Music Omi International Musicians Residency
Overview
Application Guidelines
Listen In - 2004
Listen In - 2006
Listen In - 2007
Guest Mentor
Residents
Program
Overview
Each August, approximately a dozen musicians--composers and performers from around the globe--gather for two and a half weeks to share in a unique collaborative music making residency program. A singular feature of the Music Omi artist colony experience is the presentation of public concerts at the conclusion of the program.
Application Guidelines
(note: 2009 session dates and deadlines will appear in fall 2008)
2009 Residency
How to Apply
Applicants should include the following (joint applications will be considered as well):
Please note that materials will not be returned. Be sure to make a copy of your application for your own records.
- A letter describing your work and why you would make a good candidate for admission to Music Omi. Please indicate how you heard about Music Omi and what instrument(s) you will be performing or working with while at Omi.
- A bio or resume (which identifies your country of origin and where you currently live).
- A recording of your work (CD, DVD, or cassette)--include a brief description of the recording and your specific role in creating it (indicate if you are composer, performer, etc.). Do NOT send scores.
- A letter of recommendation from a professional in your field.
- You must include an e-mail address for notification. NOTE: application materials will NOT be returned.
Mail applications to:
Jeffrey Lependorf, Music Omi Director
Art Omi, Inc.
55 Fifth Avenue, 15th Floor
New York, NY 10003
USA
Fellowships & Prizes
Francis Greenburger Fellowship on Mitigating Religious and Ethnic Conflict: Fellowship only for an artist whose work relates to managing and/or mitigating religious and ethnic conflict. Work made at Omi must be in direct relation to this area.
Prana Studios Award: Prana Studios Award Sponsorship for an Indian who currently lives and works in India.
Questions may be directed to: musicians@artomi.org
Music Omi 2008 Guest Mentor
Katie Down
Katie Down is a composer and sound designer for theatre as well as a performer and is an active player in New York’s downtown music scene. She has created numerous sound scores for Ripe Time, Target Margin, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Butane Group, New Georges, The South Wing, and many other theatrical institutions. She has also created sound installations for two galleries in New York. Katie’s instruments include flute, ukulele, voice, and a host of non-traditional, homemade instruments including glass harmonica and the steel cello. She has been a member of several ensembles including the Sephardic music ensemble Adelantre, and the Bulgarian choir, Yasna Voices. She is currently an active member of both The Ukuladies! and The New York Ukulele Ensemble. Katie has traveled extensively throughout the Balkans, Europe, and Africa teaching and performing with different theatre companies conducting vocal and improvisation workshops for young adults and children. She recently returned from South Africa where she was teaching and performing for two months with the clown theatre company, The Glass Contraption, and will be teaching clowning, voice, and of course ukulele again in Ohrid, Macedonia in June. Katie is currently pursuing a masters degree in music therapy at NYU.
Katie Downs Website
Music Omi 2008 Invited Residents
(Last year's 2007 Music Omi Residents)
Ricardo Arias (Colombia)
Ivo Bol (Netherlands) is a composer, live performer and sound artist from Amsterdam who specializes in music for film, dance and theatre. He has developed a live sampling and synthesis instrument using various game controllers to trigger and manipulate sound in an intuitive and playful way. Ivo Bol has finished a Sonology course at the Royal Conservatory in Den Haag and has performed in China, the United States, Venezuela and throughout Europe.
http://www.ivobol.nl/
Vlady Bystrov (Russia/Germany) studied jazz and classic music in St. Petersburg, Russia, receiving an MA, and in 1994 took his residence in Braunschweig, Germany. Since then he has performed in numerous experimental projects introducing (and connecting) electronics, video, dance and painting. Since 2004 he has acted as artistic manager of "neue-nacht" ("new-night"), an international forum for electro-acoustical music and media art (www.neuenacht.de). He currently tours internationally with a repertoire of solo compositions composed for a live-electronic setup he developed himself "... for one musician and electronics."
www.bystrov.de
Alessandro Bossetti (Italy)
http://www.melgun.net/
Ziggy Campbell (Scotland) sings and writes songs with his band FOUND and creates sound installations in the guise of FOUND Electronics. He's currently signed to Fence Records.
www.myspace.com/ziggycampbell
Julianne Carney (US) is a classically trained, improvising violinist based in Brooklyn, NY, who finds intersections between classical, Appalachian old time, electro-acoustic improv, hip hop, gypsy, indie, and arabic sounds. Julianne performs with her duo Ahnfinod with saxophonist Lathan Hardy, performed with Jay Z at Radio City Music Hall and at Royal Albert Hall, recorded with Sufjan Stevens for his album Illinois, and has appeared with Beyonce, Jenny Scheinman, Bill Frisell, Adam Matta (beatbox), My Brightest Diamond (formerly AwRY), among many other projects. Julianne has completed extensive training in the Suzuki Method and teaches violin in Brooklyn. She was a Watson Fellow in 2001-02 and received her B.Mus in Violin Performance, Summa Cum Laude, at Lawrence University.
Jen-Kuang Chang (Taiwan/US) is a composer of acoustic, electronic, and audiovisual composition. His works have been featured in SCI Conference, Spark Festival, Electronic Music Midwest, Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, Sonoimágenes Festival, ASTAS ROMAS 404 Festival, Signal and Noise Festival, and the Summer Studies for Jazz & Improvised Music Salzburg. His "Chakra," the 2nd prize winner of the JIMS International Composition Contest for Improvised Chamber Music "Stadtpfeifer", will soon be released in ERM Media record's new CD series "Made in Americas."
Eremira Çitaku (Kosovo)
http://myspace.com/flautizma
http://myspace.com/eremiracitaku
NYC based singer and writer, Monika Heidemann likes to create mysterious melodies over the grind of weird rock on the fringes of jazz, with enough spontaneous ruminations to still question where her music could have come from. Her music and lyrics are a platform for her band to tell the ever-changing story of her songs. Monika has released her first solo album "Bright" in 2006 and is awaiting a fall 2008 release for her second full length. She has toured the US and Europe with her various projects and has received two Meet the Composer grants to perform her music abroad.
http://monikah.com/
Jasna Jovicevic (Serbia/Canada)Jasna Jovicevic (Serbia/Canada) is a saxophone, flute player and composer. Jasna received her BA degree in jazz saxophone from FrancLiszt Music Academy in Budapest, and is this summer receiving her MA degree in composition from the York University in Toronto, Canada. She has also studied music in Serbia, Brazil and Austria and has received grants to Veneto Jazz in Italy, Banff Centre in Canada, ArtsLink in New York City, and the Djerassi Residency/San Francisco Artist in Residency program. Jovicevic received 1st prize at the International Ethno Music Competition in Milan (Italy), 2nd prize at the International BalkanArt Festival in Ljubljana (Slovenia), and the 3rd prize at the Contest for Best Jazz Composition organized by the Hungarian Jazz Federation. She has performed with such artists as Billy Harper, Mike Murley, Chico Freeman, Al Di Meola, Ray Anderson, Dave Young, Edgar Mayer, Cecil Bridgewater, Kenny Aronoff, Benny Powll, Szakcsi Lakatos Bela, Olah Kalman and many others, and has a solo album coming out in June.
http://www.jasnamusic.com/
http://www.myspace.com/jasnajazz
Sankari Krishnan (India) is a South Indian Classical vocalist performing all over India and abroad. Adisciple of the world renowned violin maestro, Lalgudi G.Jayaraman, she is also a senior faculty at Brhaddhvani, The Research and Training Centre for the Musics of the World. She is also an 'A' Grade artiste of the prestigious Radio Corporation of India, viz All India Radio.
http://www.sankarikrishnan.com/
Udo Moll (Germany) Cologne-based trumpet player and composer Udo Moll is widely recognized as one of the most innovative minds of the younger German music scene. Having studied jazz trumpet and contemporary composition in Cologne, he founded the legendary groups "Brainslasher," "Teufelshörner" and "Novotnik44," and composed music for dance theatre and a variety of chamber music in cross-stylistic settings. Currently he works a lot with media artists and is researching Eastern European folk music as well as the possibilities of using the computer as an instrument for improvisation. Traveling with diverse groups, Moll has played concerts all over Europe and in Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Taiwan, Korea and Japan.
www.udomoll.de
Hans Parment (Sweden) has written music for a diverse range of performers and environments, from solo-instrument to orchestra. Today he mostly works with electroacoustic music, often in combination with live instruments. As a flutist, Hans plays improvised contemporary music and often works on interdisciplinary projects bringing together visual artists, performers and video film makers. Currently Hans Parment teaches composition, with responsibility for the Master Class for Contemporary Music at Växjö University, and is also a teacher with the Art & Sound Department at the Culture School in Växjö, is a producer at Contemporary Music and Artists (CoMA), a centre for modern art music in Växjö (www.comasweden.se), is also Chairman of Media Artes, an experimental forum for innovative artistic manifestations.
Milo Tamez, freelance Mexican percussionist-composer, leads: SchlagArt Project ¨Arte Percusivo Libre¨; rízOmä dance-poetry-percussion-video collective; and the TAMBORERO LAB Percussion Quartet.
http://www.myspace.com/mulocololo
Ute Völker (Germany)is an accordionist who specialises in improvised music. She gives concerts regularly at international festivals for improvised music in Europe where she performs as a soloist or in ad-hoc positions. She also works in interdisciplinary projects together with visual artists, video film makers, actors, literati and performers. She lives in Wuppertal and works as a music teacher at the Musikschule Bochum (Bochum Music School).
http://www.utevoelker.de/
Music Omi Director
Jeffrey Lependorf
Jeffrey Lependorf, himself an alumnus of Music Omi, creates operas, chamber music, and sound installations, and is also a 'certified master' of the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese bamboo flute (he received the venerable name Koku-"empty nothingness"-from Kinko Master Yoshinobu Taniguchi in 1984). He has performed and had work performed around the globe; literally, in fact: a recording of his "Night Pond" for solo shakuhachi was launched into space when the shuttle Atlantis took off on May 15, 1997 and remained for a year aboard the Russian space station Mir. Most recently, his music composition concentrates on opera projects that utilize transcriptions of real speech combined with appropriated musical materials to explore multifaceted layerings of opera, language and history.
The Program
Each August, approximately a dozen musicians--composers and performers from around the globe--gather for two and a half weeks to share in a unique collaborative music making residency program. Music Omi encourages its residents to participate as members of an international musical community; sharing ideas, performing each others works and writing music for one another while exploring their own musical vision. Music Omi invites applicants from all musical disciplines who wish to broaden their artistic horizons and engage actively with a diversity of other musicians. Unlike most artists residency programs, where artists come to work in isolation, Music Omi actively encourages the exchange of ideas and the sharing of cultures through active collaboration. A singular feature of the Music Omi experience is the presentation of two public concerts at the conclusion of the program (one on the Art Omi campus itself near the conclusion of the residency, and the other at a New York City venue the day following the conclusion of the residency).
Applicants may be primarily composers, improvisers or performers, but have some proficiency in each of these areas. Music Omi welcomes academically trained musicians, musicians "of the street," players of traditional instruments, concert instruments, vocalists, and sound artists of all kinds. "Pop," "jazz," "classical," "folk," "experimental," and other such labels have no bearing on the selection process, only musical excellence and a wish to collaborate. It is recommended that applicants come not with specific projects in mind, but rather with a willingness to share their skills and sensibilities, and an openness to working together with others on jointly conceived musical projects.
All awarded fellows commit to remaining for the entire residency and to participating in the concluding concerts. Everyone accepted to Music Omi receives full room and board during his or her stay (note that Art Omi is unable to provide travel funds).
Advisory Committee
David Amran
Robert H. Browning
Alain Kirili
Butch Morris
Isaiah Sheffer
Board of Directors
Laura Andel
Baikida Carroll
John Cross
Linda Cross
Francis Greenburger, President
Andy Humphrey
Ingrid Jensen
Joan Kaghan
Arthur Kell
David Kra
Jeffrey Lependorf, Director
Lee Repko
Cynthia Rogers
C. Bryan Rulon
Ursel Schlicht
Ross Willows
Sponsors - Thank You
Music Omi expresses its gratitude to the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Irish Arts Council, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Republic of China), the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, Friends of Music Omi, and Francis Greenburger.
