On the radio tonight

Tonight, starting at 8:30pm PST, I'll be on the air at KALW (91.7 FM in San Francisco), talking about my music and natural-object instruments. I'll play some examples of my Antarctic and Arctic compositions and perhaps something brand new from my recent trip to Australia. Tune in if you can!

Antarctic Works in Tempe, AZ and Santa Cruz, CA

Next week I'll be out in toasty Tempe, Arizona for the Balance-Unbalance Conference, exploring intersections between nature, art, science, new technologies, aid agencies and society.

I'm very pleased to be performing at the conference on Sunday in Sonic Reckonings, a 60-minute concert of contemporary music about Antarctica. The program includes live performances by Doug Quin, Jay Needham, and myself, as well as a selection of outstanding works for tape by some of the world’s leading “polar” sound artists, including Philip Samartzis and Lawrence English. The performance will include a special edition of program notes authored by music theorist and musicologist Dr. Carolyn Philpott.

If you are in the area don't miss this show!


SUNDAY, MARCH 29, 2015
12:15pm-1:15pm  

Balance Unbalance Conference: Water, Climate and Place 
Stauffer B111, Arizona State University 
950 S. Forest Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281  

SONIC RECKONINGS CONCERT 
Musical works about Antarctica and climate change by Lawrence English, Cheryl E. Leonard, Jay Needham, Phillip Samartis, Douglas Quinn. Live performances by Cheryl E. Leonard, Jay Needham, and Douglas Quinn.

Info on conference registration, and single day/keynote events admission

Fellow Antarctican Oona Stern and I also have a video and music piece entitled Southern Ocean currently on display in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History in their unique Everybody's Ocean exhibition. Our piece is among the video pieces that cycle through on a flat screen monitor on the left side of the gallery as you enter. 


ON VIEW THROUGH APRIL 19, 2015 

Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History
705 Front Street
Santa Cruz, CA

Everybody's Ocean Exhibition
A constantly evolving exhibition of artworks about the ocean featuring both crowd-sourced and curated pieces. Cheryl Leonard and Oona Stern's music and video piece Southern Ocean is included in Wave II of the exhibition.

February Performances in Oakland, CA and Boulder, CO

This month I'm excited to be performing polar music and video works in California and Colorado, including a piece inspired by the Southern Ocean (which encircles Antarctica). The show in Colorado will be streaming live, so you can watch it from anywhere with internet!

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 8, 2015
8-9 pm, free

Temescal Art Center
511 48th Street (at Telegraph)
Oakland, CA 

Composer, musician, and instrument builder Cheryl Leonard will present four works about water created in collaboration with visual artists Rebecca Haseltine and Oona Stern. Inspired by hydrology, aquifers, and California landscapes, Watershed combines field recordings from caves, rivers and oceans with sounds played live on water, glass, shells, kelp, and sand. Frozen Over is based on aural and visual phenomena from frozen lakes, and features recordings of flanging, thumping, and cracking lakes in Yosemite National Park. Rebecca Haseltine will create live video for these two pieces using natural objects, drawing, pouring, and painting. Southern Ocean and Glugge are shorter works about the polar oceans that Leonard has developed with Brooklyn-based Oona Stern. Merging audio recordings and video footage collected in the Arctic and Antarctic with live sounds from natural objects, these pieces reflect on climate change at the ends of the earth.

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 25, 2015
7:30pm (Mountain Standard Time), free
live streaming at music.colorado.edu/live

ATLAS Black Box Theater
Level 2B, Roser ATLAS Building
1125 18th Street
University of Colorado Boulder
Boulder, CO

Pendulum New Music Concert Series
Music and multimedia works by Nick Balderston, Aidan Patrick Cook, Hugh Lobel, JP Merz, and the final round of the 64-Bit E-Music Competition. Cheryl Leonard will perform Southern Ocean and Glugge, two pieces about climate change in the polar oceans with videos by visual artist (and fellow Antarctican) Oona Stern.

Ablation Zone in the San Francisco Tape Music Festival Jan 10th

The Marr Ice Piedmont, Anvers Island, Antarctica

This Saturday January 10th my Antarctic piece, Ablation Zone, will be played in the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, America's only festival devoted to the performance of audio works projected in three-dimensional space. This year the festival features four distinct concerts of classic audio art and new fixed media compositions by 32 local and international composers. Hear members of the SF Tape Music Collective, along with guest composers, shape the sound live over a pristine surround system consisting of 16 high-end loudspeakers while the audience is seated in complete darkness. It's a unique opportunity to experience music forming - literally - around you.

My piece, Ablation Zone, is crafted from field recordings of the Marr Ice Piedmont (the massive glacier that enshrouds most of Anvers Island) plus sounds produced on Adélie penguin vertebrae and nesting stones. Like most glaciers along the Western Antarctica Peninsula, the Marr is shrinking, and behind Palmer Station the ice has retreated more than 1500 feet over the last 50 years. The "ablation zone" of a glacier is the area below a certain elevation where there is a net loss of ice mass due to melting, evaporation, sublimination, calving, wind scouring, and so forth. Within the Marr's ablation zone I collected field recordings of meltwater streams and crevasses full of icicles. In the ocean near the Marr's terminal ice cliffs I recorded icebergs and brash ice that it had jettisoned.

The Marr produced a beguiling array of unique sounds. Each meltwater stream bubbled, gurgled, or sputtered it's own rhythms and melodies, sometimes sounding like electronics or machinery. Icicles dripped the intricate layers of gamalan songs. Icebergs crackled and snapped like giant pop-rocks, or contained large cavities in which waves resonated. To my field recordings, full of motion and insistent energy, I added the subtle sound of polished penguin nesting stones rubbing together, and otherworldly voices produced by bowing Adélie penguin vertebrae.

For this show I won't be playing any instruments live, but I will be running the mixing board and shaping how my piece is dispersed amongst the 16 loudspeakers that surround the audience. It should be cool (pardon the pun please)!