Artist Statement
According to Facebook user Brice Everett Ivan, my practice centers around “devolving the saxophone with attention-seeking gimmicks.” These “attention-seekings” (for brevity’s sake, further notated as “ASs”) are fueled by my desire to redefine the performer-instrumental relationship by inventing scenarios which dismantle tradition and expand music-making into a curiosity-centered, interdisciplinary process. As a composer, performer, and curator, I believe that exploration challenges us to listen and live in radically healthy ways.
This ASs has seen me modify instruments with tubes, custom mouthpieces, percussive preparations, and live electronics.
This ASs has seen me wobble metal construction objects during improvised sonic mating arenas to assert dominance over alpha-male culture.
This ASs has seen me turn a preserved heart specimen into an electronic music instrument used in the middle of anti-capitalist music-theatre factories, all while adorned in a glitter suit and fake mustache, armed with bubble guns and a band of fellow artists fighting for human rights.
This Ass has seen me perform fake dental surgery on unsuspecting audience members, using real human teeth, to a soundtrack of guitars played with electronic toothbrushes and raucous saxophone multiphonics.
This ASs has seen me create interactive motion-controlled dance installations and project vintage slides found at thrift stores across America to a soundtrack of divorce and dementia.
This ASs has seen me melt ice off aluminum sculptures in an art gallery, a church, and the back of a jeep on the side of a highway.
As a performer in the Baltimore noise/experimental improvisation scene, and a founder of the interdisciplinary arts collective, Wieldflower Arts, I exist wholeheartedly embracing exploration as a necessity. I see my work as a way of freeing both performers and audiences from the conventions that limit our self-expression. I believe in artmaking as a humanizing practice, and curate sound in a way that allows us all to exist imperfectly and with open minds.
Bio
Sarah Parker is a Baltimore, MD based composer, saxophonist, educator, and improviser. Her music has been performed by ~Nois, airborne extended, Rebekah Heller and Dan Lippel of International Contemporary Ensemble, SPLICE ensemble, Sound Icon, the New Composer’s String Quartet, Wieldflower Arts, the Peabody Composers Ensemble, the Baltimore Baroque Band, the Berklee Contemporary Symphony Orchestra, and the Berklee Symphonic Winds.
Her recent work The Alpha’s Guide to Getting Lekky transforms mating calls of the Greater Sage Grouse (as heard during a lek, or courtship ritual) into a wobbly sheet-metal filled ode to, or perhaps critique of, the sounds and social dynamics of attraction, complete with a mating arena in which performers compete for alpha status. Composed for airborne extended (flute, alto/Paetzold recorders, harp, harpsichord) this piece is part of Sarah’s explorations translating research and real-world sonic phenomena into musical material.
Her approach to the saxophone is fueled by a sense of experimentation and a passion for ultra-gritty multiphonics. She is drawn to augmenting the saxophone with tubes, custom mouthpieces, percussive preparations, effects pedals, and live electronics. She has over a decade of experience performing in wind ensembles, marching bands, and chamber groups, and regularly performs new works by living composers. Sarah performs regularly in improv trio Sophie Rollover with Michael Begay (guitar) and Forrest Wentzel (electronics) and as a member of Wieldflower Arts.
Sarah earned her M.M. in Composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where she studied with Sky Macklay and was awarded the Otto Ortmann Composition Award, 2nd place in the DeLillo Composition Competition, and 2nd place in the Prix d'Ete Composition Competition. Sarah earned a B.M. in Composition from the Berklee College of Music, where she studied with Marti Epstein and Nomi Epstein. While at Berklee, Sarah was awarded the Amy Beach Composition Award.
