Modal Interchange: Conversations on 21st-Century Performance Practices - The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music
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Modal Interchange: Conversations on 21st-Century Performance Practices

The personality of Los Angeles’s new music scene mirrors its city’s culture and geography as a whole: equal parts diversity and decentralization, in a battle for recognition and relevance that crisscrosses 650 freeway miles. The Modal Interchange series casts a wide net around LA’s new music community, hosting a diverse group of individuals who might not otherwise share the same artistic and academic spaces, in a series of lecture-workshops geared to an audience of performers.

Modal Interchange is a series of six workshops through 2026-27. Each workshop focuses on an element of 21st-century performing, programming, and music-making in the world of contemporary music, with special focus on the topics’ relevance in greater LA: histories of experimental music and the avant-garde, commissioning new works, concert programming, listening as an audience member, listening as a performer, score-reading and part-marking, learning and practicing contemporary works, improvisation practices, and arts activism.


This series is conceived and hosted by violist Wendy Richman and produced in partnership with the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities. Dr. Richman is Lecturer in Performance Studies, Director of uclaFLUX, and a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble.

List of Events

Wednesday, October 14: Pianist Vicki Ray -- Concert Curation IS Composition!

Pianist Vicki Ray, Concert Curation IS Composition!

 

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

3pm-6pm

Schoenberg Music Building Green Room
Click here to RSVP


Every musician presenting a concert is: a composer! In this talk I’ll explore different ways to think about concert programming and how the works you program constitute a meta-composition. Using musical examples I’ll explore the way connections between worlds – musical and otherwise – can create fresh, interesting juxtapositions that challenge (and hopefully delight!) the performer as well as the listener. Folded into this approach is the opportunity to commission new works that can tie previously unrelated pieces together and expand the repertoire of our instrument.

Bio


Described as “phenomenal and fearless” Vicki Ray is a pianist, improviser and composer. She has commissioned and premiered countless new works by today’s leading composers. Ray is a founding member of Piano Spheres and was, for many years, the head of keyboard studies at the California Institute of the Arts where she was named the first recipient of the Hal Blaine Chair in Musical Performance. She has appeared on numerous international festivals and was a regular member of the faculty at the Bang On a Can Summer Festival at MASS MoCA. Ray has been featured on the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Series as soloist and collaborative artist. Her widely varied performing and recording career covers the gamut of new and old music: from Boulez to Reich, Wadada Leo Smith to Beethoven. Notable recordings include the first Canadian disc of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with the Blue Rider Ensemble, the premiere recordings of Steve Reich’s You Are (Variations) and the Daniel Variations with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the first recording of John Cage’s Europeras 3 and 4. Her recording of Cage’s The Ten Thousand Things on Microfest Records received 2013 Grammy nomination. Vicki can also be seen playing the chromelodeon in the Los Angeles based PARTCH ensemble. Vicki Ray is a Steinway artist.

Jonathan Hepfer, percussionist and Artistic Director of Monday Evening Concerts

 

Sisyphus as Artist (Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work)

 

Monday, November 16, 2026

3pm-6pm
Schoenberg Music Building, 1344
Click here to RSVP

 

Whether navigating complex scores or directing a series, the common denominator is simply problem solving: using one’s sense of logic, aesthetics, ethics, and intuition to figure out how to get from A to B. Every project or piece is completely different, requiring constant reinvention and re-equipping of one’s toolbox. More abstractly, but of equal or greater weight, is the importance of nurturing non-musical artistic and creative interests while we hone our problem-solving skills. Whether performer, presenter, painter, or poet, artists flourish when we connect through our shared goal: to make a lasting impression on the souls of those around us.

Jonathan Hepfer is a percussionist, conductor, and concert curator. He attended Oberlin Conservatory, UC San Diego and the Musikhochschule Freiburg (on a DAAD fellowship), studying with Michael Rosen, Steven Schick and Bernhard Wulff. Since 2015, he has been the Artistic Director of Monday Evening Concerts (MEC) in Los Angeles as well as its resident ensemble, ECHOI. At MEC, Jonathan has directed performances of major works by Boulez, Cage, Eastman, Feldman, Glass, Grisey, Hennies, Klein, Pärt, Reich, Sciarrino, Shaw, Tyshawn, ten Holt, and Xenakis.


As a curator and producer, he has presented works by Aperghis, Billone, Chen, Czernowin, Eastman, Hammons, Hennies, Kurtág, Lang, Lucier, Otte, Radigue, Pisaro-Liu, Shaw, Smith, Takasugi, Tines, and Tsang. Jonathan has directed (or co-directed) projects at venues such as the Getty Museum, Harvard University, Hauser & Wirth, Jeffrey Deitch, LACMA, LAXART, Marciano Art Foundation, the Santa Monica Carousel (Frieze), Thomas Mann House, and the Pinault Collection in Paris. 


As a percussion soloist, Jonathan has performed widely across the United States, Europe and Asia, with an broad engagement in works by avant-garde and experimental composers. He has published interviews with Meredith Monk, Éliane Radigue, and Steve Reich, and has documented the oral histories of the pioneering generation of percussion soloists.


Jonathan has served on the faculty at Art Center Pasadena and CalArts. He is interested in the ways that music intersects with visual art, literature, architecture, fashion and film.

 

Melissa Achten and Eli Klausner of Oracle Egg

 

Building Oracle Egg: platforming ambitious work through artist-run spaces

Monday, January 11, 2027
3pm-6pm
Schoenberg Music Building, Green Room

 

    Founded and run by two artists, Oracle Egg is an experimental music and performance space in downtown Los Angeles built around a simple question: what kinds of structures allow ambitious new work to take shape and reach an audience? In this talk, Oracle Egg co-founders Melissa Achten and Eli Klausner will share their experience building Oracle Egg from the ground up, from defining its purpose and vision to navigating the practical realities of making a small arts organization work. Drawing from examples of Oracle Egg’s programming, they’ll discuss discovering and supporting artists, curating a season, developing a residency series, documenting work, and building relationships with audiences and donors. More broadly, they’ll reflect on their own path as artist-presenters and how Oracle Egg has expanded their understanding of what it can mean to support, sustain, and participate in an artistic community.

 

Melissa Achten is a Los Angeles–based harpist, composer, improvisor, and curator. Drawn to interdisciplinary form, Melissa frequently collaborates with performers, composers, and other artists to realize their work and her own. She is the other half of experimental harp & cello duo RÁN and the principal harpist for Ghost Ensemble. As a soloist and ensemble member, she has performed and premiered work in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, London, and Copenhagen.

Eli Klausner is a composer, improviser, and curator whose work spans composition, improvisation, and instrument building. His practice ranges from piano to hand-built instruments of his own invention, and his compositions have been presented in Los Angeles, London, Cyprus, and at the Darmstadt Summer Festival.

Shalini Vijayan, violinist and curator of Tuesdays @ Monk Space


Say Yes: Expanding the Possibilities of a Career in Music

Monday, February 8, 2027
3pm-6pm
Schoenberg Music Building, Green Room

Shalini Vijayan has had a diverse life in music that has included multiple genres and ensembles. Her career is living proof that learning to say yes to every opportunity that presents itself—including music with still-wet ink!—can lead to a richer, more exciting career.

Coming Soon

John Schneider, guitarist, composer, author, and broadcaster

NEW MUSIC: An Acquired Taste?

May 10, 2027

3pm-6pm
Schoenberg Music Building, Green Room

 

Creating an audience for unfamiliar music has always been a challenge, but what about an entirely new musical language that demands exotic instruments, rare repertoire and unfamiliar composers? As founding Artistic Director of the annual MicroFest, the Grammy® Award winning PARTCH Ensemble, MicroFest Records, and producer/host of decades of radio broadcasts (KUSC, KPFK), Schneider has been a tireless advocate for so-called ‘microtonal’ music and musicians who create it. He will present concert videos, recordings, and photos from many of those presentations, and discuss the joys and challenges of opening audience’s ears, and most importantly, the gray matter found between them.

John Schneider is the Grammy® Award winning & four-time Grammy® nominated guitarist, composer, author, and broadcaster whose weekly television and radio programs have brought the guitar into millions of homes. He holds a PhD in Music & Physics from the U. C. Cardiff [U.K.], music degrees from the University of California and the Royal College of Music [London] and is past President of the Guitar Foundation of America. He has released over twenty CD’s and written dozens of articles on the guitar, while his book The Contemporary Guitar has become the standard text in the field. He has performed in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, & throughout North America, and been featured by New Music America, the DaCamera Society, Southwest Chamber Music, New American Music Festival, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San
Francisco Symphony, Other Minds, and the BBC. He is the founding artistic director of MicroFest, the music ensembles Just Strings, PARTCH Ensemble, and founder of MicroFest Records, while his recordings can be found on the Bridge, Cambria, Etcetera, Innova, MicroFest, Mode, New Albion, Other Minds, and Pitch record labels. He can be heard weekly on Pacifica Radio’s The Global Village, www.KPFK.org. (more at www.JohnSchneider.LA).

Wendy Richman

Lecturer - Performance Studies, Academic Lecturer and Director of uclaFLUX at UCLA

Violist Wendy Richman is celebrated for her compelling sound and “absorbing,” “fresh and idiomatic” interpretations with “a brawny vitality” (The New York Times, The Washington Post). As soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral player, she has performed at major venues across the U.S. and around the world. She is a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Click for full bio

Acknowledgements

This program is made possible by the Joyce S and Robert U. Nelson Fund. Robert Uriel Nelson was a revered musicologist and music professor at UCLA, who, together with his wife, established a generous endowment for the university to make programs like this possible.

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