Jack Straw Artist Support Program

Phillip Arnautoff is a Seattle-based classical musician and cello player.

Artist Support Program 2009 : Recorded an album of his sixteen Variations for Adapted Cello.

Vicki is an active and passionate performer of all styles of music and plays all sizes of recorders. Her travels and performances have taken her across the United States as well as Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, England, Scotland and Germany.

In the Pacific Northwest, Vicki is a returning soloist with the Seattle Baroque Orchestra and has performed with the Portland Baroque Orchestra, Portland Opera and Philharmonia Northwest Orchestra. She is a regular guest with the Medieval Women’s Choir led by Margriet Tindemans and the Gallery Concerts Series.

She is the new Artistic Director for the Port Townsend Early Music Workshop and is the Music Director for the Portland Recorder Society. Vicki has been on the faculty of the Music Center of the Northwest in Seattle since 2005, and with colleague, Darlene Franz, is the resident recorder teacher for the 3rd grade recorder program at West Woodland Elementary. She is also on the faculty for the newly launched early music program at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.

Vicki taught at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen for 12 years, and at the Ishøj Municipal School of Music for 23 years. She co-founded a regional recorder youth orchestra which continues to flourish and grow in Denmark. Her students from the Royal Academy are all now professional performers and teachers passing on the tradition. She was also co-founder of two Danish-based ensembles: Opus 4, and Wood’N’Flutes and continues to perform with both of these ensembles as often as she can in spite of the geography.

Artist Assistance Program 2012

Artist Support Program 2009 : Recorded an album of six sonatas by the Italian Baroque composer, Francesco Barsanti with Ensemble Electra.

Andrea Baumgarten spent most of her childhood in rural Missouri, where she felt the power of the ballad. Ballads are sung horror tales; they are confession, witness, and warning, wrapped in the resolution provided by ancient melodies that have flowed between continents and counties for hundreds of years. Formerly common, unaccompanied ballads have all but disappeared—just as we urgently need their cathartic essence. Yesterday’s ballad can serve us in the same way that traditional ghost stories have been reborn as urban legends: fear will always be fear, and the telling of it releases us.

Andrea takes Missouri, Ozark, and middle-American ballads and relies upon their ancient structure to tell tales both old and new. Through innovative licensing and open distribution, she hopes to offer a handful of these utterly loud yet achingly quiet pieces back to their owners: listeners reaching for connection to the heart of the matter.

Andrea received a Hedgebrook residency in 2008 to explore her other artistic passion, literature for children and young adults. She is a preschool teacher and parent educator in a local community college program, a former deputy prosecuting attorney, and an avid gardener. Andrea and her family live in Seattle.

2009 Artist Support Program: Record a collection of traditional, unaccompanied ballads

Jesse Canterbury has played new music of many varieties for years:  performances have ranged over jazz, new and old classical music, and free improvisation.  He has performed on countless premieres of new works by emerging and established composers and has given concerts of some of the masterpieces of modern chamber music.  As an improviser, he exhibits a wide ranging vocabulary, built on a thorough knowledge of the clarinet including the various “extended” techniques.  He can be heard on a variety of recordings, highlights of which include collage/décollage, an album of chamber music for two clarinetists (with William O. Smith) and several recordings with the Tom Baker Quartet and the Tom Varner Tentet.  Canterbury’s own compositions can be heard on the contrasting albums Vertigo (clarinet, cello, guitar, and trombone) and Here/Now (clarinet, piano, bass, drums).  Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he performs with sfSound and Dan Plonsey’s Daniel Popsicle.

Fiddler Ruthie Dornfeld’s big tone, fierce rhythm and fluid style, along with a wildly eclectic repertoire, have won her popularity among dancers and concert audiences alike. Fluent in a wide range of traditional styles (Irish, American old-time, Scandinavian and Eastern European, for starters), she has performed and taught for over forty years throughout the USA and from the Manaus Operahouse in the Brazilian Amazon to the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland.

Now settled in Seattle, Ruthie keeps busy as a member of 3 Fiddlers, 3 Traditions (together with Danish fiddler Kristian Bugge and Métis fiddler Jamie Fox), the tango band Tangoheart, accompanying country singing duo Margo Murphy and John Roberts, and playing for local dances. Ruthie also plays a 5 string medieval fiddle (vielle), and her compositions for that instrument are featured in the recording Lay of the Waves, for which she received grants from Artist Trust and the Jack Straw Foundation.

Artist Support Program 2009: Lay of the Waves, an album of original compositions for the 5-string vielle, a medieval percursor to the violin.

Ellen Sollod is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Pacific Northwest. Her practice includes large scale, site-specific public art, multimedia temporary installations, artist books, photography and photo-based works. Born in NY and raised in South Carolina, she moved successively north and west, finally alighting in Seattle, where she has made her home for the last 25 years. Ellen has a BA in art history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a MA from the Institute for Urban Studies, University of Maryland. She served as Assistant Director of the Dance Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, Executive Director of the Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities and the Seattle Arts Commission. Since 1993, she has devoted herself to her public and studio practice, maintaining an activist role on behalf of the arts in civic life. She recently served as Vice Chair of the Seattle Design Commission and as a member of the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture Public Art Advisory Committee. Ellen has traveled extensively to Europe, SE Asia, Africa and Latin America. All of this has influenced her work.

Major public commissions include Seattle’s Mercer Corridor, Brightwater Wastewater Treatment Plant, San Jose Light Rail, Olympia, WA Gateway Corridor, Bellingham, WA Arts District, Pier Park (Portland, OR), Morrill Meadows Park (Kent, WA), Harborview Medical Center (Seattle, WA). Her bookworks are included in such collections as Yale University Center for the Book, NYPL Spencer Collection, University of Washington Special Collections and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

New Media Gallery 2011-12 (with Johanna Melamed): Outside In/Inside Out: The Inner Life of Jack

Malic Amalya is a moving-image artist working at the cross sections of avant-garde cinema traditions, queercore DIY communities, and feminist and critical race theories. Working in 16mm film, video, and expanded cinema, Malic’s work traverses the political implications and emotional impact of estrangement. Images linger over abandoned spaces, decaying fauna, and overgrown wreckages. Forms, sounds, signifiers, and narratives deteriorate and then reform. Slow unveilings, deliberate repetition, and unexpected juxtapositions highlight disregarded details. Tensions rise between preciousness and abjection within the discarded and the overlooked.

Malic is the recipient of the 2014 GOLDIE Award in Film, presented by the SF Bay Guardian. The Museum of Transgender History and Art named him as one of the 2013 “Unrecognized Artists of the Year.” Malic’s film Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow won Best Experimental Film at the 2012 Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival in Portland, Oregon.

Malic currently teaches video production at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and in the Public Education Department at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MA in History and Theory of Contemporary Art from SFAI. Originally from Vermont, Malic lives in Oakland, California with his partner Nathan Hill.

Artist Support Program 2009: Created the 16mm film Drifting.

Byron Au Yong composes songs of dislocation dedicated to intercultural collaboration and the places people call home. Works include Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas (Bumbershoot Festival of the Arts), Occupy Orchestra 無量園 Infinity Garden (Chicago Composers Orchestra), Piano Concerto–Houston (Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts), Stuck Elevator (American Conservatory Theatre), and YIJU 移居 (Jack Straw New Media Gallery).

Au Yong has been artist-in-residence with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Montalvo Arts Center, Rutgers University Center for Migration & the Global City, Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, Virginia Tech Center for the Arts, Westminster Choir College, and Yale Institute for Music Theatre. Honors include a Creative Capital Award and Time Warner Foundation Fellowship.

Artist Support Program 2009

New Media Gallery 2008-09 (with Randy Moss): Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas

New Media Gallery 2004-05: Yiju: Songs of Dislocation

Artist Support Program 1997

Tom Baker has been active as a composer, performer, and music producer in the new-music scene since arriving in Seattle in 1994. He is the artistic director of the Seattle Composers’ Salon, co-founder of the Seattle EXperimental Opera (SEXO), and an advisory board member of the Washington Composers’ Forum. Baker’s works have been performed throughout the United States, Canada and in Europe. His two most recent chamber operas, The Gospel of the Red-Hot Stars (2006) and Hunger: The Journey of Tamsen Donner (2008), were both premiered by the Seattle EXperimental Opera and are available on the Present Sounds label. Baker has received numerous accolades for his work including awards and grants from Meet The Composer, the Seattle Arts Commission, King County Arts Commission, Artist Trust, and Jack Straw Cultural Center. He was also awarded a fellowship in 2006 as an associate artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, where he spent three weeks working with composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill.

In 2011, Baker was chosen to be a resident artist at the Montalvo Center in Saratoga, CA, where he completed the first in a series of ten quartets based on a book of stories by Italo Calvino. As a guitarist (on both fretted and unfretted instruments), Baker has appeared in concerts and recitals throughout the United States including Seattle, San Francisco and New York, as well as in The Netherlands. Baker earned his DMA in Composition from the University of Washington, where he studied composition with Chinary Ung, William O. Smith, and John Rahn. His music has been recorded on several labels, including Rosewood Recordings, Acoustic Levitation, Present Sounds Recordings, and Engine Records.

Artist Support Program 2015: Record and mix new compositions for solo piano and soprano, trumpet, and percussion.

Artist Support Program 2009 (with Seattle Experimental Opera): Record Hunger: The Journey of Tamsen Donner, a new opera about The Donner Party.

Artist Support Program 2006: Record Gospel of the Red-Hot Stars, an “operatorio” based on texts by Margaret Atwood.

Artist Support Program 2004: Record four song cycles for vocalists accompanied by various chamber groupings.

Artist Support Program 2002: Record a composition for string quartet and spoken word.

Artist Support Program 2000: Record a cycle of four songs for baritone, piano and cello, and a work for eight voices.

Jose Carrillo, producer, translator, reader, was born in Durango, Dgo. Mexico, grew up in San Francisco where he graduated from SF State, having studied, music, theater, and poetry. He now lives in Seattle close to his daughters and granddaughters. Currently, Jose free lances in music as a flutist, an actor and writer. He is a member and website manager of Los Norteños Seattle Latino Writers Group. He is also a member of the Cascadia Jazz Big Band in Lynnwood and the Seattle Flute Society.

Artist Support Program 2009: Produce high quality recordings of original literary works by members of Los Norteños Writers and others, prepared in bilingual, Spanish-English editions.

Artist Support Program 2000: produce a CD of original music.

As a pianist, Rachel Matthews has performed across the U.S and in Canada and Europe. Increasingly active in recent years as a composer, Rachel is winner of the 2010 International Music Prize for Excellence in Composition, as well as the first biennial Maurice Gardner Composition Competition. Her works have been heard in concert and on radio around the country, and 2013 saw the premiere of her works at the Fondazione Ambrosianeum in Milan and the Espoo Music College in Finland. Rachel is recipient of grants and commissions including the American Composers Forum, 4Culture, and Jack Straw’s Artist Support Program, and she held a 2011 City Artist Grant from the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs. Her Voices of Trees for clarinet and piano was released in 2008 on the Origin Classical label, and a full-length disc of her compositions, entitled Dreams, produced through Jack Straw’s Artist Support Program, was released in April 2012 on Centaur. This album was well received in the national press: critic Laurence Vittes described it as “exquisite . . . one of those miracles in which a new musical vision is defined” (Strings, November 2012). Various of her works are published by Ourtext and Comus Editions, both based in the UK.

Rachel Matthews is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and holds a doctorate in piano performance from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, where she was recipient of the Irving Lowens Memorial Prize and the Peabody Career Development Grant. She maintains an active teaching studio in Seattle.

Artist Support Program 2014: Record material for her second CD of original compositions.

Artist Support Program 2009: Record new original works for piano and violin.

Captain Gravel began their musical experiment in 2004 as a bluegrass band. One-microphone, suit wearing acoustic music. This format served them well for several years. Slowly over time the members of the band would be replaced and the sound would shift to a point where Captain Gravel no longer became recognizable to those formerly familiar with the group. This is where we pick up the story.

Captain Gravel is a band of Seattle musicians playing a form of mostly acoustic music. There are amps on stage, a drum set which didn’t exist before and when appropriate to the room, a Hammond organ providing a sonic wall unknown to this reformed string band. Still occupying the traditional realm; acoustic guitar, mandolin and upright bass maintain their prominent roles. The change in sound and instrumentation was not calculated in ways one might assume. The band is based on a group of musicians who enjoy making music together regardless of genre preconceptions or traditional dogma. The influences are vast and the sound is diverse but seems to live somewhere between country, jazz, folk and rock.  The experiment continues and we hope that if you have a listen you enjoy what we offer.

2009 Artist Support Program: Record a collection of original music