Meridian Music: Composers in Performance announces its midsummer concert, the premiere of a new work Tintinnare, by composer Tom Bickley. In this new work, Bickley explores bells in various roles: calls to attention, invitations to contemplation, energizing sounds, signifiers of solemnity, bringers of delight, awareness, transcendence and presence. Inspired by the bell sculptures of Bruce Hasson, currently on view at Meridian Gallery, and a long fascination with bells, Tom invites your participation in this acoustic and digital multi-channel listening and sounding experience.

On Saturday July 19th from 2-4pm, Tom Bickley will lead an open workshop for the public. At this workshop members of the public will explore ways of sounding various bells. Tom will record the results of these explorations and use them in the performance. Participants in these workshops will discuss an overview of bells as signals and signifiers (particularly as time markers, cues for immediate response [e.g., answering a telephone, or entering a contemplative state], the complexity of overtones that create a bell's timbre, and options for eliciting sound from the bells. FREE ADMISSION.

Tom Bickley listens to the world always hoping to hear more and more fully. He grew up in the semitropical soundscape of Houston, sojourned in Washington, DC (studying music, religion, and information science) and came to the Bay Area as a composer in residence at Mills College. He studied music with Pauline Oliveros, Scott Reiss, and Ruth Steiner. He is part of the community at Incarnation Priory (an Episcopal Benedictine community), a member of the library faculty at CSU East Bay, and teaches music privately and at the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training. He plays with Gusty Winds May Exist (with shakuhachi player Nancy Beckman) and directs the Cornelius Cardew Choir. His work is available on CD on Quarterstick and Metatron Press.