About
Liz Tonne’s performance practice explores the imaginative edge of the human voice, synthesizing abstracted song and text through an array of both traditional and extended vocal techniques.
Tonne was a Boston-based improviser throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s and in numerous groups that helped define Boston’s electro-acoustic aesthetic. As a member of the pioneering ensemble, undr quartet, she contributed to the presentation of a new wave of sonic minimalism referred to as lowercase music.
Liz has continued to work through teaching, offering guidance rooted in Yogic Pranayam, the therapeutic release work of the Roy Hart Theater, and the somatic practice of Continuum. With her students, Liz shares her background in vocal training under Craig Wich of the Boston Conservatory of Music, Vocal Sound Healing under Jonathan Goldman, and her deepening Continuum practice under the tutelage of Megan Bathory-Peeler.
Many years back, Liz injured both her arms in an overly excited Bach binge. She subsequently rebooted her keyboard technique through studying the Taubman Approach and has studied with Taubman/ Golandsky specialists Julia Bady and Yoriko Mizuno Fieleke .
Liz was a member of The BSC, a group of electro-acoustic musicians translating an orchestral form of improvised music under the curatorship of Bhob Rainey. The BSC performed selections from John Cage’s Songbooks at The Philadelphia Museum of Art in the festival Cage: Beyond Silence in 2013. As well as performing as improvisers at The New England Conservatory of Music, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room, and the Philadelphia Phoneme Festival, The BSC were Artists in Residence assisting master’s degree students in composition at Wesleyan College and Princeton University. Further exploring the world of Cage, Tonne performed Ryoanjii and additional pieces from Songbooks in a duet with percussionist Tim Feeney at Cornell University in 2011.
Pre-Covid projects included collaborating with artists Jeff Gibbons and Gregory Ruppe on their installation, Grubnik + Suzanne which exhibited at the Nasher Sculpture Center during the 2018 Dallas Soluna Festival and the performance of Tonne’s solo piece Louder than an Angry Ocean at the Words/Matter Exhibition at the University of Texas’ Blanton Museum of Art and the HUT series in Northampton, MA in 2019. Contemporary work has included contributing to an ensemble of international musicians performing Dave Dove’s Sounding untitled for the Self-guided Listener, a site-specific response to the acoustic qualities of Dan Flavin’s untitled (Marfa Project) at the 2021 Chinati Weekend Open House in Marfa, Texas as well as lecturing as a Visiting Artist at The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts.
