Presented by TURNmusic

7pm doors / 7:30pm music

all ages

$15-30 sliding scale

Join vocalist and Hardanger d’amore player Zosha Warpeha for an evening of intimate and meditative music in anticipation of her forthcoming album silver dawn. Matthew Evan Taylor will open the night and then join Zosha for a duet performance. 

Zosha Warpeha is a composer-performer working in a meditative space at the intersection of contemporary improvisation and folk traditions. Using bowed stringed instruments alongside her own voice, her long-form compositions explore transformations of time and tonality. She performs primarily on Hardanger d’amore, a sympathetic-stringed instrument closely related to the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, as well as five-string violin. Her current acoustic and electro-acoustic work is informed by the cyclical forms, rhythmic elasticity, and the physical momentum of Nordic folk music. 

Originally from Minnesota and currently based in Brooklyn, NY, she is active within folk and improvised music communities in the United States and abroad as a solo artist, collaborator, and session musician. Notable performances have taken place at the Emanuel Vigeland Museum (Norway - Solo), Bern Jazz Festival (Switzerland - Zosha Warpeha Quartet), Drammen Sacred Music Festival (Norway - Unni Løvlid & Zosha Warpeha: VITA), Newport Jazz Festival (USA - Ben Morris Quintet), and Detroit Institute of Arts (USA - Sonya Belaya’s “Dacha”). She was commissioned in 2022 to compose and perform a full-length score for a movement piece by choreographer Erin Landers, titled of body of body of, which premiered at MOtiVE Brooklyn. Recent performance projects include an improvisational duo with percussionist Carlo Costa, electro-acoustic ambient duo visible worlds, and contemporary chamber ensemble Stratus Quartet. 

In 2019, Zosha received the US Fulbright Award to embark upon a year of artistic study in Norway. Her Fulbright project and subsequent master’s project involved a practice-based study of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle tradition and the development of a personal approach to solo performance through Nordic folk music and contemporary improvisation. Her work has also been supported by the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. She holds bachelor's degrees from the New School of Jazz & Contemporary Music and Eugene Lang College in New York City and a master’s degree in Nordic folk music performance from the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo.  

https://zoshawarpeha.com/

Composer and improviser Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor (1980) has been hailed as a composer of “insistent and defiant…envelopingly hypnotic” music (Alan Young, Lucid Culture). Dr. Taylor’s work is sparked by his curiosity about the surrounding world and the inherent social bonds built through music. Whether he is addressing issues about the nature of time or the bounds of the human breath on musical performance, Dr. Taylor writes music that is engaging, surprising, and unmistakably human. His aesthetic is typified by vibrant instrumental colors, mercurial juxtapositions, and an affinity for groove. Innovative projects such as Life Returns, Say Their Names, Postcards to the Met, and The Unheard Mixtapes were created as new templates for composition and performance in the wake of the pandemic. His ongoing series The Living Score aims to decolonize the compositional process by democratizing the most precious Western musical artifact – the musical score. Dr. Taylor’s music is available through New Amsterdam Records. Dr. Taylor is based in Vermont, where he is Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College. He also serves as Artist-Teacher in Composition at The Longy School of Music of Bard College.