Iktus Percussion Quartet

Music Performance
Saturday, February 18, 2012 | 7:30pm
Admission: $15 / $8 Students & Seniors

Featuring:
Milton Babbitt’s All Set
& Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise

 

With Special Guests:
Lonely Brook
Levy Lorenzo – “New Electronic Instruments”

 

 

About Iktus

Based in New York City, the Iktus Percussion Quartet is an ambitious and dynamic young ensemble committed to expanding the boundaries of the percussion genre. As a group with strong ties to the local artistic community, Iktus is dedicated to commissioning new compositions from emerging artists. Since its inception, the quartet has commissioned over fifty new works for percussion quartet by such composers as Angélica Negrón, Aaron Siegel, Lisa R. Coons, Jenny Olivia Johnson, Stefan Weisman, and Billy Martin (of Medeski, Martin and Wood).

 

Iktus’ wide range of repertoire has brought them to perform several venues and festivals, including the Bang on A Can Marathon, Galapagos Arts Space, Le Poisson Rouge, Issue Project Room, Symphony Space, and Trinity Church. Iktus has held residencies at SUNY Purchase College, where they performed Laura Kaminsky’s Terra Terribilis, a concerto for percussion quartet and orchestra, as well as residencies at CUNY Brooklyn, and the Pre-College music program at Stony Brook University.

 

This past summer, Iktus established Iktus+: a collective of outstanding musicians, composers and conductors that regularly collaborate with the group. As performer-educators, Iktus has also given master classes to various enthusiastic elementary school audiences. Iktus is endorsed by Mike Balter Mallets and Grover Pro Percussion.

 

 

About the Special Guests

 

We ditch our tuxes, take of our shoes, grab our instruments and tell stories that infect you with love, sooth you with passion, and simply make you want to smile and dance. 

 

Lonely Brook is Australian singing cellist Richard Vaudrey, American trombonist/vocalist James Hubbard, and electronic producer/percussionist Steven Sehman. Together they mold influences from classic early cinema, funk, and indie folk song into the popular alternative form.

 

Their unique genre defying instrumental and vocal writing has been turning industry heads at live shows throughout New York City over the past six months. All hailing from graduate music performance study at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York, these three exciting performers know how to take a stage. Their high energy with untouchable intimacy is as if Arthur Russell and Trombone Shorty joined Jamie XX and set up in a Brooklyn Loft. Since forming their early foundations in 2010, Lonely Brook has played venues throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. In February 2012 they released their debut EP ‘Do For You’ – a five track EP with infectious depth of original sound and musicality, making them an undeniable pick as one of Brooklyn’s breakout bands of 2012.

 

 

Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. is an electronics engineer and percussionist living in New York.

 

Specializing in microcontroller and Arduino-based systems, he performs and composes live-electronic music using new, custom electronic musical instruments that he designs. His electronics work has been featured at STEIM’s 2011 Patterns and Pleasure Festival in Amsterdam, the Guthman Musical Instrument Design Competition, the International Computer Music Conference, the International Society for Improvised Music, the G4TV network, Pitchfork.com, Slashdot.org, the 2007 Geneva Auto Show, and BBC Ecuador. An advocate for interdisciplinary arts, he has collaborated with dancers, video artists, installation artists, mathematicians, sculptors, engineers and dramaturgs.

 

As an active performer of modern classical music for percussion, he has performed at the Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music (DE), the International Ensemble Moderne Academy (AT), and gave the US Premiere of Martin Matalon’s TRAME VIII Marimba Concerto. Outside of the western classical tradition, his musical background includes free improvisation, Afro-carribean drumming, and drumset for rock and jazz ensembles. Levy is particularly interested in performing pieces that use both percussion and electronic elements.

 

Levy is active as a freelance electronics engineer, as well as a calculus and physics tutor. // levylorenzo.com