Saturday, April 20, 7pm – FREE
Center for Musical Arts (CMA), 200 E Baseline Rd, Lafayette, CO 80026
The Playground Ensemble is the Rocky Mountain Region’s premier new music group. We are professional musicians, composers, educators and fans dedicated to presenting chamber music as a living art form.
Collaboration is at the heart of the Playground’s artistic vision. We commission new works by living composers, support of touring improvisors, and have a full annual concert season. We work with dancers, poets, spoken word artists, visual artists, and multi-media artists, finding inspiration across disciplines and exploring new, hybrid artistic forms. We are also active in music education. Our K12 music creation programs will serve 3,000- 5,000 students every year. More can be found at playgroundensemble.org
About the Artists
Conrad Kehn
“Cryptic Digital Diary is a narrative work using the live human voice, that is equal parts found audio objects, spoken word, a church choir, a pagan street preacher, a fetus, and robots.”
Conrad Kehn is a composer, performer, educator, and an arts administrator. He is the founding Director of The Playground Ensemble.
An award-winning composer, Conrad’s output includes traditional and contemporary chamber music, experimental and multi-media works, and popular music.
As a vocalist, Conrad specializes in electronic music, improvisation, and contemporary chamber music. He gigs regularly with a quasi-improvised Ableton set that combines digitally manipulated live vocals and found content from older media formats. He participates regularly in low latency networked music performances, a process allowing performers in different locations to make music as if they are in the same room.
David Farrell
My personal alarm at the rise of authoritarianism, both at home and abroad, inspired this work. It is simultaneously a lament and a reflection on words of the imprisoned Russian activist Alexei Navalny, who died in prison since this work’s premiere.
“I most clearly understand the essence of the ideology of the Putin regime: The present and the future are being substituted with the past — the truly heroic past, or embellished past, or completely fictional past. All sorts of past must constantly be in the spotlight to displace thoughts about the future and questions about the present.”
David E. Farrell is a composer based in Denver, CO. His music has been performed at various festivals by ensembles across the United States. He is a longtime member of The Playground Ensemble, where he composes and performs music with interactive electronics regularly. David is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Ryan Fiegl
“Cold Dark is a work for electric guitar, electronics, and laptop that uses prerecorded instrument sounds, found sounds, and synthesizers with live processing. The work is a conceptual narrative on the toll the past can have on the internal world.”
Ryan Fiegl is a guitarist/composer/arranger and educator from and currently based in Denver.
His compositions and scoring are rooted in sparse minimalistic textures and immersive soundscapes using synthesizers, electronics, and guitars.
Ryan is an active member of The Playground Ensemble as a composer, performer, and an educator. He is a collaborator with the immersive theater and dance collective Control Group Productions, regularly works with longtime friend and mentor William Hill, and has played in numerous rock and jazz-centric groups in Denver
Also an active educator, Ryan currently serves as faculty at The University of Denver and Regis University.
