Madison Greenstone will entangle exstatic resonances from their recent album Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness, in a wildly free style of solo clarinet performance. These resonances arise from treating the timbre of the clarinet as a site of generative indeterminacy. Through acoustic and haptic feedback, Madison explores the physical coupling of air and breath within the instrument with the air-becoming-resonance all around, creating passages and transferences between performer and audience. Madison’s performance practices explores ecstatic thresholds of resonance, where an excess of acoustical energy creates unruly, chaotic, and polyphonic timbral and spatial interferences. There will be bells, there will be acoustical mirages.

Madison Greenstone (b. 1992; Los Angeles, California) is a clarinetist, composer, and writer based in Brooklyn - Lenapehoking. Madison’s solo performance practice, exstatic resonances, explores ‘shatteringly intense’ instrumental expressivities, wherein ‘intentionality, incredible control, [and] embrace of chance creates a thrilling rawness. (The Wire).

Exstatic resonances melds ongoing studies in phenomenology, self-generative music, and acoustics, in treating the clarinet as a site of indeterminacy to create wild acoustical emergences.

Madison performs widely as a soloist and chamber musician. As a soloist, they have presented through KM28 (Berlin), the Vigeland Mausoleum (Oslo), Night of Surprise (Cologne), ISSUE Project Room (NYC), Non Event (Boston), and the Merce Cunningham Centennial Night of 100 Solos (Los Angeles). As a chamber and orchestral musician they have performed at the New York Philharmonic, PS21 (Chatham), KKL Luzern, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, Indexical (Santa Cruz), Walt Disney Concert Hall (LA), and Miller Theater (NY). They have held residencies at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and University of Chicago.

Their debut solo album, Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness (Relative Pitch Records), was included in Bandcamp’s Best Experimental Music of 2023 compilation, and has been described as “devastating” (Nowhere Street), and “a perfectly paced page turner” (Best of Bandcamp). Madison can be heard on labels such as Wandelweiser Editions, Another Timbre, TAK Editions, Pleasure of the Text Records, New Focus Recordings, Impakt Collective, and upcoming on Dinzu Artefacts.

As a writer, Madison has contributed a catalog essay for the Museum of Neuchâtel’s exhibition Sur Papier, exploring the work of Sivan Eldar. Their writing will appear in the upcoming issue of Contemporary Music Review dedicated to the work of Éliane Radigue in an essay co-authored with Charles Curtis and Anthony Vine titled Toward an Anti-Ideal: Radigue, Recording, and the Paradoxes of Representation.

Madison is the clarinetist of TAK Ensemble, and a founding member of the [Switch~ Ensemble].
Trained in contemporary classical performance, they have learned greatly from the mentorship of Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis at UC San Diego.