March 19, 2026 | 5:30 PM & 8:00 PM
Fishman Studio, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts

Magic. Music. Morse Code. Open Secrets.

Join us for this event, guided by artist, magician and researcher Jeanette Andrews, that depicts the secret of one of the oldest pieces of magic in history, purely in music form and performed in tandem with the original magic effect.

By creating a musical notation key to transform traditional Morse code beep sequences into a musical notation system, Andrews translated the text that describes the secret of a magic trick – one of the first to have been published in the West – into this system and then created a lush score for cello. What you will see is a performance which encodes the ancient secret in the form of music in tandem with a performance of the piece of magic that manifests that secret information in visual form. This performance will also integrate the very rare (as most were burned in the Inquisition), original 16th-century manuscript, on loan from the H. Adrian Smith Collection of Conjuring and Magicana at Brown’s John Hay Library. The performance will be followed by dialogue on the cultural evolution of magic. 

Featured Cellists: Isabel Castellvi, Anna Kerber, and Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez.
Interlocutor: Virginia Krause, Professor of French and Francophone Studies.

“In Plain Listen” was originally commissioned by and funded by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston.

Jeanette Andrews is a New York-based artist working at the intersections of illusion, performance, installation, film, and audio. Her studio practice bridges the worlds of illusion, installation, and conceptual art, creating interactive vignettes and surreal, multisensory experiences that investigate perception, cognition, and the seemingly impossible. Her background as a lifelong magician affords her a unique set of skills to craft experiences exploring anomalies in perception;She invites audiences to co-create her illusory performances which function as live thought experiments;She has presented numerous commissioned works with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, as well as for the Quebec City Biennial and Boca Raton Museum of Art, presented talks for Cooper Hewitt, Chicago Ideas Week, The British Society of Aesthetics, and universities, including Yale, Columbia, Princeton and Harvard.

She has held residencies with the Institute for Art and Olfaction and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston, and is a former National Arts Club Artist Fellow and Affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard. She was a 2024-2025 Visiting Artist for the Center for Art, Science and Technology at MIT and A Prizma Arts and Research Residency artist for Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. Her work has been featured in the Boston Globe, PBS, Chicago Tribune and New York Times.

A specialist of early modern France, Virginia Krause studies the period's opaque pursuits, those undertaken in the shadows. Witchcraft, Demonology, and Confession (2015) examines the methods employed by demonologists, specialists in the early modern "science of demons" trained to listen carefully to the dark truths that could not be seen.   She is also co-editor of the critical edition of Jean Bodin’s De la démonomanie (1580), a notorious treatise and prosecutorial manual from the age of the Witch Hunts.

Isabel Castellvi is a cellist, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, songwriter, composer and music educator.  As a versatile musician you can find her collaborating with musicians from around the globe. These collaborations span many genres, including her collaborations with Poet/singer Haleh Liza Gafori, an NYC based experimental performance group thingNY, the band Vudu Sister, she is a co-organizer of PVD Cello Fest and hosts a weekly songwriting group. Her own solo projects including looping cello, performing as a singer/songwriter, improvising sound healing journeys, as well as composing music for dance and film. Isabel is grateful to share music all over the world through performances, recordings and teaching. Her musical travels have taken her throughout North America, Europe, Asia, Central and South America and the Middle East. She currently lives and works in Providence, RI where she the music teacher and director of the strings program at the Croft School. isabelcastellvi.com

Anna Kerber (MCM '22) is an interdisciplinary artist inspired by dreams, relationships, and the Earth. She performs original songs and improvisation for cello and voice as Animal Love (instagram.com/animalov3). Her autobiographical experimental animation about licking leaves, Celebrating What's Easy Now, can be viewed at vimeo.com/annakerber.

Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez is a cellist and composer from New York who treats composition as an activity embedded in everyday life, from composing music and images to composing oneself. Working with electroacoustic improvisation, club music, and expanded cinema, he explores the ways in which sound mediates subject formation. His work searches out textures that approach the haptic—a sense of being touched, or moved—drawing out the intimacies of theory, history, politics and personal experience. A PhD candidate in Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown University, Jake’s research moves between sound studies, disability studies, and the environmental humanities as he attends to rhythms of rupture and repair. Jake has performed at the the Museum of Modern Art, the Performa Biennale, Stimmen Festival (DE), Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and the Vision Festival, and collaborated with William Parker, Pauline Oliveros, Marina Rosenfeld, T ania Bruguera, Claire Chase, abdu mongo ali, Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez, Naomi Greene and Infinite Coles. As a music producer he has over a million streams across platforms. He is a co-founder of Pyxis, a radically inclusive third space in Providence dedicated to expanding access to creative technology.

The Prizma Arts and Research Residency program brings your favorite artists' favorite artists to Brown’s campus: Artists whose influence far exceeds their visibility, are the secret engines of contemporary practice and whose work sparks the imagination of entire fields.