A composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist, Jonathan Bepler embraces classical traditions, improvisation, and unconventional methods. His collaborations with musical ensembles, choreographers, and filmmakers alike have led him to perform and present new work in opera houses, theaters, and museums around the world. As a baritone vocalist, he has performed opera, recital, oratorio, and new music. Bepler composes music for dance and theater and has led ensembles of both improvised and pre-composed music in the U.S. and Europe.
Through a collaboration with FWM, Jonathan Bepler created Invisible Dances for Broken Ensemble, a site-specific installation made for the exhibition New Media/New Materials: Highlights in Contemporary Art from The Fabric Workshop and Museum, an exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center (CAC) in Cincinnati, Ohio (2007). Made in response to the acclaimed new CAC building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid, Bepler‘s project explored sound as a way of representing his physical movement through space. Salvaging used and damaged acoustic instruments from Cincinnati pawn shops, thrift and music stores, Bepler set up a music studio in an empty CAC gallery where he played each instrument in specific locations around the room. To obtain a reasonably accurate and consistent representation of the space through sound, acoustical absorbers were installed along with eight highly sensitive microphones along its perimeter. Each microphone was then fed through its own channel into the playback system. Bepler’s experimental recordings were edited into a final composition employing multi-tracking and overdubbing to create an ensemble effect, allowing the performer to be in more than one place at the same time.
For the gallery experience, the microphones were removed and replaced with high-quality studio monitor speakers. Instruments and objects featured in the recording process—including a sandwich press, piccolo, cello, autoharp, Gopichand, cooking pot with lid, metal trash can, pie tins, guitars, drums, cardboard, cymbals, aluminum, horns, violins, candlesticks, tennis racket and shoes—remained in the room. Snapshots of Bepler’s performances were pinned to the acoustical absorbers while three video monitors offered minimal glimpses of the performances. In Bepler’s eight-channel “audio spatialization system,” different audio tracks signified the artist’s physical navigation of the space and allowed the visitor to visualize the performance without actually seeing it. Sound became a pure descriptor of dimensional form, locating the performer in the room and sculpting the space.
