David Adamczyk

David Adamczyk is part of the Living Legacy Project at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Click here to listen to his artist interview. 

David Adamczyk is a Buffalo-born violinist, composer, street musician, and public-art advocate. His music is described as highly personal and naturally raw, with a virtuosic technique at his disposal.[1]  In addition to creating and self publishing albums, compositions, and performances with musicians like Tatsuya Nakatani and Steve Baczkowski, he is also heavily active in the Buffalo art community. 

A violinist for over 27 years, Adamcyzk studied at the Park School in Amherst, New York and was privately instructed by local violinist Thomas Halpin. Adamcyzk was also concertmaster in the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra. In 2005 he won the Amherst Symphony Scholarship and the Buffalo Chamber Music Society’s Silverman String Scholarship. Adamczyk has a Bachelors of Arts in Music Composition from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied under Composition under the tutelage of Nils Vigeland. 

It was when Adamczyk moved to NYC for the Manhattan School of Music in 2005 that his love of street performing began to develop. As a Composition student, he was required to learn piano instead of violin, so he played violin out in the streets of New York. When he returned to Buffalo in 2012, he brought his well-developed busking skills home with him. Adamczyk has played Eastern-European folk tunes for many years to better his street performing. In 2013, Adamczyk traveled to  Asheville, NC, Nashville, and New Orlean’s French Quarter as a member of a street-performing tour. Adamczyk has performed on street corners of Pittsburgh and Toronto as well.

After performing in the Buffalo Infringement Festival (BiF) for many years, Adamczyk became BiF's first street/outdoor coordinator in 2014. In this capacity, he has elevated the public's engagement with street performance culture in Buffalo dramatically, programming hundreds of performers outdoors during the annual 11-day  festival every year. Adamczyk has been described as a "composer of artists in space, with a love of the improvisational." [2] In addition to his demanding role as street coordinator with BiF, he was involved in coordinating the first Allentown Fall Festival in 2014 and 2015, and has programmed Infringement performers at Music is Art since 2014. For the 2017 Music is Art festival at Riverworks, Adamczyk will be programming Infringement performers throughout the historic silos, culminating in his most explosive programming experience thus far.

To Adamczyk, "playing for the birds" is a compliment. In 2015, Adamczyk collaborated with Julian Montague to create Bird Captures, which paired Mondague's depictions of birds with Adamczyk's transcriptions of their songs. Bird Captures was exhibited in two iterations: first, at BT&C Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and then at TH&B Gallery in Hamilton, Ontartio, a few months later. For the first iteration of Bird Captures, Adamczyk transcribed bird songs for the violin based on Montague's series Bird Photography (Attempts). The resulting compositions were entitled Flying Mobiles:Bird Songs for Violin. For the Bird Captures 2 installation at the TH&B United invitational in Hamilton, ON, Montague created stylized fabric banners depicting different birds featured in Adamczyk's  bird song compositions. The night of the multi-installation opening at TH&B, Adamczyk performed the Flying Mobiles nested within a semi-circle formed of the banners.

 BT&C Gallery wrote the following about Adamczyk's work: 

"Musician David Adamczyk’s fascination with musical transcription of recordings of virtuosic playing styles of various world traditions combined with an interest in exploring the full sonic potential of his instrument, led him to begin transcribing real-world sounds for performance on the violin. Through these exercises the difference between original sound-source and the musical result of performing the transcriptions serve as the compositional substance. Flying Mobiles consists of a number of short modular works for violin that attempt to capture the complexities of birdcalls, calling upon unconventional modes of sound production and extreme virtuosity to emulate the increasingly uncommon songs of nature." [3]

Since 2014, Adamczyk's relationship with the Burchfield Penney Art Center has developed as well, given the Center and Adamczyk's shared focus on avant-garde and New Music. In 2015, Adamczyk performed in the original compositions which accompanied the Center's exhibition, Charles E. Burchfield: A Resounding Roar. That same year, he was selected to participate in the Living Legacy Project. In 2016, Adamczyk performed his original composition Sōn at MENTORS AND FRIENDS: THE MUSIC OF NILS VIGELAND. In 2017, Adamczyk performed with Buffluxus for THE SCORES OF A MAN: A REVIVAL OF JULIUS EASTMAN. 

David Adamczyk currently resides in the Allentown neighborhood of Buffalo, where he is an advocate for public art performances both through the Buffalo Infringement Festival, and other forms of experiential composition. His personal interests currently include trying to chart every single chord possible, making spreadsheets bend to his will even if their processing power will not, and figuring out what coding language he should learn to best fulfill his dreams of creating a specialized music database. 

Live performances of some of Adamczyk's original compositions can be found below: 

Sōn, as part of the Silo Sessions 
To BWT
Waves, composed for Buffalo String Works
Flying Mobiles: Bird Songs for Violin
Cadenza

Adamczyk has made the notation to many of his compoisitions available online at ISSU. 

David Adamczyk has performed with many groups during his career, including (but not limited to):

Will Folk for Food / Shuballuliuma: Folk-rock violin and drum trio performing arrangements of Bartok's eastern European folk transcriptions
Ravi Padmanabha's My Nada Brahma: Indian folk Jazz quartet
Paul Kozlowski Trio 
Casperous Vine: Polystylistic chamber compositions by Paul Kozlowski with an imrpovisational bent
Storyville Players: New Orleans infused original songs for bass, violin, and accordian, lead by Sarahrose Marie. 

To learn more about David Adamczyk's work, visit his website here. 

[1] "Tatsuya Nakatani with David Adamczyk & Steve Baczkowski Three Solos in Asbury Hall" http://www.hallwalls.org/music/5532.html. Accessed August 25, 2017

[2] Heather Gring, quoted August 1, 2017

[3] "David Adamczyk Flying Mobiles excerpt- as part of BT&C's Bird Captures Installation January 2015".  https://soundcloud.com/btandcgallery/david-adamczyk-flying-mobiles-excerpt-as-part-of-btcs-bird-captures-installation-january-2015. Accessed  8/25/2017