Wednesday, April 2, 12 – 1 PM, lunch provided at 11:45 AM (RSVP by 3/27), PAHB 216
Melissa Hyatt Foss is an instrument-maker, musician, composer-performer, researcher, and teaching artist developing artistic and educational projects that explore pre-Colonial sound artifacts of the Americas and their applications in contemporary art and music. Melissa is currently the Maryland Traditions Artist-in-Residence at UMBC where she shared her tradition and practice with Linehan Artist Scholars students and is guiding them to develop teaching materials that will enable public school teachers to introduce the practice, history, and cultural significance of clay instrument making to their students.
Melissa Hyatt Foss’ work takes different forms, from sculptural ceramic instruments, improvisational performances, and electroacoustic compositions, to educational workshops and residencies for all ages. Through these different expressive channels, she explores themes of memory, kinship, and myth, as well as sound itself; its ability to induce altered states of consciousness and its power to generate collective moments of shared emotions and connection. Foss’ hand-built instruments, which are both visual and sonic objects, reawaken ancient sound technologies through plant, animal, and bird-inspired forms. She navigates and negotiates between form and function to create instruments which reverently conjure more-than-human beings and highlight tunings and timbres rarely heard in music or encountered in our world today. Her evocative compositions are an intimate dialogue between the primordial, organic sound material conjured from her bespoke instruments: flutes, horns, trumpets, noise generators and whistling bottles; and electronic tools like granular processors, loopers, and electronic instruments. Often described as ritualistic, her music moves from delicate, fragile sounds to expansive and commanding sonic spaces. Profoundly shaped by the artistic-academic paradigm of the “Integral Musician,” pioneered by Alejandro Iglesias Rossi, she has developed a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to her own creative practice that draws on different but deeply interrelated fields of knowledge spanning from archaeology, anthropology, and geology, to sculpture, acoustics, technology, music, and performance.
Melissa Hyatt Foss was initiated into instrument-making and musical composition in Argentina, at the National University of Argentina at Tres de Febrero. There, she completed a master’s degree in Musical Creation, New Technologies, and Traditional Arts, performed as a soloist for seven years with the Orchestra of Indigenous Instruments and New Technologies, and taught in the bachelor’s program in Indigenous, Popular, and Classical Music of the Americas. In 2022 one of her original instruments was acquired for inclusion in the interactive educational installation in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Patricia and Mark Joseph Education Center, and she has been commissioned by the Walters Art Museum to create historic recreations of several musical instruments in their Art of the Ancient Americas collection. She has recently completed a three-year artist residency at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore, where her solo exhibition, Kith & Kin, A Rewilding of Sound and Form will be on view March 14 – April 19, 2025.