Sonic Meditation for Solo Performer
Steve Parker
April 13th - May 6th
Open Hours: Saturdays, 12-6pm (no tickets or reservations required)
Closing Performance with Pamela Martinez: Saturday, May 6th, 7-9pm (tickets required)
Sonic Meditation for Solo Performer reimagines the college marching band as a tool for sonic meditation. The project examines themes of healing, injury, and labor in NCAA football, drawing from legacies of sonic therapy, including 12th c. abbess Hildegard von Bingen’s liturgical songs, Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice, Anthony Braxton’s radical marching bands, and Guadalupe Maravilla’s Disease Thrower sculptures.
The installation works as an immersive musical composition featuring an ecosystem of automated sonic sculptures made from salvaged marching band instruments. The installation is activated by a viewer or performer wearing an EEG headset. As the participant realizes the text score, the EEG device measures and transmits electrical brain activity. The data generated by the participants' brain waves are translated in real-time to realize a multi-channel composition played by the instruments.
Steve Parker is an artist that works with salvaged musical instruments, amateur choirs, marching bands, urban bat colonies, flocks of grackles, and pedicab fleets to investigate systems of control, interspecies behavior, and forgotten histories. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Tito’s Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Parker’s projects include elaborate civic rituals for humans, animals, and machines; listening sculptures modeled after obsolete surveillance tools; and cathartic transportation symphonies for operators of cars, pedicabs, and bicycles. Exhibition and performance highlights include the American Academy in Rome (Italy), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas), CUE Art Foundation (NY), the Fusebox Festival (Austin), Gwangju Media Art Festival (Korea), the Guggenheim Museum (NY), the Lincoln Center Festival (NY), Los Angeles Philharmonic inSIGHT (LA), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), the McNay Art Museum (San Antonio), Rich Mix (London), SXSW, and Tanglewood. As a soloist and as an artist of NYC-based "new music dream team" Ensemble Signal, he has premiered 200+ new works.
Parker has been awarded support from the National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, the Copland Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, and the Mid America Arts Alliance. He is curator of SoundSpace at the Blanton Museum of Art, Executive Director of Collide Arts, and a faculty member at UTSA. He holds degrees in Math and Music from Oberlin, Rice, and UT Austin.
This project was generously supported by the Music Academy of the West Alumni Enterprise Award, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and the Art League Houston.