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Performers participating in Sound Currents 1, February 25, 2003 Odeon String Quartet Ryan Hare, bassoon Florie Rothenberg, clarinet Andrea Smardon, clarinet Seattle School Odeon String Quartet The Seattle-based Odeon String Quartet is a vibrant and dynamic ensemble, dedicated to bringing to audiences music that uplifts and excites, nurturing the human spirit, and elevating and perpetuating greater understanding through music. The Odeon repertoire explores standard and lesser known masterpieces, performing music that weaves in threads of tango, American prison blues, Persian folk music, jazz, Russian orthodox hymns, minimalism, European neo-romanticism, and contemporary and folk influences. The Odeon String Quartet is the Lehmann Ensemble-in-Residence at Cornish College of the Arts, made possible by a generous gift from Thelma Lehmann. Along with an exciting concert schedule at Cornish, including Crumb's Black Angels on February 18, 2003, the quartet provides support to the composition program. The quartet has received a prestigious King County Arts Commission grant, and has been a regular guest of the Seattle Chamber Music Festival's "Under Forte" series, and at the Lopez Center for the Arts on Lopez Island. The Odeon String Quartet has recently signed an exclusive artist endorsement agreement with Connolly & Co., Inc. on behalf of Thomastik-Infeld Company, maker of strings. Ryan Hare, bassoon Ryan Hare is a composer and bassoonist living in Seattle. He received his DMA in Composition from the University of Washington in 2000, where he studied bassoon with Arthur Grossman, and composition with Joel-Francois Durand, Richard Karpen, and Diane Thome. Though composition was his major, throughout his studies he treated the bassoon performance as a sort of de facto double major. As a bassoonist especially devoted to new music, he has had the privilege of performing many new works written specifically for him, enough to fill a recent solo recital. He is active as a freelance bassoonist throughout the Puget Sound region, and has performed with many of the top local professional orchestras. He is a founding member of the Four Winds Woodwind Quartet, and composer and bassoonist with the Seattle-based ensemble Contemporary Chamber Composers and Players. Teaching is also an active part of his career: he is presently instructor of bassoon, composition, and theory at Music Works Northwest, and instructor of bassoon at Seattle Pacific University and at Seattle University. In addition, he teaches as an auxiliary faculty member in music theory at the University of Washington. Florie Rothenberg, clarinet Clarinetist Florie Rothenberg is a graduate of the University of the Pacific (BM), the University of Michigan (MM), and the University of Arizona (DMA), where her teachers included David Shifrin and Jerry Kirkbride. Sought after as a freelance musician, Dr. Rothenberg enjoys the variety of performing in concert and pit orchestras, in the recording studio, and especially as a chamber musician. Locally, she performs with groups such as the Northwest Chamber Orchestra, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Tacoma Symphony, and the Tacoma Opera. Additionally, she has performed with the Tucson Symphony, the Arizona Opera, and the Oakland Opera. Dr. Rothenberg has taught at the University of Arizona and at the Hartwick College Summer Music Festval and Institute. She teaches privately, and at the University of Puget Sound Community Music School, Musicworks Northwest, and the Music Center of the Northwest. Andrea Smardon, clarinet Andrea Smardon is a clarinet player by night, and a web producer for KUOW Public Radio by day. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, in 1999, with a double major in English and music. She began her studies with a focus on Western classical performance in both piano and clarinet, and was a featured soloist with the Wesleyan University Orchestra in her second year. The school, with its strength in experimental and world music, soon lured her into playing klezmer and jazz. After a brief stint in Boston, and a performance class at New England Conservatory of Music, she moved to Seattle, where she plays in various combinations of klezmer, folk, jazz and new music ensembles for parties, clubs, cafes, bar mitzvahs, weddings, dances, puppet shows, art galleries and formal concerts. Seattle School Seattle School was established in 2002 as a performance group interested in exploring sound and music, primarily in terms of space, memory, timbre, large time/incidence, calculus, communication, and the redefinition of tone, language and audience. All participants are composers, but the roster changes, depending on the orchestration of individual pieces. For tonight's performance of Mike Min's Folding, the participants are Erik Aho, Ben Houge, Mike Min, and Guy Whitmore. These composers currently reside and work in Seattle and have created numerous, critically lauded works for film, theater, radio, TV, and interactive media. Erik Aho owns and operates Bluenoise Media, a music production and sound design company, and he recently scored the feature-length film Inheritance for writer/director Kris Kristensen and writer/producer Brian McDonald. Guy Whitmore is a composer on the forefront of adaptive audio for interactive media whose score for No One Lives Forever was heralded by Computer Games Magazine as "the best interactive music seen in an action game!"