Spirited Winds perform new music from York A CMRC seminar

Jennifer Cohen is a Lecturer in Music at the University of York, specialising in Performance Practice and Music Education. Playing repertoire from the Baroque period right through to contemporary compositions, Jennifer performs nationally and internationally, as a solo, chamber, and orchestral flautist. Highlights include performances in the York Early Music Festival and the York Late Music concert series; a recital and teaching residency in Bucharest, Romania; a performance at the Scottish Parliament; world premieres of Lourdes Saraiva’s Night View and David Lancaster’s Long After Tonight is All Over; soloist in Ibert’s Flute Concerto; and an appearance in the BBC Proms. Jennifer is an advocate of inclusive music opportunities for all. As well as performing and lecturing, she delivers a range of music workshops in the wider community. Highlights include outreach projects with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and spearheading the ‘I Can Play!’ programme, which provides music-making opportunities for D/deaf children and families in York.

Desmond Clarke is a composer, oboist and generative artist based in North England. His work has been performed and exhibited extensively around the UK as well as throughout Europe and North America. Throughout his multidisciplinary practice, Desmond’s work unpicks the relationships between underlying processes and their resultant forms at micro and macroscopic scales. Recent projects as of 2021 include an ongoing series of works using fixed and live-generated video scores to explore the boundaries and overlaps between notated and improvised music. His recent visual work, largely borne out of the 2020 lockdown, focuses on exploring the limits of legacy printing hardware with modern algorithmic processes to create structures and forms that articulate the friction between order and randomness found in the natural world.

In 2016, he completed a PhD in composition at the University of York with Dr Martin Suckling and has benefited from lessons and masterclasses with composers including Chaya Czernowin, Marc Sabat, Christopher Theofanidis, Mario Garuti and Unsuk Chin. Desmond has attended festivals and residencies at, amongst others, IRCAM, the Banff Centre, and the HighSCORE festival in Italy, at which he was awarded the 2013 festival prize for his string quartet Insect-Wood-Growth. In 2015, he won the RPS Composition Prize and was selected as one of the RSNO's inaugural young composers in residence. He has worked with numerous professional and amateur ensembles, including Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra. As an improvising musician he has worked and performed with numerous groups and collectives. He is a member and founder of osc~, a loose collective dedicated to the realisation of large-scale improvised works. Performances have included 6, 8 and 24-hour improvised megastructures.

Carmen Troncoso is recorder tutor at the University of York and a freelance practitioner. Active in both the early and contemporary music frameworks, her discography includes contemporary chamber music and recorder concertos with orchestra composed for her, recorder consort and research projects on Hispano-American Baroque music. Her performance projects usually address the juxtaposition of early and contemporary works, including co-created works with composers and collaborations with artists from different disciplines. She holds a PhD in performance from the University of York, UK.

Carmen continually develops interdisciplinary artistic projects that highlight the current diversity of flutes, from the ancient to the most recent. Her research combines the study of the different recorder models and their origins, evolution, use and associated contexts, with performance and creation, along with issues of identity and perception. She has received scholarships and international funds to develop musical projects and the President of the Republic Award for Music Publishing for her book New Music for Recorders by Chilean Composers (2014).

Among her projects are “Incontri”, intertwining ancient and contemporary music and dance; “In-Ventando”, commissioning, premiering and recording Chilean works for recorder; “The Mayan Triple Flute”, exploring instrumental singularity and identity in collaborative work with composers; “Recordeur: The One Who Retells”, creating electroacoustic works for recorders; and “Coppel”, examining the creative and agential potential of musical instruments and their associated objects. Her most recent artistic project was Between Air, Clay and Woods of Certain Flutes, an audiovisual immersive installation.