TNM presents ShoutHouse - featuring the music of composer/singer Majel Connery and composer/pianist Will Healy.
Hailed as “incomparable to anything else… experimenting with a whole new form of expression” (The Culture Trip), ShoutHouse is a collective of musicians based in New York. Founded by composer Will Healy in 2014, ShoutHouse has formed a large community of artists that come together to present cutting-edge concert experiences that are redefining the boundaries of genre. Their debut full-length album, Cityscapes, came out on New Amsterdam Records in 2019.
Recent season highlights include performances on The Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage, National Sawdust’s Resonator Festival, The Harlem Arts Festival, Satellite Collective’s Echo & Narcissus at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Cooper Hewitt Museum’s summer concert series, and on 44 Charlton at The Greene Space. ShoutHouse often appears at New York’s legendary clubs like The Bitter End, The Shrine, Rockwood Music Hall, and more. ShoutHouse’s first EP was featured on radio programs around the world, including WNYC’s “New Sounds” with John Schaefer, and WBAI’s “Making Music” with Jordan Maclean. Since its inception, ShoutHouse has received support from The Juilliard School’s entrepreneurship program, the Brooklyn Arts Fund, Jerome Fund for New Music, the Queens Arts Council, The Sparkplug Foundation, and others.
Majel Connery is a vocalist, composer and former musicologist, and makes electro-art-dream-pop with repressed classical influences. Her work has been called “superb” by the New York Times and “thoroughly Schubertian” by the Wall Street Journal. In 2019 she wrote songs about porn, periods, and sad fish for five episodes of Radiolab’s “Gonads” series, released as a digital album on Bandcamp.
Current projects include Sky Creature, a punk/opera band with Matt Walsh of The Forms that tours nationally in 2021; “The Rivers Are Our Brothers," a song cycle that gives the power of voice to aspects of the environment (commissioned by Musica Sierra and performed with Edwin Huizinga and Ben Matus); and “Terra Nova” with composer-collective Oracle Hysterical (at Brooklyn Library and Peabody Essex Museum).
An artist with a Ph.D., Connery moved to the Bay Area in 2013 to take an Assistant Professorship in Musicology at the University of California Berkeley, then pivoted in 2015 to pursue a career as a performer. Since then, as Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford, she commissioned, produced and performed Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw’s monodrama “Contriving the Chimes,” written for her and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, and staged by opera director Christopher Alden. As Mellon Visiting Artist at Wellesley, she commissioned and performed Aeolus, a throat-singing rock opera by Rome Prize-winning and Berlin Prize-winning composer and UC Berkeley colleague Ken Ueno.
From 2007 to 2018, Connery co-founded and ran the experimental Chicago-based opera company Opera Cabal, a think tank for the conjunction of creative and academic work on opera. Opera Cabal’s production of ATTHIS at The Kitchen was called “mesmerizing” by the New York Times.