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about the music

Carmel Raz:

"I met Chris Adler in September 2006 through The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall's Professional Training Workshop with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble ... I really connected with his music and improvisation skills. So it seemed only natural to continue our collaboration, and with the help of Gene Coleman and his Soundfield organization, we set up a few concerts and other events in April 2007 in Chicago, where this improvisation was recorded."

Gene Coleman:

"In 2000 I created Soundfield as a platform for new and experimental music, with four categories of programs: Transonic, EurEthos, Crosswork, and American Independents. Each of these categories represents an important area within contemporary music practice that we feel needs attention and greater understanding. Transonic is the category where we explore work that merges Western and non-Western musical ideas and practices. The non-Western element in the program with Christopher and Carmel was the use of traditional Thai instruments. Improvisation and composition both play important roles in exploring how Western and non-Western music can create new, hybrid forms of artistic thought and expression."

about the composers		back to top

Composer, violinist, and improviser Carmel Raz (b. 1982) is an Israeli-American born in Columbia, Missouri and raised in the United States and Israel. She studied composition with Shulamit Ran, Bernard Rands, and Jörg Mainka, and is currently a student of Amnon Wolman. Ensemble performances of her music include the Arditti and Pacifica Quartets, eighth blackbird, Musica Donum Dei, and Vox Novus; grants and support include the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Meet the Composer, and Mellon Foundation. In 2006, Raz was appointed resident composer of the Millennium Chamber Players in Chicago, Illinois. Her current commissions include works for the ensembles dal niente and Musica Nova Consort.

As a performer, Raz has served as concertmaster of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and is regularly invited to appear with Ensemble Noamnesia and Musica Nova Consort. She has collaborated with composers including Osvaldo Golijov, Helmut Lachenmann, Shulamit Ran, and Evan Ziporyn. Also active as an improvising violinist, Raz has performed with Ensemble N_JP, Patricia Barber Quartet, Silk Road Project, and saxophonist Greg Ward. She is currently based in Tel Aviv, Israel.


Gene Coleman (b. 1958) is a composer, musician, and artistic director based in Chicago, Illinois. He has created over 50 works for a range of instrumentations, often incorporating notated and improvised music in the same score. Coleman experiments with instrumental sound production possibilities in his music and performances, seeking a greater synthesis between pure sound/noise and notated music. Since 2001 his work has focused on globalization and music's relationship to architecture and video.

Born in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, Coleman studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1979 to 1984. His principal teachers were Barbara Rossi (painting), Robert Snyder (music and sound art), Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr (filmmaking). He also studied composition privately with Ross Feller. Coleman has an extensive record working internationally, with many composer residencies in Europe and Asia; grants from Meet the Composer and the US State Department for a residency in Beirut, Lebanon; and a fellowship from the NEA/Japan-US Friendship Commission to live for eight months in Japan, where he was aguest composer at the Takefu International Music Festival. Other grants and commissions include Chamber Music Now, Chicago Cultural Center, Ernst von Siemens Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, International House of Japan, Klangforum Wien, Kunststiftung NRW, and Winifred Haun & Dancers.

Coleman is also known for his work as an artistic director of new music programs and festivals. In 2007 he collaborated with the US State Department and Kennedy Center on The Tabadol Project, a concert and outreach project with Lebanese musicians in six US cities, and in 2003-04 directed the Transonic festival at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin. Coleman founded and directs the Soundfield experimental music festival and Ensemble Noamnesia in Chicago, and is music curator for the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. He created the group Ensemble N_JP in 2001 with traditional and experimental Japanese musicians, and collaborates as an improviser with a wide range of performers. Recordings of Coleman's work may be found on the False Walls, GROB, hat ART, Leo, and Okka Disk labels.


Christopher Adler's (b. 1972) work emerges from an exchange between composition, improvisation, mathematics, and the traditional music of Thailand and Laos. He is internationally recognized as a composer and performer of new and traditional music for khaen, a free-reed mouth organ from Laos and northeast Thailand. Adler's music is influenced by experimental and minimalist music of the United States, including the early works of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, later works of Morton Feldman and John Cage, and the ambient works of Alvin Lucier. He has also been influenced by the recent interactions of popular and classical genres by such composers as Louis Andriessen, Michael Gordon, and Evan Ziporyn.

Adler was born in Mountain View, California, and grew up in California and Washington, DC. He studied composition and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and composition at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. His teachers included Scott Lindroth, Stephen Jaffe, Sidney Corbett, Evan Ziporyn, and for studies of Thai music, Panya Roongruang. Adler currently teaches composition, sound art, theory, computer music, and world music at the University of San Diego; he has also taught at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, and was a visiting professor at Mahasarakham University in Thailand.

Adler's music has been performed across the US by ensembles including NOISE, pulsoptional, red fish blue fish, Seattle Creative Orchestra, Silk Road Ensemble, and many solo artists. A CD of Adler's music, Epilogue for a Dark Day, is available on the Tzadik label, and his retrospective analysis of ten years of cross-cultural composition was recently published in Arcana II: Musicians on Music (Hips Road). Adler has performed his own khaen compositions and traditional repertoire at the Bang on a Can Marathon, Carnegie Hall, Cultural Center of Chicago, Music at the Anthology, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and many universities across the US and Thailand. He promotes the instrument through the commissioning of new works, recently premiering a work by Sidney Marquez Boquiren and recording a work by David Loeb for the Vienna Modern Masters label.

Adler is pianist and composer-in-residence with the San Diego New Music resident ensemble NOISE, and recently co-founded the soundON Festival of Modern Music, four days of performances and workshops in June 2007 centered around the work of emerging composers. He performs improvised music on piano in a duo with woodwind player Alan Lechusza and trio with drummer Vikas Srivastava. In addition, he collaborates on khaen with Marcelo Radulovich, Charles Curtis, and Scott Walton as the improvising acoustic ensemble Gunther's Grass. Adler has conducted large improvising ensemble projects by Alan Lechusza and Nathan Hubbard, and performed with a wide range of improvising musicians. Recordings of these projects are available on the Accretions, Artship, Nine Winds, and pfMENTUM labels.

related websites
http://www.carmelraz.com
http://www.soundfield.org/genecoleman.html
http://www.christopheradler.com