Julia A. Miller
Sponsored Project: Dissecting Adam
This summer, Miller will be working on a piece of the two-year project, "Dissecting Adam", an actively composed multimedia chamber opera.
The opera concerns Evelyn, a woman whose 111-year lifetime - between 1899 and 2011 - touches upon three centuries. Her story is interpreted by five female voices each of whom represent a different era of Evelyn’s existence, framing an investigation into evolutionary archetypes by way of the woman's relationship to the male figures in her life, collectively known as "Adam". Other themes explored by the work include wordplay on "adam" (human being, here translated as man) and the feminine "adamah"(ground, soil), and the ancient Chinese practice of using oracle bones for divination.
“Dissecting Adam” employs the use of ancient, adapted, or hacked technology, invented instruments and performative objects, and the incorporation of the visual and physical into the sonic.
www.juliamiller.org
Artist Bio:
Julia A. Miller is a composer, guitarist, electronic musician, poet, VJ/ancient technologist, and curator. Poetry and the voice live at the heart of Julia's work, and poetic documents as scores, performative objects, and new media poetics are part of Julia's ongoing exploration into the hybridization of voice, instruments, electronics, and video to create an organic whole from one source of material (her voice). To this end, Julia developed two innovative courses for the School of the Art Institute: Song (Sound), and Sound Poetry (LibHum).
As a composer, Julia is active with the Chicago Composer's Consortium and New Music Chicago. Julia's music has been performed by artists including guitarist Fareed Haque, piano trio The Lincoln Trio, guitar and mandolin duo Ahlert & Schwab, and sopranos Toni Arnold and Julia Bentley, and has been featured at such festivals and venues as the Aspen Music Festival, May In Miami, the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Depaul University, Northwestern University, and Oberlin University, as well as rock clubs, cabarets, bars and alternative spaces internationally. Julia completed the composition half of a double MM at Northwestern University also in 1993, and a DMA in Composition from Northwestern University in 2005. Julia has received awards and fellowships from the Chicago Tribune Foundation, the New York Art Ensemble, the United Arts Council, the American Composer's Forum, and Meet the Composer. Julia is currently a member of the composition faculty at the Music Institute of Chicago.
As an electronic musician, Julia recently completed a sound installation for the Florasonic series at the Lincoln Park Conservatory sponsored by the Experimental Sound Studio. In 2008, Julia premiered a new work for 5.1 DVD and video titled "artists go from unknown to mainstream overnight" at the Electronic Music Midwest Festival. In 1998, Julia was a finalist for the Gaudeamus Music Week Composition Competition for the acousmatic work "bluu", and also presented that 2011 3Arts Artist Awards 4 same work at the IRCAM Forum in Paris.
Julia is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Sound at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Julia is an aficionado of the combination of cutting edge and "ancient" or obsolete (sometimes by more than a century!) technology. For the better part of a decade, Julia has been a presenter and then curator, along with founder George Flynn and composer Jeff Kowalkowski, of the New Music at the Green Mill concert series. Additionally, Julia was instrumental in the technical organization of the Chicago Composer's Forum's productions of John Cage's Musicircus at the Museum of Contemporary Art (2005) and the Chicago Cultural Center (2007). Currently, Julia is music curator for Collaboraction's Sketchbook (2011), and curator of Articular Facet, a performance series created to support "Dissecting Adam", her chamber opera-in-progress.
