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New York native Paul Pinto is a composer, vocalist and founding artistic director of experimental music ensemble thingNY. As a multi-instrumental and vocal improviser, Paul has lent his talents to collaborative projects in theatre and film. His music has been performed in the International Istanbul Film Festival, Glasgow's Shakespeare in the City Festival, and by ensembles and performers around the world, including Pauline Oliveros, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Ensemble loadbang, The Royal Scottish Academy Chamber Chorus, the Carnegie Mellon Concert Chorus, the ai Ensemble and IKTUS Percussion Quartet. Paul has studied composition at Carnegie Mellon with Leonardo Balada and Nancy Galbraith and at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama with John Maxwell Geddes and James Macmillan. He has also studied voice with Stephen Neely and conducting with Robert Page, Frank Nemhauser and Alasdair Mitchell. As a vocalist, Paul has most recently performed in the Kitchen's remounting of Robert Ashley's 1967 experimental opera, That Morning Thing, as well as his own work and collaborations with ensemble thingNY. As a conductor and music director, Paul is an advocate of underrepresented experimentalists in classical music. At the helm of thingNY (called an "inventive new music cabal" by Time Out New York) Paul has premiered hundreds of works from emerging composers in thingNY's six year existence. Paul has also led premieres of more established composers like Pauline Oliveros, Paul Burnell, Art Jarvinen, Kyle Gann and Gerard Grisey. Equally interested in written and improvised experimental chamber and electronic music, Paul's latest projects have been focused on composing for unconventional instruments (such as turntables and radios) and collaborating on new opera compositions. TIME: A Complete Explanation in Three Parts (a collaboration with thingNY and the Panoply Performance Laboratory) was a critics' pick in Time Out New York, Channel Thirteen Arts Blog, and Flavorpill who wrote “this thoughtful work explores each moment to the fullest.” NewMusicBox writes of Paul's first album with thingNY, the experimental operaADDDDDDDDD “takes rapid-fire, largely spoken-word lyrical content and plays it out across a pulseraising background constructed of sonic accents like dinging bells and remote control channel changing—multiple streams of content flashing by at warp speed. Even in its audio-only CD release format, it’s somehow all consuming. I bet no one feels the urge to check their email during a live performance.” Along with newly formed collective, Varispeed, Paul arranged and premiered a day-long, site-specific version of Robert Ashley's seminal opera for television, Perfect Lives, hailed by the New York Times as “delighting”, “perplexing” and “unleash[ing] latent potential, while remaining faithful to [the original's] textural integrity and structural rigor.” Scenes from his ballet, Miseke are available on DVD and CD through the educational UK label, Learning and Teaching Scotland. In addition to ADDDDDDDDD, Paul has also released four albums: The Gentlemen (2009), a suite for vocals and electronics, Every Note on the Piano (2010), NUDES: live at the Mary Benson Gallery (2010) with guitarist animal nudity, and For Stefanos Tsigrimanis (2011) an elegy for turntables, voice, guitar and electronics. His scores have been published by Deep Listening Publications. |