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.

Catherine Lamb’s interius/exterius, composed in close collaboration with the musicians of Ghost Ensemble through the 2021-22 season, investigates how collective intentions or focal points allow various and sometimes unusual pathways to emerge. As the group links together in phase, the greater web of activity aligns intention and desire within a community of musicians sounding together, the initiation of sound constantly shifting, unfolding new sonic dimensions.
This commission has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Catherine Lamb is an active composer exploring the interaction of tone, summations of shapes and shadows, phenomenological expansions, the architecture of the liminal, and the long introduction form. “Simultaneously singular and, somehow, all-encompassing in her approach,” Lamb creates a musical experience that is “infinitely inspiring and reflective of the human condition” (Nate Wooley, Sound American).

Laura Cetilia’s nestled in the static is a unique immersive listening experience comprised of pre-recorded spatialized sound and live acoustic cello and voice. Created by Chicanx composer/performer Laura Cetilia, the work explores ideas around noise and euphony, their individual beauty and im/balance with one another. The pre-recorded material is diffused throughout the venue with an array of twelve mini-speakers while the composer herself is ensconced in the center of the sound field.
Audience members are encouraged to move around the space to discover what each vantage point has to offer: undulations of noise, gently beating tones, metallic tinkling, and/or soaring cello lines.
Cellist and electronic musician Laura Cetilia is a performer, composer, educator, and presenter. As a daughter of mixed heritage (second generation Mexican-American), she is at home with in-betweeness, moving through genres and practices as she did with cultures and languages growing up on the Eastside of Los Angeles. As a composer, her music has been described as “unorthodox loveliness” by the Boston Globe and “alternately penetrating and atmospheric” in Sequenza 21.