PAUL J - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Artistic Director, Proserpina Project
• Professor of Musicology at Bucknell University

Annie Randall is professor of Musicology at Bucknell University and has also taught at Mills College (CA), New York University, and College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati. She has published on 18th-century German melodrama, Puccini's operas, women in music, American protest music, and 1960s British pop. Her books include: Dusty! Queen of the Postmods (Oxford, 2009), Music, Power, and Politics (Routledge, 2005), and Puccini and 'The Girl': History and Reception of Girl of the Golden West (Chicago, 2004). Dusty! won the Philip Brett Award of the American Musicological Society and was the subject of numerous articles in north America and Europe (The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Daily Mail [UK]) and radio programs (Jon Schaefer's Soundcheck [WNYC], Robin Young's "Here and Now" [Boston NPR], the BBC 4' s Woman's Hour, "Newstalk with Tom Dunne" [Irish national radio], among others). She is a graduate of College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati (Ph.D, Musicology), DePaul University School of Music (M.Mus, Composition), University of Kent at Canterbury, England, (B.A., Early Modern European History).

Job Titles:

• Conductor

Noted for her "directorial command," "technical expertise," and work with women's vocal ensembles, Beth Willer is founder and Artistic Director of the acclaimed Lorelei Ensemble and Director of Bucknell University's Choir and Camerata. Willer has initiated collaborations with composers from the U.S. and abroad, leading Loerelei in numerous world, U.S. and regional premieres, while working to expose lesser-known works of the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods. In 2016-17 Lorelei will perform at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), and deliver the U.S. premiere of George Benjamin's Dream of the Song with the Boston Symphony Orchestra Boston's Symphony Hall, and Carnegie Hall. Recipient of Chorus America's prestigious Louis Botto Award, Willer has served as Resident Conductor of the Radcliffe Choral Society, conductor of The Boston Conservatory Women's Chorus, and chorus master for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Willer holds graduate degrees in conducting from Boston University (DMA and MM), and an undergraduate degree in Music Education from Luther College, having studied with Ann Howard Jones, David Hoose, Bruce Hangen and Weston Noble.

Christian Humcke is currently a graduate Composition student at Peabody Conservatory. In addition to composing music, he is an accomplished conductor, pianist, and trombonist. The recipient of many Music department accolades and University awards, he is a graduate of Bucknell University.

Job Titles:

• Department of Music / Bucknell University

Paul J. Botelho is a composer, performer, developer, and artist whose work includes a series of one-act operas, acoustic and electro-acoustic music, multimedia installation pieces, visual art works, and vocal improvisation. He performs as a vocalist primarily with extended technique and incorporates the voice into many of his pieces. His work has been performed, presented, and exhibited in concerts, festivals, galleries, and museums across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Botelho received an M.F.A. and Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University, an M.A. in Electro-Acoustic Music from Dartmouth College, and a B.F.A. in Contemporary Music Performance and Composition from the College of Santa Fe. Currently he is Assistant Professor of Music at Bucknell University where he teaches music composition. Paul J. Botelho's Proserpina (2016) is an opera for solo voice, chorus, and electro-acoustic fixed media, to be performed directly following Seckendorff's Proserpina (1777). Though Proserpina (2016) is a freestanding composition that can be staged either alone or in tandem with Proserpina (1777), when the two are performed together audiences will inevitably perceive profound through-lines in both works. Botelho's piece consciously acknowledges and extends the spirit of vocal and theatrical experimentation that is so clearly present in Goethe and Seckendorff's piece. And just as Proserpina (1777) benefited greatly from the creative collaboration of Corona Schröter (Weimar's principal singer and actress who starred in the first performance), Botelho's work draws upon Tiffany DuMouchelle's rich experience with contemporary vocal and theatrical technique, thus mirroring the earlier collaboration. Indeed, the same singer in both pieces represents an intentional link between the two, undermining assumptions of time and space: can this be the same person, trapped in the same place, by the same tormentor, surrounded by the same dead souls? Audiences will also perceive stark differences between the two pieces. While Goethe and Seckendorff spectacularly foregrounded Proserpina's own point of view and her own words (historically, a new sense of agency), the audience is still positioned at a psychological distance from her, looking on, almost voyeuristically. Paul Botelho's piece, in contrast, rivets attention on Proserpina's physical voice and her psychological state as expressed through extended vocal technique and electro-acoustic fixed media; Botelho attempts to collapse the distance of the earlier work and position the audience within her terrified and terrorized psyche as she realizes the full import of her situation. Proserpina's / Goethe's words are collaterally damaged in the process, but they are still words, still Proserpina's centuries-old text, no matter how mangled and flayed by terror. Or are they?

Job Titles:

• Video Artist

Russell Chartier has spent many years working in Broadcast Television working for various networks including A&E, The History Channel, YES Network, Lifetime, NFL, NHL and several others. He is currently a Broadcast Operations Supervisor at Encompass Digital Media. His work in the Video Art Medium explores multiple layers and focuses heavily on texture and color. Many of the images in his works are distorted and manipulated in various unorthodox in an attempt to create a visual depth where recognizable images will appear within the collage of manipulated images and textures. Russell attended the College of Santa Fe. He went on to study Broadcast Engineering at the Cleveland Institute of Electronics and received his MA from the University of Canterbury in Media Arts.

Job Titles:

• Director
• Founder
• Artistic Director, New York Baroque, Inc.

Wen is the founder and Artistic Director of New York Baroque Incorporated. An alumna of The Juilliard School and Yale School of Music, Wen studied viola da gamba with Sarah Cunningham, and double bass with Don Palma, Timothy Cobb and Robert Nairn. She has earned praise both for her "angelically played" solos (Charleston Today) and for "knocking people off their seats" (Sarasota Herald-Tribune), and has performed with William Christie, Jordi Savall, Masaaki Suzuki, Monica Huggett, Ton Koopman, and Richard Egarr. In addition to performing and directing, Wen can also be found cooking, and living in New York City with her husband, cellist Ezra Seltzer.