Active Listening

Thollem McDonas – Contributed photo

Internationally-known pianist/composer/teacher Thollem McDonas presents:
“Active Listening: Participating in the Present Moment”

BRICKWORKS on Sunday, June 27th, 1:00 – 3:30pm Admission is FREE

This is a workshop open to anyone with a desire to enhance their experience and health through a greater awareness of their sense of hearing and the point our bodies connect with the sonic world around us. Thollem leads the participants through exercises that emphasize active listening and eventually participation with the sounds of the environment. This is a workshop that is beneficial to both experienced musicians as well as those that have never played an instrument and everyone in between.

Thollem McDonas is a pianist, composer, improviser and teacher. He travels perpetually internationally performing as a soloist as well as in collaboration with a wide array of artists in wildly divergent directions. In the past 7 years, he has added 35 albums to his discography on 15 different vanguard labels. He was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area of Irish and Cherokee descent.

At the age of five, he began studying the keyboard repertoire from the medieval to the 20th century and studied with many notable teachers including Aiko Onishi and Lou Harrison. After graduating with degrees in both piano performance and composition, he stepped from the concert pianist trajectory to dedicate his time to grassroots political movements and ecological restoration projects. In 2005, he returned to his music as his full focus, incorporating his myriad experiences into his compositions, improvisations and teaching.

He has performed extensively as a soloist as well as in piano concertos with symphonies, West African drumming troupes, Javanese Gamelan ensembles, punk bands, with film makers, dancers, poets and painters and a wide array of divergent musicians, both famous and under-known. He is the founding director of Estamos Ensemble, a Mexican-American cross border ensemble for musical exchange. As a writer, his essay, Deep Listening and the Peripatetic Life of an Improvising Musician was written specifically for An Anthology of Essays on Deep Listening (Deep Listening Institute, 2012) in honor of Pauline Oliveros  80th birthday and he is a regular columnist in Full Moon Magazine (Prague), a print publication dedicated to independent music. His music is diverse, with each album and every concert exploring a variety of approaches and paths, resulting in dramatically new and different outcomes. More about Thollem can be found at http://www.thollem.com/bio.html.

This event is presented by the SJI Ag Guild and is part of the SJI Ag Guild’s LIVE LIFE WELL EDUCATION SERIES.

For more details, please contact Tanja Williamson at 360-472-0337 or
tanja [@] fhbrickworks [.] com

Note he is also playing a house concert,  separately from this event at Brickworks, that same evening at the home of Albert and Margaret Hall, 250 Scenic Place, Friday Harbor
at 5:30 pm. Admission by donation.

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