evelyn ficarra
Early Influences: Born in California of a Swiss mother and a Sicilian-American father. There was always music in the house, whether live or recorded: jazz, classical, renaissance, baroque, marching band, Broadway musical, contemporary, electronic, rock, pop, folk. Studied flute and piano, sang in choirs & madrigal groups, played in jazz band, chamber groups, orchestras and the Junior High School Pep Band. Two early trips to Europe left strong impressions; images, sounds and smells of Switzerland (chocolate) Italy, (spaghetti al burro) Greece (the sea) and England (the London Underground.) Many childhood trips to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival engendered a love of theatre and language. Left California for Britain in the mid 70's.
Education: Spent one year as a flautist at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester before moving south to Brighton, where she studied music at the University of Sussex. Studied composition with Peter Weigold and Jonathan Harvey, receiving her BA in 1985 and an MA in Composition and Aesthetics in 1986. She also wrote music for a number of student drama productions, started a music theatre workshop with other students, and discovered an affinity for working in the electronic music studio. It was through her attraction for sound, recorded and electronic, that Evelyn initially found her voice as a composer.
"I especially remember the day Jonathan Harvey showed us how to splice tape. He picked up a length of quarter inch and waving it gently in the air said, 'this is the sound'. Something struck me then about the physicality of the sound object - the length of tape that is, and yet is not, the sound; the recording of a blackbird that evokes, but is not, the blackbird itself; sounds which reach out in one direction to the physical world and in the other direction to the imagination and to more abstract constructs of rhythm, shape, line, colour, pattern; and above all the dependence of sounds on time and movement; the bow over the violin, the tape over the tape head, the binary code down the wire. I am attracted to sound, not quite for its own sake, but for the meanings and structural potential it contains."
She later studied screen music composition at the National Film and Television School, graduating in 1994.
In 2005 Evelyn Ficarra accepted a Fellowship from the University of California at Berkeley where she is currently working towards a PhD in Composition. Since moving back to California she has studied composition with Edmund Campion, Cindy Cox, Jorge Liderman, Myra Melford, Erik Ulman and David Wessel. At Berkeley she has continued to explore music as a collaborative art form, not only with other artists but within the act and presentation of musical expression itself.
"In my work I see every performance — even in the concert hall – as a piece of theatre, in which space, gesture and image take part in, or are contained by, the musical expression. Sometimes the image is only in the mind, as with my purely electronic pieces, but the ideas of gesture, and of relationships which are worked out as in a drama, are still present. Compositionally I am rooted in an obsession with sound (vocal, instrumental, environmental, mechanical, natural, electronic) and the ways in which these sounds reach out towards meanings that are more than purely musical. Music for me is never essentially abstract; it is always of necessity an expression of lived — and heard — experience."
Professional Activities: Composing
After university, Evelyn Ficarra's composing career was launched by a commission from the Second Stride Dance Theatre, funded by an Arts Council of Great Britain Composers for Dance Award in 1988, which resulted in the piece
Dancing and Shouting with choreographer/director Ian Spink and designer Anthony MacDonald. This has been followed over the years by a range of work across a number of genres including electroacoustic concert music, dance, theatre, radio and film.
Evelyn Ficarra's work has received support from the Sonic Arts Network, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Arts Council of England, the London Arts Board, Hearing is Believing, the Hinrichsen Foundation, the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, Choreodrome, Poems on the Underground, and Meet the Composer. An Electroacoustic Composer's Bursary from the RVW funded her for six months at the International Electronic Music Studio in Stockholm, and the resulting tape piece, Source of Uncertainty, was a finalist in the
1993 Prix Noroit. Her work has also been short listed for the
Bourges and
Luigi Russolo competitions. In 2004 she was selected for the
Djerassi Resident Artists Program and in 2008 she won an
Eisner Award for music. Her music has been performed at a number of festivals including the
City of London Festival,
Brighton Festival,
Sonorities, and the
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and has been heard in concerts, at the theatre, on the radio, or in film festivals, in Britain, Europe, North America, South America, and the Far East. A CD of Evelyn's electroacoustic chamber and tape works,
Frantic Mid-Atlantic, was released on the
Sargasso label in 1999. Her work is featured through the British Information Centre's
Contemporary Voices project www.bmic.co.uk, and recent works were selected by
Critical Notice and are available on their website www.criticalnotice.com.
Ficarra has always valued collaborative work and gains inspiration from interaction with other musicians and other artistic disciplines - in particular dance, theatre, film. Notable collaborators include musicians/improvisors: singer
Shie Shoji and her group Shonorities; pianist/improvisor/composer
Myra Melford, singer/improvisor
Aurora Josephson; choreographers
Ian Spink,
Stephen Goff,
Sarah Fahie and
paige starling sorvillo; theatre director Sue Buckmaster of
theatre-rites, and filmmakers
Suse Bohse and
Ian Winters. In 2002 Evelyn Ficarra and Jerwood Award winning choreographer Sarah Fahie co-founded
naked fish productions which created three dance/theatre pieces premiered at the Robin Howard Theatre at The Place in London;
Submarine 2002;
Fugue for a Furnished Flat 2003; and
Nocturne for Night Cleaning 2004. Subsequent collaborations with Fahie include
Such Sweet Thunder 2006 and
night bed is in mess 2007.
Recent works include
Rendition for prepared piano, harpsichord and video, a collaboration with filmmaker and photographer Ian Winters and
Keynote+ (pianist Kate Ryder and harpsichordist Jane Chapman) premiered in the Cutting Edge Festival in London, 2006;
night bed is in mess for voice, flute and piano, commissioned by Shie Shoji of Shonorities and choreographed by Sarah Fahie in 2007;
Submarine Revisited an electronic sound scape featuring singer Loré Lixemberg and pianist Dominic Saunders available on www.criticalnotice.com, and
Night Edge, a collaboration with dancer/choreographer paige starling sorvillo, singer Aurora Josephson, flautist Heather Frasch and pianist Myra Melford premiered in Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus in December 2007. Her new fixed media piece
Fractured Marble appears on Jonathan Harvey's
Other Presences CD released by Sargasso in 2008
www.sargasso.com
Teaching
In Britain between 1991 and 1998 Evelyn Ficarra taught courses or run workshops in composition and music technology at a number of institutions including the
University of Westminster (Commercial Music Department, 1994-1997), the
University of Hertfordshire (Electronic Music Department, 1991 - 1995),
Liverpool University (Composer in Residence, March/April 1995), and the
Royal Northern College of Music (Visiting Tutor in Composition, March 1994). She took part in running education workshops for the Sonic Arts Network, Piano Circus, Hampstead Theatre and The Place Learning and Access. At UC Berkeley she is currently a Graduate Student Instructor, and has taught Musicianship and Music Theory, as well as on the Introduction to Western Music course.
Sound Editing and Design
Between 1998 and 2005, Evelyn Ficarra also worked as a freelance sound editor for a number of post production sound houses in London, including Videosonics, Boom, Jumbuck and Clarity Post Production. Her skills include dialogue editing, effects editing, music editing and sound design. Television credits include Vanity Fair (BBC, 1998); Great Expectations (BBC 1999); Nicholas Nickleby (ITV, 2000); In a Land of Plenty (BBC 2000); The Swap (ITV, 2001); Daddy's Girl (LWT, 2002); Grass (BBC, 2003); Reversals (ITV, 2003); Manchild (BBC, 2002/3); William and Mary (ITV, 2003); Absolute Power (BBC, 2003); My Life in Film (BBC, 2004). Feature film credits include
Pandaemonium (UK, 2000);
Dr. Sleep (UK, 2001);
I Capture the Castle (UK, 2002);
Oh Happy Day (Denmark, 2004);
Moerke (Denmark, 2005); and
Zozo (Sweden, 2005, selected to represent Sweden at the Academy Awards in 2006.)
For further information on Evelyn Ficarra's work and to see scores, contact the British Music Information Centre at www.bmic.co.uk and follow links to Contemporary Voices or write to evelynf@evelynficarra.com