq. Finally, the concert will feature the premiere of Burtner and Mona Kasra's work “Dwelling in the Enfolding” for ensemble and video, which was previously released for planetariums and VR immersive headsets.

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About the Ensemble

The EcoSono Ensemble creates interactive earth music with a collective of diverse musicians, artists, scientists and activists from around the globe. As a branch of the EcoSono Institute, this ensemble integrates ecoacoustics, technology, environmental exploration, cross-disciplinary collaborations, cultural exchange and environmental activism into artistic output and virtuosic instrumental and vocal performance. EcoSono pursues commonalities between interdisciplinary music creation and ecological awareness often blurring the lines between installation, field research and performance.

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Click here for more information!

March 4, 2023 @ Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills 3pm

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Sculpted Shadow is a musical interpretation of Scott Hocking’s Detroit Night, a series of photographs of Detroit seen in shadow, streetlamps, and the silence of night. Like one’s eyes adjusting to darkness, the musical program traverses a grayscale terrain, adjusting gradually to an aural shadowscape. The program begins with Pixelation by Daniel Wohl, a work of blurry vision yet containing an underlying rhythmic clarity, leading into Linda Buckley’s piece for solo piano and electronics, Fridur, puncturing the darkness with luminosity. Not fully adjusted to the darkness quite yet, our eyes and ears are immersed in a dissolution of space and time in Paul Clift’s work The Sea Isn’t Rising, The Ground is Sinking, and then our whole being enveloped in the viscous darkness in Irradiance, a work for solo cello and electronics, by Mario Diaz de Leon. Kennedy Taylor Dixon’s work in plain sight, for percussion and fixed media, crosses us over from a world of dark abstraction into a wide-open space of clarity beginning to emerge through the fog and shadow. As dawn rises, we end with Scott Smallwood’s piano trio, Thali Ringing, where shape and form become tangible again. Sculpted Shadow presented by New Music Detroit is performed by Joe Becker, Percussion; Úna O’Riordan, Cello; Justin Snyder, Piano; and Jocelyn Zelasko, voice with Creative Direction by Justin Snyder. This musical program is free with gallery admission. RSVP is required via the form below.

New Music Detroit (NMD) is a collective of musicians dedicated to performing groundbreaking musical works from the late-20th century to the present day. A highly flexible ensemble with a cast of core members and prominent guest artists, NMD performs new and adventurous classical music in a wide variety of settings, for a wide variety of people. NMD strives to collaborate with the most exciting creative voices of our time and regularly gives performances of rarely-heard works by today’s major composers. Through innovative programming and risk-taking, virtuoso performances, NMD continues to explore new ways of bringing the best of new and experimental music to the City of Detroit.  

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Free with museum admission. Click here for more information!

Friday, January 27, 2023 @ DIA Film Theatre, Detroit 7pm 

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When Stravinsky wrote the The Soldier’s Tale in 1918, he was already revered for his great ballets that brought dance and music together so seamlessly, but World War 1 and the Russian Revolution brought extraordinary financial hardship. Stravinsky’s genius was to create the The Soldier’s Tale as a masterpiece in miniature, with dancers and narration accompanied by only 7 instrumentalists – two strings, two winds, two brass and percussion. With Detroit Chamber Winds & Strings and Eisenhower Dance Detroit, the performance will include three narrators. Singer, award-winning songwriter and actor Lulu Fall, will narrate the role of the soldier. New music soprano, Jocelyn Zelasko will portray the role of the Devil and Carl Grapetine, long-time host of the morning program on WFMT/ 98.7 FM, Chicago's Classical music station, will take on the role of a narrator.

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Free with museum admission. Click here for more information!

Friday, December 9, 2022 @ Wasserman Projects, Detroit 7pm

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Sand and Stone draws inspiration from Janus, Matter Design's massive concrete sculpture, serving as a monument of contradictions and as a reference point for the accompanying pieces in Wasserman Projects' exhibition 'Ancient Entanglements'. The musical program is a parallel reflection upon duality and the deep entanglement of the old with the new. Veiled by Niloufar Nourbakhsh opens the program, capturing the dissonant clash between modern revolutionary change and oppressive and persistent remnants of subjection. Ear, Skin, and Bone Riddles by Marcos Balter echoes ghosts of the past, tilling through layers of trauma to make way for growth. Taking us deep down to the darkest layers of the ocean, we hear the language of a primordial world untouched and unexplored by humans in Shiosai by Noriko Baba. The following triad of works, Less Is More (Molly Joyce), The Reflecting Pool (Leo Chadburn), and The Understanding of All Things (Kate Soper) reflect a dissolution of the overcomplicated in favor of the innate. The program concludes with Wooden by Silvia Borzelli, an unfolding soundscape exploring the capabilities of achieving depth and malleability in a rigid material. 

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Click here for tickets!

Sunday, December 4, 2022 @ Epiphany Chicago 2pm

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Since meeting at Eighth Blackbird’s inaugural Blackbird Creative Lab in 2017, Jocelyn Zelasko (voice) and Phoebe Wu (piano) have performed many engaging and thought-provoking concerts together, with a recent focus on the music of George Crumb. The duo will present two works by George Crumb: the song cycle Apparition with text from Walt Whitman's 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'; and A Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979 for solo piano, inspired by the Nativity frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy. They will be joined by guest artist Michael Whalen (percussion) to perform Fjóla Evans’ Desiccated for piano and percussion. Fjóla Evans is a Canadian/Icelandic composer and cellist whose work explores the visceral physicality of sound while drawing inspiration from patterns of natural phenomena. Inspired by the patterns of cracks in drying mud, Desiccated builds a world from withered attacks and husky buzzings. Vibraphonist Michael Whalen joins the duo for the Illinois premiere of this work.

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Visit EpiphanyChi for tickets!

Fri, Sep 16, 2022 - Sun, Sep 18, 2022 @ Andy Arts Center & The Cube

Andy Arts Center (Fri) & The Cube @ Orchestra Hall (Sat & Sun)

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​This year's contemporary music marathon features some of our city's finest forward-thinkers in music, a world premiere commission from Marcus Elliot and chamber arrangements of music by Shara Nova (My Brightest Diamond).

Schedule:

FRIDAY (Andy Art Center): 8pm (Doors at 7pm)
New Music Detroit: Crumb & Evans
James Cornish Light Opera

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SATURDAY (The Cube): 8pm (Doors at 7pm)
New Music Detroit performing: Kyriakidas and guest composers: Marcus Elliot + Shara Nova

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SUNDAY (The Cube): 7pm (Doors at 6pm)
Sophiyah E. Ensemble
Marcus Elliot
Rafael Statin

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