ARTIST BIO
Brian Felsen is an award-winning pianist and graduate of the Wharton School
of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1993 he created and ran the
Philadelphia Music Conference, an international music festival, working with
many gold-record-selling artists such as Lisa Loeb, The Nixons, Phil Spector,
and Nirvana, and is credited with discovering several major-label recording
artists.
After selling the business in 1997 and studying at the Mannes School of Music
in NYC, he began work on musically representing ideas from cognitive science
and philosophy of mind. He wrote an oratorio, View from the Strangers' Gallery,
in 2000; two song-cycles, Great Expectations and The Court Gossip, in 2001;
and a play, Conducting Elif, in 2002. He has presented his music at the SciArt
festival in London and at the ASCI festival in New York in 2001; this summer,
he gave a talk on his poetry at Caltech in Los Angeles. His new installation
piece, “The Cartesian Theater,” made its debut at the New Haven
City Wide Open Studios, sponsored by the Andy Warhol Foundation. His art photography
and short films have been exhibited throughout the country.
Other projects include producing and editing a documentary film about the Turkish
military interventions and coups d'etat, Coup (Darbe), which received the NY
Council on the Arts/ETVS' highest grant award for 1999, and a CD of art songs
by gay composers of the 19th and 20th centuries, Songs from the Age of the Closet,
performed by the opera singer Elif Savas.
He lives in New York and Istanbul with his wife, son, and two cats.
|
