Jessie Marino

Jessie Marino

Luciano Berio Rome Prize
September 10, 2018–July 26, 2019
Profession
Adjunct Faculty, Department of Sound, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Project title
Live Performance Project: “The Vanity of Small Differences”
Project description

My project as a Rome Prize Fellow will be creating a new work of interdisciplinary music for and with the violinist Winnie Huang titled The Vanity of Small Differences. The work created will find itself situated between the genres of opera, dance, and installation art aiming to answer the question: What happens to the body’s ability to communicate when subjected to musically constructed parameters of time? We train our bodies and voices from the first moments of our human existence. We are all experts at our everyday negotiations of physical and emotional space. Our bodies have remarkably communicative capabilities which are both consciously and unconsciously transmitted—in addition, we muddle and mix in language as an agreed upon method of conveying an apparent truth to the ways our bodies may be communicating. How, then, can we create musical performances which use these conventions of body, voice, and time, while obscuring and abstracting their entrained meaning to create a new style of perception.