Eliot Burk presents:

What is the most dissonant music possible? This talk explores theories of dissonance (and consonance) starting with work by James Tenney, Hermann von Helmholtz, Richard Parncutt, Graham Hair, and others, extrapolating from those theories to generate novel systems of intonation, and artificial principles for musical structure.

Eliot Burk is a DMA student in composition at Cornell University. His music is the art of motion in time & space -- from traditionally musical scales (i.e. vibrations -- microtonality & new pitch systems), to performance actions which last years, span across continents, & utilize all forms of transit - walking, driving, swimming, flying. Burk is in the midst of a 12-year performance cycle of Tom Johnson's The Chord Catalogue, in which each chord is held for 1-minute. In the summer of 2025, he hitchhiked from Ithaca, NY, to Corralitos, CA, documenting the various characters who assisted him along the way in a variety of media. Other works include: A Yearlong Performance Piece (2012), Seven Strategies for Ending Music Entirely (2022, video: 2023), Asper Studies (2023 - present), & songs (2015 - present). He is the founder of the Society for Public Musical Performances (2014/2024), a guerilla experimental art & music collective.

Jasmine Morris presents:

The voice is perhaps the most intimate sign by which we recognize a subject—singular, unmistakably our own. But what happens when the voice itself becomes relational? In this talk, I will present three recent compositions for string ensembles: Interbeing for violin and viola duo, Poems of Consciousness for string quartet and The Light Progresses Slowly, Perfectly for solo cello and electronics. Across these works, I explore the voice as something that both belongs to the body and exceeds it through the merging of instrumental sound and human voice. 

Jasmine Morris is a British composer based in upstate New York. Her compositional approach integrates instrumental writing with field recordings and the sampling of found sounds. Through her work, she aims to push musical boundaries through signal processing and electronic experimentation. She has been awarded multiple residencies and workshops (Venice Biennale, LSO Soundhub, Jack Studio, Britten-Pears Young Artist, Dartington Music Festival, Luxembourg Composition Fellow) and prizes (BBC Young Composer of the Year). Her work has been premiered at the Barbican, Aldeburgh Music Festival and King's Place. Further commissions have come from the Riot Ensemble, Solem Quartet and the Viktoria Mullova Ensemble. In 2020, Jasmine collaborated with musician Per Runberg on the album Astrophilia, released by the label Nonclassical. She holds a Bachelor of Music from the Royal College of Music and is pursuing a D.M.A in Composition at Cornell University.