Shh! Quiet Concert Series

Catharine DeLong is a certified music-thanatologist, contemplative musician, hospice chaplain, and end-of-life educator. She tends to the emotional, physical and spiritual needs of palliative patients and their families with harp and voice.

Catharine’s harp music invites you to be present to what is going on within and around yourself in the moment. The repertoire derives from folk music, chant, and lullabies, as well as her original compositions. You may experience a sense of calm and even feel like resting your eyes.

Kathryn Shuman is Salt Lake City based performer/composer who loves weaving widely varying vocal, synthesized, and everyday life sounds to create spacious sonic environments. Some of her many musical interests include microtonal tuning systems, improvisation, medieval chant, and the 20th-century avant-garde. She loves creating with and responding to the environment. The Wasatch front is a powerful place that Kathryn continues to explore and seek inspiration from.<

Kathryn will play a very quiet set of looped ethereal vocals and repeated, slowly sequenced, oscillating sine tones using hardware synthesizers. She will use and include storytelling from the Library’s own books (perhaps with some audience participation, encouraging listeners to hand her books to recite aloud in improvised song). This will be ambient, featuring medieval-chant style melodies on a bed of some dense vocal harmonies and soft synthesized electronic sounds.

Kevin Shumway studied cello performance at Northwestern University with Hans Jensen and at the Cleveland Institute of Music with Stephen Geber. He joined the Utah Symphony in 1994. His wife Emily Day-Shumway is Associate Concertmaster of the Ballet West Orchestra. They have three sons.

Kevin loves to be part of the big, rich sound of an orchestra. But he will get a chance to be a soloist when he plays unaccompanied Bach Cello Suites in the variety of sound spaces at the Main Library.

Peachy Fingernail is a DIY artist who’s been playing shows in the Salt Lake DIY scene for a few years. She likes to make quiet, contemplative, and atmospheric music.

Peachy Fingernail will be making and layering loops with a guitar or Casio keyboard and processing them through effects. She uses these as the base elements for songs with either lyrics or non-verbal vocals as ambient textures to develop an atmosphere.

Hailing from the Pacific Northwest, Ben Swisher is a Salt Lake City-based “person who makes music,” utilizing a variety of borrowed and half-known instruments to explore both the magic of the mundane and the meaning of labor in making. Ben’s work often involves limitations and symbolism as ways to translate, or at the very least make peace with, what so often lies beyond the grasp of language and understanding. He has most recently composed dance scores for Wasatch Contemporary Dance Company, Roxanne Gray for loveDANCEmore and 12 Minutes Max, and Jasmine Stack for 801 Salon. Before that, Ben released an album of songs, “Bird Languages,” as Sen Wisher for Song Club Records.

Ben will be clocking in for a piece entitled “A Sound, There Is No Such Thing As,” where he will, as part of his job, explore whether there is any sound to be found in the library, and, if there is, to determine the appropriate response. He will be using a handheld portable synth-sampler-amp for his task, slowly working to address overlooked sounds throughout the building until the end of his shift. He may or may not be joined by one or two additional workers and call upon the help of other instruments or devices. He will investigate phenomena on each level of the library, from the highest to lowest floors.

Heidi Jaeger is a Hospice Chaplain and Certified Therapeutic Harp Practitioner (CTHP) who plays at the bedside of people in pain or who may be preparing for their transition beyond this life.  She combines her professional experience and intuition to create a healing cradle of sound which envelopes the listener and helps them relax. Healing can only occur when the body and mind are free of stress. Her goal is to reach people where they are emotionally, physically and spiritually, then help them transcend to a better space through the music. A Reiki Master, Heidi uses the freely vibrating harp strings as a vehicle to channel universal energy to her audience.

Heidi will be playing in different spaces throughout the Library for 10 to 20 minutes at a time during the two hour session, and then will move to a different location with her portable harp. The music may be familiar or improvised but will be designed to connect with the mood of each location, depending upon the vibrational frequency of the space, and then aim for a higher vibrational frequency, before she moves on.

Willow Skye-Biggs is a multimedia artist, music producer and filmmaker. Willow’s work explores emotional states, mental illness, the supernatural and the spiritual. Over the past decade Willow has produced over 30 albums under different aliases (Stag Hare, Ava Lux, Sabriel’s Orb, Ariel) as well as performances internationally at venues such as the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art.  Willow’s musical work blends atmospheric moods, nuanced emotional melodies, and hypnotic beats, often combining both euphoric and melancholic emotions at once. Willow spends much of her time looking at rivers and things that are far away with her 8 year old son.

Willow’s performance will be a unique, site specific, immersive sound sculpture. Using minimal composition she builds subtle layers of sound and texture using a mix of guitar, synthesizer, acoustic instruments, and field recorded samples. Melodies and subtle rhythms hide inside washes of warm otherworldly drones as repeating motifs and tones create a quietly powerful sonic environment.