In early June, a Case Western Reserve University student will bring an adventurous spate of creators and performers from around the country to Cleveland for a festival of new and experimental music.
Re:Sound, now in its second year, is staged by the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project (CUSP), a nonprofit supporting experimental music. Sophie Benn, a PhD candidate in musicology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve, co-directs the organization with Noa Even, assistant professor of saxophone at Kent State University.
“Audiences should definitely plan to be a little surprised and open to adventure,” said Benn. “We have a festival lineup that’s a sampler of new music in America right now.”
Organizers define “new music” as that which is freely improvised and has been composed in the 21st century.
From June 6-9, Benn and her colleagues will bring 14 musical acts hailing from Boston, New York City, Kansas, Texas, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and other U.S. locales to perform at six distinct Re:Sound events in five Northeast Ohio venues.
The festival features a wide range of sonic offerings, Benn said: groups playing melodic, delicate and intimate music with traditional instruments; others known for their noisy, loud, electronic tunes—and some combining both styles, or a little of everything in between.
“There really is no limit to what ‘new music’ artists wish to perform,” said Benn, a cellist and musicologist who enjoys playing “both very old and very new music,” according to her online biography.
As a cellist, Benn specializes in modernist and contemporary repertoire; as an academic, she focuses on relationships between notation, music, and the body in late-19th century and early modernist aesthetics.
Given an ever-expanding menu of sounds, techniques and diversity of genres and styles, “new music”—in many ways—is an artistic reflection of the world today, said Benn.
“Artists can draw on both the long history of music-making and the ways our modern world allows for the breaking of new ground—from new technology to limitlessness of their imaginations,” said Benn, who is also the principal cellist of CityMusic Cleveland, a professional chamber orchestra that performs free concerts in Northeast Ohio.
Formed in 2017, CUSP aims to facilitate collaboration among artists, both local and beyond, by bringing them together for new projects and performances. The Re:Sound festival hopes to gather musicians to establish deeper connections in their common community and with wider audiences.
“We want to give a voice to performers of diverse backgrounds who need a platform for their work,” said Benn. “We also wanted to bring in outside voices to a vibrant Cleveland new music scene, while also hopefully reaching people who would not normally come to shows like this.”
Tickets for individual shows and passes for the entire festival are available online, as well as a trailer and information about each performer.
For more information, contact Daniel Robison daniel.robison@case.edu.
This article was originally published May 21, 2019.