Replaying the Tape
Jane Boxall
Saturday, November 11, 2023 // 7:00 pm
Greenwich House Music School // 46 Barrow Street, New York, NY 10014
Tickets: $20 General Admission and $5 Children/Student/Low Income (+ processing fee)
“Replay the tape a million times… and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.” — Stephen J Gould
‘Replaying the Tape’ is a collaboration between women practitioners: New-York based composer Dr. Jane Boxall, palaeontologist Dr. Frankie Dunn, and poet Penny Boxall. We will conjure an imaginary menagerie of animals which might have existed had the dice-throw of evolution fallen differently. Jane will compose and premiere new music for tape and live percussionist, which in a performance setting will interweave with the live poetry performance. The tape aspect will include field recordings from Dr. Dunn’s archaeological digs, tape manipulation of found sounds, and excerpts from research and altered samples from the new poetry itself. The live percussion part will have choreographic and visual elements. Penny Boxall will write new poems for the project, and perform these live in concert with me.
Our project will help make palaeontology accessible to a new audience, and writing workshops and legacy recordings make the project truly inclusive. By engaging with cutting-edge research about the ancient origins of animal life, we will make accessible an area which not only suffers from an image problem (palaeontology has long been perceived as an area of science difficult for women to enter, and for the public to engage with), but which is ripe for creative interpretation.
Music and poetry bring the remote closer; this project might enable adults and children to have an emotional response to an abstract area of science. Our aim is to imagine, through words and sound, animals which have never been, but could have existed: we wish to invite our audience to consider what role chance plays in our own existence.
Jane’s Artist Statement
As a composer, I am interested in contradictions. The “hearing eye” of musical notation, and the “seeing ear” of audio-recorded landscapes and journeys. The freedom to be found within the tight, limited sonic quadrant of a 2-minute field recording (which I often use as the frame for ‘Field Notes’ compositions). I particularly love playing and performing electroacoustic music, in which the electronic tracks are an inflexible, unlistening yet supportive and interactive musical partner. I feel a duality of identity as a New York (state) composer, active in NYC but resident in the northern Adirondack wilderness. My adulthood has been spent as an emigrant and immigrant, a part and apart, home everywhere and nowhere.
I am thrilled to be collaborating on Replaying The Tape with my sister Penny, and palaeontologist Frankie Dunn. As a percussionist I have worked mainly with the timbres of metal, wood and skin; stone is an intriguing timbral source and inspiration for this project. By focusing a “hearing eye” on fossils, we can draw connections between the incredibly-old and the brand-new.
Artist Bios
Jane Boxall
Jane Boxall is an adventurous composer-percussionist, working across diverse musical genres. As a soloist, collaborator and session player, Jane has performed in concert halls, art galleries, cafes, castles, kindergartens, hospitals, universities, forests and festivals from Cyprus to San Francisco, India to Quebec, and Manhattan to France. She is dedicated to new music, specializing in contemporary art music on marimba and vibes, and rock and hiphop drumkit for original artists. Born in England and raised in Scotland, Jane completed her BA and MA in Contemporary Music at the University of York (UK), and her Doctorate in Percussion Performance & Literature (minor in Composition & Theory) at the University of Illinois.
Jane's compositions for percussion ensemble have been performed from Texas to Hong Kong; her studio recordings have received radio airplay across the United States, on the BBC and on the Dutch radio stations Concertzender and Radio Mona Lisa. Jane’s recordings of Nancy Van de Vate’s marimba compositions are released on the Naxos label. Jane has appeared with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, Montpelier Chamber Orchestra, TURNmusic, Guildhall Symphony Orchestra, Prairie Ensemble and the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble. In 2012, Jane premiered Garry Jones’s Concerto for Park Bench and Orchestra with the Event In A Tent Festival Orchestra – “I’ve never heard a park bench played so passionately,” stated the composer.
Jane is one of a very limited number of marimba artists worldwide to have developed a ten-mallet technique. Her 2012 album, Zero to Eight Mallets, has been enduringly popular with percussionists and non-percussionists alike. An album review in the Percussive Arts Society’s magazine Percussive Notes stated: “Jane Boxall’s CD is an eclectic mix of 100 years’ worth of music masterfully performed on marimba…Throughout the recording, Boxall’s performance is consistently excellent.” Of the 0-8 mallet concert program, composer and percussionist Brian Johnson opined: “it is highly interesting, entertaining and intelligent.”
Jane is deeply committed to the development of art music for percussion, and continues to seek and create innovative and adventurous programs. In 2013, Jane was the recipient of a grant from the Vermont Community Foundation, which enabled her to undertake the inaugural “Portable Percussionist” tour on foot from Canada to Massachusetts. Jane commissioned local composers to write “portable” concert pieces then hiked the Long Trail through the state of Vermont, stopping along the way to perform solo percussion recitals. Composer Dennis Bathory-Kitsz commented: “Jane Boxall's Portable Percussionist was a brilliant presentation. She held the audience spellbound with the simplest of materials -- rocks, sticks, pots, and even the zippers on her pack. One composition student later said, ‘My mind was completely blown. I have to re-think everything about composing’."
Jane plays and endorses Vic Firth sticks and mallets, Coe Percussion marimbas, and Alternate Mode MIDI instruments.
Frankie Dunn
Frankie Dunn is a palaeobiologist based at the University of Oxford. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Warwick in 2015 and her PhD in 2019 from the University of Bristol. She subsequently moved to Oxford to take up two fellowships: a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College and an Early Career Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the exhibition of 1851. She is now a NERC Independent Research Fellow and a Senior Researcher at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Frankie’s research focuses on the rise of animals: a profound transition in the History of Life - for the first-time organisms were able to engineer the environment around them, altering geochemical cycles, building complex ecosystems and diversifying into myriad forms. The ultimate aim of this research is to understand how animal bodyplans evolved in deep time.
Penny Boxall
Penny Boxall is a poet whose published collections are: Ship of the Line (Eyewear, 2014); Who Goes There? (Valley Press, 2018); and In Praise of Hands (with Naoko Matsubara’s woodcuts, Ashmolean Museum, 2020). She has won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award (Scotland’s largest poetry prize) and the Mslexia/PBS International Women’s Poetry Prize. She is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, and has held fellowships/residencies with UNESCO Cities of Literature, Tartu, Estonia (2022); Merton College, University of Oxford (2019); Château de Lavigny, Switzerland (2018); Hawthornden Castle, Scotland (2017, 2023); and Gladstone’s Library, Wales (2017). Her poetry has appeared in places including The Sunday Times, POETRY (Chicago) and The Rialto. In 2021 she received funding from Arts Council England to develop her first novel for children. In 2023 Merton College Choir will premiere a work by Gabriel Jackson, setting new poems by Penny.
