Jack Straw Artist Support Program

The practitioners of the ancient art of alchemy often sought to transform or combine a variety of elements. In a similar manner, the members of the ensemble Alchymeia gather folk song ingredients from various cultures and arrange them in new and fascinating ways. The repertoire reflects the varying backgrounds of the ensemble’s founding musicians.

Nadia Tarnawsky has been studying Eastern European singing techniques for nearly two decades with Ukrainian singers Mariana Sadowska, Lilia Pavlovska, Albanian singer Merita Halili, and Bulgarian singers Maria Bebelekova and Donka Koleva. S

Brandon Vance is a two-time Open U.S. National Scottish Fiddle Champion and the youngest player ever to attain the national title at age 14. Brandon has performed with numerous Celtic artists including Alasdair Fraser, Natalie Haas, and Carl Peterson.

Nadia and Brandon began performing together in 2008 and in 2010 they enlisted some of Seattle’s finest musicians to create Alchymeia.

Artist Support Program 2011 : Recorded their debut album Alchymeia.

Aono Jikken, pronounced Ah-Oh-No Gee-Ken (Japanese for blue field experiment), is a Seattle-based experimental ensemble. Through structured improvisation the group creates unique music and soundscapes played on everything from traditional Asian and Western instruments to childrens sound toys, found objects, and specially invented instruments made of metal, plastic, kelp and other materials. The group also incorporates dance, theatre, film, and visual art into their live performances. Aono Jikkens work aims to balance Eastern with Western influences, improvisation with composition, and innovation with conventional approaches to their instruments. Founded in 1997 by Taiko drummer/percussionist and filmmaker William Satake Blauvelt, the group’s members have included: sound composer and instrument maker Susie Kozawa; dancer/choreographer and visual artist Yoko Murao; multi-instrumentalist and sound designer Mike Shannon; and flutist/composer Esther Sugai.

Artist Support Program 2011: Record one or more of their original scores for classic and contemporary silent cinema

Artist Support Program 1998: Produce a soundtrack for the 1926 silent film A Page of Madness.

Wendy Call (she/her) wrote the award-winning nonfiction book No Word for Welcome, co-edited Telling True Stories and Best Literary Translations, and translated three collections of trilingual poetry by Indigenous Mexican women. She lives on Duwamish land (Southeast Seattle) and Mixtec/Zapotec land (Oaxaca City) and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop.

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems, by Mikeas Sánchez, co-translated from Spanish and Zoque by Wendy Call and Shook, includes selections from six books by the only woman to have published a book of poetry in Zoque. Called a “groundbreaking and deeply passionate poetry collection that celebrates language and feminine power” by Library Journal, this trilingual book received a Booklist starred review and glowing coverage in the New York Times Book Review.

How to Be a Good Savage

My grandfather Simón wanted to be a good savage,

he learned Spanish,

and all the saints’ names.

He danced before the altar

and was baptized with a smile.

My grandfather had the force of Red Thunder

and his nagual was a tiger.

My grandfather was a poet

who healed with words.

But he wanted to be a good savage,

learned to eat with a spoon,

and the Nhkirawa’s electric lamps impressed him.

My grandfather was a powerful shaman

who spoke the gods’ language.

He wanted to be a good savage,

but he never quite learned how.

Artist Support Program 2011 (with Irma Pineda): A trilingual (Zapotec-Spanish-English) audio collection of poems.

2008 Writers Program

Irma Pineda is an author, editor, translator, and educator in Juchitán, Oaxaca. She has published seven books of bilingual Isthmus Zapotec-Spanish poetry. She is the only woman to have been president of Mexico’s national organization of indigenous-language authors (ELIAC) and is a professor at the National Teachers University.

Artist Support Program 2011 (with Wendy Call): Record a trilingual (Zapotec-Spanish-English) CD of one dozen poems.

City Meditation Crew is a fictitious city department tasked with inspiring hurried pedestrians to slow down and notice their environs one moment at a time. Members remain nameless to the extent possible to emphasize what they do rather than who they are.

New Media Gallery 2016-17 (with Vaughn Bell): Meditations on Water

Artist Support Program 2011: Create an “audio map” of Seattle in collaboration with a writer, a sound artist, and a scientist.

Count Constantin is a violinist, composer, bow maker and luthier.

The violin is the world’s most perfect amplifier. It can find ghosts from the past and receive signals from across the Cosmos. Count Constantin sees the strings of the violin as four mathematical lines, each of which contains an infinite number of points. As a violinist, he invents scales that don’t exist and tries for notes that aren’t there.

As a composer, and indeed, as a musician in general, he is interested in heterophony, polyphony, gapped scales and additive rhythms, but always, one hopes, in the service of the Music, and not the other way around.

Artist Support Program 2011: Record the original 5-movement string quartet Voronets Blue.

Born in outer Mongolia, Urtaa Gantulga began studying morin khuur at the age of eleven. The son of a traditional Mongolian wrestler, Urtaa began racing horses at 5 years old and was the two time champion of the famous Naddam Horseracing Festival. However, at the urging of his grandfather, who loved folk singing, he decided to study music. In 2000, Mr. Gantulga joined the Mongolian Morin Khuur Ensemble and three years later graduated from the Music and Dance College in Ulaan Bataar. He has performed in over 14 countries, including Russia, China, Japan, North and South Korea, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria. o, Urtaa moved to the U.S. to expose western audiences to the morin khuur and increase Americans’ knowledge of Mongolian culture. He currently teaches and performs in Seattle.

Artist Support Program 2011: Produce an album of solo and accompanied Morin Khuur (Mongolian horsehead fiddle) music.

The Monktail Creative Music Concern is a collective of composers, musicians and artists based in Seattle, WA who thrive o­n the atypical and exigent; the real weirdo stuff.

The collective recorded the Special O.P.S. EP Backdoor Draft as part of their Artist Support Program residency at Jack Straw in 2011.

Artist Support Program 2011: Record new pieces composed by its members.

Jesikah Maria Ross is an award winning media artist who works with schools, non-governmental organizations and social action groups to create participatory media projects that generate civic engagement and community change. She is the founding director of the UC Davis Art of Regional Change, which brings scholars, students and artists together with community members to collaborate on media projects that address pressing social issues. Jesikah recently co-directed Saving the Sierra, a multimedia project using public radio, the internet, and a mobile storybooth to spotlight grassroots efforts to conserve the culture, economy, and environment of California’s Sierra Nevada. The project produced five public radio features, 80 webstories, a Sustaining Rural Places toolkit, and a documentary special that aired on over 200 NPR stations.

Artist Support Program 2011: Produce an audio tour of the Cache Creek Nature Preserve in Northern California.

Bob Antone is from a family of artists and woodcarvers with a history in the Pacific Northwest.  Many of his uncles and both grandfathers were or still are wood carvers, painters or sculptors. This includes a variety of materials including metal and ceramics.  His specialties are oral history and immigrant folklore of the Seattle area and greater northwest region.  He also performs historical music, recites poetry and plays instrumental compositions in connection to his visual expression. Performed on a musical saw, old family violin from 1893, heirloom guitar and Irish drum, the music accompanies visual storytelling and folklore.  Bob is currently a music teacher at Music and Arts located on Front Street in Issaquah, WA.

Artist Support Program 2011 : Recorded an album that tells his story through music with an old family violin from 1893 Seattle, his grandfather’s musical saw, and songs performed in a Northwest regional style.

Nicholas Chase’s music has been hailed by Strad Magazine as ‘brilliant,’ the Los Angeles Times as ‘flamboyant, avant-garde’ and ‘brawling…the Rite of Spring meets Metallica,’ by the Albuquerque Journal as ‘crackling, witty,’ by the Whittier Press as ‘seamless, powerful… spectacular’ and, dubbing him ‘Eye/Ear Explorer,’ the LA Weekly writes of his short opera 22, ‘the human brain at its most imaginative.’

Chase earned his MFA in Composition/New Media and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts studying with Morton Subotnick, Bunita Marcus, Stephen L. Mosko, and additionally with Ziad Bunni of the Aleppo Conservatory of Arabic Classical Music, and James Tenney. In 2011 he earned PhD candidacy in Integrated Elecgronic Arts at Renssellaer Polytechnic Institute working with Pauline Oliveros.

“Voluptuous” is one of several tracks produced through Nicholas Chase’s 2011 Jack Straw Artist Support Program residency. “Voluptuous: Works for Solo Piano” is available here and more albums featuring works produced at Jack Straw will be released in the near future.

Adam Fong is an active composer, performer and producer of new music, and a community leader in arts and culture.

He has helped build two innovative arts service organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area: Emerging Arts Professionals (Co-Founder 2008; Director 2011-14) is a network dedicated to the development and growth of next generation arts and culture workers; Center for New Music (Co-Founder 2012; Executive Director 2012-18) serves the practitioners of creative, non-commercial music in San Francisco by providing resources including space to work, rehearse and perform, and access to a like-minded community. In 2018, he joined the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as Program Officer in the Performing Arts.

As Associate Director of Other Minds (2006–2012), Fong produced the annual Other Minds Festival and contributed to many special projects including the four-disc reissue of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano, tribute concerts to Ruth Crawford Seeger, Henry Cowell, and Carl Ruggles, a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Fluxus, the US Premiere of 18 Microtonal Ragas based on “Solo for Voice 58” by John Cage, and the creation of a composer fellowship. Fong’s own compositions have been performed internationally in Auckland, London, Berlin, Tübingen and Darmstadt, at many US universities, and throughout California, by performers including New York’s Dither Quartet, the Magik*Magik Orchestra, and the two-piano team Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa.

Fong received the MFA in Music Composition at California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with James Tenney and Wadada Leo Smith. He also holds a master’s degree from Stanford University (English), has lectured on cultural entrepreneurship at San Francisco Conservatory of Music and on experimental music at CalArts, and has served as a strategist, producer, and panelist for a wide variety of cultural communities, foundations, awards, and public agencies.

Artist Support Program 2011: Record Prime Speed, an experimental composition for multi-tracked, just-tuned voices

Justin Mata is a curator and a visual artist working in painting, installation and video. He received his BFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.  His works have been shown at NURTUREart (Brooklyn), El Museo del Barrio (New York), Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle) and ArtXChange Gallery (Seattle). He is a GAP Grant recipient from the Artist Trust (Seattle), Artist Support recipient from Jack Straw (Seattle) and a member of the Artist Trust, New York chapter. He is also the curator for the Rare Medium collective in Capitol Hill.

Artist Support Program 2011: Produce a soundtrack for Excerpts from a Treaty, a new animated video work.

Clarinettist Sean Osborn has performed on four continents since his recital debut at the age of seventeen at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Appointed over nearly 300 other applicants to a position with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in 1989, Osborn was the youngest clarinetist in the history of the Met.

A student of Stanley Hasty at the Eastman School of Music, Sean Osborn is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and the Interlochen Arts Academy where received its highest honor – the Young Artist Certificate, while studying with Dr. Frank Kowalsky. In 1999 he received his Master’s Degree from Southern Illinois University, where he studied clarinet with Dr. Eric Mandat and composition with Dr. Frank Stemper. He has also given numerous master classes throughout the country, including those at The Eastman School of Music, Rice University, Florida State University, and The Manhattan School of Music. From 2006-2009, Sean taught clarinet and chamber music at the University of Washington.

Artist Support Program 2011: Bits and Pieces, an album of solo clarinet music, including standards, rarely recorded, and never-before-recorded works.

Artist Support Program 2006: 32 Etudes for Clarinet, by composer Cyrille Rose.

Artist Support Program 2011: The vocal group Sankofa produced a CD of a capella music written, arranged, and/or originally performed by musicians from the African Diaspora.

Byron Schenkman believes in the power of music to bring people together for healing and joy. By the time they went to their first music camp at the age of eleven, Byron knew that playing chamber music would be an important part of their life’s work. They have since been a founding member of several ensembles, including the Seattle Baroque Orchestra which they codirected until 2013. In addition to performing live on piano, harpsichord, and fortepiano, Byron can be heard on more than forty CDs, including recordings on historical instruments from the National Music Museum, Vermillion, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A recipient of the Erwin Bodky Award from the Cambridge Society for Early Music “for outstanding achievement in the field of early music,” Byron was voted “Best Classical Instrumentalist” by the readers of Seattle Weekly, and their piano playing has been described in The New York Times as “sparkling,” “elegant,” and “insightful.” A graduate of the New England Conservatory and Indiana University, Byron currently teaches music history at Seattle University, and has been a guest lecturer in harpsichord and fortepiano at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Artist Support Program 2011 (with Seattle Baroque): Record a CD of chamber works by Antonio Vivaldi.

The Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble (SJCE) exists to create and perform new compositions by Pacific Northwest composers and arrangers, providing sustainable opportunities for continuing education and work advancement for professional musicians. Within this context SJCE strives to provide the public with unique, compelling community events at the lowest cost possible; integrate cross-disciplinary elements to transcend the traditional concert format; showcase Pacific Northwest composers and musicians on a regional and national level; channel public and private funding directly into the hands of artists for their work.

Since its founding in 2007 by Michael Owcharuk and Nate Omdal, SJCE has commissioned over 15 composers, featured over 30 musicians, produced several large concert events a year, and performed many grassroots concerts; all sustained through community support. SJCE has received support from 4Culture, The Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, and Jack Straw Artist Support Program, and has garnered media attention from the Seattle Times, The Stranger, and 94.9fm KUOW.

Artist Support Program 2014: record an album of newly commissioned works from Seattle composers.

Artist Support Program 2011: SJCE Volume 1, an album of newly commissioned works from Seattle composers.

Stephen Silha is a communications consultant, writer and facilitator. He oversees the web and film operations, raises funds, and inspires. He has reported for magazines and newspapers including The Christian Science Monitor and The Minneapolis Star, covering education, communications, arts, community affairs, and youth issues. He has worked with a range of philanthropic organizations, including The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Northwest Area Foundation, and Idaho Commission on the Arts. His nonprofit clients have included the United Nations, Libraries for the Future, Children’s Express, Washington Council for the Humanities, Digital Partners, AIDS Housing of Washington and Seattle’s Metrocenter YMCA. He co-convened the first national symposium on the Media and Philanthropy, which spawned the local research project Good News/Good Deeds: Citizen Effectiveness in the Age of Electronic Democracy. Today, he co-facilitates Journalism That Matters, a think-tank on the future of journalism.

Artist Support Program 2011: Record the soundtrack and edit audio for the documentary film Big Joy.

Curtis Taylor is a narrative filmmaker and playwright. In Seattle he operated the underground theater Vodvil from 1996 to 2006, and under these auspices created original folk operas, cabarets, recitals and sound art installations. His recent work has combined mannered musical languages (murder ballads, sacred choir and opera) with historic stage traditions (ballet, vaudeville and burlesque) to consider themes of art, life and time.

Artist Support Program 2011: Audio production design for The White Days, an original play.

Artist Support Program 2008: Record music featuring the Compline Choir of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle and sound design for Church Weather, a short film that completes a trilogy on the theme of song as visual narrative.

Nick Wong is a writer and photographer who explores culture through the art of boxing. A Mary Gates Scholar, a Bonderman Fellow, and a VONA alum, he served as the assistant editor at the International Examiner from 2009-2010 and now freelances for online boxing websites. He is currently writing his first book about his journey through the boxing gyms of Latin America, and working towards his dream of building boxing gyms around the world.

2012 Writers Program

Artist Support Program 2011: Create an audio companion piece to The Wandering Pugilist, a photographic and literary documentary project.