USA Projects

MARY ELLEN CHILDS has been acclaimed for creating both rhythmic, exuberant instrumental works and bold, kinetic compositions that integrate music, dance and theater in fresh and unexpected ways.  She has created numerous "visual percussion" pieces that embody the concept of music in motion, for her ensemble CRASH.  Her repertoire includes Click, a fast-paced, game-like work for three stick-wielding performers; DrumRoll, for four drummers on wheels; Sight of Hand, based on uniquely American forms of body percussion--girls' clapping games, hamboning, and baseball coaching signals-and Crash, a full-evening work for 6 crash cymbal players on rollerstools and various other rolling means of transportation. The Village Voice deemed Click "a newly born classic, like Steve Reich's Clapping Music, only a thousand times more virtuosic.  Myself, I can't whistle, but afterward everybody who could, did." Her output also includes multi-monitor video pieces A Chording To and the award winning Still Life, and her electronic Standpoints, a collaboration with lighting designer Jeff Bartlett.

Childs also composes "purely musical" concert works and has received commissions from the Kronos Quartet, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Dale Warland Singers, The Kitchen, the Walker Art Center, three commissioning grants from Meet The Composer's commissioning program, and three commissions from the MAP Fund.  One of her favorite instruments to write for is the accordion, and as a result of her close working association with accordionist Guy Klucevsek, she has created nearly a dozen works that include the instrument.  "Mary Ellen Childs's quiet pointillistic Oa Poa Polka had notes peeping from all over the accordion," observed the New York Times of one performance, "with the oompah just barely winking into view."  She has composed two works for concert band, Zephyrus and Green Light.  Her recent full-length works include Dream House for string quartet (written for ETHEL) and multi-image video, based on images of destruction and construction, cycles of time, and rhythms of construction work; and Wreck, created for the Black Label Movement Company, for which she won a 2008 Sage Award. Other recent and upcoming projects include a new opera Propeller commissioned by Nautilus Music Theater with funds from MAP and Opera America, a new solo string bass piece for Robert Black (Bang On A Can All-Stars) and a new work for QNG, a recorder collective based in Germany, and a new piano piece for Anthony de Mare's project LIAISONS: Re-imaginging Sondheim from the Piano.

She has received artist fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, the Bush Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board, and a 2011 grant from Live Music for Dance NY/NJ.