This event is SOLD OUT
Location: Hampden
A festive evening unfolds with Creative Alliance Resident Artist Melissa Hyatt Foss, whose clay instruments are an experiment in sophisticated sound. After sharing a meal of empanadas, beans, rice, tortillas, and more, guests are invited to participate in a guided interactive flute-happening, using a set of clay ocarinas that Melissa sculpted herself. The event culminates in an immersive musical experience, where the group is treated to the unique sounds of ancient and rare instruments like polyphonic flutes, horns, and whistling bottles, woven together seamlessly with live electronics.
Artist Bio
Melissa Hyatt Foss is an instrument-maker, musician, composer-performer and teaching artist who co-creates with an ever-growing collection of instruments that she hand-crafts with clay and other natural materials. Her instruments, which are both visual and sonic objects, both sculptural and functional, recreate and reimagine Pre-Columbian sound artifacts of the Americas through the lens of personal narrative and regional mythology.
Foss received her training in Argentina under the tutelage of composer and educator Alejandro Iglesias Rossi and musicologist and educator Susana Ferreres, and developed her career as a performer, instrument-maker, teaching artist, and researcher for nearly a decade in connection with the National University of Argentina. There she completed her master’s degree in Musical Composition, New Technologies, and Traditional Arts and performed as a soloist for 7 years with the Orchestra of Indigenous Instruments and New Technologies.