JACK
HERSCOWITZ
Click art below for
'Mystic Elevator' album link
Click art below for
'Castle Anthrax' album link
biography
Jack Herscowitz is a Los Angeles based composer, improviser, and sound artist who engages deep inter-personal collaborations, trans-disciplinary thinking, and alternate definitions of "score" to recognize music as a process which has always extended beyond the singular dimension of sound. His work runs the wide gamut of interactive sound installations, noisy live processed improvisations, ethereal drone soundscapes, theatrical chamber music, and communal spaces for sound making.
His music has been performed throughout the United States and Europe by artists including the Arditti Quartet, Del Sol String Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Syntagma Piano Duo, Atlantic Reed Consort, Hypercube, Anat Nazarathy, Anaís Azul, and Pete Francis. His work has been presented by IRCAM’s ManiFeste Festival, Barcelona Modern Festival, soundpedro, June in Buffalo, CEME Festival, Arts Letters and Numbers, DePaul University's Residency for New Music, and the Provincetown Film Festival, with performances at the Centquatre-Paris, Hellerau European Centre for the Arts, Phonos UPF, the Moscow Conservatory, the Santa Maria del Carmine, Pavia, the City of Basel Music Academy, the Spencer Museum of Art, Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, and the Montpelier Arts Center.
Jack performs improvised live electronics on custom coded instruments with Mystic Elevator (voice + electronics) and Castle Anthrax (percussion + tuba + electronics). He has collaborated on multidisciplinary works with poet/novelist Julia Alvarez, filmmaker/artist Clemente Ciarrocca, choreographer Ashlee Dance, and choreographer/filmmaker Sam Kann. Alongside cellist James Alexander, he cofounded the Lawrence, KS based interdisciplinary arts group, Amorphous Collective.
Jack has presented his personal research at SCI National, NECSEM, ROCC, and precept.concept.percept conferences and won the 2021 Lise Waxer NECSEM Prize for his research on the legacy of La Nueva Canción Chilena. He worked as professor Damascus Kafumbe’s assistant on the book, Tuning the Kingdom, which was published spring 2018 and won the 2020 Kwabena Nketia Book Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Jack is pursuing an M.F.A. in Composition and Experimental Sound Practices at CalArts and holds a B.A. in Music and Environmental Studies from Middlebury College. His musical mentors include Michael Pisaro, Steve Lehman, Micaela Tobin, and Matthew Evan Taylor.