Guest Performance with Kirin McElwain
with Paul Rudy and Christina Silvius
Selections from Youth(2022-24) Kirin McElwain (1987)
Kirin McElwain, Cello, modular synthesizer, samples, voice
Short intermission
Meditation (2025) Kirin McElwain and Paul Rudy (b. 1962)
Kirin McElwain, Cello, modular synthesizer, samples, voice
Christina Sylvius, Viola and electronics
Paul Rudy, electronics, vocals and toys
Program notes
My process for composing Youth was very simple: improvising and remaining aware of body sensation, recording everything.
For this music, I worked with the halldorophone and the modular synthesizer-- instruments that I have no formal training on, and that are inherently somewhat unpredictable. I developed most of the source material for Youth out of recordings I made during a residency as EMS Stockholm. I then added cello, voice, and viola da gamba to these recordings, sometimes pulling from my library of samples, and other times writing parts and recording them to layer over the intial material.
As I think back to the two years I spent working on this music, I am reminded by how much grief, uncertainty, and doubt I was experiencing around my history with the cello and music-making during this time. I think this uncertainty is reflected in the choice of instrumentation in terms of working with the unfamiliar (halldorophone, feedback sources) and the familiar/habitual (cello), and I am struck by the personal return to self and clarity that can occur through the simple act of remaining present with body sensation while working with sound.
Bio
Kirin McElwain is a cellist and composer working in the realms of experimental, contemporary classical, and improvised music. Weaving together classical and Baroque influences with an affinity for sub-bass and harsh electronic textures, her music explores themes of desire, shame, perfection, and belonging.
As a cellist, Kirin has performed on various film and television scores (HBO, National Geographic, Gimlet Media, PBS, NPR Tiny Desk), with contemporary artists (Post Malone, Ioanna Gika, This Will Destroy You), and as part of mixed media installations (the MET, James Cohan Gallery, Neue Galerie) as well as traditional classical and contemporary classical concerts (Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust, Kimmel Center, Roulette), in addition to many community-run venues.
Her self-released 2023 EP Viriditas made the end-of-year lists at Anxious Magazine and A Closer Listen.
Kirin has been an artist-in-residence at EMS Stockholm and Westben Center for the Arts, a New Amsterdam Records Composers Lab Fellow, and her duo with vocalist Alex Koi is the recipient of a 2024 Young Arts grant for their upcoming collaborative LP Wake.
Kirin’s full-length solo debut Youth will be released by AKP Recordings in fall 2025.
Christina Silvius is an improviser, violist, and multidisciplinary artist based in Kansas City, Missouri. She builds immersive layered soundscapes with live electronics, looping, viola, and vocals. Each performance is unique in that she plays to the space she is in; reflecting on the particular acoustics, audience, and energies of the room, she devises a score that resonates to a collected mediation of sound and spatial awareness. Her practice is informed by sounds of nature, Deep Listening, transitional states of being, and sound healing. Christina released her album Solstice at Sunset for Manheim Gardens in August 2025. She is currently a studio resident at the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City. Follow at www.christinasilvius.com
Paul Rudy is a composer, sound artist, sound healing practitioner, land artist and steward, photographer, and researcher. A profound and shaking experience at age eight taught him the power of sound, and a focused study and curiosity has led to a Curators’ Distinguished Professorship at the UMKC Conservatory and International awards as a composer, where he currently serves as the Coordinator of Integrated Arts Initiative. He is a Rome Prize (2010), Guggenheim (2008), Fulbright (1997), and Wurlitzer Foundation (2007 and 2009) Fellow. Recent endeavors include a sound healing practice, composing personal sound meditations for clients, and NIH supported research studying sound in the operating room to improve patient safety with Surgilab at the UMKC Medical School.