SPLICE Festival VII 2026 Concert 2 Program
Friday March 6, 2026
2:00pm EDT
Black Box Theater, Colby College
Produced by Colby College Department of Music with the Department of Performance, Theater, and Dance, Colby Arts Office
All times are Eastern Time and various events will be streamed live.
Adam Wilson : The Fourth Man
Adam Wilson, fretless bass
Miguel Chuaqui : Arioso
Lisa Chaufty, recorder
Michael Mills : These Days
Marie Herrington, soprano
Robert Karpay, cello
Antoine Jackson : In the Time Between
Antoine Jackson, trumpet
Cecilia Suhr : Self-Censorship
Cecilia Suhr, violin
Robert Karpay : Chasm of Vines
Robert Karpay, baritone saxophone
Felipe Tovar-Henao : «salsa al vapor»
Jacob Mason, piano
Ethan Helm : The Lotus Peak
Ethan Helm, saxophone
Jonas Regnier : Plastic Cinders
Duo Riso:
Zaira Castillo, piano
Evan Kopca, clarinets
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Notes
Adam Wilson : The Fourth Man
The Fourth Man is a musical work for fretless electric guitar and real-time electronics that builds off The Third Man, for the same instrumentation, conceived in 2024. The Fourth Man augments technology used in The Third Man with a novel analysis involving bitstream correlation of repeated motives based on contour. Recognized motives will be exploited for real-time accompaniment. The Fourth Man presents, rhythmically and timbrally, as a jazz fusion quartet (drums, bass, harmony and lead guitar). However, aside from being mostly algorithmically generated and orchestrated with virtual instruments, it deviates from the fusion tradition through (1) use of harmonies built on a sixteen-tone scale, and (2) subtle deployment of passages that human instrumentalists would find close to impossible. Drums are pre-generated from a short kernel of composed music, providing a scaffolding for formal structure, while harmonies are generated in real time and develop according to a few rule-based systems and a simple probability model applied to a factor oracle representation of music produced by the improvising guitarist. Pitches and note durations from the live guitar are tracked in real time and quantized to a pitch-duration cross-alphabet before being fed to the factor oracle. The pitch of the live guitar is used to adjust the reference frequency of the scale from which harmonies are derived.
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Miguel Chuaqui : Arioso
Arioso is a style of singing between the recitative and aria that arose in the 16th century. The form is usually free, and it tends to include frequent tempo changes. The piece is inspired by a print from a picture of a captive unicorn from “The Hunt of the Unicorn,” a tapestry from the early 16th century. The soloist represents the unicorn, and its captivity is represented by the harmonies that surround it, especially in the recurring slow sections of the piece. These alternate with more lyrical yearning types of gestures and with fast music in which the unicorn attempts to escape from the harmonies, sometimes more successfully than others. At the end the only possible release is a disembodied sort of dream-like escape. The work uses live electronics created by a Max patch that receives the audio from the soloist and tracks the pitches played by the soloist. It transposes these pitches to create successions of harmonies and other transformations of the soloist's musical material. These transformations are intended to blur the distinction between harmony and timbre, further emphasizing the imprisonment in which the recorder finds itself.
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Michael Mills : These Days
These Days for soprano, cello, and electronics blends Appalachian folk traditions, art song, and church hymns into a piece that searches for hope and beauty amongst what can otherwise feel like an overwhelming torrent of anxiety and fear.
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Antoine Jackson : In the Time Between
In the Time Between explores the fragile space where change occurs — the moment when something has ceased to be what it was, yet has not fully become what follows. The work reflects the tension between resistance and acceptance, the unease of transformation, and the quiet beauty that emerges through uncertainty.
The trumpet exists not as a dominant voice but as one color within a shifting texture. An array of effects merges acoustic and electronic soundscapes, while the interplay of tonality and atonality evokes the state of being “in between.” The piece contemplates how we, as humans, navigate transition — discovering meaning not through resolution, but through the continuous act of becoming.
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Cecilia Suhr : Self-Censorship
Self-censorship is a multimedia audio-visual performance representing disenfranchised and oppressed voices. It combines a loosely improvised violin performance with live processing and fixed media featuring a bamboo flute. The live violin music interacts with the visual elements in real-time, creating a dynamic auditory and visual landscape. This piece not only depicts the push to silence minorities, women, and other marginalized groups but also reflects on the broader intersections of sound, music, and artistic expression. Within Self-censorship, the boundaries between sound and music, artistic intent, didactic purpose, and immersive storytelling are blurred. This interweaving of sonic and visual elements mirrors the tension between the impulse to speak up and the fear of suppression, evoking both the chaos of a Tower of Babel and the potential for new, unexpected connections. By expanding our perception of sound and its role in expression, this work transforms self-censorship from an act of oppression into a space for reimagining voices that refuse to be silenced.
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Robert Karpay : Chasm of Vines
Chasm of Vines is a work for cello and fixed electronics consisting of two movements. All of the electronic elements are made from cello samples. The cello part is improvised in reaction to the tape part and is intended to be different with every performance.
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Felipe Tovar-Henao : «salsa al vapor»
«salsa al vapor» is an homage to and celebration of the late Méxican composer Javier Álvarez (1956-2023), whose eclectic and idiosyncratic music had a transformative impact on my own.
Largely inspired by his 1990’s electroacoustic miniature « Mambo à la Braque », where Álvarez uses samples from Pérez Prado’s mambo, «Caballo negro» to create a cubist-like sound collage, «salsa al vapor» takes the recording of Colombian salsa hit song, «El Preso» by Fruko y sus Tesos, to generate highly rhythmic passages for both the electronic and instrumental parts. This is interwoven with more meditative and sparse material that takes inspiration from the album Mirror Guide (2021) by vaporwave artist Giant Claw. The coexistence between these two highly contrasting soundworlds is meant to allude to the vast and diverse range of influences that Álvarez had throughout his life.
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Ethan Helm : The Lotus Peak
The Lotus Peak is inspired by the majesty and mystery of Mt. Fuji. Although this monument is so large that it dominates the horizon, it is often entirely hidden by clouds. This piece recreates the spiritual experience of witnessing the mountain—its ancient power, geometry, and its fickle nature.
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Jonas Regnier : Plastic Cinders
Plastic Cinders is a multidisciplinary composition that intertwines music, theater and lights to create an immersive experience that addresses the pressing issues of plastic pollution and the concepts daily plastic consumption, waste and microplastics.
By blending synthesized sounds, field recordings, and studio-recorded sounds from the duo, the electronics (stereo fixed media) expand and contract the auditory space, amplifying further the tension between the instruments.
Plastic Cinders not only transforms passive listening into a multi-sensory experience through its use of lights, electronics and theatrical elements, but also engages the audience in a thought-provoking exploration of the consequences of plastic consumption and the resilience of our planet.
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Bios
Lisa Chaufty
In addition to her work as Director of the University of Utah McKay Music Library, Lisa is an active early music performer and concert curator. She began her musical studies as a flutist in Rhode Island and discovered early music and the recorder while an undergraduate at Wellesley College. Her training in Medieval/Renaissance Studies and Musicology inform her work as a performer and teacher of early music. Lisa's early music mentors include Dutch recorderist Saskia Coolen and Baroque flutist Suzanne Stumpf. Lisa has directed the University of Utah Early Music Ensemble since 2014 and seeks out collaborations from members of the local and national early music community to provide exciting musical opportunities for her students. A recent ensemble collaboration, featuring the villancico "Xicochi conetzintle" by Gaspar Fernandes (c. 1565-1629), is a wonderful example of collaboration at work.
As a performer, Lisa has been praised for her "remarkably vibrant" playing, performing frequently as a soloist and chamber player with local early music groups and with musicians in the School of Music. Lisa plays primarily early music; however, she has traveled into the realm of new music, premiering Miguel Chuaqui's Arioso for Recorder and Live Electronics at several festivals; and most notably in June 2014 at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. In the past few years, Lisa has returned to her first instrument (in its ancestral form), and performs on the traverso as well as the recorder. She has taught traverso to undergraduate and graduate flute students through the Early Music Ensemble. Lisa is also the co-founder and co-director of heArt Music, an early music group that performs music several concerts a season for underserved populations.
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Chilean-American composer Miguel Chuaqui studied piano at the Escuela Moderna de Música and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied electroacoustic music at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). He completed his Ph.D. in Composition at UC Berkeley with composer Andrew Imbrie. Chuaqui’s music, which includes orchestral, chamber, vocal, and electroacoustic works, has been performed in many venues in the U.S. and abroad, by ensembles and music presenters such as NOVA, Speculum Musicae, Parnassus, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP), Earplay, Left Coast Ensemble, Empyrean Ensemble, Octagon, Riverside Symphony (New York), New York Virtuoso Singers, Colorado Chamber Players, Canyonlands Ensemble, Abramyan String Quartet, Ulysses Quartet, Ensemble Bartok Chile, Teatro del Lago (Frutillar, Chile), SEAMUS (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the U.S.), New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF), and Festival Ai-Maako (Chile). He has received commissions from the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress, the Utah Arts Council (NEA), Meet the Composer, and from many U.S. and international performers and ensembles. Honors include an Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Aaron Copland Recording Grant, the Eisner Prize, a Nicola de Lorenzo Award, an award from the Society for Universal Sacred Music, and induction into the National Association of Composers of Chile. His works are released on Parma Recordings, Centaur Records, New World Records, and Albany Records, and they are available on all streaming platforms. Dr. Chuaqui is Professor of Music in the School of Music at the University of Utah, where he has served as Director and head of the Composition Area.
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Ethan Helm
plays the saxophone,
writes music,
leads Cowboys & Frenchmen,
drinks a responsible amount of coffee,
works with dancers,
wakes up early,
releases albums,
improvises,
wanders through old neighborhoods,
collaborates,
plays the flute,
listens,
authors books,
teaches at NYU and Hofstra University,
has a PhD,
came from Southern California,
attended Eastman School of Music,
lives in New York City,
and daydreams often.
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Duo Riso—co-founded by clarinetist Evan Kopca and pianist Zaira Castillo—reimagines the concert experience as a playful, boundary-blurring exploration of sound, space, and connection. Riso, meaning “laughter” in Latin, reflects the duo’s joyful approach to music-making, where camaraderie and curiosity fuel creative expression. Dedicated to expanding the sonic possibilities of piano and clarinet, Duo Riso performs in both traditional and unconventional spaces. Their repertoire spans classical, contemporary classical, improvisation, and electroacoustic works, with a growing emphasis on pieces that incorporate electronics and live processing. The duo is deeply committed to interdisciplinary collaboration, working with artists from diverse fields to create immersive and unexpected experiences. Recent projects have involved recycled plastics, sculpture, interactive lighting, and theatrical elements. Duo Riso is equally invested in education and community engagement. They have led workshops for students at Northwestern University and strive to make experimental music accessible and engaging for a wide range of audiences. Performance venues include Roosevelt University, Northwestern University, Experimental Sound Studio, the Toledo Club (Ohio), Clara Chicago, and the Constellation Frequency Series. Duo Riso seeks to cultivate spaces where music becomes a shared act of discovery and connection—open, joyful, and transformative.
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Marie Herrington
Marie’s active love of writing and performing vocal music is a staple of her artistic career and bleeds into her collaborations. She actively works on projects with New Orleans-based videographer and photographer Luca Hoffmann, who sets eerie electronic vocal music of hers to footage of nature in the greater New Orleans area that has been affected by climate change. The two have been members of the NOLA contemporary music collective, Alluvium Ensemble. Both began working together for an art installation at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center in 2023 titled “Water,” with music primarily composed by Alluvium’s lead composer, Ben Zervigon. Marie was also a featured musician on Alluvium Ensemble’s 2021 album “Hipster Genocide” which featured all improvised instruments. Marie and Luca most recently had a work “What is Hell? Let me awake from this paralysis” which was premiered for La Hora Ausmática’s first virtual concert of the fall 2025 season.
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Antoine Jackson is a musician and composer whose work dissolves boundaries between the classical tradition, electronic experimentation, and multimedia art. His creative practice centers on electroacoustic performance and chamber collaborations, with a growing body of work that explores the intersections of acoustic and digital sound.
Through projects that merge real-time processing, fixed media, and immersive environments, Antoine seeks to reimagine the relationships between performer, instrument, and technology. His most recent work, "Come What May…" was premiered at the 2025 New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival.
He has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kimmel Center, and other major venues, appearing with leading conductors and ensembles. Antoine earned degrees in Trumpet Performance from Youngstown State University (B.M.), Penn State University (M.M.), and the Peabody Conservatory (GPD). He is currently pursuing a DMA at Temple University.
Robert Karpay is a Baltimore-based composer, improviser, cellist, pianist, and recording artist. His concert works span from chamber and orchestral pieces to maniacal and intimate electronic productions, with notable projects including the award-winning score for “Vivid Dreams” and his original soundtrack “This World Falls”.
A Manhattan School of Music graduate (BM, MM), Karpay studied under Richard Danielpour, Nils Vigeland, and Reiko Füting, while studying piano with Marjean Olson. His collaborative spirit has led to partnerships with a wide range of performers, most recently joining forces with Stephen Tamas and Olivia Katz in Moon Unit. His recording expertise extends to working with diverse artists and creating sound design for major brands (Toshiba, Bose, Google).
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American pianist Jacob Mason leapt onto the classical music scene in 2013, when he performed Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 1 with the New World Symphony alongside conductor Joshua Gersen. Since then, he has played with numerous orchestras, and in some of the world’s premiere halls. He has been invited to perform at the Miami International Piano Festival Academy, Piano Lab in Martina Franca, Kaleidoscope MusArt, Tzlil Meudcan in Tel Aviv, and the Birmingham New Music Festival. He is the winner of the second prize at the 9th annual John Cage Award in Halberstadt, Germany.
Critics have praised his “daunting technique and expertise.” He has been called “clearly a talented player with a penchant for offbeat and demanding repertoire,” and has been lauded for his “rock-solid technique and attention to detail.” George Grella wrote of his Carnegie Hall debut, “Mason’s playing was exceptional, with dazzling fingerwork and an ear for phrasing.”
The son of two composers, he has been an active member of the global new music community. He has performed in various theatrical productions, including “Senza Ora” at Gare du Nord and “Abteilung Leben,” a production of Christoph Marthaler at Theater Basel. He has founded many chamber groups, including the Escape Ensemble in Seaside, FL, and has performed with SOYUZ and Ensemble Lemniscate in Switzerland. In 2020 he founded Ex-Sentia, along with percussionist Miguel Fernández and percussionist Santiago Villar. In the past few years, Ex-Sentia has commissioned and premiered new works by various important composers throughout Europe and the US. In 2023 they were asked to play the closing concert of the Impuls Festival Graz.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1998, Jacob currently holds a Master of Arts degree from the Hochschule für Musik Basel, where he studied with Claudio Martinez Mehner. He earned his Bachelor of Music degree from the Frost School of Music where he studied with Kevin Kenner. He previously spent two years studying at the New England Conservatory in Boston. In addition to the piano, he has studied harpsichord and continuo at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, organ with Joanne Schulte, and digital processing and synthesis at the Elektronisches Studio Basel.
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Described as having a “…highly individual sound world…” that is “… both beautiful and piercingly astringent at once,” (Richard Sisson) Michael Mills composes music addressing topics of the human condition through an extremely personal lens. Utilizing a unique compositional voice that blends contemporary and traditional practices as well as Appalachian folk influences, Michael explores and embraces the paradox of universality amongst otherwise highly individualistic lives. His work is defined by visceral gestures, expansive timbres, and the juxtaposition “natural” and “unnatural” sounds. Michael’s work has garnered performances throughout America, on public radio, and across Europe and Asia working with groups such as Tacet(i), Quartetto Indaco, Dal Niente, and Popebama.
Michael is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds an M.M. in Composition from The Peabody Institute and a B.A. in Music: Composition and Technology with a minor in Psychology from Virginia Tech.
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Jonas Regnier (b.1995) is a French composer and researcher currently based in Montreal. Their research and artistic interests focus on music cognition and psychology, and more specifically the ways to direct listeners’ attention with timbre, space and musical discourse. They are exploring instrumental, electroacoustic, and mixed music composition with equal interest. Their music has been performed in France, Belgium, Canada, Thailand, South Korea and the US and is published by BabelScores in digital and printed formats.
They integrated the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology and the ACTOR Project (Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration) research labs in 2019, which allowed them to work on numerous interdisciplinary research-creation projects with performers, music technologists and neuroscientists.
Jonas Regnier obtained an organ performance diploma, an instrumental and electroacoustic composition diploma at the Conservatoire of Music of Toulouse (France) in 2018. At the same time, they obtained their Bachelor of Arts degree in Musicology at the Sorbonne University (Paris). In 2021, they received a Master of Music in Composition at McGill University. They are now pursuing a PhD in Composition at McGill University under the supervision of Philippe Leroux, Robert Hasegawa and Stephen McAdams.
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Cecilia Suhr is an award-winning intermedia artist, multimedia composer, and researcher whose work bridges music, visual art, performance, and technology. A multi-instrumentalist (violin, cello, voice, piano, and bamboo flute) and painter, she creates immersive performances that merge acoustic improvisation, live electronics, and visual expression into cohesive, interdisciplinary experiences. Her creative practice and research explore the intersections of sound, image, and embodiment—often engaging themes that examine tensions, paradoxes, and boundaries between opposing forces and concepts. She has received honors spanning music, art, research, and interactive media, including recognition from the International Alliance for Women in Music (Pauline Oliveros Award), the MacArthur Foundation (DML Grant), The American Prize, the Global Music Awards, and the Broadcast Education Association (BEA), among others. Her music and intermedia works have been featured internationally at major festivals and conferences such as ICMC, SEAMUS, NYCEMF, Mise-En Music Festival, New Music on the Bayou, Performing Media Art Festival, Splice, Mantis, TENOR, ACMC, EMM, SCI, BEAST Feast, MoXsonic, and many more. She is the author of Social Media and Music (Peter Lang, 2012) and Evaluation and Credentialing in Digital Music Communities (MIT Press, 2014) and serves as a full professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Arts at Miami University Regionals.
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Felipe Tovar-Henao is a US-based multimedia artist, developer, and researcher whose work explores computer algorithms as expressive tools for human and post-human creativity, cognition, and pedagogy. This has led him to work on a wide variety of projects involving digital instrument design, software development, immersive art installations, generative audiovisual algorithms, machine learning, music information retrieval, human-computer interaction, and more. His music is often motivated by and rooted in transformative experiences with technology, philosophy, and cinema, and it frequently focuses on exploring human perception, memory, and recognition.
As a composer, he has been featured at a variety of international festivals and conferences, including TIME:SPANS, the International Computer Music Conference, the Mizzou International Composers Festival, the Ravinia Festival, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, WOCMAT (Taiwan), CAMPGround, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, CLICK Fest, the SCI National Conference, the SEAMUS National Conference, the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, CEMICircles, IRCAM's CIEE Summer Contemporary Music Creation + Critique Program and ManiFeste Academy, Electronic Music Midwest, and the Midwest Composer Symposium. He has also been the recipient of artistic awards and distinctions, including the SCI/ASCAP Student Commission Award and the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award.
His music has been performed by international artists and ensembles such as Alarm Will Sound, the Grossman Ensemble, Quatuor Diotima, the Contemporary Art Music Project, the New Downbeat Collective, NEXUS Chamber Music, Sound Icon, the IU New Music Ensemble, AURA Contemporary Ensemble, Hear no Evil, Sociedad de Música de Cámara de Bogotá, Ensamble Periscopio, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, and the Orquesta Sinfónica EAFIT, among many others.
He has held research and teaching positions at various institutions, including the 2023/25 Charles H. Turner Postdoctoral Fellowship in Music Composition at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, the 2021/22 CCCC Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Chicago, Lecturer in Music Theory and Composition at Universidad EAFIT, as well as Associate Instructor and Coordinator of the IU JSoM Composition Department. He was recently appointed as Assistant Professor of AI and Composition at the University of Florida.
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Adam James Wilson is a composer, guitarist, and software developer who programs computers to improvise with human musicians. His music incorporates algorithmic music composition and real-time generative techniques. Wilson performs with his software experiments on the fretless electric guitar, an instrument that caters to his penchant for microtonality. He has performed/presented his work in Tokyo, New York, Paris, Montreal, San Diego, Washington D.C., Boston, Brussels, Baltimore, Atlanta, Belfast, Baton Rouge, Palo Alto, and elsewhere. Wilson co-founded and serves as director of the New York City Electroacoustic Improvisation Summit, an annual concert series featuring music by artists focused on the integration of music improvisation and real-time interactive computer systems. He is currently Associate Professor and Director of Emerging Media Technology, specializing in Computer Music, at New York City College of Technology (CUNY City Tech).
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