Five-One Experimental Orchestra at NEOSonicFest 2016: Jeremy Allen and Tracy Mortimore

The 3rd annual NEOSonicFest is upon us, running now through March 16. Cleveland's own FiveOne Experimental Orchestra appears as part of the festival with a concert on March 5 at Rising Star Coffee Roastery. Executive Director Jeremy Allen and bassist Tracy Mortimore spoke with Mark Satola. 

FiveOne Experimental Orchestra
Saturday, March 5 at 8:00 p.m.

Featuring new and exciting works by:

Nico Muhly
Greg Pattillo
John HC Thompson
Jeremy Allen*
Buck McDaniel
Sarah Kirkland Snider
and a new Experiment* conceived and led by 51XO's Tracy Mortimore

*World Premieres

Drink in the sounds, smells, and tastes of fresh new music and locally-roasted coffee beans in this unique west side Cleveland venue.

From fiveonemusic.org: 

FiveOne Experimental Orchestra (51XO) is a Cleveland-based music collective of ten composers and performers with a ‘no-boundaries’ approach to music. Our vision is to create and perform a diverse stream of fresh, new-perspective musical works and to bring an intriguing meld of genres, styles, and artistic disciplines to usual and unusual spaces. Toward that end, we often position players around or within the audience, blend art music with rock, digital sounds or world music, and collaborate with other artists to produce innovative multimedia performances.

We differentiate our conductorless modern music chamber band from other new music ensembles by abandoning an academic setting in favor of unusual, artful locations that may be more freely viewed and appreciated by the community. We offer early-career professional musicians the opportunity to play challenging, new pieces that directly involve them in the creative process, resulting in an integrated musical landscape more in-step with the energy of modern live musical performance.

The world of pop music is an ever-growing one, now so large, imaginative, and sophisticated that it shares many things in common with the finely crafted art music long relegated to academia. We believe there is a large market of free-thinking individuals who could form a lasting bond with the intricacies and abstraction of recent classical music if properly introduced on their terms, in their venues.

We performed our first concert in May of 2008. The following year, we formed a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation. Since that time, 51XO has continued to expand, holding more concerts each year, commissioning new works by exciting emerging composers, establishing a set instrumentation (flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, guitar, violin, cello, and double bass), and forming new partnerships within the Cleveland arts community and beyond. We have reached out to many other artistic disciplines through a variety of collaborations, including sculptors, filmmakers, video artists, dancers, poets, and visual artists.

Now in our seventh full season of concerts, 51XO is in the midst of our strategic planning process, streamlining our infrastructure, increasing our financial sustainability, and challenging ourselves to program our concerts in more imaginative ways than ever. From a rotating audience solo concert in a vintage clothier, to collaborations in a theatre setting with poets and video artists, to a concert featuring mash-ups of pop/rock and classical works, this season offers something fascinating for every audience member to connect with.

The heart of 51XO's mission is to invite both traditional and non-traditional concert-goers to participate with open mind, eyes, ears, and hearts in a truly unique musical experience. We compose with both power chords and counterpoint. Our audiences are as diverse as our music, yet our music speaks to each listener on a personal level. FiveOne Experimental Orchestra is about using the arts to communicate, to foster community, and create cosmos in a world of chaos.