PATHWAYS Deep Listening Workshops
Monday August 5, 7:15 to 9 pm
Wednesday August 7, 7:15 to 9 pm
PS21 Grounds
Price: $15 dollars a session
Attendees: No musical experience necessary, Age 16+, all movement abilities welcome.
Boston-based composer, curator, performer, and educator Nomi Epstein will guide two Deep Listening® workshops. The workshops will consist of a series of exercises in listening, sonic meditation, movement, and imagination that will open our senses to new ways of interacting with the world around us.
Deep Listening® Workshop with Nomi Epstein
How do we listen? What sounds do we notice/perceive and when? How can we change and grow our sonic focus? Deep Listening® is a practice developed by Pauline Oliveros, the late pioneering experimental music composer, which facilitates an awareness of our attention to and relationship with sound. Each Deep Listening® workshop will feature a series of exercises in listening, sonic meditation, movement, and imagination that help lead us into a more centered place. This practice invites us to be aware of our attention, allowing our senses to be opened, and enabling us to feel a greater connection to our bodies, to others, and to the environment. By exploring, reflecting on, and discussing the core principles of the Deep Listening practice, we can discover new ways of interacting with the world around us.
An experimental music practitioner devoted to a focused listening practice, Nomi Epstein’s work embraces subtlety, the uncovering of sounds, and gratitude for the sonic realms surrounding her.
The music of Nomi Epstein, Boston-based composer/improvisor/curator/Deep Listening® Practitioner, centers around her interest in sonic fragility. Her compositions have been performed throughout the US/Europe by SurPlus, ICE, Wet Ink, Mivos, Wild Rumpus, Dedalus, and Southland. Her third and most recent portrait album featuring Apartment House/Vibrant Matter was released under Another Timbre (February 2024). An active practitioner and advocate of experimental music, she is founder/director of a•pe•ri•od•ic, the critically acclaimed, experimental ensemble. Her curatorial work includes large scale festivals as in the Chicago area 2012 centennial John Cage Festival, the Wandelweiser and Ustvolskaya Festivals, and concerts across the US/abroad. She continues to research, write, and lecture on experimental music and serves as Associate Professor of Composition at Berklee.
“Nomi Epstein writes magical, otherworldly, spacious music.” (New York Music Daily)
Nomi Epstein is a Boston-based composer/improvisor/curator/Deep Listening® practitioner whose music emanates from her interest in sonic fragility, where structure arises out of textural subtleties. Her work has been performed throughout the U.S. and Europe by ensembles such as SurPlus, ICE, Wet Ink, Mivos Quartet, Wild Rumpus, Dedalus, Southland, and counter)induction. She has received artist’s grants from the Illinois Arts Councile, DCASE, and New Music USA.
An active practitioner and advocate of experimental music, Epstein is the founder/director of the critically acclaimed experimental music ensemble a•pe•ri•od•ic, in which she also performs. Her curatorial work includes large-scale festivals such as A John Cage Festival (2012), the Chicago Wandelweiser Festival (2014), and the Galina Ustvolskaya Festival (2017), as well as experimental music concerts in the U.S. and abroad involving composers from across the globe. She continues to research, write, and lecture on post-Cagean notated, experimental music.
She has released three albums, Nomi Epstein: sounds (New Focus Recordings), which featured Reinier van Houdt and Collect/Project; cubes (Sawyer Editions), and sounds (New Focus). Her compositions have also been performed on Juliet Fraser’s Spilled Out from Tangles (HCR, 2020) and Pluralities (Chen Li Music, 2017); and performances on NbN’s Trios (2019) and Jürg Frey’s Buch der Räume und Zeiten (Irritable Hedgehog, 2018).
Epstein is Associate Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music. She previously taught at Northwestern University, Roosevelt University, the University of Illinois Chicago, DePaul University, and the University of Iowa. She received her DMA from Northwestern and BA and MM degrees from Barnard College and the New England Conservatory of Music.
