James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer whose work draws from a range of collagist and improvisatory musical languages and investigates the creases, cracks, and folds in traditions ranging from early music to New Age. His concerts subtly exaggerate their seemingly liminal aspects, such as atmosphere and the bodily presence of the performer, until these take on weight equal to that of the musical elements such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre. In Rushford’s long-standing practices on piano, synthesizer, electroacoustic devices, and portative organ, he brings to each instrument a delicate touch and a harmonic sensibility in which unorthodox tunings coexist with influences from fin-de-siècle Impressionism, the twentieth-century avant-garde, and the structures of popular music.

For this performance, Rushford will debut a pair of new works for portative organ, electronics, and voice: Quire (2022), a “kind of futuristic take on a medieval codex” for Pythagorean tuning, and Befall (2023), which will explore the principle of harmonic distance through just intonation.