Biography
Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in New York City. Her work has deployed both musical and visual media, including a noted series of performance works; sound installation; video; photography and hybrid forms drawing on these. While still a student, in 1994 she created the Sheer Frost Orchestra, a musical performance realized by 17 women on floor-bound electric guitars, deploying nail-polish bottles as sensitive and magical sound-producing implements. Other large-scale works include the performances Emotional Orchestra (Deitch Projects, New York, Tate Modern, London), WHITE LINES (Wien Modern, British School at Rome, Taktlos Bern, Weld/Stockholm and others), and 2008’s Teenage Lontano, a work for 34-voice teenaged choir and suspended speaker installation. Teenage Lontano, Rosenfeld’s “cover version” of Gyorgy Ligeti's orchestral work Lontano of 1967, was premiered in the vast Drill Hall space of the Park Avenue Armory in New York as part of the Whitney Biennial 2008. “Watching this piece, I felt the opening of a portal between a failed utopian past and the possibility that the more real present is already something to love. I was transported.” (New York Magazine, 2008). The work had its European premiere in Amsterdam in June 2009 as a co-production of the Holland Festival and Stedelijk Museum. Rosenfeld also performs frequently in the US and Europe as an improviser, playing a distinctive combination of turntables and her own dub plates, for which she composes original music; these records are later remixed, manipulated, and otherwise transformed in live performance, sometimes by other turntablists as well as herself. Rosenfeld's collaborators have included Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, George Lewis, Kaffe Matthews, Nels Cline, Zeena Parkins, Lee Ranaldo, Martin Tétreault, Philip Jeck, Kim Gordon, Christof Kurzmann, Alan Licht, Dieb 13, Raz Mesinai, Anthony Coleman, and many others. Rosenfeld’s work has appeared in a wide variety of contexts including two Whitney Biennials (2002 and 2008); Creative Time’s project for the World Financial Center site after September 11; survey exhibitions such as “Bitstreams” (Whitney Museum), “Her Noise” (Electra), “Music / Video” (Bronx Museum & Strassbourg Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain), “Electronic Music Archive” (Kunsthalle St. Gallen), and “New Sounds New York” (The Kitchen); and major festivals in North America and Europe including Wein Modern, Donaueschingen, the Holland Festival, Ars Electronica, Musikprotokoll, Pro Musica Nova, Maerz Musik, Mutek, Electronic Music Foundation/Ear to the Earth, and Los Angeles’ CEIAT festival, among others. Rosenfeld has also performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; with the art-band “Text of Light”; with Sonic Youth during their “Good-bye Twentieth Century” tour; and was part of the London Musicians Collective’s “Turntable Hell” project. Rosenfeld’s recordings include: Plastic Materials (2009, Room40/Brisbane) Sour Mash (forthcoming March 2010 on Innova), a collaboration with George Lewisjoy of fear (2006, Softl/Cologne) The Sheer Frost Orchestra: Hop, Drop, Drone, Slide, Scratch and A for Anything (2001, Charhizma/Vienna)theforestthegardenthesea: music from Fragment Opera (1999, Charhizma / Vienna) Performers in Rosenfeld’s Sheer Frost and Emotional orchestras have been too numerous to list, but include Laurie Anderson, Kembra Pfahler (aka Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black), Kaffe Matthews, o.blaat, Okkyung Lee, Chiara Giovando, Honeychild, Jutta Koether, Josephine Meckseper, Jacqueline Humphries, Jennifer Baron, and many illustrious others. Rosenfeld’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Leonardo, the LA Weekly and in John Zorn’s “Arcana 2: Musicians on Music.” Her work is the subject of a chapter of a new book by art historian Seth Kim-Cohen, “In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art” (Continuum, 2009). She’s been a member of the faculty of Bard College's MFA program, the Milton Avery School of the Arts, since 2003, and Co-Chair of its department of Music/Sound since 2007.
