Composers Gene Pritsker and Seth Boustead will perform a duo concert featuring special guests, poet Robert C. Ford and composer/pianist Rodrigo Grillo Grillasca. The program will showcase newly written electroacoustic music combined with poetry and film, performed five times in five different cities. The event will launch on March 8th in New York City at the Westbeth Artist Complex. The group will then travel to San José, Costa Rica, performing on March 20th at the University of Costa Rica and on March 22nd in Turrialba, Costa Rica. Next, they will head to Mexico City for a performance on March 27th, followed by a presentation on March 28th in Morelia, Mexico at CMMAS (Mexican Center for Music and the Sound Arts). Most of the music is scored for electric guitar, piano, and electronics, with poetry by Robert C. Ford and Imelda O’Reilly. Also on the program are three films—two by Octavio Maya and one by Salem Krieger. The composers on the program are Seth Boustead, Gene Pritsker, Marvin Camacho, Carlos Castro, Rodrigo Grillo Grillasca, and Rodrigo Sigal.
Bios
Seth Boustead - composer/piano
Seth Boustead is a composer, radio host, arts manager and writer, concert producer, in-demand speaker and visionary with the goal of revolutionizing how and where classical music is performed and how it is perceived by the general public. He received his Master of Music Composition degree from the Chicago College for the Performing Arts in 2002 and has gone on to forge a unique and highly personal musical identity through a prolific outpouring of works in every conceivable genre. His music is regularly performed across the United States and in Europe and has been heard on radio and television stations in Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Paris among others.
Seth is the founder and Executive Director of Access Contemporary Music, an organization that exists to present classical music as a living art form by performing new works in innovative ways for new audiences, providing community-based music education focused on creativity, and commissioning projects with composers from around the world. ACM began when Seth started the now-legendary Weekly Readings program in which he and other musicians met every week to read through, record and post pieces by living composers every week. Weekly Readings ran for six years and attracted major press including the NewMusicBox, Chamber Music Today and the Chicago Sun-Times.
Gene Pritsker - composer/Di.J. / guitar
Composer Gene Pritsker has written over one thousand compositions, including chamber operas, orchestral and chamber works, electro-acoustic music and songs for hip-hop and rock ensembles. His compositions employ an eclectic spectrum of styles, that are influenced by his studies of various musical cultures.
He is the founder and leader of Sound Liberation, an eclectic hip hop-chamber-jazz-rock-etc. ensemble. He also Co-Directs Composers Concordance. Gene's music is performed all over the world at internationally recognized festivals and by highly respected ensembles and performers.
He co-founded the Grammy-nominated Absolute Ensemble with Kristjan Jarvi and has been a composer in residence and guitarist since its creation in 1993. He worked closely with jazz fusion legend Joe Zawinul and has orchestrated major Hollywood movies, including 'Cloud Atlas', for which he wrote additional music and composed his ''Cloud Atlas Symphony’. He is also the lead orchestrator for such TV series as Babylon Berlin, Jett, Netflix's Sense8 and Messiah. Gene is the lead orchestrator and has additional music in the 2021 film The Matrix Resurrections.
“My music is extremely eclectic, for me music has no bounds - I view the world of music as one big genre. My motto for my art is ending the segregation of sound vibration.” Gene is also a guitarist/rapper/Di.J./ and producer he incorporates each of these musical attributes to create music that is “not designed for easy listening or to melt into the background. It is insistent. It demands attention and curiosity." - New York Newsday.
Robert C. Ford - poet / narrator
Robert C. Ford, aka Wall Street Poet, is a poet, spoken word artist and host of Sky Vault, an intimate concert venue in New York City. He frequently collaborates with Composers Concordance, a contemporary music organization, and other world class performers, for both recorded and live music featuring his words self-narrated or brought to life by accomplished jazz and opera singers.
He has released 2 albums of his poetry set to music, The Music Between Us (2021) and Footprints of Steel (2025), in collaboration with composers Charles Coleman (Paavo Järvi, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Kristjan Järvi, London Symphony Orchestra), Mark Kostabi (Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion, Ramones Adios Amigos, Ornette Coleman), Carli Muñoz (Beach Boys, Eddie Gómez), Gene Pritsker (Matrix Resurrections, Joe Zawinul) and Jay Rodriguez Sierra (Groove Collective, Miles Davis).
He has performed at renown NYC venues such as Birdland Jazz Club, The Bitter End, Chelsea Table + Stage, DROM, Greenwich House, Joe's Pub, Nublu, Pangea, Pianos, Le Poisson Rouge, Queens New Music Festival and Theatre 80 as well as Howland Cultural Center (Beacon, NY), Jazz Club ZWE (Vienna, Austria) and NWEAMO Festival (San Diego State University). In September 2022, he was one of four poets featured at the storied Players Theatre (NYC) with Grammy-award-winning artist Suzanne Vega as part of The [Greenwich] Village Trip Festival.
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