CalArtians Take Part in The Co-Incidence Festival Jan. 19-28

The Co-incidence Festival begins on Friday in Somerville, Mass. | Image courtesy of the festival via Facebook.

This month, CalArts alumni present the second annual Co-Incidence Festival, an experimental music festival and residency hosted at Washington Street Gallery in Somerville, Mass.

Founded in 2017 by Aaron Foster Breilyn (Music MFA 13) and Luke Martin (Music MFA 16), the event seeks to convene composers and performers to challenge the definitions of art, music and the traditional concert, crafting the festival “as an experimental composer might build a piece.”

On Friday (Jan. 19), the festival kicks off with an outdoor concert of Boston-based composers leading up Washington Street. During the week, co-directors Breilyn and Martin provide a time, space and loose framework for performances, inviting both invited artists and community members to attend and contribute, growing compositions organically. Participating composers, performers and artists will focus on collaboration, critical discussion, workshopping and performance.

This year, “Sound Bridges” composed by Austrian artist Joachim Eckl will be performed by participating artists in Union Square each day. Amy Golden, CalArts alumna (Music MFA 16), and Michael Pisaro, CalArts faculty, both serve as guest artists.

The festival concludes with a potluck dinner on Saturday, Jan. 27, during which pieces composed throughout the week could be performed.

As Martin told the Boston Globe last year, “We approach this residency as an experimental music piece, a social piece. The organization of [the festival] is a lot of bringing people together, to interact in ways in which we may or may not know what happens, and that concert is like a condensed form of that. So we don’t know when it will end. We don’t know how all the pieces will turn out as they go. We’re letting that develop as it will throughout the week.”

The Co-Incidence Festival is hosted by Non-Event, a Boston-based concert series devoted to the presentation of experimental, abstract, and improvised music from New England and around the world.