Evelyn Ficarra

Bio:

Evelyn Ficarra is a composer and sound artist. Her work finds expression across a range of forms including music theatre, multi media, installation, dance, film and the concert hall. Throughout her career she has enjoyed collaborative work with choreographers, directors, filmmakers, and visual artists. Even in their ‘purest’ forms – say, a solo piano piece – her musical ideas are often co-mingled with, or germinated from, other materials (words, images, sounds) which inform the development and shape of the music and leave their traces in it. In that sense, her work is interdisciplinary at its core. In another sense, she is thoroughly single minded – she stubbornly hears all sounds as music, understands all time based structures (films, dance, theatre) as music, looks at all objects as potential sound sources (music.)

Current preoccupations include explorations of sound objects in various contexts: vocal music theatre, installation and live improvisation. In her recent collaboration on Mary Armentrout Dance Theatre's "Reveries and Elegies" (Brighton / San Francisco 2015), Evelyn explored pianos and teacups as sound objects in various stages of disintegration / destruction, creating a sound installation in which the objects are inhabited by their sonic ghosts.

A dual citizen (UK/USA), Evelyn Ficarra studied composition at the [University of Sussex] and at the University of California, Berkeley. She has several years’ experience as a freelance composer, teacher and sound editor. Her work has received support from the Arts Council of England, the London Arts Board, the Sonic Arts Network, the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, the Hinrichsen Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Meet the Composer and Poems on the Underground. Her music has been heard in concert halls, theaters, music festivals, film festivals, on television and in radio broadcasts in the UK, Europe, the Americas, Australia and the Far East. Current projects include "War Poems - the dead returning lightly dance" for large ensemble and recorded sounds, commissioned by Poems on the Underground, and "Summer Winter Spring" - a multi media performance collaboration with video artist Ian Winters and composer Heather Frasch, for site specific performance in San Francisco Jan 2017.

Evelyn Ficarra is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Sussex.