Ghost Ensemble joins us in Santa Cruz for a two-night residency of new work, with opening performances by their close friends, colleagues, and ensemble members. On the two-night culmination of their West Coast tour, the ensemble performs new work by Catherine Lamb, Ben Richter, and Sky Macklay.

Sky Macklay’s Harmonifriends features two of the composer’s inflating “harmonitree” sculptures, which use vinyl, fans, and dozens of deconstructed harmonicas to create vibrating tree-shaped free-reed sound creatures. The ensemble interacts in sonic and kinetic counterpoint with the moving and sounding sculptures as they rise, sing, tremble, and fall in a visceral aural and visual experience that is whimsical yet intense.
Sky Macklay is Ghost Ensemble’s founding oboist, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, and serves on the composition faculty of the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.

Ben Richter’s Rewild is inspired by the perspectives and timescales of nonhuman beings, the manifold periodicities of deep time, and distant orders of magnitude in the universe of life. Its musical parameters seek new strata in the uncanny zones at which pitch becomes rhythm, harmonic interval becomes beating rate, and timbres morph over time, following the fractal symmetry by which each order of magnitude in biology—organelle, cell, organism, ecosystem, biosphere—resembles and mirrors the others. By offering an aural metaphor for the interacting gradual processes of quantum and cosmic systems, Rewild aims to orient listening toward the vast and infinitesimal timescales we do not experience in everyday life. Perhaps the more we are able to listen as plants, mushrooms, rhizospheres, ecosystems, the more we can see ourselves not just as individuals or as a species but as blood cells in the higher-level organism of the biosphere.
Ghost Ensemble’s founding director and accordionist, Ben Richter creates immersive, gradually evolving compositions that have been hailed as “likely to offer a profound impact on the very nature of listening” (Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio).