CONCETTA ABBATE
VIOLINIST//COMPOSER
CONCETTA
ABBATE
"Spring" Directed by Luciano Munhoz
"Nobody balances the duality of simultaneously beautiful and haunting music better than Concetta Abbate"
-Filmmaker Brian Ariotti
Concetta Abbate is a classically trained violinist turned improviser and composer. Grammy.com describes her original performances as a mix of “Violin and delicate vocals that float between the worlds of Modern Classical, Neo-Folk, and poignant and poetic verse”
As an instrumentalist and singer she has performed with ensembles in NY including PARK Quartet, Femmelody Chamber Music Collective and the Creative Music Orchestra. She has worked as a studio recording artist for bands including Cornelius Eady Trio, Mariachi Flor de Toloache and the Latin music group Inti and the Moon. She is a founding member of the SparrowSong Ensemble.
She has released four full length studio albums of her original music spanning genres of New Classical, Jazz, Experimental and Folk.
Her original electroacoustic composition for the film “L'attessa” (directed by Vera Comploj) premiered at the International Fashion Film Festival of Milan 2015. Her Dance scores, made in collaboration with choreographers from Arch Contemporary Ballet and WO Dance Company, have been performed at Lincoln Center as well as Theatre for the New City. Notable residencies include TAKT Gallery in Berlin (2016 and 2018) as well as the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva Island, Florida (2019).
In 2014 she founded a Music Education program called Teacup Music which provides sliding scale music lessons to students in Brooklyn. Through this program she is a mentor to a vibrant community of students. Her teaching work has received grants and recognition from Brooklyn Arts Council, The Roothbert Fund and the Charles Mayer Foundation.
Concetta holds degrees in Music, Education and Cultural Studies from Smith College (BA) as well as Columbia University (MA).
Fleeting sounds scarcely noticed. Paper clips, a dusty book, bright fish in time. Little songs like little shells. Falling in time is a concept album that incorporates poetry, field recordings and instrumentations ranging from String Quartet to Jazz ensemble. The album was released in 2015 on Waterbug Records and was funded through the supportive donations of fans and friends.
Stream of Consciousness//Graphic Map Scored
Free Improvisation//Electroacoustic
All Music and Lyrics composed by Concetta Abbate and Benjamin Engel
Concetta Abbate Electric Violin/Voice
Benjamin Engel Synth/Percussion/Drum Kit
Film Score
Directed by Vera Comploj, this film is an exploration of age, time and beauty. The film was nominated for an award at the Fashion Film Festival in Milan in October of 2017. Concetta provided sound design for this film which incorporated a combination of synthesizer effects and recordings from ice glaciers scraping the floor of the depths of the ocean.
Dance Score
Concetta Abbate worked in collaboration with choreographer Wendy Osserman as well as Composer/Instrument builder Skip LaPlante to create a music and sound score for the production Undermine. The piece premiered at the Theatre for the New City on the Manhattan's Lower East Side in March of 2018. The score included viola, electronics and found objects as instruments including styrofoam boxes and metal bowls.
IN THE MEDIA
Like many violinists, Concetta Abbate is classically trained, just as likely to be found playing Ravel or Paganini as she is her own music. She finds inspiration in poetry, literature and scientific observation. The point of the “pocket-sized songs” on her loosely thematic new debut album, Falling in Time (streaming at Bandcamp) is that despite how distracted we are by the demands of dayjobs, family and (yuck) technology and social media, we mustn’t cut ourselves off from the world around us because it’s so interesting. Abbate isn’t necessarily telling us to stop and smell the roses, although she might encourage us to stop and watch the waves at the river’s edge…or the faces on the platform as the train pulls into the station. Abbate finds meaning and beauty in the seemingly mundane, translating that tersely and imagistically into a series of brief, often barely two-minute songs that could be called chamber pop or art-rock but really defy categorization.
"Some music does not sit well with categorization. One of those certainly is Concetta Abbate's solo debut CD Falling in Time, Pocket-Sized Songs (Waterbug). It is an album of art songs that could well bear a subtitle "Songs of Innocence and Experience" after William Blake, for there is something of both in her whimsical approach. The arrangements are well wrought, with Concetta's violin working with other strings and other instruments sometimes in quasi-classical ways. The songs are original, her voice enchanting. Explorations "in poetry and soundscapes" is how it is put on the inner sleeve. Well, yes. That."
"This sort of passion is the 'it' that one recognizes in the true troubadours whose minds can't help but fill up with bursting melodies."
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PERFORMANCE
Sunlight to a Spanish Poet
Performed and Composed by Concetta Abbate
Rauschenberg Open Studios Performance
Performed and Composed by Concetta Abbate
Isolation Tales
Original Improvisation
by Concetta Abbate (Viola) and Charlie Rauh (Guitar)
EVENTS
CONTACT
LABEL | Independent
PRESS CONTACT | Email Hello at ConcettaAbbate.com
BOOKING | Email Hello at ConcettaAbbate.com