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Tag: Sarah Goldfeather

Spotlight On: Sarah Goldfeather

Spotlight On

Roulette catches up with artist Sarah Goldfeather for a quick Q+A. 

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

I am a violinist, a singer, a songwriter, and a composer. I run, perform, and write music for a band called Goldfeather, a soprano-violin duo called Cipher, a septet called Exceptet. I also enjoy puns and funny socks.

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

Exceptet was the result of an impulse to start a new music ensemble with a silly name that took commissioning and performing music seriously. We have in fact commissioned and performed works from nine young and talented composers since our 2015 inception. Our project with Roulette will be an evening-length concert that focuses on three brand new premieres — substantial pieces by Brendon Randall-Myers and Matt Evans, and a short piece by myself. Each piece will come from a distinctly different sound world, and will shape out an evening of contrasting musical voices that work with sound and space. Brendon and Matt are both high-caliber musicians on and offstage, and we at Exceptet are thrilled to be collaborating with them. Brendon’s piece will feature each member of the septet; Matt’s piece will utilize the space by breaking the group into subsets; and my own piece is the synthesis of my normally disparate worlds of pop songwriting and contemporary classical music.

What is your favorite Roulette memory?

There have been a great many highlights, but one concert in particular that sticks out was Invisible Anatomy’s semi-staged evening-length work, Transfigure. The show was visually stunning, the music captivating and memorable, and the performers were incredibly engaging — I remember being completely absorbed and inspired. The performers were stationed in the middle of the space, and I recall appreciating how versatile Roulette is as a performance space.

What is your favorite record?

It is difficult to pick just one, but if I had to choose a record that influenced most of my musical tastes today, it would probably be Sunlandic Twins by Of Montreal. The songwriting is incredibly creative and the harmonies and textures take so many unexpected yet satisfying twists and turns. Coincidentally, the album was the exact length of my commute to my high school youth orchestra, so I really got to sing along the whole way through twice every Saturday morning for a few glorious adolescent years.

What are your top three favorite or most visited websites and why?

In 2003 I started my very own Geocities account and dedicated a whole page titled “Good Sites,” which consisted solely of numerous Lord of the Rings Parody websites. Since then, my tastes have broadened somewhat. Aside from the popular news/social media/email correspondence sites, I am most fond of Goodreads.com, which I update fastidiously; Megan Amram’s twitter account, because she might be the funniest person who has ever lived; and omfgdogs.com, to be experienced on a laptop with the volume all the way up.

What is influencing your work right now?

Interpersonal relationships of the past and present, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, music with unusual chord changes and/or unexpected meter changes, Kimbra as an artist, the music of Mitski, Anna Meredith, Ted Hearne, and Scott Wollschleger, the writing of Lydia Davis, Maggie Nelson, and Louise Gluck.

How long have you lived in New York City and what brought you here?

I have lived in Brooklyn for over 7 years, and honestly it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how I ended up here — I suppose a friend from college asked me to move to Brooklyn with her, and it certainly seemed like the proper place to migrate after graduation. I didn’t really have a plan back then, and certainly didn’t have any illusions that it was possible to be a musician at the time. Looking back, I’m grateful I followed that whim, as I don’t know if I could have grown as an artist and musician without this wonderful musical community stationed here.

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Exceptet performs Mouth Full of Ears by Sarah Goldfeather, alongside new works from Matt Evans and Brendon Randall-Myers on February 8, 2018.

Exceptet Winter Concert: Premieres by Sarah Goldfeather, Brendon Randall-Myers, Matt Evans

What: World premieres from composers Brendon Randall-Myers, Matt Evans, and Sarah Goldfeather, performed by Exceptet.
When: Thursday, February 8, 2018, 8pm
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $20 Online $25 Doors
Info: www.roulette.org // (917) 267-0368

Brooklyn, NY – New York-based ensemble Exceptet performs three brand new works — Episodic Memory by Brendon Randall-Myers, which draws on brain processes regarding trauma; The mesh by Matt Evans, inspired by human’s impact on the environment; and Mouth Full of Ears by Exceptet’s very own violinist Sarah Goldfeather, which illustrates contemporary political discourse in a musical manner.

Episodic Memory by Brendon Randall-Myers is a 25-minute work in three sections that reflects the way our brains process trauma and learn from mistakes. The first section starts with subtly shifting polyrhythms that emerge from the beat patterns of microtonal inflections of a single pitch, which are gradually picked up, articulated, and elaborated on directly by the ensemble. The second section abruptly focuses these rhythms to a 16th-note ostinato played at an extremely fast speed, high register, and loud volume. The third and final section begins with extremely quiet multiphonic trills traded around the ensemble, which gradually coalesce into a huge, oscillating mass of sound built on the same pitch that opened the piece. Randall-Myers was a 2017 Roulette Artist-in-Residence.

The mesh by Matt Evans is a 20-minute work in three continuous parts that unpacks the questions surrounding human impact on modern ecology in our recently defined epoch the “anthropocene” through musical abstraction and representation. Three distinct sections of the piece will represent the three basic states of Timothy Morton’s philosophy of Dark Ecology: “darkness as depression, darkness as uncanny, and darkness as sweetness.” The piece draws inspiration from the earth and the sublime through a musical topography of chromatic polyrhythmic dissonances, gradients of noise, and drones of ultimate stillness.

Mouth Full of Ears by Sarah Goldfeather is a 5-minute song featuring a simple melody that builds in orchestration and intensity. The text describes a person who cannot or does not think or speak for themselves — one who simply regurgitates information he or she hears without any synthesis, and on whom it is easy to project your own opinions and designs. An archetype prevalent on both sides of the today’s political spectrum, where so many default to a stance without critical thought, thus creating an even greater rift between us and near impossibility of sensible discourse.

About Exceptet
Founded on the rag-tag instrumentation of Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, New York-based Exceptet is an ensemble with “vast emotional range and onomatopoetic charm” (I Care If You Listen) dedicated to commissioning today’s most compelling emerging composers. Exceptet recently performed on the Ecstatic Music Festival as part of the MATA Interval Series, The Times Two Series in Boston, the Queens New Music Festival, The UPenn Composers Guild, and has been showcased several times on WQXR. The group has commissioned new works from a wide range of composers, including Scott Wollschleger, Matt Evans, Brendon Randall-Myers, Sarah Goldfeather, Fay Kueen Wang, Alex Weiser, Fjola Evans, Brooks Frederickson, Paul Kerekes, Brian Petuch, and Eric Shanfield. The ensemble also collaborated with Exceptet violinist Sarah Goldfeather’s indie folk-band, Goldfeather.