Eli Berman '23
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Eli Berman (she/they/זי/זיי) is a vocalist, improviser, composer-producer, and new instrument builder from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She creates electroacoustic music using experimental vocal techniques across a variety of her ancestral vocal technologies, including khazones (Ashkenazi Jewish cantorial music), Yiddish and Appalachian folk songs, Slovak travnice (traditional women's haymaking songs), and western classical repertoire. For the past three years, Eli has been developing feedback instruments that extend the human voice using PVC pipes, metal sheets, and frame drums amplified by transducers and modulated by delay pedals. In the past year she has begun to create beats from digital samples of her voice. Eli has premiered her music at the Watermill Center, (R)evolution: Resonant Bodies at the Banff Centre, New Music On the Point, Yiddish Summer Weimar, New Explorative Oratorio Voice Festival, Atlantic Music Festival, and Gender Unbound. Eli performed in and contributed to Anna Lublina's 2023 Undying in Yidderland: Jargon Rituals at Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt, Germany), and in 2022 she performed in the live premiere of Sanni Est's album PHOTOPHOBIA for the Pop-Kultur Festival at Kulturbrauerei (Berlin, Germany). In addition to her experience as a countertenor and baritone in vocal ensembles such as C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective (NYC), Eli has sung as a soloist in the 2018 U.S. premiere of John Tavener's Total Eclipse and a 2018 New York Times critically-acclaimed concert of works by Eve Beglarian. She has presented her music and creative research at the 2021 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 2020 Pan-American Vocology Association Symposium, and 2019 Transgender Singing Voice Conference. Eli is a second-year in the Digital Musics Master's program at Dartmouth College.