Her performance career is varied, from playing in the pit at The Phantom of the Opera in Las Vegas, to performing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring with the Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra. Cara has also maintained private teaching studios in horn and piano for over a decade.

Cara holds a Master’s degree from DePaul University in Chicago, IL and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in Madison as well as performance certificates from the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain.

In a recent conversation with my maternal grandfather (Pépère), he made an obvious and yet striking comment about his reality.  “My roots run deep here.”  He is referring to the Houle family farm, located in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom on which he has lived his entire life.  All 90+ years of it.  He currently sleeps in the same room in which he was born (1921).  For much of this time things really have not changed.  For the bulk of its years it has been a dairy farm.  It has always produced maple syrup.  The scenery has always been gorgeous and the barn cats are numerous.  His existence is so intertwined with the place that acknowledging his deep roots in the farm is a trivialization; they are at once tranquil and grounded while simultaneously aggressive and unyielding. 

 On my latest visit to the farm, my grandmother (Mémère) gave to me two old gifts: a family book of French hymns and a violin that had been owned by my great-grandfather.  As the most avid musician in the family these were precious and inspirational gifts to me.  The violin was an instrument my great-grandfather chose not to teach to his son as his existence on the land was being secured.  Thus it has been largely unused for many years revealing the aggressive and unyielding nature of his roots.  Upon my return to Chicago, I played through the old hymnbook and was drawn to the tranquil beauty of Gounod’s Le ciel visité la terre and Riga’s Christ adoré.  In a humble effort to awaken the ‘spirit’ of the old violin through the inspiring roots of my grandfather, I have employed these two hymns as the melodic foundation for Roots Run Deep. Dually tranquil and aggressive; the music’s gravity persistently pulls the listener upward.

- Brian Baxter

The CCO will perform the orchestral premiere of De Rerum on the Winter Concert on Tuesday February 21, 2012.

The religious imagination – with its long memory, appetite for layering metaphors on metaphors, and genial ‘suspension of disbelief’ – often strikes me as more dazzling and profligate than the secular artistic imagination. Whereas the market-pressed artist today stakes out territories of difference, the religious imagination pursues resonance, drawing on deep cultural memories and freely (re)mixing words, images, symbols and references to that end. De Rerum was a project of this kind of imagination. As I wrote this history of the world (to c.2000BCE) and made these videos, I worked hard to layer each image on a resonant one from a distant source: the Biblical Wheels of Gagallin are imagined as the spinning circles that draw sine waves, sine waves as the regular crest-and-trough of farmland and irrigation channel, irrigation channels as formants in a tone. The result: my own personal mythic syncretism of folk cosmogonies, Lucretian materialism, fake Deleuze, Mesopotamian history, acoustics and, well, a hundred other things.

This work was originally commissioned, developed and produced by Opera Cabal as part of its operaSHOP series, all rights reserved.

- Elliot Cole

Elliot Cole is a composer who also uses video art and computer programming to explore liminal spaces in individual consciousness and cultural memory.  Mythology resonates through much of his work: the neo-romantic opera Selkie, which taps into Celtic lore, is being recorded by Divergence Vocal Theater in 2012; The Rake’s Progress and Billy Budd, two collaborative hip-hop operas, have been produced, respectively, by the Metropolis Ensemble at the 2011 MATA Festival, and the Lucerne Festival, where he was a Spotlight Artist in 2011; he has performed his own Babinagar, a song cycle with Afghan roots, in living rooms across Texas and in New York; and he wrote and performed a score to Sophocles’ Electra with the University of Houston in 2010.  He toured a suite of songs inspired by Grimm’s folktales around Germany, and he rapped his Fisherman and His Wife, another Grimm’s tale, with the Brentano Quartet, and with the Franklin Quartet as a presenter at the Columbia University Remixing Opera conference in 2011.  De Rerum, a hip-hop lecture that synthesizes mythological and materialist cosmogonies, was incubated in an Opera Shop residency in Chicago.

His chamber music has been performed by Psappha (UK), the Metropolis Ensemble, Brentano Quartet, Ensemble ACJW, members of the Lucerne Festival Academy and Lucerne Conservatory, violinist Tema Watstein, harpist Mollie Marcuson, guitarist Flavio Virzi, singers Nicole Rodin, Misha Penton, Caroline Shaw and Alison Fletcher, and the Sissy Eared Mollycoddles.  Bassoonist Brad Balliett and bassist Doug Balliett remain primary collaborators.  2012 will see new premieres by the Dither electric guitar quartet, the Flux quartet with bassist Logan Coale, So Percussion, and pianist Conor Hanick.

As a programmer, he is developing a composition tool that blends chance, serialism, ear-driven musicality, and plant-modeling formal grammars.  In December 2011, he presented this work with members of the Metropolis Ensemble at The Box (NYC).

He is a graduate student in composition at Princeton, and also holds degrees in music and cognitive linguistics from Rice University.

While living in Europe, Maria established herself as an active soloist and chamber
musician, performing among others with Torun Chamber Orchestra, A.Rubinstein
School of Music Symphony Orchestra and appearing at the Festival Weeks in Gmunden, Austria.

Her recent engagements include a solo violin concert at St. James Chapel, as part of the concert series Second Saturday at Two, LIVE concert at the Piano Forte Salon Series, broadcasted on WFMT Chicago and solo appearance with Waukegan Symphony Orchestra. She now plays in One Sun Duo with New York-based South African pianist Kathleen Tagg and Linea duo with flutist Nancy Rinaldi.

Maria received degrees from Indiana University and Roosevelt University, and her teachers have included Mark Kaplan, Vadim Gluzman and Arcady Winokurov. She holds first violin position at Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra, and is a substitute violinist of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra.