Author: Yvonne Freckmann
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Windmill visit De Ster
On a grey and rainy February morning I packed my trusty Nikon camera, H4N Zoom audio recorder, red notebook, and camera stand to catch a train to Utrecht. It’s that time again, to meet with Iris and check out a potential windmill for performance. In the past we have performed in the provinces of South…
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The white woods – music theater in art exhibition with Sabine Jacobs
Collaborating with artists from other disciplines provides me with such rich seeds from which to grow new music and performances. On Saturday, Clara Rivière and I gave the premiere performance of Der weiße Wald (The white woods), a music theater fairy tale for acting cellist and narrator. Clara performed the tragic protagonist role within the…
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Zvov Sensory Belgium Tour March 2017
Zvov Sensory is hitting the road again in March for performances in the lovely cities of Brussels and Antwerp. I’ve always enjoyed my visits to these cities, and it’s even more special to combine traveling with music. Through the sensory performances I’ve met so many different people very close up. Often I feel I understand…
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Zvov Sensory Tour Preparations
Success! Zvov Sensory Funded! Time to Prepare! Crowdfunding conclusion: Through Voordekunst.nl we raised over 6,000 Euros for “Zvov Sensory” Tour of the Netherlands. Our intimate and immersive performances of sound, touch, smell, and taste for a blindfolded audience will now envelop more people through your support! Thanks to more than 100 donors and several foundations we managed to gather the starter money…
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Thompson Street Opera Company to move to Chicago
Since my master’s studies in Louisville, Kentucky, I became good friends with my colleague Claire DiVizio (opera singer, producer, great cook!). For her and Pat MacDevitt, tenor, I composed a comedic pocket opera “Close Encounter with the Hillbilly Kind”, which she included in Thompson Street Opera Company‘s 2012 season. In 2014, TSOC premiered my “Rootabaga Stories”…
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Disklavier Project
During the past year I had the chance to create a piece for Yamaha Disklavier. My first encounter with this instrument was in a concert for Yamaha Disklavier (and the Peter Ablinger automatic piano) at the Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse 2014. There I saw and heard a variety of uses for this automated instrument in combination…
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Spring Festival The Hague 2015
The climax of this year was the Spring Festival – the culmination and showcase of the composition department at the Conservatoire. Five days with multiple concerts, and premieres of five pieces/projects of mine! Our Spring Festival was April 13-17, 2015 in Den Haag at the conservatoire and Korzo Theater, and here is a recap of the…
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Field Recording Workshop
The Field Recording Workshop with Justin Bennett has been one of the highlights of this year so far. The Koninklijk Conservatorium offers a variety of workshops from Sonology, Art of Sound, and Composition departments, and I was very excited to spend two weeks learning of techniques, various microphones, microphone pickup patterns, Internet sites for sharing…
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Ensemble Klang – Bang on a Can composers
Feast for the ears and eyes on Monday, January 12, 2015 in Rotterdam. Ensemble Klang performed the first half of the concert in Doelen Grote Zaal, playing “Lick” by Julia Wolfe and “Men” by John Zorn. The playing was excellent, the hall full, and the Zorn piece also had a video by Matt Mullican of…
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School Visit
This school visit turned out to be such a blast! As part of the Fulbright program, I was invited to NSG Nijmegen (Nijmeegse Scholengemeenschap Groenewoud) to have discussions with several English classes, including Cambridge English class, and a music course. These were students between ages 14 and 16. Students prepared all sorts of questions about…