Eli Berman

Background

About Eli Berman

Eli Berman is a professional vocalist, composer-producer, and new musical instrument builder with experience in nonprofits and teaching. She creates electroacoustic music using experimental and extended vocal techniques across a variety of vocal traditions, including khazones (Ashkenazi Jewish cantorial music), Yiddish and Appalachian folk songs, and western classical countertenor and baritone repertoire ranging from early music to contemporary compositions. For the past four 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 two years she has begun to create electronic dance music all from digital samples of her voice. Eli has premiered her music at the Watermill Center, National Sawdust,(R)evolution: Resonant Bodies at the Banff Centre, Yiddish New York, Yiddish Summer Weimar, New Music On the Point, New Explorative Oratorio Voice Festival, Atlantic Music Festival, and Gender Unbound. Eli performed in and contributed original musical instruments to Bonita Oliver's "Trans Water Mythologies" at the 2023 Snug Harbor Dance Festival (Staten Island, NY) as well as Anna Lublina's 2023 "Undying in Yidderland: Jargon Rituals" at Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt, Germany). 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 US 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.