Leah Barclay was invited to give a keynote presentation featuring River Listening during the 2014 EcoMusicologies Conference, 2-6 October, in Asheville, North Carolina, USA

Dialogues — verbal, musical and ecological — are the keys to our interconnected world, offering up new meanings while infusing life with reciprocity. In the spirit of dialogue, Ecomusics and Ecomusicologies 2014 invites scholars, musicians and activists to trade ideas and disciplinary perspectives on the campus of UNC Asheville, at the heart of a musically and politically vibrant, environmentally conscious community. Asheville’s unique natural beauty and rich history makes it an ideal gathering spot for this conference: it is where Béla Bartók composed the sounds of local birds in his Piano Concerto No. 3, where John Cage conducted happenings, where sonic engineer Bob Moog pioneered new technologies, and where Buckminster Fuller created his geodesic dome. The multi-day event will include panel discussions, concerts, soundwalks, workshops, and outings.

Six internationally renowned keynote speakers, representing a range of interests and expertise, will convene panels responding to musical collaboration, improvisation, green industry practices, acoustic ecology, ecopoetics, soundscapes, sustainability, contemporary composition, musical activism and other fields. Exciting concerts, sound installations, and alternative format performances both on- and off-campus will round out the program. These include an appearance by seven-time Grammy® winner Paul Winter; a performance of Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Luther Adams’s “outdoor” composition Inuksuit; the Chicago-based Fry Street String Quartet’s multimedia Crossroads Project; a workshop led by Moog associate Dr. Wayne Kirby and Grammy® winning performer Roy “Futureman” Wooten; an installation by Greensboro’s Invisible; a performance by New York’s electronic duo The Mast; and a screening of the critically acclaimed film Musicwood.

Further information: www.ecomusicologies.org