Today’s Four/Ten Media video premiere features composer-performer Molly Joyce performing Form and Flee from her upcoming album Breaking and Entering.
Breaking and Entering marks Joyce’s debut full-length album on New Amsterdam Records’ digital-only Windmill Series. The album features all electro-acoustic works written and performed by Joyce on her electric vintage toy organ. The unique design of this instrument provides a wealth of creative possibilities that accommodate her left hand, which is impaired from a car accident in her childhood, and the album as a whole explores this intersection of disability and creative practice.
Here’s what Molly had to say about Form and Flee:
Form and Flee grapples with the moment of physical sensation and movement leaving one’s body. I wished to ask where that sensation and movement go and how the relationship with one’s body changes thereafter. Through collaboration with Evan Chapman and Kevin Eikenberg of Four/Ten Media, we filmed in black and white with intimate and detailed views of the physically-different hands and them interacting with light in order to emphasize such, as well as emphasis on a grey color scheme as the in-between of black and white, and thus the in-between of immobile and mobile.
Breaking and Entering drops on June 5th, and you can keep up with announcements about the album on New Amsterdam Records’ website.
About Molly Joyce
Molly Joyce’s music has been described as one of “serene power” (New York Times), written to “superb effect” (The Wire), and “impassioned” (The Washington Post). Her works have been commissioned and performed by ensembles including the New World, New York Youth, Pittsburgh, Albany, and Milwaukee Symphony Orchestras, and the New Juilliard, Decoda, and Contemporaneous ensembles, and her work has been presented at TEDxMidAtlantic, Bang on a Can Marathon, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Classical:NEXT, VisionIntoArt’s FERUS Festival, and featured in outlets such as Pitchfork, Red Bull Radio, WNYC’s New Sounds, I Care If You Listen, and The Log Journal. Her work is primarily concerned with disability as a creative source; she has an impaired left hand from a previous car accident, and the primary vehicle in her pursuit is her electric vintage toy organ, an instrument that suits her body and engages her disability on a compositional and performative level. Related speaking/performance events include TEDxMidAtlantic and at the National Gallery of Art.
As a collaborator, Molly has worked across several disciplines and mediums including collaborations with visual artists Lex Brown, Leo Castaneda, Alteronce Gumby, Maya Smira, Julianne Swartz, choreographers Melissa Barak, Kelsey Connolly, Carlye Eckert, Jerron Herman, director Austin Regan, and writers Marco Grosse, James Kennedy, Christopher Oscar Peña, and Jacqueline Suskin. She has also assisted Shara Nova of My Brightest Diamond, including orchestral arrangements for American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, as well as Glenn Kotche of Wilco. Molly is a graduate of The Juilliard School (graduating with scholastic distinction), Royal Conservatory in The Hague (recipient of the Frank Huntington Beebe Fund Grant), Yale School of Music, and alumnus of the National Young Arts Foundation. She currently serves on the composition faculty at New York University Steinhardt.
