Past
Grantees

The artist will travel to Saskatoon, Canada to attend the John Arcand Fiddle Festival to research and learn Metis fiddle music. She will also travel to Gatineau, Canada to visit the Canadian Museum of History for its archive of Metis historical resources.

Ibrahim will travel to London, England to attend the Somali Week Festival, meeting with leaders in the Somali community and prominent Somali artists and learning about work happening in Somali diaspora communities in other parts of the world.

The artist will travel to Haiti to research the women of Haitian song, exploring their individual stories as they related to Afro-Caribbean culture, society, history and music.

The artist will travel to São Vicente, Cape Verde to conduct in-depth studies into Cape Verdean traditional musical forms and to conduct ethnographic research about the late singer Cesária Évora and the cultural implications of her music.

ALAJE, SEKOU, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Osogbo, Osun State, Nigeria, to research the birth place of the Yoruba goddess of fresh water, Osun, and continue research on drum rhythms, song, call and response chants, horns, and strings and other African Diaspora musical forms. Alaje is working on a series of compositions called Sweet Waters and has been conducting interviews and conversations with various African musicians and cultural leaders throughout the Southern United States and Cuba. This trip will provide Alaje the opportunity to study and hear direct stories from the people of Osogbo, which will all be incorporated into this project. 

BERGMARK, KRISSY, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Mumbai, India. Bergmark plans to study Hindustani tabla drumming with world-renowned master Pandit Yogesh Samsi. This study opportunity will inform new compositions for her percussion quartet, Matra.

ELDEBEK, HADI, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Lebanon to explore and research different genres and styles of Lebanese music (rural and urban), as well as the influences of Lebanese subcultures on various musical styles, such as Arabic, Armenian, Francophone, Gypsy, Kurdish, and more.

SHYU, JEN, Bronx, New York, will travel to East Timor and West Timor, from the city of Suai in the East Timorese district of Cova Lima, westward to the village of Laran in West Timor. Shyu plans to learn, document, and compare the traditional music and ritual language of different elder female storytellers’ versions of the Wehali tale about the woman warrior legend named Ho’a Nahak Samane Oan, who disguised herself as a man in order to conquer a rival king. This trip will incorporated into her work as a multilingual and multicultural composer and experimental jazz vocalist.

THAO, FRES, Saint Paul, Minnesota, will travel to Chiang Mai, Mae Rim, Doi Pui, Mae Sa Ma, and Kad Luang, Thailand. Thao plans to visit cities and villages to conduct interviews with artists and cultural organizers to collect narratives around technique and aesthetics, as well as ideologies around creating art, the importance of art in the Hmong Thai culture, and the inclusion of art in everyday life. This experience will inform his work as Executive Director for the Center for Hmong Arts and Talent (CHAT), the first multidisciplinary Hmong arts organization, and his work as a hip hop/spoken word artist and founder of hip hop groups, Illegoaliens and Figure 8 Loops. 

WIRTH-DAVIS, SPENCER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Kielder Forest, England, home to the Kielder Observatory, and some of the darkest night skies on Earth. Wirth-Davis is exploring the relationship between natural, dark night skies and the potential effects of extremely rural, natural settings on his genres of music born of urban environments and technology as inspiration for new work.

AUDAIN, CARVER, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Kaffe Matthews' AuDRey Studio and Research Center, London, England, to study techniques and approaches to multichannel production and presentation. Audain is a self-taught pianist and composer, whose works are explorations in harmonics utilizing the piano, electronic organ, guitar and cymbals. Through digital signal processing and editing techniques, his recent works explore harmonic structures to create an array of slowly shifting sound fields that merge and transform within their physical surroundings. The study with Matthews, a pioneer in the field of electronic improvisation and live composition, will provide Audain an opportunity to further Audain his development as a composer.

DETWAH, DULCINEA (CORNELIA MCPHERSON), Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Detroit, Michigan, to deepen her knowledge of techno music and hone her own work in this unique music community. Detwah plans to study with B Moe from the Bruiser Brigade; Derrick May, a pioneer of techno and founder of the Electronic Music Festival in Detroit; and Mike Huckaby, a techno music composer and educator. Detwah’s work with these Detroit techno legends will help her gain more knowledge about their history, style and process as she seeks to push her composition to a more professional level.

DORN, Adrienne, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Copenhagen, Denmark, to attend the second annual Copenhagen-Somali Seminar and meet with leaders, artists, and academics from the Somali community to enhance her professional support of the Somali immigrant communities in Minnesota. Dorn’s organization, The Cedar Cultural Center, is based in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood, which is home to a large Somali population. The Cedar is making a concerted effort to connect with the Somali community and to support Somali artists through its global music and dance programming. Dorn sees participation is this seminar as a means to deepening her understanding and connections.

ORTIZ-VIZCAY, ORLANDO ARUÁN, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Cuba to study the historic turning points in the development of Afro-Haitian music, percussion instruments, and the fusion of Afro-Haitian music with European music, in order to comprise a reference, structure, and philosophy for his future compositions. Ortiz-Vizcay was born in Santiago de Cuba and is of Cuban-Haitian descent. His formal musical training was nevertheless classically focused on Western jazz with no historical background or in-depth study of African elements in Cuban music and Haitian-Cuban music. In recent years, he has found his compositional interests pulled toward his cultural roots. Ortiz-Vizcay plans to interview individuals from key Afro-Cuban and Haitian-Cuban cultural centers and heritage societies as well as attend rehearsals and performances to understand how ensembles are arranged. He will take lessons with masters of Afro-Haitian percussion instruments such as premier tambour, second tambour, tambora, and catá, to understand the rhythmic variations.

Rimpel, Adriana, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Mexico City, Mexico, to research her maternal Mexican lineage. Rimpel, of Mexican-American and Haitian descent, experienced a profound connection when she visited her mother's family in Mexico nine years ago. With this return trip, she seeks to map the correlations between her and her family, as inspiration and content for new work. Rimpel plans to conduct interviews with family members and research family records and archives to discover the influence of the arts in the lives of her family, their core personal values, professions and specialized skills, and any participation in activism and social justice work.

ROBERTS, MATANA, New York, New York, will travel to Canton, Mississippi, Memphis, Tennessee,and Natchitoches and New Orleans, Louisiana, to conduct institutional research and private interviews for an ongoing, segmented, multi-media sound project based on her ancestral history in the American south. As a jazz composer an improviser, Roberts seeks to synthesize tradition and experimentation, breathing life into five generations of her African-American family's soundscapes, narratives, mythology, and lore. She has been gathering stories and doing online and word of mouth research for several years.  She has enough focus now to journey to the towns and cities where her family lived, and where some still live, to find the authentic textures, rhythms, and sounds one can only discover through direct experience.

Rudoi, Paul John, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton, Illinois to conduct research on the first two published works of C.S. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage: A Circle of Lyrics and Dymer, in preparation for musical settings of both texts. The Wade Center houses the largest collection of C.S. Lewis materials in North America, including unpublished analyses, letters, and other materials corresponding to the works Rudoi is referencing. In addition to the archival research, Rudoi has arranged to meet with two scholars of Lewis' literature: Dr. Gerald Root from Wheaton College and Dr. Don King from Montreat College. Rudoi is interested in these works for the vitality and blunt musicality of the language.

SCOTT, THOMAS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Sarajevo, Bosnia, to research Bosnian Sevdah music or Bosnian blues, through study with local musicians as facilitated by Sarajevo-based musician and recording engineer Alan Omerovic.  With Omerovic's help, he will arrange lessons and master classes to explore the unique instrumental techniques and individual roles in the Sevdah music ensemble, including frame drum, accordion, violin, clarinet, voice, and sargiya (Bosnian oud).  As a multi-instrumentalist and orchestrator, Scott feels it is critical to have a working knowledge of the ranges and fundamentals of the instruments for composing. He is attracted to the unique blend of Eastern and Western influences and the polyrhythmic dexterity and variety of meters and time signatures found in the Sevdah music.

LYNNEE DENISE BONNER, composer and sound designer, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa, to gain a political and cultural understanding of the social landscape that generated the music and dance genre, Kwaito. Kwaito, house music combined with African sounds and shouted or chanted lyrics, emerged in South Africa during the late 1990s. Bonners interest in researching this form is part of her ongoing composition work around the African Diaspora.

SABRINA CHAPADJIEU, composer and songwriter, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to London, Paris, and Berlin, to study neo-burlesque to inspire her composition and performance style in this form. She is interested in exploring the different geographic influences, such as the of Londons theartical politics, Berlins Weimar era cabarets, and Paris new wave of feminist burlesque, to create a new series of songs.