Electronic music pioneer David Behrman returns to Lampo after 14 years to perform with Cleek Schrey on hardanger d’amore. Together they present “Pushback against Tough Situations,” a program built around the interplay of acoustic performance and computer-controlled systems.

Behrman writes:

“Our program tonight is a collaboration by Cleek Schrey and myself. We met in 2014 at a graduate music seminar at Wesleyan and have done a number of performances together since then, featuring situations that mix acoustic and electronically produced sounds. These situations incorporate relationships between musicians and specially designed software capable of sensing live performance as it happens. The results are a mix of elements of composition with spontaneous interaction.

“Because we’re performing in this dark, dangerous year when so much has gone wrong in the world and in the U.S., we’re calling this event ‘Pushback against Tough Situations.’ For me that phrase brings back earlier decades when pushbacks came sometimes into the music I was working on. We’re including on our program versions of two short pieces, one of which, Useful Information, was made during the Republican convention in NYC before the 2004 election. Protesting New Yorkers were being arrested and sometimes detained overnight by the police. A local radio station offered advice from a lawyer about what to do if you are arrested. That lawyer’s words are a part of the piece. At the time we were becoming aware that fascist elements were making their way into American politics. A reason for bringing that piece back now, in 2026, is to highlight the contrast between the comparatively mild repressive situation then and the far worse one now.

“Although most of our program tonight isn’t directly political, it can be argued that music by itself can, by creating its own breathing room and mood, ‘pushback’ against life-diminishing behaviors of bad human actors.”

David Behrman (b.1937, Salzburg, Austria) has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s and has created many works for performance as well as sound installations. Most of his music has involved homemade electronics and responsive systems that interact with collaborating performers.

In 1966 he founded the Sonic Arts Union with Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma. Working at Columbia Records in the late ’60s, he produced the Music of Our Time series of new music recordings, which presented works by Cage, Oliveros, Lucier, Reich, Riley, Pousseur, and other influential composers. He has had a long association with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as composer and performer and has created music for several of the Company’s repertory pieces. He received a D.A.A.D. fellowship in 1988–89 and an Individuals Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 1994. Behrman lives in New York.

This is David Behrman’s fourth performance for Lampo: he performed in October 2012 with Okkyung Lee, in November 2006 with Mark Trayle, and in September 2003 with cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. At the ’03 concert, which was his first Chicago performance since 1975, Behrman presented Homemade Synthesizer Music with Sliding Pitches and a new version of QS/RL made for Lonberg-Holm.

Cleek Schrey (b.1984, Bath Co., Va.) is a fiddler, composer, and improviser. He plays traditional music from Appalachia and Ireland as well as experimental music with a wide range of musicians. Schrey performs on the hardanger d’amore, a violin with sympathetic strings, and the daxophone, a wooden idiophone designed by Hans Reichel. His practice is preoccupied with the physical phenomena of vibrating strings and the histories and aesthetics of recording technologies.

Collaborators include composer David Behrman, the viol da gamba player Liam Byrne, traditional fiddle icon Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, and the late Fluxus artist Yasunao Tone. He has performed at the Big Ears Festival, Knoxville, Tenn.; Kilkenny Arts Festival, Kilkenny; SuperSense Festival of the Ecstatic, Melbourne; Issue Project Room, Brooklyn; Roulette, Brooklyn (in a program curated by Meredith Monk); and the Beckett in London Festival with Gare St. Lazare, London, among others.

Recent releases include The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (Pagans, 2024), a recording of shape-note melodies transcribed for organs with Weston Olencki, and Beehive Cathedral (Dear Life Records, 2024), an album of traditional southern music with Joseph Decosimo and Luke Richardson.

Past residencies include Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; Roulette, Brooklyn; Harvestworks, New York; and the Watermill Center, Water Mill, N.Y. Schrey holds an MFA in Music Composition from Princeton University and has lectured at the University of Pennsylvania and the Cooper Union. He lives in Brooklyn.

In October 2025, Cleek Schrey premiered Strange Creek Music, a new fiddle work on his hardanger d’amore, designed for and performed in the 10 x 20-foot Lampo office. Across eight 20-minute performances for audiences of four, Schrey reimagined Appalachian fiddle tunes, moving from their traditional forms into free improvisation.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation