Palingenesis

Melissa Hyatt Foss is an instrument-maker, musician and composer-performer who co-creates with an ever-growing collection of instruments that she hand-crafts with clay and other natural materials. Her evocative music is an intimate dialogue between the primordial, organic sound material conjured from her bespoke instruments: polyphonic flutes, horns, noise generators and whistling bottles, and electronic tools like granular processors, loopers, and synthesizers.

Foss’ instruments, which are both visual and sonic objects, both sculptural and functional, recreate and reimagine Pre-Columbian sound artifacts of the Americas through the lens of personal narrative and regional mythology.

Her music, often described as ritualistic, moves from delicate, fragile sounds to expansive and commanding sonic spaces. Her work, whether in the form of a zoomorphic instrument, an improvised performance, or an electroacoustic composition, is an exploration of sound, its ability to affect consciousness, and its power to generate moments of collective connection and shared emotions.

Profoundly shaped by the artistic-academic paradigm of the “Integral Musician,” pioneered by Alejandro Iglesias Rossi, she has developed a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to her own creative practice that draws on different but deeply interrelated fields of knowledge spanning from archaeology, anthropology, and ethnomusicology, to sculpture, acoustics, music, and performance.

In this way, Foss cultivates an integrated musical experience that relates deeply to human history and references important cultural patrimony while also being firmly rooted in the place and time that we inhabit.