Steve Parker + Austin SoundWaves

AUSTIN SOUNDWAVES currently offers free, intensive musical education to low-income youth from Travis and Hays Counties that attend East Austin College Prep (EAPrep), a charter school located in the heart of East Austin. Instruction is inspired by the world-renowned, pedagogic model for music education known as El Sistema. El Sistema has served more than 400,000 underprivileged youth in more than 25 countries and is based on the idea that engaging and intensive musical instruction can enrich and improve the lives of children, teaching skills that support academic and creative success. Students learn to read and play music, perform in orchestras, think creatively, and work collaboratively. Austin Soundwaves provides daily intensive group instruction, individual instruction from highly qualified musician-educators, and performance opportunities for over 110 students from across Central Texas.

STEVE PARKER is presently on faculty at The University of Texas at San Antonio and is Artist-In-Residence at the Blanton Museum of Art and the Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia. He previously worked as a J. William Fulbright Scholar in Germany and a Donald D. Harrington Fellow at UT Austin. As a soloist, Steve has performed in the US, Europe, Asia, and South America, with performances at the Spoleto Festival, futureplaces (Portugal), Santa Fe New Music, Bowerbird (Philadelphia), Roulette (NYC), BACKFABRIK (Berlin), HPR’s From the Front Row (Houston), and the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago). An advocate of new music, Steve has commissioned or premiered over 100 new works, working with composers Helmut Lachenmann, Corey Dargel, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang. He is an artist of Ensemble Signal, described as “a new music dream team” (TONY), with appearances at Tanglewood, the Guggenhem Museum, Le Poisson Rouge, and the Bang on a Can Marathon. His performances can be heard on NPR’s Performance Today, PBS Newshour, and on Bridge, Cantaloupe and Mode Records.

JEBNEY LEWIS is a musician, artist, and educator who’s work distills the past, the built environment, science, and social interactions into admixtures of visual art and performance pageantry. Past projects include – a choral requiem for Philadelphia steam engines featuring 10 singers and a railway pump car; large topo-maps of dead-fall, plastic, and sculpted grass, made to explain theories of rapid environmental shift; a community arts center transformed into a self-spying building for a symposium on surveillance and identity theft; and a series of small billboards in the Central Himalayas with folk proverbs, buried amid roadside ads for hotels and resorts. He has performed or shown at the Philadelphia International Festival of Art (Philadelphia), The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education (Philadelphia), Nexus Center for Today’s Art (Philadelphia), Bumbershoot (Seattle), The Richard Hugo House (Seattle), University of Virginia’s School of Architecture (Charlottesville), and Aarohi (India). His work has been supported by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority’s Percent for Art Program and the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

TRAVIS WELLER is a composer, performer and instrument builder. He is one of the founders of Austin New Music Co-op, which has been presenting adventurous new music in central Texas for over a decade. His music has been commissioned and performed by ensembles in Europe and various cities around the US including New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Travis collaborates frequently with a large group of colleagues, both regional and international, and has participated in residencies at Cornell University in Ithaca, STEIM in Amsterdam, and OdysseyWorks in San Francisco. An avid interpreter of new music, Travis has performed a variety of contemporary music from mid-20th century onward and has worked directly with many internationally known composers including John Butcher, Phill Niblock, Olivia Block, Michael Pisaro, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Ellen Fullman, Tristan Perich, Pauline Oliveros, and Arnold Dreyblatt.

More info: http://www.stableunstable.com