In never leave story, percussionist Bonnie Whiting explores intersections of storytelling and experimental music, integrating text, movement, creative sonification, and technology. Act I features collaborations with dancer Jennifer Salk and ceramicist Timea Tihanyi, plus music by Jeffrey Treviño and field recordings of poet Alice Notley. In Act II, Whiting extends her speaking percussionist project via a new commission from composer Kevin Clark and a reimagining of a historic work by Iannis Xenakis. Tennyson’s Ulysses looks back on his life, while Aeschylus’ Kassandra looks forward: in reality, both point to the urgency of “the now.”

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Program

Act I
flow/bell curve/ebb (2025/6): Bonnie Whiting

Slackwater (2026): Jennifer Salk, dance & Bonnie Whiting*              

Corpus to Corpus (The Third Body) (2025): Timea Tihanyi, ceramics & Bonnie Whiting  

Act II
Being Pollen (2011): Jeffrey Treviño/text by Alice Notley
I.    Conversation (Bolinas, 1971)
II.    The Song Called “Get Away” (Buffalo, 1987)
III.    Pollen (Philadelphia, 2006)   

Kassandra (1987): Iannis Xenakis/text Aeschylus Agamemnon 
(c.a. 450 BCE; supertitles from the Anne Carson’s An Oresteia, 2009)

Some Work of Noble Note (2026): Kevin Clark*/text: Ulysses Alfred, Lord Tennyson with Hymn to Poseidon (Homeric Hymn, c.a. 500 BCE)
                    Stage direction: Rose Ginsberg

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Program Notes

flow/bell curve/ebb
In late 2025, king tides and a series of atmospheric rivers contributed to catastrophic flooding in the Salish Sea floodplain and surrounding rivers. flow/bell curve/ebb uses creative realization to sonify data and texts related to those events. I am curious about how structured improvisation, filtered through my own taste and memory, changes how I respond to my environment. Salvaged and traditional metals are activated on a resonating drum surface. The head of the instrument slopes and bends and a hidden pedal plummets and soars, while the force of striking, the pull of gravity, and the malleability of the head itself contributes to instability, change, and an unpredictable physical and sonic environment. The objects move and shift as they are activated, generating both precarity and independence. Listening -to myself, to others, to the environment- and responding is a way to cultivate resilience as things change. The instability of the surface itself proposes new directions. Improvisation, listening, and response is, for me, a way to perform agency -and process climate grief- during our time of wilder rivers, changing tides, and rising seas.

Slackwater
Slackwater is the most recent outgrowth of my collaboration with dance artist Jennifer Salk: a playful and deep process of co-creation and experimentation. This summer, we both read Melissa Kirsch’s essay on the year’s midpoint, Gravitational Pull,  in the New York Times. I often use mesostic writing as a way to create structure from existing texts. This one yielded the following:

                thiS week
       an apheLion  
            the plAnet’s tilt
                we Can fathom
                   taKing up inches of space

              We can 
             fAthom
  the exacT middle
              wE can picture
midpoints fRom which to look forward and back  

Kirsch writes: Odysseus is hardly a man to tread water in the middle of a punishing sea, but he gets aid from the gods when he’s drowning: “The current ceased; the River God restrained / the waves and made them calm. He brought him safe / into the river mouth.” It takes Odysseus 10 years to make it home from the war. Ten aphelia, 10 summers, 10 midpoints from which to look forward and look back.
-Bonnie Whiting

Corpus to Corpus 
Timea Tihanyi's sculptures in Corpus to Corpus were generated through Touching Space, an interactive touch-based Virtual Reality environment Tihanyi co-created with Zoe Kaputa in 2024, with support from the UW Reality Lab. In Touching Space, participants wearing Quest2 headsets enter a virtual space that looks and feels both architectural and visceral. Through their hand gestures, participants can shape the walls of the space using a form of virtual touch. The walls shiver, heave, and change shape as the hands nudge them. The experience feels both haptic and kinetic, while the virtual space around becomes alive and, once set into motion, continues to morph on its own. Participants may capture the 3-dimensional shape of this virtual space at a precise moment of their choosing. The digitally-formed space-forms are subsequently printed in porcelain on a ceramic 3D printer. In this version of the project, with percussionist Bonnie Whiting, a third body, enters in a performance environment, activating these amplified resonant structures alongside recordings of the objects themselves.
-Timea Tihanyi

Being Pollen
I don't want the poems transformed in any way, they are exactly the way they're supposed to be. If someone sets them to music, it's as if they're not complete enough as they are.... I just don't consider my poems to be malleable.... I know a lot of famous poems have been set to music (I'm thinking of German and French poets) — and there's a case to be made for that; but I feel oh so leery of it right now. Poetry doesn't get its own due as the kind of music it is.... I want the poems as read by me heard by the audience. I've gone to a lot of trouble to make them be the way they are.
—Alice Notley, 2011 (excerpted from correspondence with the composer; ellipses indicate the composer's omissions)

In Being Pollen for percussionist and loudspeaker (commissioned jointly by percussionists Bonnie Whiting and Johannes Fischer in 2011), composer Jeff Treviño honors the poet Alice Notley's objections to conventional text setting through a continuous, multi-movement structure that accompanies and transitions between three unaltered recordings of her recitations: 'Conversation,' as read in Bolinas, California in 1971; 'The Song Called 'Get Away',' itself an excerpt from the much longer 'In Ancient December,' as read in Buffalo in 1987; and 'Pollen,' as read in Philadelphia in 2006. Because the recitations occur nearly two decades apart from one another, together spanning more than thirty years, we hear Notley's speaking voice across three different stages of life.
The piece's structure alternates between solo movements and accompaniments that explore different relationships between sound and recorded recitation. In 'Conversation,' a poem full of playful repetition, the music waltzes with and then dissolves into incantations of a single found conversational fragment: 'My name is Wesley Jackson, and my favorite song is 'Valencia' — isn't that beautiful?'; the repetitions in the poem occur because Notley reads aloud from its symmetrical graphic layout. A solo interlude varies the poem's rhythms to bridge to 'The Song Called 'Get Away',' in which a composite rhythm, created by layering the rhythms of fragments from 'Conversation,' repeats and gradually slows throughout the unaltered recitation. Lastly, in 'Pollen,' an ecstatic hymn to disintegration, the percussionist first recites the poem silently, while playing in alignment with its unspoken syllables, and then repeats the movement with Notley's recitation playing audibly.
The work's instrumentation favors small, quiet, high instruments and found objects that might appear at first to be more at home in a kitchen or garage than in a concert hall. Whiting and Treviño began work on the piece in the recording studio, working directly with Whiting's percussion sounds and Notley's recorded recitations before the creation of any notation, and composer Ben Hackbarth's AudioGuide program enabled Treviño to measure similarity between recordings of Whiting's percussion sounds and Notley's spoken words. These measurements became a material for composition in the 'Pollen' movement, in which the composer paired sounds with the timing of Notley's spoken words according to how closely each sound resembled the syllable it accompanied, or composed silence in cases where no similar sounds existed.
-Jeffrey Treviño

Kassandra
More than twenty years after the premiere of his opera the Oresteia, Iannis Xenakis added  Kassandra (1987), a scene for baritone and percussion. In it, the singer alternates between a piercing falsetto voice (the prophet, Kassandra, foretelling both Agamemnon’s grisly death and her own) and a naturally-deep modal voice (the Chorus and Chorus leader, interrogating this foreign woman, mostly misunderstanding and disbelieving what she foretells.) I’ve performed this work with the wonderful bass baritone Nicholas Isherwood many times, and am always struck by the chilling quality of the falsetto. This gender-bending setting of the ancient tale amplifies what seems hysterical and unbelievable about Kassandra’s story. In both tessituras, the vocal line uses graphic rather than precise notation, and the lower Chorus passages are often marked “spoken” to better fit an individual singer’s range.  Furthermore, both parts must be exactly synchronized, with precise accents and sharp punctuations from the percussion instruments that must, somehow, carefully align with the singer’s idiosyncratic realization of the graphic material.  While I don’t have an operatic range, I found a solo-simultaneous version for a treble-voiced singing/speaking percussionist irresistible: what if we heard Kassandra herself as the reliable narrator, and the Chorus more false? To achieve this effect, I use a simple octave doubler pedal (the appropriately-named TC Helicon VoiceTone D1) to shift my voice down an octave and double it for the Chorus parts. I’m also providing supertitles; these are based on Anne Carson’s evocative version of the scene from An Oresteia (2009.) Still: some of the text doesn’t translate; this is by design. More than 100 years ago, in her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, Virgina Woolf writes: 
The meaning is just on the far side of language. . .By the bold and running use of metaphor [Aeschylus] will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid. . .No splendour or richness of metaphor could have saved the Agamemnon if either images or allusions of the subtlest or most decorative had got between us and the naked cry ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ· / ὤπολλον ὤπολλον’. 
In this powerful musical setting Xenakis uses sound to build a bridge toward sense, inviting us to hear not just the denotation but the connotation of the syllables themselves. 
-BW 

Some Work of Noble Note
Among poets, Tennyson sure does get the blood flowing. His “Ulysses” is set after the Odyssey, and shows us an unhappy Odysseus, with an unstoppable drive to travel, to explore, to act. We see him alone, late at night in Ithaca, deciding to use his famous cleverness to change his life. This piece adds to Tennyson’s poem both the Homeric “Hymn to Poseidon” and a flashback to one of Odysseus’ military successes from the Iliad. These elements bring some of the worldview of antiquity into Tennyson’s 19th century poem, and help us see Odysseus as, in Emily Wilson’s translation, a ‘complicated man.’ Listen today for both the exciting Tennyson, and for the wily Odysseus. What is he asking of you? And what will you do?
-Kevin Clark 

*world premiere

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to The Meany Center, especially Seah Johnson (lighting designer), The School of Music, especially Doug Niemela (sound), Joanne DePue (publicity), and student workers Daisy Waters and Devon Rafanelli. 

The University of Washington acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations. 

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Biographies

Bonnie Whiting performs, improvises, and creates new music for percussion. Exploring intersections of storytelling and experimental music, her work integrates text, movement, and technology. Her debut album, featuring a solo-simultaneous realization of John Cage's 45' for a speaker and 27'10.554 for a percussionist was released by Mode Records in 2017, and her second album, Perishable Structures, launched on the New Focus Recordings label in 2020. Her third solo album Through the Eye(s) (Neuma, 2026) is an extractable cycle of nine pieces for speaking/singing percussionist collaboratively developed with composer Eliza Brown and ten artists and writers incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison. The project was featured on NPR’s nationally-syndicated Slingshot program, and locally via Seattle’s ClassicalKING radio station. Her original music with James Falzone (clarinets) and Lisa Cay Miller (prepared piano) can be heard on Six Artifacts (Allos Documents, 2024). Recent projects include collaboration with composer Wang Lu on the expansive solo theatrical work Stages, the world premiere of Jonathan Bingham’s percussion concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra, performances on the original Harry Partch instrumentarium, and concerto appearances with the State Symphony Orchestra of Turkmenistan.  She is the on-stage percussionist in The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist, a multimedia opera featured at Lincoln Center, The Hopkins Center at Dartmouth, and Stanford Live. Her collaboration with multimedia artist Afroditi Psarra generated (Zero Moon records.) Their project with designer Audrey Desjardins transcoding data from IoT devices as performance received a Mellon Creative Fellowship, lives as an interactive net art installation, and was explored in workshop at the 2020 Transmediale Festival. She is co-Artistic Director of Seattle Modern Orchestra, and has performed with Ensemble Dal Niente, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, and red fish blue fish percussion group. She is the Donald E. Peterson Endowed Associate Professor of Music and Chair of Percussion Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. More at is a composer, facilitator, and mission-driven technology leader. His music uses historical texts, theatre, and participation to explore issues of collective agency. Currently COO at Productable, Kevin previously led public-interest technology projects at Pivotal Labs. A sought-after facilitator, he has led workshops at Brown University, Jacob’s Pillow, and the Biden White House. Formerly Director of Platform at New Music USA, he developed influential grantmaking tools, and continues to advise funders on participatory funding, technology, and strategy.

Alice Elizabeth Notley was born on November 8, 1945, in Bisbee, Arizona, and grew up in Needles, California. She received a BA from Barnard College in 1967 and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1969. She moved frequently during her youth—to San Francisco, Bolinas, London, Essex, and Chicago—and eventually married the poet Ted Berrigan in 1972, with whom she had two sons. In the early 1970s, Notley settled on New York’s Lower East Side, where she was very involved in the local literary scene for several decades. In 1979, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. After Berrigan’s death in 1983, she married the British poet Douglas Oliver.
Though Notley is often identified as a prominent member of the eclectic second generation of The New York School, her poetry also demonstrates a continuing fascination with the desert and its inhabitants. Her collections of verse include Early Works (Fonograf Editions, 2022); Certain Magical Acts (Penguin, 2016); Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (Wesleyan University Press, 2011); Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970–2005  (Wesleyan University Press, 2006), which was awarded the 2007 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the best book of the year; Disobedience (Penguin, 2001), winner of the 2002 International Griffin Poetry Prize; Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998); Selected Poems of Alice Notley (Talisman House, 1993); Margaret and Dusty (Coffee House Press, 1985); and Sorrento (Sherwood Press, 1984). 
Notley’s collection How Spring Comes (Toothpaste Press, 1981) received a 1982 San Francisco Poetry Award. Other early titles include Waltzing Matilda (Kulchur Foundation, 1981); Alice Ordered Me to Be Made (Yellow Press, 1976); and 165 Meeting House Lane (“C” Press, 1971). She has also published Tell Me Again (Am Here Books, 1982), an autobiography, and experiments with visual arts. Her work in the latter field includes collages, watercolors, and sketches.
Notley has said that her speech is the voice of “the new wife, and the new mother” in her own time, but that her first aim is to make a poem, rather than present a platform of social reform.
Notley’s other awards include the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2001, she received both an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. In 2015, she was honored with the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. 
Notley died on May 19, 2025, in Paris, France, where she had lived for decades.

Iannis Xenakis was born to Greek parents living in Romania in 1922. His childhood interests included the rich folk music of his native region as well as mathematics and engineering, which led him to enter Athens Polytechnic with the intention of becoming an engineer. He began to seriously pursue music during this period.
When World War II broke out, Xenakis joined the Resistance movement and eventually moved to Paris. It was here that his complementary interests - engineering and music - led to an encounter with architect Le Corbusier, who introduced him to two leading members of the musical avant-garde, Varèse and Messaien. It was with these early contacts in France that the self-taught musician was able to find encouragement, support and the help he needed to publish an article and conduct several premières. He even completed a formal music degree under Messaien at Sorbonne. Xenakis' acquaintance with Le Coursier enabled him to undertake some engineering calculations and collaborate with the architect on several studies for housing projects in Nantes and Marseilles, the convent of La Tourette, the assembly building at Chandigarh, and the Baghdad stadium. He invented an architecture constructed entirely from faces derived from the hyperbolic paraboloid for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Exposition.
This was an architectural revolution that was closely associated to the composer's breakthrough work and first composition, Metastasis, in which he unified architectural space and music. His obsession with 'space' permeates his pieces most directly concerned with sound, and the connections between the two are elaborated in his works. It is the use of mathematical processes that allow Xenakis to discover patterns and communicable musical ideas out of a totally unrestricted musical vocabulary. His compositions arise from more abstract structures and mathematical models, recalling Greek mathematical philosophy.
Metastasis (1953-4) and Pithoprakta (1955-6), another orchestra piece concerned with global, mass phenomena, were followed by the first product of Xenakis work in the Groupe de Recherches Musicales: Diamorphoses (1957-8). His use of set theory in musical composition is exemplified by Herma for piano (1960-4). His music also reflects an interest both in electronic music and in Greek culture, especially folk culture and ancient Greek drama.
To stimulate research into music theory, he founded the Equipe de Mathematique et d'Automatique Musicales (EMAMu) in Paris in 1966. In the years following he toured the globe attending performances of his music, lecturing and giving courses in composition and aesthetics. He taught for several months of each year at Indiana University, Bloomington from 1967 to 1972, where he founded a sister branch to the EMAMu: the Center for Musical Mathematics and Automation. In 1970, the EMAMu was granted official recognition by the French government and accommodation in the Centre de Recherche Nucléaire of the Collège de France.
Aeschylus, often regarded as the 'father of Western tragedy,' was a seminal figure in ancient Greek theater, born around 525-524 BCE in Eleusis, an Attic town near Athens. His aristocratic background provided him with a solid education, fostering a deep appreciation for poetry and civic responsibility. Although much of his early life is shrouded in unreliable accounts, Aeschylus's military service during significant battles against the Persian Empire, such as Marathon and Salamis, is well-documented and likely influenced his later works.
Aeschylus wrote approximately eighty plays, of which only seven tragedies survive today, including the renowned 'Oresteia' trilogy. His innovative approach to dramatic structure, particularly his use of connected trilogies and dialogues, set new standards for theater. His works often drew from themes of myth and historical events, showcasing complex moral and social issues. Aeschylus's legacy endures not only through his plays but also through the influence he had on subsequent playwrights, establishing a foundation for the evolution of Greek tragedy. He died in Gela, Sicily, around 456 or 455 BCE, leaving behind a body of work that continues to be studied and revered in literature and theater.
Born on August 6, 1809, in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England, Alfred, Lord Tennyson is one of the most well-loved Victorian poets. Tennyson, the fourth of twelve children, showed an early talent for writing. At the age of twelve he wrote a six-thousand-line epic poem. His father, the Reverend George Tennyson, tutored his sons in classical and modern languages. In the 1820s, however, Tennyson’s father began to suffer frequent mental breakdowns that were exacerbated by alcoholism. One of Tennyson’s brothers had violent quarrels with his father, a second was later confined to an insane asylum, and another became an opium addict.
Tennyson escaped home in 1827 to attend Trinity College, Cambridge. In that same year, he and his brother Charles published Poems by Two Brothers. Although the poems in the book were mostly juvenilia, they attracted the attention of the “Apostles,” an undergraduate literary club led by Arthur Henry Hallam. The “Apostles” provided Tennyson, who was tremendously shy, with much needed friendship and confidence as a poet. Hallam and Tennyson became the best of friends; they toured Europe together in 1830 and again in 1832. Hallam’s sudden death in 1833 greatly affected the young poet. The long elegy “In Memoriam” and many of Tennyson’s other poems are tributes to Hallam.
In 1830, Tennyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and in 1832 he published a second volume entitled simply Poems. Some reviewers condemned these books as “affected” and “obscure.” Tennyson, stung by the reviews, would not publish another book for nine years. In 1836, he became engaged to Emily Sellwood. When he lost his inheritance on a bad investment in 1840, Sellwood’s family called off the engagement. In 1842, however, Tennyson’s Poems in two volumes was a tremendous critical and popular success. In 1850, with the publication of “In Memoriam,” Tennyson became one of Britain’s most popular poets. He was selected as poet laureate in succession to William Wordsworth. In that same year, he married Emily Sellwood. They had two sons, Hallam and Lionel.
At the age of forty-one, Tennyson had established himself as the most popular poet of the Victorian era. The money from his poetry (at times exceeding ten thousand pounds per year) allowed him to purchase a house in the country and to write in relative seclusion. His appearance—a large and bearded man who regularly wore a cloak and a broad-brimmed hat—enhanced his notoriety. He read his poetry with a booming voice, a habit later adopted by Dylan Thomas. In 1859, Tennyson published the first poems of “Idylls of the Kings,” which sold more than ten thousand copies in one month. In 1884, he accepted a peerage, becoming Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Tennyson died on October 6, 1892, in Aldworth, Surrey, England, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

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Additional Notes and Texts

Alice Notley: ConversatIon
Alice Notley: The Song Called Get Away
Jeffrey Trevino: Score image of 'conversation'
Excerpts: Agamemnon (Aeschylus), as translated by Anne Carson in An Oresteia
Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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Seattle Modern Orchestra’s (SMO's) University of Washington residency celebrates the legacies of longtime former School of Music professors and West Coast luminaries Stuart Dempster (b. 1936) and William O. Smith (1926-2020) with '90/100, Celebrating Stuart Dempster, William O. Smith, and West Coast Experimentalism.' Curated by longtime SMO clarinetist Rachel Yoder, the evening integrates elements of improvisation, deep listening, and playfully creative movement while rebooting elements of the composer/performer duo’s historic antics. 

SMO is joined by all-star guests C. Neil Parsons (Boston) on bass trombone and movement and Yoder on clarinets. Expect movement throughout the space and embodied, theatrical music-making, as well as the sonic high of Smith’s wild and wonderful extended clarinet techniques.

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Program

Pauline Oliveros: The Well and the Gentle (1985)
William O. Smith: Encounter (1970)
Rachel Yoder: Double Void (WORLD PREMIERE)
Curtis K. Hughes: chewing gum tornado (2026)
William O. Smith: Explorations for clarinet and chamber orchestra (1998)
Stuart Dempster: S.M.O.R.E.S (2017)* SMO Commission 

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Program Note

“Ten years ago, in the fall of 2016, there was an '80 and 90' concert at Meany Hall in celebration of the 80th birthday of Stuart Dempster and the 90th birthday of William O. “Bill” Smith. It was a tradition that apparently began with a 40/50 concert in 1976, and though Bill passed away in 2020, it brings me great joy that we can now celebrate Stuart’s 90th birthday, and what would have been Bill’s 100th!

Stuart and Bill are names well-known to the Seattle experimental music scene and beyond, as composers and performers of course, but also due to their three decades as co-leaders of the UW Contemporary Group (1968-1997). As I researched for this concert, looking through Contemporary Group papers and programs in the UW library, I was struck by the staggering number of performances they put on over the years, often involving dozens of faculty and students. Many of these people are still playing and creating music in Seattle (including in our own SMO!), and we must give thanks in part to Stuart and Bill for the thriving, multifaceted contemporary music community we enjoy today.

So what, in 2026, is the musical legacy of Stuart and Bill? For me, it’s very personal: Bill was my inspiration to begin to consider myself a “composer” at the age of 40. From the time we met in 2015 until he passed away in 2020, I had the amazing opportunity to get to know Bill – improvising with him, getting advice on playing his music, then working on a couple new solo pieces he wrote for me. He showed me (through his always kind and curious example) a different route to composition that I had never considered, ultimately helping me find my way to myself.

The musical spirit of Stuart Dempster and William O. Smith lives on, here on campus, in the Seattle new music community, and well beyond.”
—Rachel Yoder, curator

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David Alexander Rahbee and the UW Symphony present 'Fate Now Conquers,' a program of music by Carlos Simon, Charles Villiers Stanford, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. With faculty artist Benjamin Lulich, clarinet.

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Program 

'Fate Now Conquers' 

Carlos Simon: Fate Now Conquers 
Charles Villiers Stanford: Clarinet Concerto in A minor, op.80 
Pyotr Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.5 in E minor, op.64

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Biography