Cellist/Composer Greg Byers and Cafe Alma’s Chef de Cuisine Matti Sprague bring Acoustic Cuisine  – a multisensory food and music experience – to Mounds Theater as part of a grant through the Minnesota State Arts Board.  

 

The hour long work for chamber ensemble will showcase Byers' compositions alongside a synergetic tasting menu. Audience members will be able to try six hors d'oeuvres while listening to Byers’ musical compliment. 

 

This conversation between musical and culinary palettes is the result of a yearlong collaboration between Byers and Sprague, who have shared their methods, intentions, and art with one another in order to tell a story through taste and sound. The ephemeral nature of both music and food make them ideal partners. While chefs have selected playlists for countless dinners, and musicians have performed at countless restaurants, the purposeful collaboration of both senses is uncommon.

 

Byers began his relationship with music at 2 1/2, when he began studying cello in the Suzuki method. In 2008 Byers became the first person in the history of University of Miami to double major in Instrumental Performance/Studio Music & Jazz on cello and bass, Summa Cum Laude. He has since performed on BBC Two (Later... with Jools Holland), Univision (Latin GRAMMYs) and 2017 Paisley Park Battle of the Bands (Radiochurch); arranged strings for the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and Birth of a Ghost by Omar Rodriguez Lopez. 

 

Receiving the Artist Initiative grant allowed Byers to involve Cafe Alma, as well as local musicians Aaron Hedenstrom, Sten Johnson, Becky Gaunt, Javier Santiago, Dave Hagedorn, and Ted Olsen.

 

Chef Sprague started with Cafe Alma in 2006, more than a decade later taking on the role of Chef de Cuisine. As Steve Hoffman says in The Growler, “Matti’s position as chef de cuisine at Cafe Alma places him among the Twin Cities’ food royalty… under a whimsical magic spell, it is the knife guiding Matti’s hand, and not the other way around.”

 

Greg Byers is a fiscal year 2017 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

Please get in touch with Greg Byers at cellogreg@gmail.com for additional information.