Florida SouthWestern State College is pleased to announce that current Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Captiva Island Artist-in-Residence, composer and musician Neil Leonard will be at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW this Saturday, August 20th at 1pm for a “live” concert on saxophone (with accompaniment by Kat Epple) and a post-performance Q. & A. in conjunction with the on-going “Glenn BRANCA & Philip CORNER re:SOUND” exhibition.
Neil Leonard is an interdisciplinary arts composer and saxophonist. His work includes jazz performance; composition for orchestra with computer-generated video and sound; and sound/music for dance, theater, installation, and film. Mr. Leonard’s collaborations with visual artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons were featured in the 49th Venice Biennale and Museum of Modern Art/NYC, purchased by the Guangzhou Contemporary Art Museum/China and the National Gallery of Canada, and presented by the U.S. State Department at the Dakar Biennial/Senegal. He composed music for the Whitney Biennial featured “Relatives” installation by Tony Oursler and Constance DeJong. His compositions have been performed at Carnegie Hall/NYC, the Boston Globe Jazz Festival, Havana Jazz Festival, Panama Jazz Festival, International Computer Music Convention/Montreal, Tel Aviv Biennial for New Music, Moscow Autumn, Auditorium Parco della Music/Rome, and Museo Riena Sofia/Madrid. Mr. Leonard is professor of electronic production and design at Berklee College of Music and Artistic Director of the Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute.
Accompanying Neil Leonard on flute and performing on “Bo” (the “Strategic Structure” bell-grade brass and aluminum instrument she developed and played with Bob Rauschenberg and collaborators Bob Stohl, Lawrence Voytek and Laury Getford), Kat Epple’s Emmy and Peabody Award-winning compositions encompass a great variety of musical styles – World Music, New Age, Jazz, Metal, Orchestral Film Scores, Electronic Space Music, Native and Ambient Music. She has released 30 albums internationally, composes music for film scores and television soundtracks, and performs live original music featuring synthesizers and flutes with her various ensembles, including the “Space Music” band Emerald Web and Sonic Combine. Ms. Epple has performed at the Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The United Nations, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Italy, the National Gallery of Art/Washington DC, London’s Union Chapel, and for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. For two decades, legendary visual artist and Gallery namesake, Bob Rauschenberg commissioned her to perform at his openings around the world.
More about the exhibition: “Glenn BRANCA & Philip CORNER re:SOUND” at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery is an exhibition featuring the graphic/musical scores, Harmonic series drawings and artist-built instruments of Glenn Branca and Philip Corner. This immersive installation highlights two of the most influential avant-garde composer-performers alive today. Both explore the visualization of sound. The large-scale drawings of Branca (all created in 1985) investigate the geometry and mathematics of harmonics, while Corner’s site-specific work invites visitor participation and includes the world premiere of a recently re-discovered (never-before-exhibited) series of fifty-plus original hand-painted/collaged drawings that form the basis and score for the artist’s seminal “Metal Meditations” (1973-76).