In advance of the midterm elections composer/improviser Carla Kihlstedt and poet Rafael Osés present X AMENDMENTS, an improvised sonic structure for an orchestra of voices, electric guitars, and an audience, using the first ten amendments of the United States Constitution – The Bill of Rights – as its source material. The performance is an experiment in individual and collective freedoms and an exploration of rights, responsibilities, agency, and restrictions.
As Carla Kihlstedt describes it: “The eleven performers live as a community and explore what it means to make choices independently, choices together — how to tell stories, how to use these clues to make resonances together.”
Holland Andrews voice
Gelsey Bell voice
Carla Kihlstedt voice
Anaïs Maviel voice
Kalyn Harewood voice
Rafael Osés voice
Dither:
Taylor Levine guitar
Joshua Lopes guitar
James Moore guitar
Brendon Randall-Myers guitar
Brandon Ross guitar
A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.
Carla Kihlstedt is an American composer, improviser, writer and educator who plays violin/viola and sings, often simultaneously. She loves the economy, intimacy, and unapologetic directness of song. In her larger pieces (Black Inscription, Necessary Monsters, 26 Little Deaths, At Night We Walk in Circles and Are Consumed by Fire, Pandæmonium, X Amendments, 6 Dioramas) she explores the complexity of a single idea through many different lenses. Carla is a founding member of the experimental metal band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, the composers collective Tin Hat (formerly Tin Hat Trio), the song-based projects Rabbit Rabbit Radio and 2 Foot Yard, and the improvised bands Causing A Tiger, and Minamo. She is on the faculty of the Contemporary Musical Arts Department of the New England Conservatory, the MFA in Music Composition program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts at CalArts, and she co-facilitated the Creative Gesture Lab for composers and choreographers at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She is currently incubating two new choral projects: Long for This World—an educational, environmentally-centered youth chorus project; Feral Choir—an experimental vocal group rooted in the physicality of singing bodies.
Dither, a New York based electric guitar quartet, is dedicated to an eclectic mix of experimental repertoire which spans composed, improvised, and electronic music. Formed in 2007, the quartet has performed across the United States and abroad, presenting new commissions, original compositions, multimedia works, and large guitar ensemble pieces. Dither’s members are Taylor Levine, Joshua Lopes, James Moore, and Brendon Randall-Myers.
Holland Andrews (they/them) is a vocalist, composer, producer, and performer whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build cathartic and dissonant soundscapes. Andrews arranges music for voice, clarinet, and electronics and frequently highlights themes surrounding vulnerability and healing. Andrews harnesses these instruments’ innate qualities of power and elegance to serve as a cohesive vessel for these themes. As a vocalist, their influences stem from a dynamic range including contemporary opera, theater, and jazz, while also cultivating their own unique vocal style which integrates these influences with language disintegration, vocal distortion, and environmental ambience. Andrews previously performed solo music under the stage name Like a Villain. Their previous work also includes composing film scores for Rebeca Huntt’s BEBA (nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and acquired by Neon and Onyx Collective/Hulu) and Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn’s Another Body (awarded SXSW 2023 Documentary Feature Special Jury Award for Innovation in Storytelling). Andrews has gained recognition from publications such as The Wire, The New York Times, Vogue, Le Monde, and BBC Radio. Holland Andrews is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
Gelsey Bell (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary performance creator, composer, and vocalist. Her recent works include the experimental opera mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning] (2023), commissioned by the HERE Arts Center and presented in the Prototype Festival; Cairns (2020), a soundwalk for Green-Wood Cemetery; the musical one-act “Archaeopteris” (2025), commissioned by Wet Ink; and thingNY’s collaboratively written opera Mouthful (2024). She is the Co-Artistic Director of thingNY and Varispeed. She has released multiple albums, including the recent mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning], Skylighght, and Heads Together. She has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Opera America, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Japan Foundation, NYSCA, and others. Performance highlights also include Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway) and Ghost Quartet, Robert Ashley’s Celestial Excursions and Foreign Experiences, Darius Jones’s Samesoul Maker, Alaina Ferris’s The Lydian Gale Parr, Aaron Siegel’s Rainbird, and other works by Jay Afrisando, Kate Soper, Tomomi Adachi, Brent Michael Davids, and others.
Anaïs Maviel is a multidisciplinary artist whose work transforms spiritual concepts into immersive sensory experience, treating perception itself as a medium. A composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist, she works across traditional and experimental practices to explore the power of sound to shape reality and highlight the stakes of cultural multiplicity. She moves fluidly between song, choral, instrumental, and orchestral music, as well as interactive staging, drawing on sacred geometry and cosmologies of sound as structural foundations. Through an aesthetically layered vocabulary and embodied processes, she creates multidimensional, “spiritually illuminating” experiences (New York City Jazz Record). Her expansive collaborations across mediums include Alarm Will Sound, Craig Taborn, Meshell Ndegeocello, Meredith Monk, Merce Cunningham Trust, Okwui Okpokwasili, Sean Webley, and Nene Humphrey. Jazz Right Now has called her a “unique aesthetic visionary.” She is a recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship (2019), the American Composers Forum Create Award (2020), the Jerome Foundation Fellowship (2021–2022), the New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship (2022), New Music USA’s Next Jazz Legacy (2023), and a nominee for the Herb Alpert Award in Music Composition (2023).
