improvisation: color and sound

The Blue Building, Midtown Manhattan

July 27, 2025

Blindfolded painting meets live piano improvisation as Claire Zakiewicz and Magnus Villanueva create a real-time dialogue between sound and painting at

A durational, constraint-driven performance, the piece uses a predetermined toolset and no score: Zakiewicz, blindfolded, translates the piano’s texture, rhythm, and dynamic contour into gesture; Villanueva responds at the piano, until neither medium leads nor follows. The resulting large-scale canvas remains as the performance’s trace and artifact—a visual transcription of an ephemeral event.

Rooted in the histories of graphic scores, surrealist automatism, and gestural abstraction, the collaboration explores the mind–body link between music and drawing, and the tension between intention and accident.

Orléans 2024

Salle de l'Institut du Conservatoire d'Orléans

April 24, 2024

Works highlighting the tension and harmony between nature’s eternal rhythms and the cutting-edge sound worlds of contemporary piano music. This program embodies a dynamic convergence of avant-garde composition and technical brilliance.

Recombinant part I (2017), Wang Lu

Étude no. 12: Entrelacs (1993), György Ligeti

St. François d'Assise: La prédication aux oiseaux (1863), Franz Liszt

Homenatge (2011), Tania León

Catalogue d'oiseaux: Le Loriot (1956-58), Olivier Messiaen

Étude no. 5: Toccata (2003), Unsuk Chin

Bach's Preludes

Riverside Church, Manhattan

September 30, 2023

24 preludes from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1. The performance order of the pieces in this set will be unique and determined during the concert. The purpose of rearranging the order is to unlock new interpretive possibilities and to engage in a pseudo-improvisatory experience for both the performer and the audience.

This project was made possible in part with funds from Creative Engagement, a regrant program supported by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) in partnership with the City Council and Howard Gilman Foundation and administered by LMCC.

avant-garde solo piano

Presented by the Frequency Series at Constellation Chicago

November 26, 2023

What fundamental forces or existential principles govern the origin of sound, and how does the interplay of these forces shape the intricate fabric of the audible universe?

The pieces in this program seek to provide an answer. Sailing depicts traveling through waves of sound, exploring depth and resonance akin to the oceans with its titles “Ressac, Twinkle, Foghorn, Gust, and Estran.”

Pregunta no.2: Cóndor asks the final question: Is it through memory that we construct our conception of the world, History, and our sense of identity? The historical identity of the piano is challenged through the incorporation of e-bows, hand-held electronic devices that induce continuous vibrations on a string to create a sustained sound, and the use of harmonics of subtle microtonal deviations obtained by touching a specific node on a piano string while pressing the correspondent key.

Piano Quintets: FilAm music foundation

Presented by Classical Music Chicago and Rush Hour Concerts; St. James Cathedral, Chicago

August 15, 2023

FilAm Music Foundation presents programs featuring Filipino classical musicians.

The program features a pre-concert talk and piano quintets by Florence Price and Ottorino Respighi.

Instruments are generously donated by Violins of Hope, a project that presents concerts based on a private collection of string instruments many belonging to Jews before and during World War 2.

avant-garde solo piano

Recorded at Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, New York

November 30, 2021

Ligeti’s piano etudes are among the most influential of the late 20th century, redefining what the instrument can do through radical rhythm, color, and texture while remaining intensely physical and expressive to play and to hear.

Fém showcases Banda-Linda rhythms from the Central African Republic, interlocking complex rhythmic patterns.

White on White is a sonic representation of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918). A nearly monochrome painting: a slightly tilted white square floats against a slightly warmer white background. Its faint tonal differences make the boundaries between figure and ground almost dissolve.

For Malevich, this was a statement of “pure feeling”—a move beyond representation into an art of weightless, infinite space.