Carnegie Hill Concerts presents:
Ortiz the Musician
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Featuring compositions by Keir GoGwilt, Wilfrido Terrazas, Kyle Motl, and Vicente Hansen Atria
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Featuring performances and improvisations by:
Miranda Cuckson
Alec Goldfarb
Keir GoGwilt
Conrad Harris
Coleman Itzkoff
Kyle Motl
Wilfrido Terrazas
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Ortiz the Musician is a performance project sounding the complex intertwinement of music and colonization in 16th-century Mexico. The original music for this project is inspired by the life of the eponymous Ortiz — a shadowy figure mentioned in Alejo Carpentier’s monograph on music in Cuba. According to Carpentier, Ortiz played the vihuela and taught dance. He joined Hernán Cortés’s army in Trinidad, Cuba, and was later granted a lot of land in Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, where he installed a school of dance and music.
This performance features seven performers bridging baroque, improvisatory, and experimental traditions to reconstruct the musical world of Ortiz.
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Special thanks to the American Modern Opera Company, YellowBarn Music Festival, and YoungArts for support of this project and presentation.
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Keir GoGwilt is a violinist, scholar, and composer who grew up in New York City, where he currently lives. His work combines historical research and collaborative experimentation across a range of musical styles and genres. Known as a "formidable performer" (New York Times) with an "evocative sound" (London Jazz News) and "finger-busting virtuosity" (San Diego Union Tribune), he has soloed with groups including the Orchestra of St. Luke's, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Chinese National Symphony, Orquesta Filarmonica de Santiago, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the New England Philharmonia, and the La Jolla Symphony. As a founding member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), he has performed original, collaboratively-devised music, dance, and theater works at the 92nd st Y, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Luminato Festival, PS 122 COIL, Stanford Live, American Repertory Theater, Carolina Performing Arts, Momentary, and the Ojai Music Festival. GoGwilt earned his PhD in Music (Integrative Studies) from UC San Diego in 2022 and was awarded the Chancellor's Dissertation Medal for the Division of Arts & Humanities. As an undergraduate at Harvard he studied Literature, and was awarded the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts. His research on histories and philosophies of performance, pedagogy, and embodiment has been published in Current Musicology, Naxos Musicology, the Orpheus Institute Series, and the BACH Journal (forthcoming).
Wilfrido Terrazas (Willy/he/él) is a San Diego-based Mexican flutist, improviser, composer, and
educator whose work explores the borderlands between improvisation, musical notation, and collective creation. He has performed over 400 world premieres, composed over 70 works, and recorded more than 50 albums, eight of them as a soloist or leader. His recordings have been published in Mexico, the US and Europe, on labels like Abolipop, Another Timbre, Bridge, Cero, Creative Sources, New Focus, New World, Transvection, Umor, and Wide Hive. Wilfrido has presented his work in 22 countries. He
has been a guest performer at international festivals such as Creative Fest (Lisbon), ¡Escucha! (Madrid), Festival Cervantino (Guanajuato), High Zero (Baltimore), MATA (NYC), NUNC! (Chicago), and TENOR (Hamburg), and at venues and series for experimental music like Auditorio Nacional (Madrid), Bowerbird (Philadelphia), Teatro Nacional Cervantes (Buenos Aires), CCRMA (Stanford University), Splendor (Amsterdam), Flagey (Brussels), Littlefield Hall (Mills College), Unerhörte Musik (Berlin), St. Ruprechtskirche (Vienna), The Wulf and REDCAT (Los Angeles), Soup & Sound and The Stone/New School (NYC). He has also carried out residencies at Omi International Arts Center (NY), Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida) and Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture (Greece).
Wilfrido is a member of two influential Mexico City-based ensembles: the improvisers’ collective Generación Espontánea, widely acknowledged as one of the pioneering groups for freely improvised music in Latin America, and Liminar, one of Mexico’s leading new music groups. Since 2014, Wilfrido co-curates the Semana Internacional de Improvisación, an improvised music festival in Ensenada, his hometown. Recent collaborations include projects with Angélica Castelló, Amy Cimini, Michael Dessen,
Carmina Escobar, Gabby Fluke-Mogul, Lisa Mezzacappa, Roscoe Mitchell, Abdul Moimême, Natalia Pérez Turner, Iván Trujillo, artists Esther Gámez and G.T. Pellizzi, and poets Ricardo Cázares, Nuria Manzur, and Ronnie Yates. Additionally, his compositions have been performed by José Manuel Alcántara, Aldo Aranda, Anagram Trio, Daniel Bruno, Ensamble Süden, Ghost Ensemble, in^set, International Contemporary Ensemble, Omar López, Low Frequency Trio, San Diego New Music, Kathryn Schulmeister, Albane Tamagna, wasteLAnd, and Miguel Zazueta, among many others. Wilfrido has also published more than 30 texts about music, amongst them four book chapters. Some of his writings can be read in the Pendragon, Routledge, and Suono Mobile presses. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at the University of California San Diego, where he has worked since 2017.
Kyle Motl is a bassist, composer, and improviser described as a “spectacularly adventurous and dynamic musician” whose playing is noted for both “iridescent delicacy as well as abrasive force” (The Wire). A frequent soloist, his performances “promise to change us by revealing things we could never have imagined” (Free Jazz Collective). As a composer and bandleader, Kyle’s ensemble music has been praised for its “speculative, many-layered evolution of imagination,” (Free Jazz Collective) and for “constantly confounding expectation” (Jazz da Gama). He has performed alongside luminaries including Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Kidd Jordan, Mary Halvorson, Anthony Davis, and others. In the area of contemporary concert music, Kyle works regularly with both emerging and established composers and champions new works for the bass. He has performed with ensembles from the International Contemporary Ensemble to Ghost Ensemble, and was improvising bass soloist on the premiere of Anthony Davis’ Central Park Five with the Long Beach Opera. 2022 sees the release of Hydra Nightingale on Infrequent Seams.
Alec Goldfarb is a Brooklyn-based guitarist, composer, and Hindustani classical musician. Active in the NYC jazz and new music communities, his work explores musical traits as historical vestiges of migrations, colonialism, geographies, labor, ritual. An exponent of the Seniya-Maihar Gharana, Alec performs Hindustani classical music across the globe on the guitar using a novel synthesis of sarod and sitar technique. He holds a masters degree in Music Composition from CUNY Brooklyn College and B.A.’s from the University of Illinois in Music Composition/Theory and Philosophy, is an alumnus of the Kimmel Center Creative Music Program, and is currently on faculty at NYC Guitar School. Performances include Roulette Intermedium, the Kimmel Center, Asia Society NYC, The Joyce, and more. Summer 2023 will see a Southeast Asia tour as well as performances in Spain, Morocco, and Germany.
A “fearless, visionary and tremendously talented artist” (Sequenza21), Miranda Cuckson delights listeners with her playing of a remarkably wide range of music and styles, from older eras to the newest creations. Known for her organic expressivity, dexterous virtuosity, imagination, insight, and love for music, she is sought after as a soloist and collaborator. A violinist and violist, she performs internationally at venues large and small, concert halls, and informal spaces. As soloist these have included the Berlin Philharmonie, Suntory Hall, Casa da Musica Porto, Teatro Colón, Cleveland Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Strathmore, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series, National Sawdust, and the Bard, Marlboro, Portland, Music Mountain, Ojai, West Cork (Ireland), SinusTon (Germany), Wien Modern (Austria), and LeGuessWho and Soundsofmusic (Netherlands) festivals. Miranda made her Carnegie Hall debut playing Piston’s Concerto No. 1 with the American Symphony Orchestra. She recently premiered concertos written for her by Georg Friedrich Haas in Tokyo, Stuttgart and Porto, and by Marcela Rodriguez in Mexico City. Her upcoming solo performances include the Grafenegg Festival and San Francisco Performances.
Violinist Conrad Harris has performed new works for violin at Ostrava Days, Darmstadt Ferrienkürse für Neue Musik, Gulbenkian Encounters of New Music, Radio France, Warsaw Autumn, and New York's Sonic Boom Festival. In addition to being a member of the FLUX Quartet and violin duo String Noise, he is concertmaster/soloist with the S.E.M. Orchestra, Ostravská Banda, STX Ensemble, Wordless Music Orchestra and Ensemble LPR.
He has performed and recorded with such artists as Elliott Sharp, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, David Behrman "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Jean-Claude Risset, Rohan de Saram and Tiny Tim. His recordings of the Lejaren Hiller Violin Sonatas with pianist, Joseph Kubera will be released in 2018 on New World Records. He has also recorded for Asphodel, Vandenburg, CRI, and Vinyl Retentive Records.
New York based cellist Coleman Itzkoff enjoys a diverse musical life, playing classical, contemporary, and baroque cello interchangeably, in addition to arranging and improvising music. Recent highlights include performances with the Houston and San Diego Symphonies, chamber performances at La Jolla Summerfest, and Marlboro Music Festival, and Baroque performances with Ruckus at Caramoor and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, as well as the release of the film and soundtrack for the Amazon Original “The Mad Women’s Ball”, for which he was the sole arranger and cellist. Coleman has been featured in several projects as actor, dancer, and musical artist on the stage and on film, and is a long-time collaborator of the director and choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith, having appeared live in her work “Lost Mountain” and in her upcoming film “Broken Theater”. Coleman is a founding member of AMOC, the American Modern Opera Company, who most recently were the music directors for the 2022 Ojai Music Festival. He holds a B.M. from Rice University, a M.M. from USC, and an Artist Diploma from the Juilliard School.
Vicente Atria is a Chilean composer and drummer. Described as “virtuosic”, “revelatory” (The New York Times) and “ecstatic,” (The Guardian), his music riffs on a wide range of idioms, from microtonal renaissance dances to Korean sanjo, creating ludic, futuristic sonic worlds.
A 2022-23 Wet Ink Ensemble Artist-in-Residence, Vicente’s work has been commissioned and performed by the Sun Ra Arkestra, JACK Quartet, Wet Ink Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, and International Contemporary Ensemble. He has been featured in venues and festivals, including Moers Festival (Germany), MATA Festival (NY), The Shed (NY), Roulette Intermedium (NY), The Stone (NY), Festival Mixtur (Spain), and ATLÁNTICX Festival (NY).
He is a recipient of the Deutscher Jazzpreis (2023), the ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award (2022), an ACF Create award (2021), The Shed Open Call commission (2019), and two Chilean Ministry of Culture Fondo de la Música grants (2022 & 2020). He holds a DMA in Composition from Columbia University.