Brazilian-American violinist Maiani da Silva enjoys a varied career as a freelancer, feeling equally at home playing in concert halls, recording studios, breweries, and parked cars! An omnivorous chamber musician, Maiani performs contemporary/cross-over works as well as the classics, and can also occasionally be found interpretive dancing during measures of rest, or playing percussion in an Afro-Brazilian band. Maiani is the new violinist with Eighth Blackbird, one of the world’s preeminent new music chamber ensembles. She is also the co-founder and co-artistic director of The Furies, an intersectional-feminist violin duo, and a member and caixa (snare) player of Batalá New York, a samba-reggae band.
New Music/Contemporary Classical/Performance Art
Maiani is dedicated to working with cutting-edge contemporary ensembles, most notably as violinist with Eighth Blackbird . She has also played with Wild Up , with whom she’s performed for Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Noon to Midnight from 2016-2019. Other groups/series include The Industry, an experimental opera company (L.A.) Shattered Glass (N.Y.C.), Equal Sound (L.A.) , Princeton Sound Kitchen, Pasadena Opera, Aperture Duo, Now Hear Ensemble, Ludovico Ensemble (Boston), One Found Sound (S.F.) , New Music Brandeis, and Juventas New Music Ensemble (Boston), Desdemona (N.Y.C.), among others.
As a Blackbird Creative Lab fellow, Maiani worked with 4-time Grammy-winning artists from Eighth Blackbird, as well as incomparable composers such as Pulitzer winner Jennifer Higdon, and Nico Muhly, and one of Australia's leading dancers and choreographers, Ros Warby, who introduced Maiani to the work of Deborah Hay, and also how to really dance to Taylor Swift. Her performance of Rzewki's "Coming Together" (arr. by Matt Albert) was hailed by Lisa Kaplan as "the most primal 'six months'" yell she had ever heard. As a Bang On a Can fellow, Maiani worked directly with composers George Lewis and Louis Andriessen, as well as BOAC All-Stars at Mass Moca for another marathon. There, she performed an abridged version of Andy Akiho’s Ping Pong Concerto with David Cossin, and also dabbled in composition while performing on a 9-foot banjo.
Maiani and her duo The Furies were featured as one of Great Lakes Chamber Music Festivals' artists summer of 2019, as well as at Detroit's Third Place Concert Series, and an artist residency at Detroit's Light Box.
Performance Art (cont.)/Pop/TV & Film Recording Sessions
For L.A. Phil's Fluxus Festival, Maiani performed the west-coast premiere of Ragnar Kjartansson's Bliss—a 12-hour performance art piece—and her exhausted giggles were featured in the L.A. Times review. With performance artist and MacArthur Fellow (2017) Taylor Mac, she premiered the 24-Decade History of Popular Music in Brooklyn in 2016 (you guessed it, another marathon!) and rejoined the band for a portion of the 2017-2018 tour. She also toured with Taylor's Holiday Sauce in late 2018. Highlights of working with Taylor were sharing a stage with a generous artists, sobbing on stage, and rocking out with the women of the band while a topless Margaret Cho recited the Lesbian Avenger's Dyke Manifesto. Maiani has also performed with Shara Nova (My Brightest Diamond), Peter Gabriel, Kanye West, Anoushka Shankar, Childish Gambino, Rose Cousins, AverySunshine, Time for Three, Parisian electro-rock band Satine, Trans Chorus of L.A., New York cabaret singer Joey Arias, Nan Schwartz, and Rod Stewart, with whom she danced on stage to “If you think I’m sexy” while playing in a tragically flat-ridden key. She performed with New York's Wordless Orchestra, playing live screenings of Phantom Thread, and The Death of Stalin (premiere), with the composers, directors, and cast present. She has also recorded soundtracks for movies and TV shows such as the indie-feature film Stella, Netflix's Dear White People and When They See Us the ABC/Disney show For The People, and Disney Channel/Disney Junior's Fancy Nancy.
Orchestral
Having played across the country from Juneau to New York, and internationally from Western Europe to Eastern Asia, Maiani has orchestral performance experience working with ensembles like Pacific Opera Project, as concertmaster, Los Angeles Ballet Orchestra, as violinist and Assistant Orchestra Manager, Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, Experiential Orchestra, L’Orchestre Lamoureux (Paris), St. Matthew’s Chamber Orchestra, Monterey Symphony, Cape Cod Symphony, The New European Philharmonic (Paris), Symphony New Hampshire, Monterey Symphony, Chorus Pro Musica (Boston), Newport String Project, the orchestras of Indian Hill, Lexington, New Bedford, has toured with the Philharmonie Leipzig in China. She's also performed with The Bach Consort of Worcester, L.A.'s Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Santa Cecilia Orchestra, Los Angeles Virtuosi Orchestra, and the Juneau Symphony, among others.
Teaching
A dedicated violin and viola teacher, Maiani has taught privately for over 10 years (ages 3+), in both the U.S. and France, and a devoted Teaching Artist with the Harmony Project . She has been faculty of the Quincy Point Music Academy, Propsect Hill Academy in Somerville, San Francisco's Community Music Center (private teacher and chamber music coach), has coached chamber music for groups in the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, and has enjoyed group teaching with El Sistema teachers at The Boston String Academy, and Music Team San Francisco. In 2016, Maiani joined the faculty of L.A.'s Harmony Project as a Teaching Artist serving L.A.'s underprivileged youth with violin, viola, and orchestral instruction. She has also worked with young composers from schools such the Boston Conservatory, the Berklee School of Music, and UCLA; the latter being with wildUp. Her students have appeared with youth orchestras in Carnegie Hall and Boston's Symphony Hall.
Maiani is passionate about making music available to everyone in the community.
Education
Maiani holds a B.M. and a Graduate Performance Diploma from The Boston Conservatory, where she studied under Magdalena Richter and Irina Muresanu as a scholarship recipient.
Maiani also studied under the tutelage of Mela Tenenbaum in Brooklyn, New York. In the summer of 2013, Maiani was a Fellow of the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in New Hampshire studying under
Lenny Matczynski. She performed with the Fellowship String Quartet as part of the Tuesday Night Summer Concert Series, and as a guest artist, where she performed with members of the esteemed Apple Hill String Quartet.
In 2015, Maiani received an Artist Diploma with Honors from The San Francisco Academy Orchestra, having studied with Dan Carlson and David Chernyavsky.
Maiani also enjoys dancing, reading about the Pleistocene and evolutionary biology, in-person philosophical debates, ice cream, and sleep.
Maiani is an Associate Fellow of the Berkeley College at Yale University.
Brazilian-American violinist Maiani da Silva enjoys a richly varied career as a freelancer, feeling equally at home playing in concert halls, recording studios, breweries, and parked cars. An omnivorous musician, Maiani performs contemporary/cross-over works as well as the classics, and can also occasionally be found interpretive dancing during measures of rest, or playing percussion in an Afro-Brazilian band. Maiani is the new violinist with Eighth Blackbird, one of the world’s preeminent new music chamber ensembles. She has also collaborated with various cutting-edge contemporary artists, from members of Bang On A Can All Stars, Wild Up, Shattered Glass, Louis Andriessen, George Lewis, L.A. Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, to Taylor Mac, Childish Gambino, Shara Nova (My Brightest Diamond), Kanye West, and Peter Gabriel.
Not one to shy away from bold projects and collaborations, Maiani performed the West Coast premiere of Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss, as part of the L.A. Phil's Fluxus Festival where she joined Wild Up for a 12-hour loop of the final moments of The Marriage of Figaro, and Taylor Mac’s 24 Decade History of Popular Music 24-hour show in Brooklyn, as well as parts of the national tour, as well as Mac's Holiday Sauce (west coast tour). Recordings include a newly-released trio album by the Summa Trio (Navona Records) and a handful of TV/film works on both East and West Coasts. Maiani is the co-founder and co-artistic director of The Furies, an intersectional feminist duo that focuses on empowering the female-identified/non-binary experience through chamber music and performance art. Maiani also enjoys playing caixa (snare) as a member of Batalá New York, dancing, collecting fossils, and in-person philosophical debates. Maiani is an Associate Fellow of the Berkeley College at Yale University.
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