Jenny Judge, Laura Mullen & Claire Chase

The New York instalment of ‘Notes from a Biscuit Tin’ features philosopher Jenny Judge, poet Laura Mullen and flutist and MacArthur fellow Claire Chase, in an evening-long exploration of the various ways in which philosophers, artist and musicians respectively set about making sense of the world.

A conversation between Judge and Mullen on the theme of Art in Mary Midgley’s work is interwoven with Chase’s performances of improvisatory works by pioneering experimental and electronic composer Pauline Oliveros.

This event is free but registration is required.
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Jenny Judge

Jenny Judge is a PhD candidate in philosophy at NYU. She also holds a PhD in music from the University of Cambridge, as well as degrees in philosophy, mathematics and music from University College Cork and the Cork School of Music. In her doctoral dissertation, she develops and defends a novel theory of musical meaning. In addition to being a philosopher, Judge is also an active musician: she writes and performs original music in New York City as part of 'Pet Beast', a collaboration with guitarist Ted Morcaldi. While at Cambridge, she sang with Trinity College Choir. In addition to her academic publications, Judge has also published for non-specialist audiences in venues such as Aeon, Medium, The Philosopher's Magazine and The Guardian.

Laura Mullen

Poet Laura Mullen was born in Los Angeles in 1958. She earned her BA at the University of California-Berkeley and MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her collections of poetry include Enduring Freedom (2012), Dark Archive (2011), Murmur (2007), Subject (2005), After I Was Dead (1999), The Tales of Horror (1999), and The Surface (1991), which was a National Poetry Series selection. Known for writing book-length and hybrid texts, Mullen’s work has been praised for its wild invention and play. Her poems are included in anthologies such as American Hybrid (2009), The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (2012), and I’ll Drown my Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2012), among others. The composer Jason Eckardt’s setting of her poem “The Distance (This)” was released as Undersong by Mode records in 2011.

Mullen’s many honors and awards include foundations from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. She is the recipient of the Ironwood’s Stanford Prize and a Creative Writing special interest delegate for the Modern Language Association. Mullen teaches in the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets at Naropa and is the McElveen Professor in English at Louisiana State University.

Claire Chase

Claire Chase is a soloist, collaborative artist, curator and advocate for new and experimental music. Over the past decade she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works for the flute in performances throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia, and she has championed new music throughout the world by building organizations, forming alliances, pioneering commissioning initiatives and supporting educational programs that reach new audiences. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize.

In 2013 Chase launched Density 2036, a 23-year commissioning project to create an entirely new body of repertory for flute between 2014 and 2036, the centenary of Edgard Varèse’s groundbreaking 1936 flute solo, Density 21.5. Each season as part of the project, Chase premieres a new program of commissioned music, with six hours of new repertory created to date. In 2036, she will play a 24-hour marathon of all of the repertory created in the project. Chase will release world premiere recordings the first four years of the Density cycle in collaboration with the producer Matias Tarnopolsky at Meyer Sound Laboratories in Berkeley, CA.