VU 2 July 18, 2017

COMPOSER BIOS AND WORKS DESCRIPTIONS

10:30AM THE PAST IS PRESENT OR WORKS UTILIZING TIME         

Michele Abondano A la inequívoca memoria de mi piel (2016) Bogota, Colombia 8’28” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

[In English: To the unequivocal memory of my skin]  “Fragments of sounds that have been torn, cried, mixed, filtered, transposed, reversed, multiplied just like old memories of each kiss… of each step”.  This is an electroacoustic piece composed completely with sounds of a Flute in C. It is an excursion across past memories that seem to be intact in spite of time, as if they had been tattooed on the skin. The structure responds to the perceptual experience of three semantic dimensions of timbre: brilliance, mass, and texture. In terms of brilliance, the beginning of the piece explores the higher part of the register and also presents sounds with strong spectral centroid fluctuations that disappear according as more brilliant sounds fill the space. Meanwhile, mass is approached like an additive process of thickening that is completely reached in the transition from the middle to the final part. Finally, texture is developed as a gradual process from roughness to smoothness. This multidimensional experience of timbre is related in the piece to the overwhelming act of remembering.

MICHELE ABONDANO:  Colombian composer, vocal and electronics performer. Her creative work has been developed in the fields of acoustic and electroacoustic music as well as live electronics and music for dance. Her main interest is to explore the timbral qualities of sound, especially, its multidimensional and dynamic condition. She has been winner of the Contemporary Music Creation Scholarship granted by the Ministry of Culture (Colombia, 2015), winner of the ECOES-UNAM Scholarship for an Artistic Residency at the Mexican Centre for Music and Sonic Arts [CMMAS] (Mexico, 2014), commissioned by Bogota Improvisers Orchestra [BOI] (Colombia, 2013), and winner of the Melos/Gandini Scholarship (Argentina, 2011). She has worked as a Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of Pamplona (Colombia, 2012), she has taught courses in multidisciplinary creation at Francisco José de Caldas District University (Colombia, 2015), and she has been the Director of the Division of Research and Creation at Colombian Circle of Contemporary Music [CCMC] (Colombia, 2012).  She holds a Master’s degree in Music Composition, Honorable Mention, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (2015) where she studied with Gabriela Ortiz and Carole Chargueron. She also completed a Bachelor in Composition at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina (2011) with Marcelo Delgado and Marcos Franciosi, and a Bachelor in Music, Meritorious Distinction, at the National Pedagogic University (Colombia, 2008). She has attended workshops with Luca Belcastro and 4mil Quartet of Saxophones, with Gerardo Gandini and Compañía Oblicua Ensemble, and with José Luis Castillo and CEPROMUSIC Ensemble. Her music has been performed at Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, USA, Spain, Italy, Bolivia and Brazil.

Quentin Tolimieri Canone all’Unisono (2017) Brooklyn, NY 25’ (PREMIERE)

Canone all’Unisono (2017) is a part of a strand of my work that utilizes, most markedly, very rudimentary, toy like midi instruments, employed, in part, as a means of exploring issues of artifice and reality in electronic music. This issue of timbal artifice is, however, only part of a broader inquiry in my recent composed electronic music that has to do with the relationship between syntax, meaning and the meaningless-object nature of sound as a physical phenomenon. Canone all’Unisono is, perhaps, an overly simple example of this inquiry, however many of the hallmarks of this strand of my music are at least latently present, particularly an ever expanding “intrusion” of higher order syntaxes onto the musical object: the original counterpoint I have composed, the Bach canon that results from those part’s interlocking hocketing, the introduction of various electronic sounds (sine waves, beeps, etc) that violate the provisionally established “reality” of the main midi sounds, various cuts and edits that point to a formal order that is largely unrelated to the developing material, etc. (Each of these syntaxes bears with it, in a sense, a kind of meaning. Presumably one could never so overload a piece of music with enough conflicting syntaxes to prevent the formation of some higher order syntax that takes into account that piece’s many variables. Meaning, in music, is, it seems, tragically inescapable.) Somewhere towards the late middle of the piece a shift in how the music is constructed should require the listener to fundamentally alter how they are listening to the work unfold.

QUENTIN TOLIMIERI is a composer, pianist and improvisor. His work has been presented throughout Europe and North America at a variety of venues, including, most recently, Roulette and The Stone (NYC), Instants Chavires and La Chapelle (France) and The SPOR Festival for New Music and Sound Art (Denmark), which presented his long form (three hours in total) multi-channel electronic work Three Comedies in its entirety. His music is included on the album West Coast Soundings (Wandelweiser Records) which has been listed as one of the top ten modern classical albums of 2014 by the Wire Magazine. A section of eldritch Priest’s Boring Formless Nonsense, Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (Bloomsbury Academic) is devoted to a lengthy discussion of his work Josef, Lieber Josef Mein. He holds an MA in composition from The University of Southampton (UK) and a BFA in composition and piano from California Institute of the Arts. He lives in New York City, and works as a freelance pianist.

Milton Babbitt Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964) USA 10’44”

Milton Babbitt was a pioneer in furthering the development of Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique to encompass aspects other than pitch — such as note durations, rhythm, and dynamics–in works such as Three Compositions for Piano (1947) and Composition for Four Instruments (1948). Babbitt’s Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964) applies these compositional methods to the then-young medium of electronic music. Realized at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the work applies traditional twelve-tone principles to a full palette of musical parameters contained within interrelating collections (or “ensembles”) of pitches. Babbitt’s use of the synthesizer at once illustrates one of the primary advantages afforded the composer of electronic music: the ability to move with great speed and perfect accuracy among an infinite array of timbral, rhythmic, dynamic, and other gradations. The result in this case is a kaleidoscope of novel timbres, and a signal work in the history of electronic music. – Rovi Staff

MILTON BABBITT American composer. He studied music and mathematics at the University of North Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University, his composition teachers including PhilipJames and Marion Bauer. His graduate studies took him to Princeton University, where he had lessons from Roger Sessions and joined the teaching staff. During World War II he worked in mathematics in Washington and Princeton. He then wrote a Broadway musical (he is an expert on the genre) before returning to the Princeton music department in 1948. Latterly he also taught at Juilliard.  Babbitt had a strong influence as a teacher and as a theorist, developing the principles of SERIALISMto embrace rhythm and dynamics in a cogent manner with the aid of terms derived from mathematics (COMBINATORIALITY, SET). His music grows out of such concerns and is always marked by a supreme elegance, even when, as in some works of the 1970s, its surface is complex. Earlier pieces tend to be more lucid, and later ones, from his lively 70s and 80s, more playful. His output includes five quartets and much other chamber music, a long series of major piano compositions, rather few orchestral pieces, songs, and works composed with electronically synthesized sounds (Ensembles for Synthesizer, 1962–4; Philomel, with soprano, 1964). – Paul  Griffiths

Andrea La Rose Historiography (2012) Prague, Czechia 2’18” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

Historiography was composed as theme music for historypodcast.net. I wanted to create something that sounded like American news music, that you might hear on NPR or PBS, as opposed to the major networks, or the doom-n-gloom of FoxNews.

Flutist, composer, and improviser ANDREA LA ROSE makes cute songs, difficult chamber works, and weird noises. She works actively with ensembles Anti-Social Music and thingNY and has also been musically involved with A/B Duo, Lone Wolf Tribe, Mohair Timewarp, and Wild Rumpus. Back when she was under 40, NPR named her as composer you should know. Print and online publications from Chamber Music America, to New Music Connoisseur, to Dusted have said lovely things about her fluting and composing prowess. Presently a professional mom and stay-at-home musician in Prague, she formerly corrupted the youth of the world as a Music Teacher at the Franconian International School in Erlangen, Germany. Her music explores how people change roles over the course of a situation, spontaneously negotiating who is leading, who is following, or if there even needs to be leaders and followers at all. When it’s not about that, it’s about clapping.

Michael Winter 4 Computer Music Studies (2016) Mexico City, Mexico 20’

My work often explores simple processes where dynamic systems, situations, and settings are defined through minimal graphic- and text-based scores that can be realized in a variety of ways. To me, everything we experience is computable. Given this digital philosophy, I acknowledge even my most open works as algorithmic; and, while not always apparent on the surface of any given piece, the considerations of computability and epistemology are integral to my practice. I often reconcile epistemological limits with artistic practicality by considering and addressing the limits of computation from a musical and experiential vantage point and by collaborating with other artists, mathematicians, and scientists in order to integrate objects, ideas, and texts from various domains as structural elements in my pieces.

MICHAEL WINTER  I have performed across the Americas and Europe at venues ranging in size from small basements to large museums to outdoor public spaces (some examples of more well known festivals and venues include REDCAT, Los Angeles; the Ostrava Festival of New Music; Tsonami Arte Sonoro Festival, Valparaiso; the Huddersfield New Music Festival; and Umbral Sesiones at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Oaxaca). In 2008, I co-founded the wulf., a Los Angeles-based organization dedicated to experimental performance and art. As a laboratory and hub for exploring new ideas, the wulf. has become an experiment in alternative communities and economies. Similarly, my work subverts discriminatory conventions and hierarchies by exploring alternative forms of presentation and interaction.

Vanessa Rossetto Whole Stories (2014) New York, NY 19’24”

In February 2013 I went to New Orleans, where I grew up, for the first time since having begun my field recording practices. It was bittersweet and illuminating in the way that only a trip home after a long absence can be.  I was there during Mardi Gras, which that year coincided with my birthday. I recorded favorite places from my past, the chaos of the crowds, casinos, parades, and long conversations with my mother, the results of which became the skeleton of the pieces on Whole Stories.  While talking with my mother, certain themes began to emerge – the idea of luck (in the casino, in relationships) and whether believing in luck blunts one’s personal agency. If you believe, as she stated at one point, that “everyone in our family had a rotten life,” will you have one too, or if you are aware of patterns can you sidestep them? Do we internalize these ideas without being aware of them by steeping in them long-term? The resolutions to these questions still play out in an open-ended way in my own life, so I can’t really offer any definitive answers, but I felt like the questions themselves were universal and that hers was a voice I was compelled to give an audience.

VANESSA ROSSETTO is an American composer, violist and visual artist from Austin, Texas, United States She uses primarily chamber instrumentation, field recordings, electronics and a wide array of different objects exploring them through extended and traditional techniques and other methods of her own devising. Trained as a painter, she seeks the same result in both her visual and sound work: the exposition of overlooked narratives. She has recorded and released two full-length CD-Rs as The Mighty Acts of God on the labels Ruralfaune and MYMWLY, as well as appearing on numerous compilation tracks and collaborative releases with Pulga, Wondrous Horse, Bright Duplex, Hwaet, Catrider and others, and in 2008 launched her own CD-R label, Music Appreciation. Through this imprint she released the first four solo albums under her own name: Misafridal, Imperial Brick, Whoreson In the Wilderness and the award-winning Dogs In English Porcelain. Her 2010 cassette release with period.tapes, pdd-nos, was described by Byron Coley in The Wire as sounding like “being under attack from slow-moving dune worms”. In November 2010 her first 12″ LP, Mineral Orange, was released by Graham Lambkin’s KYE records. In September 2011 she performed a duo set with Lambkin at Amplify 11 in New York City. Her second LP for Kye, Exotic Exit, was released in September 2012 and Temperament as Waveform, a collaboration with Manchester based artist Lee Patterson, will be released in January 2013 by Another Timbre. http://www.musicappreciationrecs.com

Karlheinz Stockhausen Étude (1951) Germany 3’

“First I recorded six sounds of variously prepared low piano strings struck with an iron beater, using a tape speed of 76.2 centimetres per second. After that, I copied each sound many times and, with scissors, cut off the attack of each sound. A few centimetres of the continuation [steady state], which was – briefly – quite steady dynamically, were used. Several of these pieces were spliced together to form a tape loop, which was then transposed to certain pitches using a transposition machine. A few minutes of each transposition were then recorded on separate tapes.  I was only allowed to have the studio with a technician for a few hours each week. Therefore, I hammered a nail into my desktop at the student hostel, laid a metal tape hub on the nail, fastened a ruler horizontally onto the desk in front of me, and placed a series of hubs with modulated tapes and one hub with leader tape next to each other at the rear of the desk. Then I cut many short pieces from a roll of white splicing tape and stuck them next to each other on the edge of the desk.  I then chose, according to my score, one of the tapes having a certain sound transposition, measured the notated length in centimetres and millimetres, cut off that length, spliced it with a little piece of the splicing tape onto a lengthy piece of white leader tape, and wound the white tape plus the first little piece of magnetic tape around the metal hub on the nail. For this I used a pencil which was inserted into the outer hole of the hub.  Next, I chose another prepared tape, measured and cut off a piece, and spliced it onto the previous piece. Whenever the score prescribed a pause, I spliced a corresponding length of white tape onto the result tape. Occasionally, my winding apparatus did not function, and tape salad was the result: I then crawled around on the floor under my desk searching for one end of the fallen tape. Once found, the confusion of the entangled tape was unravelled with great difficulty, and it was wound around the hub again.  When my studio time came, I synchronized two of my spliced tapes using two play-back tape recorders, recorded the sum on a third tape recorder and copied this result again – depending on the polyphony desired – on top of a further zebra-tape of bits of brown tape and little pieces of white pause. Already upon hearing two synchronized layers, and even more so hearing three or four layers, I became increasingly pale and helpless: I had imagined something completely different!  On the following day, the sorcery undespairingly continued: I changed my series, chose other sequences, cut other lengths, spliced different progressions, and hoped afresh for a miracle in sound.” “I can no longer recall exactly how many weeks I carried on this cutting and splicing, with ever-increasing perfection of my winding-skill. Anyway – on this CD released in 1992 – the world can now hear my Concrète ETUDE of 1952, which for many years I had presumed lost until I finally found it again in a pile of old tapes.”  SOURCE: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Compact Disk Number Three; Electronic Music 1952-1960, from the complete edition (Stockhausen Verlag), accompanying booklet.

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN (b Burg Mödrath, nr Cologne, 22 Aug. 1928; d Kürten, 5 Dec. 2007).  German composer. He studied at the Cologne Conservatory (1947–51) with Hans Otto Schmidt-Neuhaus for piano, Hermann Schroeder for harmony and counterpoint, and Frank Martin for composition. In 1951 he attended the Darmstadt summer courses, where he was impressed by Karel Goeyvaerts’s essays in applying serial methods to rhythm and also by Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949), which uses scales of rhythmic values and dynamic levels. Drawing his own conclusions from these examples, he quickly wrote Kreuzspiel for oboe, bass clarinet, piano, and percussion, and Formel for orchestra (both 1951). In 1952 he went to Paris, where he studied with Messiaen and worked in Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète studio. He then returned to Cologne, where he completed Kontra-Punkte for ten instruments (1952–3), the first work he acknowledges as mature.  Within a short period Stockhausen had thus established himself, along with Pierre Boulez, as a leader in the attempt to create a new musical language along strictly serial lines (see SERIALISM), and to each new work he brought a fresh view of musical possibilities. In the two electronic Studien(1953–4), composed at the newly founded studio in Cologne, he tried to synthesize timbres from pure tones; in Zeitmasze for five woodwind (1955–6) he integrated strict with variable tempos; in Gruppen for three orchestras (1955–7) he added acoustic space to the composer’s repertory of means; and in Gesang der Jünglinge on tape (1955–6) he achieved a full union of music and language.  In his next electronic work, the four-channel Kontakte (1958–60), Stockhausen chose to tackle complex sounds that did not lend themselves to the serial methods and the complex formal schemes of earlier works, and accordingly he introduced more empirical techniques; the heard quality of sound, rather than its symbolic representation, became the prime consideration. Stockhausen had always been an acute judge of acoustic effectiveness, but now the composition and relation of timbres became increasingly important. This is the case in Momente for soprano, chorus, and instruments (1961–72) and in various works in which Stockhausen applied electronic transformation to musical performance: Mixtur for modulated orchestra (1964), Mikrophonie I for tam-tam and microphones (1964), and Mikrophonie II for modulated chorus, Hammond organ, and tape (1965), There followed two tape pieces, Telemusik (1966) and Hymnen (1966–7), in which he integrated recordings of music from around the world, as well as several works, including Prozession (1967) and Kurzwellen (1968), for his own ensemble of musicians using natural and electronic instruments. His experience with this group led to his allowing a large degree of freedom to the performer, especially in Aus den sieben Tagen (1968), a set of prose poems intended to stimulate the musician’s intuition.   With Mantra for two pianos and electronics (1969–70) Stockhausen entered a new phase, basing each work on one or more haunting melodies. Sometimes, as in Mantra or Inori for dancer and orchestra (1973–4), the result is a massive, continuous development; in other works, such as Musik im Bauch for six percussionists (1975), the emphasis is on the ritual enactment of a musical fable. The orchestral Trans (1971) combines musical strength with dramatic effectiveness, having the strings alone visible, placed behind a gauze and bathed in violet light, while the other sections are heard from behind.  The natural next step was opera, and Stockhausen took it in a typically grandiose manner, embarking in 1977 on Licht, a cycle of seven operas for the days of the week: Donnerstag (1981), Samstag (1984), Montag (1988), Dienstag (1993), Freitag (1996), Mittwoch (1998), and Sonntag(2003). Each is a mosaic of self-sufficient scenes for various combinations of singers, instrumentalists, and dancers, often with electronic means, and the libretto is a collage of autobiography and myth. Large roles were assigned to members of the composer’s entourage, especially his sons Markus (trumpet) and Simon (electronic keyboards) and his regular companions Suzanne Stephens (basset horn) and Kathinka Pasveer (flute), all appearing on stage in costume. Neither Mittwoch nor Sonntag has had a complete staging.  From the early 1950s to the end of the 1970s Stockhausen had an enormous influence on younger composers, and he travelled the world lecturing and performing. Few of his admirers, however, were able to follow him into Licht. – Paul Griffiths

Theodore Teichman O Haupt Voll (2016) Pittsburgh, PA 3’ (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

O Haupt Voll is one work from a cycle that is an electronic reinterpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Through the electronic distortion industrial samples and the juxtaposition between the original voices and these “electronic voices”, the work creates an intense and surreal psychology and atmosphere.

THEODORE TEICHMAN blends music, neuroscience, and sound art to create sonic environments infused with memory and the tracings of narrative, and allowing listeners to find their own glimpse of these hintngs of moods and narratives. His work has been played in California, Pennsylvania, Canada, Ukraine, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The work “Haiku” has been selected to be included in the music presentation for the Moon Ark project and is being sent in a capsule to the moon as well as a tour of 14 European cities and the work Vanishing Point has been selected as a finalist in the KLK New Music Sacrarium Competition 2016 and was performed by the Lviv Philharmonic in October 2016. He is particularly interested in investigating the intersection of time, cultural context, and place in the formation and juxtaposition of musical and spatial meaning and how all these elements can be used to create highly evocative, personal, and immersive experiences of storytelling.

12PM  MORE THE PAST IS PRESENT OR WORKS UTILIZING PAST VOICES & MUSIC

Alexander Waterman Double AA Side DEXTER SINISTER (2008), New York, NY, 21’

A side: “B” (for Bartleby).  In the New Year of 2008, I sent copies of the following typewritten letter from Ireland to around forty potential cooperators, in advance of a project called TRUE MIRROR for that year’s Whitney Biennial: http://dsalcoda.org/true-mirror-microfiche-double-aa-side.  Written by Alex Waterman. Recorded at (1) The 7th Regiment Part Avenue Armory Building, New York City, 23 March, 2008, performed by Peter Evans (trumpet), Marina Rosenfeld (phonographs), Hrabba Attladottir (stroh violin), and Alex Waterman (violincello); (2) The Kitchen, New York City, 25 November 2008, solo; and (3) The ICA, London, 30 May 2009, solo. Mixed by Alex Waterman in Brooklyn.

ALEX WATERMAN is a composer, performer, and scholar based in Brooklyn, NY. He holds a Masters in Composition and Performance from the Institute for Sonology and a PhD in musicology from New York University. He studied cello with Andor Toth, Catherina Meints, George Neikrug, and Frances Marie Uitti. His installation works have been exhibited at the ICA London, Stonescape, Vilma Gold, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and theBonnefantenmuseum Maastricht. His book on Robert Ashley, written and edited by Waterman and Will Holder, was released by New Documents in September 2014. He has produced two other books with Will Holder: Agape and Between Thought and Sound. Waterman was an artist in the 2014 Whitney Biennial where he built a television studio, and installation space inside the museum in order to produce 3 operas by Robert Ashley. He has taught at Bard College (MFA program), NYU, Bloomfield College, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. His writings appear in Dot Dot Dot, Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, and The Third Rail.

Laurie Spiegel Appalachian Grove 1 (1974), USA, 5’20”

LAURIE SPIEGEL (b Chicago, 20 Sept 1945). American composer. She studied classical guitar, theory and composition with John Duarte at Oxford University, and composition with Jacob Druckman at the Juilliard School (1969–72) and Brooklyn College, CUNY (MA 1975). She began to compose computer music at Bell Laboratories with Ghent and Mathews (1973–9, 1984). Her teaching appointments have included positions at New York University, where she founded the computer music studio (1982–3), the Aspen Music Festival (1971–3) and Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York (1980–81). She has also served as artist-in-residence at the WNET Experimental Television Laboratory (1976). Her honours include awards from the Institute for Studies in American Music (1973–4), Meet the Composer (1975–7, 1979–80) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (1991–2). Her numerous articles appear in such publications as Computer Music Journal and Electronic Musician Magazine.  As a software designer and computer programmer, Spiegel has worked as a consultant for firms involved in signal processing and information technology. She helped to design the AlphaSyntauri and McLeyvier synthesizers and is widely known for her interactive music programme Music Mouse – An Intelligent Instrument (1985). Written for Macintosh computers, the programme enhances a user’s ability to automate selected aspects of composition, increasing the number of musical dimensions that can be controlled in real time and thus creating more spontaneous performances. Her works compiled as Unseen Worlds (1987–90) use this technology. Although her later compositions embody a complex intensity not present earlier, they often expose an understated sense of humour and an interest in a variety of American music traditions. Many of her works highlight the expressive capabilities of texture and timbre. Known primarily for her computer and electronic music, Spiegel has also written for acoustic instruments. – Joanna Bosse

Brian Harnetty Could I Tell You A Little Story About That? (2014), Columbus, OH, 9’

Could I Tell You A Little Story About That? combines samples from the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Archive in Shawnee, Ohio, with vibraphone.  Residents of the southeastern Appalachian Ohio region speak about their lives and work, including coal mining, labor struggles, and social life.  The piece was commissioned and performed by Aaron Michael Butler.  With archival recordings from the Shawnee Archives, Ohio.  Aaron Michael Butler, vibraphone, Brian Harnetty, electric piano.

BRIAN HARNETTY is a composer, sound artist, and writer who works with sound archives.  Deeply involved with local issues of Appalachia and the Midwest, Harnetty connects sound archives with performance, ecology, and place. Many of his pieces transform archival material––including field recordings, transcriptions, and historic recordings––into newly re-contextualized sound collages. For more than a decade, this has led to projects with archives such as the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky, and the Sun Ra/El Saturn Archives in Chicago. Harnetty’s recent work listens to the historic, economic, cultural, and environmental sounds of Appalachian Ohio, informed in part by his family’s roots in the region. Harnetty received a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. He studied with Michael Finnissy at the Royal Academy of Music, London, where he received an M.Mus. in music composition, and earned a B.Mus. from The Ohio State University.  Harnetty’s music is on Dust-to-Digital, Atavistic, and Scioto Records. As an author, Harnetty has written for ​New Music Box​, ​Experimental Music Yearbook​, ​Sound Effects​, and ​Cultural Studies​. In 2016, he was the recipient of the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award and the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. He has received additional support from the Wexner Center for the Arts, Duke Performances, Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati), the National Performance Network, the Ohio ArtsCouncil, and the Promusica Chamber Orchestra. His 2013 release, ​The Star-Faced One: from the Sun Ra/El Saturn Archives​ was MOJO Magazine’s Underground Album of the Year. A new recording based on the Berea Archives was recently released on Dust-to-Digital, called ​Rawhead and Bloodybones​.

Daniel Corral For Chuck Berry (2017), Los Angeles, CA, 12’48” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

For Chuck Berry is a microtonal synthesizer interpretation of the introduction to Johnny B. Goode, one of the most iconic guitar solos in the history of rock and roll by the quintessential rock and roll musician. For Chuck Berry is based off of my own transcription of the first 12 bars of the studio recording of Johnny B. Goode, with each measure lasting approximately one minute.

DANIEL CORRAL is a composer and multi-instrumentalist born and raised in Eagle River, Alaska. Currently living in Los Angeles, his unique voice finds outlet in accordion orchestras, puppet operas, handmade music boxes, microtonal electronics, site-specific installations, chamber music, post-punk opera, and inter-disciplinary collaborations.  Corral’s music has been commissioned and presented by venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Joe’s Pub NYC, REDCAT, Reykjavik Harpa Concert Hall, HERE Arts Center, Miami Light Project, Operadagen Rotterdam, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, USC’s Thornton School of Music, The Center for New Music, CSUN’s Mike Curb College of Arts, Pianospheres, Automata Los Angeles, Machine Project, SASSAS, the wulf., Pasadena All Saints Choir, The Santa Monica GLOW Festival, CalArts, and the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts.  Corral is composer and keyboardist for Timur and The Dime Museum and director of experimental accordion orchestra Free Reed Conspiracy. Corral has also collaborated with artists such as Anne LeBaron, Vicki Ray, Charles Gaines, Stephen Prina, Wild Up, Isaura String Quartet, Formalist String Quartet, Opera Povera, Yakima Chamber Symphony, The Industry, California EAR Unit, Kairos String Quartet, Bo Sul Kim, Daron Hagen, Pasadena All Saints Choir, Cudamani, and Sojourn Theatre.   Corral is currently composition faculty at Calarts. Residencies include APPEX, Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, I-Park Foundation, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. He received his MFA from Calarts, where he studied composition with James Tenney and Anne LeBaron. His second album, Refractions, was released on Populist Records in May 2017. http://www.spinalfrog.com

Charles Dodge He Destroyed Her Image (1974) USA 2’

Charles Dodge on “Speech Songs”(April 2000) Though vocorders and voice-guitar devices became common in popular music in the ’70’s, Dodge was a pioneer of voice-sythesis experiments before any of that, as witnessed in his series of “Speech Songs” compositions (available on Any Resemblance Is Purely Coincidental on New Albion).  In the early days of computer music in the sixties, one of the few places to actually hear what you were doing was at the Bell Laboratories (in New Jersey).  In those days, it was a very special piece of equipment called the digital-analog converter that was used for that purpose.  Bell was a friendly benevolent monopoly at this stage.  The inventor of computer music, Max Matthews, was there.  He encouraged some of us who had access to university computers to make musical sound in digital form on the computers and to listen to it and convert it to a form that could be heard in his laboratory.  That lab was used in the daytime for speech research.  When you went there to listen to your music, you often heard speech research going on in the hall.  I was fascinated by that and was so struck how much more interesting were the sounds of synthesized speech which were made by the researchers were than the attempts at musical sounds that my friends and I were making.  At some point in the early ’70’s, I had the opportunity to work at the Bell Labs in the evening, after hours, in an attempt to make music using some of the software there that had been developed for speech research.  I had access to software written by a researching named Joseph Olive, who had a musical background and an interest in music composition.  With Matthews’ permission and Olive’s active help, I was able to go to Bell after the workers had gone home and use the same computers that were used for speech research for music.  That was the genesis of the speech synthesis techniques that were used in those pieces.  The poems themselves were sketches by Mark Strand, who was a friend of mine.  We were both teaching at the School of Arts at Columbia University at the time.  I asked him if he had any texts that I would be able to use and he suggested these.  He had a whole bunch of them which he read over the phone and I copied down a few of them.  I ended up using four of the surrealistic poems that he had written.  It was really fun to do it helped me discover… I’d never been able to write very effective vocal music and here was an opportunity to make music with words.  I was really attracted to that.  It wasn’t singing in the usual sense.  It was making music out of the nature of speech itself.  With the early speech-synthesis computers, you could do two things: you could make the voice go faster or slower than the speed in which it was recorded at the same pitch or you could shift the pitch independent of the speech rhythm.  That was a kind of transformation that you couldn’t make in the usual way of making tape music.  It was fascinating to put my hands on two ways of modifying sound that were completely, newly available.  I’ve always liked humor and had an attraction to the bizarre, the surreal.  These poems were almost dream-like in their take on reality.  So that made me feel very at home somehow.  This unreal voice taking about unreal life situations was a very congruent.  The voices are very cartoon-like and that really pleased me- I was very interested in pop art like Lichtenstein.  To make a cartoon-like voice, really struck a chord with the art at the time.  People would listen to this and just giggle.  It was really fun to be a part of that.  For “He Destroyed Her Image,” I was interested in changing the tambre of the voice.  That reversal from looking outside to being inwardly confused in the poem, I tried to depict with the changes of tone quality in the voice, back and forth between a electronic phrase that sounds speech-like (you can understand the words) and an electronic phrase that’s less speech-like (where you can’t understand the words).  This happens even though the two the two have same pitch pattern.

CHARLES DODGE (b Ames, IA, 5 June 1942). American composer. He studied composition at the University of Iowa (BA 1964) and Columbia University (MA 1966, DMA 1970), where his principal teachers were Richard Hervig, Chou Wen-chung and Luening; he also studied computer music at Princeton University with Godfrey Winham (1969–70). In 1993 he became visiting professor of music at Dartmouth College. He carried out research in acoustics and computer music at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (1971–7), the University of California, San Diego (1974), and MIT (1979). His numerous awards and honours include the Bearns Prize (1964, 1967), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1975) and Guggenheim Fellowships (1972, 1975). He has received commissions from such bodies as the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Arts Council of Great Britain, Swedish National Radio, Groupe de Musique Experimentale de Bourges and the Los Angeles PO. He has been president (1971–5) and chairman of the board of directors (1975–80) of the ACA, president (1979–82) of the AMC, and has held offices in numerous other professional organizations devoted to the work of 20th-century composers.  Dodge became active as a composer of computer music in the mid-1960s, seeking to extend the compositional technique and expressive range of this medium. Earth’s Magnetic Field (1970) is a musical rendition of the effect of solar radiation on the magnetic field surrounding the earth. Speech Songs (1972) was his first work for synthesized voice; using sophisticated computer techniques he created a variety of vocal sounds which lend humour and irony to the text (by Mark Strand). In Cascando (1978), a setting of the radio play by Samuel Beckett, the voice of a live performer, the Opener, ‘controls’ two computer-synthesized audio channels, Voice and Music. Dodge’s works from the early 1980s focus on the confrontation between new, often dehumanizing technology and the musical expression of human thought and feeling: in Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental(1980), an operatic voice (originally that of Caruso) searches in vain among various computer sounds for a fitting accompaniment. In 1985 Dodge published Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition, and Performance (with T.A. Jerse; second edition, 1996). – Jerome Rosen

Jeremy Woodruff Gongburgh (Steeltown Forests) Iron City Gamelan (2012) Berlin, Germany, 8’39”

Gongburgh: Steeltown Forests is an exploration of sounds of Pittsburgh’s past, present and future. Industrial and urban sounds are mixed with gamelan to unleash the Pitt gamelan on the Pittsburgh soundscape. At the same time, the gongs themselves are exposed to sounds outside their home at the university that I imagined they must have always been yearning to hear.

JEREMY WOODRUFF is currently Head of Music Theory and Lecturer in Composition and Sound Studies at the Istanbul Technical University, Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM). His compositions and sound installations are informed by his research on subversive sound in protest, theater, permaculture gardening, sound art and media studies from the 1910s until the present. Investigations in biofeedback music interfaces, Indian music, Javanese Gamelan, Turkish music and urban sound in Chennai and Istanbul also meet innovative music curriculum design in his output.  His sound works initiate alternative social interactions and present alternate concepts of sonic text. The works redefine basic musical parameters to pose questions. He is a skilled performer in the most diverse musical settings: from classical chamber music and classical Indian music to raggae, live electronics with multiple wind instruments to professional church choirs and marching bands. He has collaborated on work in conceptual video, dance and radio.

Bernard Parmegiani En Phase/Hors Phase (1977), France, 2’32”

BERNARD PARMEGIANI (b Paris, 27 Oct 1927; d 21 Nov 2013). French composer. After studying mime with Jacques Lecoq (1957–61), a discipline he has regarded as influential to his composing, he worked as a sound engineer for French television. In late 1959 he joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), founded the previous year by Pierre Schaeffer under the auspices of RTF; Alternances (1963) was composed for the famous and tempestuous Concert Collectif devised by Schaeffer. Subsequently he provided studio assistance to several composers, most notably Xenakis, and produced music for radio, television and the stage. As head of the Musique-Image section of the GRM, he also wrote many film scores. Among his wide range of functional compositions is a jingle written for Charles de Gaulle airport in 1971. After leaving GRM in 1992, he set up a studio at Saint Rémy in Provence.  Parmegiani began to write electro-acoustic works for the concert hall in the 1960s. Violostries(1965), a dense polyphonic work in four movements for violin and tape, is constructed out of nine basic violin tones (sound cells) suggested to the composer by violinist Devy Erlih. L’instant mobile(1966) shows the emergence of Parmegiani’s preoccupation with the passing of time, an interest that led 25 years later to a series of works inspired by ideas of temporal perception. Capture éphémère (1967), one of his most successful pieces, alludes to the passing of time, as well as to the brevity and transience of sound; it is a dynamic composition in which the subject is perfectly illustrated through micro-montage. In 1971 with Pour en finir avec le pouvoir d’Orphée, a work that amounts to a confession of faith, he claims to have broken with the seductive power of repetition and the spellbinding musical fabric in which he had excelled. During this period he composed Enfer(1972), the first part of a Divine Comedy (after Dante) written in collaboration with Bayle.  It was only with the pivotal work De natura sonorum (1975) and subsequently with Dedans-Dehors(1977), however, that Parmegiani, out of a desire for rigour and abstraction, broke free of his tendency towards aural enchantment. What his music lost in charm and spontaneity it gained in meaning and compositional skill; nonetheless, the economy of his methods and the linearity of his subjects could not mask the lingering sensuality in his music. From this point on, his sound palette was modified and clarified. To some extent he abandoned massive orchestral textures in favour of a more agile kind of counterpoint. At times, however, he reverted to full-bodied and warm material, often situated in the middle or lower register. In La création du monde (1984), for example, he turned back to progressive mutations of sound material. Later works include the four Exercismes(1985–9), compositions of almost pointillist refinement; Litaniques (1987), which takes up his fascination with incantatory music; Rouge-Mort (1987), after Mérimée’s Carmen, as powerful and dramatic as its model; Le présent composé (1991), Entre-Temps (1992) and Plain-Temps (1993), highly wrought works that refer back to reflections on time; the resonant Sonare (1996); and Sons/jeux (1998). Other notable features of his music include: a sense of humour, often emphasized by punning titles; a generosity of inspiration in an almost popular vein, particularly evident in his early works; a frequent, but never banal, use of synthesized sound; and a love of the ‘material’ element. – Francis Dhomont

1PM CRITICAL MUSIC AND PURE SOUND

Doug Barrett What is the sound of one flag burning? (2017), Brooklyn, NY 9’23”

G Douglas Barrett’s What is the Sound of One Flag Burning? (2017) is a vinyl record project that combines political demonstration with philosophical reflection on sound recording technology. In 2016 the artist created an audio recording of a public flag burning in response to rising neonational sentiment in the US and in light of then president-elect’s threat to imprison those responsible for a similar event. The project suggests a double homage: firstly, to American artist Dread Scott’s 1988 What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag?, a work that invited participants to step on an American flag and which prompted President Bush Senior’s support of legislation that subsequently prohibited such acts. Secondly, the project alludes to Iannis Xenakis’s 1958 work Concrete PH, a musique concrète composition that consists entirely of the sound of a single burning ember. Invoking musique concrète composer Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of acousmatics—wherein recordings are imagined as capable of removing all reference to a sound’s source—the project asks: to what extent sound can reliably evidence acts of transgression?

G DOUGLAS BARRETT is an artist, theorist, and composer. His music and artistic work has been discussed in publications like The Wire, Postmodern Culture, MusikTexte, and Guernica. Presenting throughout North America, Europe, and Japan, Barrett was a recent artist-in-residence at USF Verftet (Norway), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), and the Catwalk Institute (New York). He has received grants from Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), DAAD, and Franklin Furnace (New York). His writing has been published in Postmodern Culture, Contemporary Music Review, Mosaic, Glissando, and Tacet. His book, After Sound: Toward a Critical Music, was published in 2016 by Bloomsbury.

Karlheinz Stockhausen Studie 1 (1953) Germany, 10’

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN SEE ABOVE FOR BIOGRAPHY (10:30AM)

Jean Claude Risset Mutations (1969) France, 4’

JEAN CLAUDE RISSET (b Le Puy, 13 March 1938). French composer and researcher of computer music. After studying mathematics, physics (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, 1957–61) and music (composition with André Jolivet, 1961–4), Risset began investigating the computer synthesis of sound (composing sound rather than with sound) as a means of bridging the gap between the perceived lack of control offered by musique concrète techniques and the elementary sounds of electronic music at that time. He began work at Bell Laboratories (1964–5, 1967–9) with Max Mathews, investigating the creation of ‘instrument-like’ timbres and met Varèse, John Pierce, James Tenney, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Richard Moore. The Computer Suite from Music for Little Boy (1968) was his first piece of pure computer music, written using the Music V program. Techniques used in his research were subsequently employed in Mutations I (1969), and were collectively gathered to form the Sound Catalogue (Risset, 1969). These ‘recipes’ of his syntheses including the imitation of instruments, pitch paradoxes and the synthesis of sound textures have served as a foundation for computer music study.  Returning to France in 1969 he held a post at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (1969–72, then from 1985 as director of research), Université d’Aix–Marseille (1972–5, 1979–85). At the request of Boulez, he became head of the computer department at IRCAM (1975–9). The works Inharmonique (1977), Moments Newtoniens (1977) and Mirages (1978) were realized here. These works used the computer (running an altered version of the Music V program) to fashion a controlled relationship between live instruments and synthetic sounds (or manipulations of recorded sound). Pitch and rhythmic paradoxes were employed in Moments Newtoniens. In Contours (1983), the focus was upon perception of melodic structure based on shapes independent of intervals.  Complex, computer-controlled exploration of instruments and their simulation in works such as Dialogues (1975) allows not only for an extension of the natural sounding instrument but for new, virtual relationships to be initiated. These are perhaps more accentuated in the works with voice such as Inharmonique and Invisibles (1994), influenced by Calvino’s Le città invisibili, as the most personal and impersonal musical instruments are contrasted. By utilizing pitch as a meeting point between real and unreal performer, Risset could explore the timbre space set up by their relationship. This space had been previously explored in Sud (1985) where the sounds of nature contrasted with pure synthesis. Techniques for imbuing the characteristics of one sound onto another through filtering, modulation and hybridization were used to create musical relationships as opposed to wild sound images. The sound of the sea, birds, wood, metal as well as gestures played on the piano or synthesized by computer formed the basic material from which grew a proliferation of new sounds. A pitch set (G–B–E–F♯–G♯) presented first with synthetic sounds was later used to colour natural elements using resonant filters.  The influence of timbre composition upon global structuring processes is evident throughout Risset’s computer music and logically extends to his instrumental works. Paradoxical techniques used first in Little Boy find parallels in Dérives (1985–7), Phases for orchestra (1988, a work influenced by recent research into fractal geometries) and Duet for One Pianist: 8 Sketches (1989, realized at MIT, where Risset was composer-in-residence). This work, for Disklavier and computer, uses the computer to transform and react to data according to predefined relations indicated by the movement headings (Double, Mirror, Extensions, Fractals, Stretch, Resonances, Up Down and Metronome).  Risset has written extensively on his work, considering it ‘very important to communicate mutually one’s experiments and experiences on sound synthesis, processing and musical elaboration, so that one can take advantage of the efforts of others and make the exploration of computer music a rich cooperative venture, even though the musical work remains in the end the responsibility of the individual composer’. – Adrian Moore

Cat Hope/ Stuart James Feather (2015) Perth, Australia, 9’

Feather (2015) co-composed with Stuart James. Commissioned by the Totally Huge New Music Festival, 2015.

This piece uses the structure of a feather as the starting point for the distribution of the sounds in the work. The sounds themselves, however, may be able to sustain a feather suspended in space, enabling it to float above the very low frequency vibration causing a movement in air. The piece examines the qualities of ‘weightlessness’; defying the notion that low frequency is a ‘heavy’ sonic experience.

CAT HOPE’s music is conceptually driven, using mostly graphic scores, acoustic /electronic combinations and new score reading technologies. It often features aleatoric elements, drone, noise, glissandi and an ongoing fascination with low frequency sound. Her composed music ranges from works for laptop duet to orchestra, with a focus on chamber works, and in 2013 she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to develop her work, as well as Civitella Ranieri (Italy) and Visby International Composers residency (Sweden) fellowships. Her practice explores the physicality of sound in different media, and has been discussed in books such as Loading the Silence (Kouvaris, 2013), Women of Note (Appleby, 2012), Sounding Postmodernism (Bennett, 2011) as well as periodicals such as The Wire, Limelight,and Neu Zeitschrift Fur Musik Shaft Her works have been recorded for Australian, German and Austrian national radio, and her work has been awarded a range of prizes including the APRA|AMC Award for Excellence in Experimental Music in 2011, 2014 and the Peggy Glanville Hicks composer residency in 2014.  She has founded a number of groups, most recently Decibel new music ensemble, noise improv duo Candied Limbs, the Abe Sada and Australian Bass Orchestra bass projects. She has also founded and written pop songs for Gata Negra (1999-2006).

Pauline Oliveros Bye Bye Butterfly, (1965) USA, 8’

PAULINE OLIVEROS (b Houston, TX, 30 May 1932). American composer, improviser, and accordionist. Born into a musical family, Oliveros played the piano, violin, accordion, and French horn in her childhood. She studied music at the University of Houston (1949–52) and at San Francisco State College (BA 1957). From 1954 to 1965 she studied composition with ROBERT ERICKSON at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where, together with Ramon Sender, she established the group Sonics to explore electroacoustic improvisation. During this period she also explored free improvisation with Terry Riley and Loren Rush. With Subotnick and Sender, in 1962 she co-founded and co-directed (until 1965) the SAN FRANCISCO TAPE MUSIC CENTER. In 1966 she studied electronic music with Hugh LeCaine and from 1966 to 1967 was the first director of the Mills College Tape Music Center. From 1967 to 1981 she taught at the University of California in San Diego, where she was the director of the Center for Music Experiment (1976–9) and founded the ♀ Ensemble. Thereafter she founded and directed the non-profit Pauline Oliveros Foundation in Kingston, New York, which in 2005 became the Deep Listening Institute. In 1988 with Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis (Peter Ward) she co-founded the Deep Listening Band to perform and record in exceptionally resonant spaces. She has also regularly offered Deep Listening workshops to advance creative listening and innovative music making. She has made worldwide appearances as a composer, improviser, and performer on the accordion, earning international recognition. Oliveros has served as visiting professor and composer-in-residence at such institutions as Oberlin, Stanford, and Northwestern and has been a Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Milhaud Professor at Mills College. Her many awards include the Bonn Beethoven Prize; Columbia University’s William Schuman Award; awards from ASCAP, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance, Gaudeamus, Seamus, Fulbright, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships; honorary doctorates from DeMontfort University, Mills College, and the University of Maryland; an honorary membership in the Society for American Music, as well as commissions from the Fromm Foundation, Lincoln Center, Meet the Composer, SEM Ensemble, and the West German Radio. Among her students are Sidney Corbett, PAUL DRESHER, and Alexina Louie.  Oliveros’s wide-ranging creative activities are marked by a strong focus on improvisation, heightened sonic awareness, and innovative uses of music technology. Oliveros began her compositional career with works featuring sustained sounds, highly differentiated timbres, and traditional notation. Much of her early music, including Variations for Sextet (1960), was based on improvisatory and intuitive creative processes. Exploring improvisation and live-electronic and electroacoustic music intensely in the 1960s, she increasingly drew upon indeterminate graph and verbal scores and unconventional sounds. In Sound Patterns (1961), rhythm and vocal extended techniques are precisely indicated, but pitch is free. Electronic works such as Bye Bye Butterfly and I of IV (1966) are based on improvisation, having been created in real time without preconceived structures and scores. In the 1960s, Oliveros began to compose so-called Theater Pieces, which in addition to improvisation comprise lighting, costumes, actors, film and electronics, often tailored to specific performers and improvisers such as Stuart Dempster and William O. Smith.  In the 1970s, having immersed herself in the study of Asian and Native American cultures, including different types of meditation, Karate and T’ai Chi, Oliveros aimed at greater body, environmental, and sonic awareness, which led to numerous, mostly verbally notated Sonic Meditations and to the practice of Deep Listening. In some of the musical meditations the performers concentrate on “unchanging tonal centers with emphasis on changing partials,” but changes may also “occur involuntarily, or without conscious effort, while sustaining a sound voluntarily.” Developed with her ♀ Ensemble, these meditations as well as such other works as To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (1970) and Njinga the Queen King (1993) reflect her preoccupation with feminism and queer identity.  From the 1980s, Oliveros has broadly explored the concept of Deep Listening as a performer with Dempster, David Gamper, Panaiotis, and other members of the Deep Listening Band, playing in caverns, cisterns, cathedrals, and other uniquely resonant spaces. Oliveros usually performs on her accordion tuned in two different just intonation systems and often uses the Expanded Instrument System, a sophisticated electronic sound-processing environment, which she designed and which provides feedback to her and her fellow musicians’ sonic input in the form of iterated or modified spatialized sounds. She has taught the philosophy and practice of Deep Listening, which centers on a very attentive and ecologically motivated approach to listening and performing, whereby trained and untrained musicians and non-musicians achieve a high level of acoustic interconnection with each other and their environment. Oliveros has also composed specific Deep Listening exercises and pieces, drawing on improvisation, meditation, and electronics, and in 1990 she founded the Deep Listening Catalog, a publishing enterprise. In recent years, Oliveros has developed new performance technology. Through her Telematic Circle, she has pursued composition in virtual worlds and cyber jamming and examined possibilities of telepresent music performed in real-time and simultaneously by musicians in different locations who use the Internet (or other broadband transmission systems) and her Adaptive Use Music Instruments software. She is currently exploring assistive software for the physically and cognitively challenged to include them in various types of music making. – Sabine Feisst

Ashkan Fakhr Tabatabaie Metamorphosis (2017) Iran/Salt Lake City, Utah, 5’35”

Metamorphosis has been designed using MAX/MSP, Super Collider and Logic Pro. These pieces of software have been used due to the diverse sonic nature of the piece that includes but not limited to human voices, instrument, ambient, and synthesized sounds. With a technical point of view, the premise of the piece is to blend musical and extra-musical events in a subtle way. In the musical events, whether prerecorded or synthesized, pitch collections based on over-tone series or tempered system, periodic rhythms of pitch change, and timbral clarity give these events their musical character. On the other hand, the non-musical events are designed with spatial subtlety based on prerecorded ambient sounds that do not necessary follow any specific rhythm, pitch collection or musical timbres. There exists also some transitory sounds with hybrid character such as water drop, water bloop, etc. that share both musical and extra-musical features, thus induce a melancholic atmosphere. Some of the transformations are, among the others, water drop to percussive kick, percussive sounds to pitch intervals, intervals to specific instrument timbre, breathing to musical tones, musical tones to running, and amphibians to humans, In this piece, golden mean has been applied as a common ratio of change to different elements and events. The proportions of the large structural sections, the proportions of the events with connected content, the rate of rhythmic change and pitch organization are some examples. Golden mean in the mentioned paradigms has been used in other pieces frequently, however, the way it has been employed in the pitch organization of this piece is innovative (to our knowledge). The ultimate goal was to generate pitch collections that their components intervallically differ by golden mean. However, applying golden mean to normal frequency measurement can be problematic since psychoacoustic studies have shown that above 500 Hz, increasingly large intervals are judged by listeners to produce equal pitch increments. This difference between the measurement and perception could make the ratio imperceptible. To address this issue in this piece, a convertor was designed to apply golden mean to mel scale measurement which has been shown to fix the problem. Furthermore, the context in which transformations happen is exceedingly important. For instance, the mentioned pitch collections appear in the large-scale golden section of the piece, which mostly carries the ambient nature sounds. This context makes the micro entities and the narrative interconnected and is one among many others in this piece. All that said, Metamorphosis is ultimately a metaphor for memory, life, and infinity.

ASHKAN FAKHR TABATABAIE’s artistic and scholarly works are interwoven. Thanks to his different backgrounds, ranging from engineering to music composition, and his exploration of music psychology, he has reached an interdisciplinary approach between science and sonic art. He applies psychological, mathematical and conventional music theory considerations to his works, many of which have been published and performed. In the process of musical composition, he schemes an aesthetic model based on subjective emotional reflections. Afterwards, by exploiting the existing music cognition findings or designing new studies, he tries to find a way to make the model as widely perceptible as possible. Currently, he is a composition PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Utah. He has also studied at Tehran University of Art and Azad University and taught at Iran University of Applied Science. His other interests are sonic art legal protection, marketing and therapy.

Nomi Epstein Slow (2016) Chicago, IL, 18’

Slow was created for SLOW:SD, a festival of slow music at UCSD in 2017, and focuses on one sound source in both a pure and processed form.

NOMI EPSTEIN, is a Chicago-based composer, educator, and curator/performer of experimental music.  Her compositions center around her interest in sonic fragility, where structure arises out of textural subtleties. Her works have been performed throughout the US and Europe by ensembles such as ICE, Ensemble SurPlus, Wet Ink, Mivos Quartet, Wild Rumpus, Dedalus, and Dal Niente. She has been awarded grants from New Music USA, The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and The Foundation of Contemporary Art, with residencies at Schloss Solitude and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She is founder/ curator of the critically acclaimed, experimental music performance collective a.pe.ri.od.ic, and also performs in the experimental improvisation trio, NbN.  Epstein’s curatorial work includes producing the Chicago area centennial John Cage Festival in 2012 and co-producing the Chicago Wandelweiser Festival in 2014. She has served on the faculties of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern, Roosevelt, DePaul, and the University of Iowa. Along with composing, she continues to research, write, and lecture on post-Cagean, notated, experimental music.

2PM  OPEN

Elsa Justel Tapage Nocturne (2016) Argentina/France, 8’ (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

“Tapage nocturne” is the electro-acoustic interlude of the trilogy for recorders and electronics “Trois moments du jour”  The individual registers of the recorder offer contrasting color , agility and timbre filling characteristics, allowing to obtain textures and conglomerates of great expressive richness.  Made with materials extracted from recordings of double bass, bass, tenor and alto recorders.

ELSA JUSTEL Doctor in Aesthetics, Science and Technology of the Arts at the University of Paris, currently works as an independent composer and video artist. Her works have received numerous awards in international competitions and were commissioned by the French government and different European studios. She has developed a pedagogical and research activity at the Universities of Marne La Vallée (France) and Pompeu Fabra (Spain) and several European schools of music.  Recordings by Empreintes Digitales (Canada) (http://www.electrocd.com/fr/bio/justel_el/discog/), and other publishers.  In 2007 she creates the Foundation Destellos to promote electroacoustic musica and digital arts, organizing an International competition.  http://www.fundestellos.org/Bio.htm

Brian Belet/ Stephen Ruppenthal A Strange Diversion (2017) San Fransisco, CA 10’15” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

A Strange Diversion is a real-time composition for two synthesis systems: Stephen Ruppenthal performing on a vintage Buchla Music Easel analog synthesizer and Brian Belet performing using the Kyma digital sound design system. Following a time line score of gestural and episodic styles, the performers improvise within a consistently evolving soundscape. What is presented here is therefore an aural snapshot of one incarnation of this composition. The title is an homage to Allen Strange (1943-2008), a good friend and mentor for both of us.

STEPHEN RUPPENTHAL and BRIAN BELET are composers and performers living in the greater San Francisco Bay area. In 2009 they founded the ensemble SoundProof with Patricia Strange.

STEPHEN RUPPENTHAL is Principal Trumpet and Contemporary Music Advisor for the Redwood Symphony, and has been Guest Artist-in-Residence at numerous universities in the US, holding courses in Electronic Music Studio Arts and Composition at the Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Art (SFSU). Stephen was a founding member of the Electric Weasel Ensemble, and more recently, SoundProof, and is known internationally for his performances and writings on text-sound composition and sound poetry. Flamethrower, a CD of new electroacoustic works for trumpet and flugelhorn performed by Stephen is currently available from Ravello Records.

BRIAN BELET lives in Campbell, California, with his partner and wife Marianne Bickett. A CD of his computer music compositions has just been published by Ravello Records (Sufficient Trouble, July 2017). Additional compositions are recorded on the Centaur, Capstone, Frog Peak Music, IMG Media, Innova, SWR Music/Hänssler Classic, and the University of Illinois CD labels; with research published in Contemporary Music Review, Organised Sound, Perspectives of New Music, and Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference. To finance this real world Dr. Belet works as Professor of Music at San Jose State University. (www.BeletMusic.com)

Dan Joseph Periodicity Piece #6 (2005) Brooklyn, NY 10’07” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

Periodicity Piece #6 originated as a multi-channel sound work composed in 2005 and premiereed that year as a six-hour sound installation with occasional live musicians, at the Diapason Gallery, New York. Subsequent presentations include a one-hour concert version performed by the sfSoundGroup in San Francisco, a second staging as an installation, at Harvestworks, New York, a 10 minute, multi-channel fixed-media version presented at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, and most recently as a 64 minute CD version that appears on my recent double-CD Electroacoustic Works (XI Records, 2017). The version I am submitting here is a stereo version of the 10-minute fixed-media version.

Rooted in classical minimalist practices, the goal of the work is to establish multiple rates of periodicity, ranging from short metrical repetitions, ie: phrases in 4/4 time for example, to longer rates of recurrence such as sonic events that recur once 15 minutes or even less frequently. The resulting experience of these simultaneously unfolding yet unrelated rates of periodicity, is to give the listener a rich and complex sense of the passing of time on multiple planes.  Fundamentally a tonal work, Periodicity Piece #6 incorporates a range of un-pitched and abstract sounds within its pitch-based structure. As sonic events are periodically cast into the musical space, the result is a slowly unfolding contemplative sound world.

DAN JOSEPH is a free-lance composer based in New York City. He began his career as a drummer in the vibrant punk scene of his native Washington, DC. During the late 1980s, he was active in the experimental tape music underground, producing ambient-industrial works for independent labels in the U.S. and abroad. He spent the ‘90s in California where he studied at CalArts and Mills College. His principal teachers include Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran and Mel Powell. Equally influential were his studies with Terry Riley during several workshops in California and Colorado.  A New York resident since 2001, Dan’s work has been presented at Merkin Concert Hall (NYC), Diapason Gallery for Sound (NYC), Roulette (NYC), Issue Project Room (NYC) The Kitchen (NYC) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (CA), New Langton Arts (CA), Headlands Center for the Arts (CA) and other venues. He has received commissions from several ensembles and performers, including Gamelan Son of Lion, the sfSoundGroup, baritone Thomas Buckner, and clarinetist Matt Ingalls. Dan has held residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center.  As an artist who embraces the musical multiplicity of our time, Dan works simultaneously in a variety of media and contexts, including instrumental chamber music, free improvisation, and various forms of electronica and sound art. Since the late 1990s, the hammer dulcimer has been the primary vehicle for his music. As a performer he is active with his own chamber ensemble, The Dan Joseph Ensemble, as well as in various improvisational collaborations and as an occasional soloist. He has collaborated with a variety of creative artists including Miya Masaoka, Pamela Z, Loren Dempster, JD Parran, India Cooke, Andrea Williams, William Winant and Miguel Frasconi and John Ingle.

Michael Gogins Three Trees (year) Bovina Center, NY 10’22” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

“Three Trees” was algorithmically composed using software of my own invention, and rendered entirely by means of Csound. The compositional algorithm is a Lindenmayer system drawing notes in a space consisting of instrument choice, time, duration, pitch, loudness, and stereo pan. The Csound instruments are by other musicians, but modified and adapted by me. The piece is a single program that runs in one pass to compile a high-resolution soundfile, in other words, I did not select, edit, or modify the soundfile except to normalize it.

MICHAEL GOGINS  I was born in 1950 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and lived there till 1973, with many trips to mountains, deserts, and unlocked university labs. My father was an inventor, my mother a fine artist and commercial artist. I have pursued poetry, photography, music performance, and music composition. I was a jazz major at the University of Utah, where I was informally introduced to electronic music by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Nyle Steiner. I have also lived in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and New York again. I have a B.A. in comparative religion, University of Washington, 1984.

While studying comparative religion, I was also studying computer music with John Rahn. Computer music gradually became my major interest. It also enabled me to make a living as a programmer, though I am now “retired” to work full-time on computer music. In the 1980s, I benefited greatly from Brad Garton’s openness to non-student participation in the woof user group and concerts at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.  I contribute code to Csound, wrote its algorithmic composition system, maintain its Windows version and the Csound for Android app, host the New York Csound Users Group, and am on the Steering Committee of the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. I write articles on computer music and create computer music. I am currently working to bring new developments in mathematical music theory into algorithmic composition software, and to create an integrated “playpen” for computer music, based on Csound and my algorithmic composition library Silencio, that works with HTML5 on desktops, Android devices, and on-line. I am married to Heidi Rogers, who was owner of Frank Music Company, a classical sheet music store in New York. We live on our farm in the Catskills, and sometimes on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Darija Andovska LIQUID-CRYSTAL (2015) Skopje, Macedonia 8’ (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

“LIQUID-CRYSTAL”-  According to definition, liquid crystals are matter in a state which has properties between those of conventional liquids and those of solid crystals. A liquid crystal may flow like a liquid, but its molecules may be oriented in a crystal-like way. Different liquid crystal phases appear to have distinct textures. The contrasting areas in the textures correspond to domains where the liquid-crystal molecules are oriented in different directions. Behind this scientific explanation, lies a very intimate personal story.

DARIJA ANDOVSKA  Her works have been performed in Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Georgia, Italy, Ireland, Macedonia, Mexico, Montenegro, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, USA. Her music has been published on CD’s in Switzerland, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Italy, Macedonia, Serbia & Montenegro, Germany, and her scores published by Nuova Stradivarius- Italy, Sordino- Switzerland, Association of Composers- Macedonia.   Won several competitions, nominated and awarded as well for film and theater music all over the world.   Chosen by MusMA (Music Masters on Air) as one of the best young composers in Europe for 2013/2014. Nominated (2014) and twice awarded (2013, 2015) the “Virtuoso” award for Best Composer in Macedonia. Won the Cultural Honor Award of the City of Zürich- Best Composer in 2014. Macedonian music ambassador for the project CEEC 16+1 between China and central- and east European countries for 2016/2017.  Works as an associate professor at the Faculty for music and Faculty for dramatic arts in Skopje.

Bob Bellerue Music of Liberation (side B) (2016) Brooklyn, NY 10’15” (PREMIERE)

This recording was made during a residency at Sonoscopia in Porto, Portugal, in April 2016. It was re-mixed in early 2017 at Issue Project Room to add acoustic reverb.  Instrumentation: shruti box, amplified acoustic bass, electronics, laptop

BOB BELLERUE is a noise composer, experimental musician, and creative technician based in Brooklyn NY. Over the last 30 years he has been involved in a wide range of sonic activities – experimental electronic music, junk metal percussion ensembles, Balinese gamelan, sound scores for dance/ theater/ video/ performance art, and sound / video installations. His electronic sound work is focused on resonant feedback systems, using amplified instruments/ objects/ spaces/ circuits in combination with electronics and Supercollider programming. Bob’s work has been presented at The Kitchen, Issue Project Room, Experimental Intermedia, Cafe Oto, the Yogyakarta Gamelan Festival, Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona, Sonic Circuits Festival, Living Arts of Tulsa’s New Genre Festival, CEAIT Festival, Ende Tymes Festival, Denver Noise Festival, Olympia Experimental Music Festival, PDX Noise Festival, Diapason Sound Gallery, Roulette, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Elastic Arts, Here Art Center, Radio Epsilonia (Paris), WFMU, WKCR, WNYU, KFJC, KXLU, East Village Radio, the Art Institute of Chicago, Stanford University, The New School, UCSD, and UCLA. His discography includes dozens of releases on Banned Productions, P-Tapes, RRR Records, Love Earth Music, Prison Tatt Records, Los Discos Enfantasmes, Zelphabet, Anarchymoon Recordings, Sleepy Hollow Editions, Peyote Tapes, No Rent Records, and Important Records. He curates and produces the Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation (currently in its 7th year). He was formerly based in Los Angeles, where he ran the sub-garde experimental music/performance space the Il Corral, and curated the Beyond Music series and festival.

Paula Matthusen within the social history of saltpeter (2017), Middleton, CN 5’13”

Over the past four years, I have been making regular excursions to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. My interest in the space stems from its unique acoustical features, its fascinating ecosystem, and long history of both tourism and musical performance. This performance is one part of the long term project, that continues to expand.  Recordings were conducted through a research permit provided by the National Park Service. My enormous gratitude to the numerous rangers who have assisted me in making recordings and guiding me to places of such sonic intrigue, and thanks in particular to Rick Toomey.

PAULA MATTHUSEN is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. In addition to writing for a variety of different ensembles, she also collaborates with choreographers and theater companies. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered.  Her music has been performed by Dither, Mantra Percussion, the Bang On A Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Brooklyn Rider, loadbang ensemble, orchest de ereprijs, The Glass Farm Ensemble, the Estonian National Ballet, James Moore, Kathryn Woodard, Todd Reynolds, Kathleen Supové, Margaret Lancaster and Jody Redhage. Her work has been performed at numerous venues and festivals in America and Europe, including the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, the MusicNOW Series of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Ecstatic Music Festival, Other Minds, the MATA Festival, Merkin Concert Hall, the Aspen Music Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music at MassMoCA, the Gaudeamus New Music Week, SEAMUS, International Computer Music Conference and Dither’s Invisible Dog Extravaganza. She performs frequently with Object Collection, and through the theater company Kinderdeutsch Projekts.  Awards include the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Grant, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Awards, First Prize in the Young Composers’ Meeting Composition Competition, the MacCracken and Langley Ryan Fellowship, the “New Genre Prize” from the IAWM Search for New Music, and recently the 2014 Elliott Carter Rome Prize. Matthusen has also held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, create@iEar at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, STEIM, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Matthusen completed her Ph.D. at New York University – GSAS. She was Director of Music Technology at Florida International University for four years, where she founded the FLEA Laptop Ensemble. Matthusen is currently Associate Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, where she teaches experimental music, composition, and music technology.

3PM  BLUE OR THE SOUND OF BLUE OR BLUE SKIES

Carlotta Ferrari La Vie en Bleu (2014) Firenze, Italy 7’01” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

La vie en bleu (2014) is a meditation on the clouds moving through the sky, as a melancholic metaphor for the passing of time.  The opening of the piece is up to the electronic effects, which seem to be the background for something that will be happening. When the digital piano enters, however, one realizes that this piano part is the actual background: it is conceived as a long ostinato with no rhytmical layout.  Going on with the piece, the two elements – electronics and piano – show a deep interconnection, just like the sky and the clouds, and it is impossible to say what is in the background. Fragments of the sky, always blue and represented by the piano ostinato, emerge from the clouds. Or is it the clouds – represented by the unstable electronic sounds – moving fast against the canvas of the sky?  Time passes by, and the sky and the clouds always remain the same. The ending of the piece comes along smoothly, without any surprise.  The title of the piece refers to the well known French song, La vie en rose.

CARLOTTA FERRARI (b. 1975) is an Italian composer. She served as chair of music composition at Hebei Normal University in Shijiazhuang, China, and is currently professor of music composition at the European School of Economics in Florence, Italy.  Educated at the Conservatory in Milan, she has composed in many genres, developing a personal language that is concerned with the blend of past and present. Her compositions have been performed around the world in venues such as Westminster Choir College, New York University, Steinway Haus in Hamburg and München, National Center for Performing Arts in Beijing, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, St. Gallen Cathedral, St.George’s Hanover Square in London, Manhattan Central Synagogue in NYC, Oliwa Cathedral in Gdansk, Basilica di Santa Croce in Firenze, and other relevant theaters and churches.  Carlotta Ferrari won the 2nd prize at 2013 edition of Sisì-Frezza competition for women composers held by IFBPW (International Federation of Business and Professional Women). She received the auspices of the President of Italy in 2008 for the premieree of her secular Cantata dedicated to the victims of terrorism.  Ferrari’s music appears on several CD recordings, and is regularly broadcast on WPRB Princeton, orgelradio.eu, and Music of Our Mothers, a radio program devoted to women in music, hosted by Flagler College Radio (Florida).  Carlotta Ferrari is a member of International Alliance for Women in Music, and Italian Society for Contemporary Music. Her current research interest lies mainly in contemporary modal music: she is working on RPS modal system, a new compositional grammar in cooperation with Harvard organist and composer Carson Cooman, who first developed it. Also she is currently cooperating with Marco Casazza, violinist and physicist, on the relationship between art and science.  She encourages the diffusion of her works worldwide (please visit her Imslp page).

Julius Bucsis Blue (2011) Muncie, Indiana 3’04” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

Blue was composed in 2011. It is the second movement of a four movement composition, A Glimpse beyond the Event Horizon. When I composed the longer piece, I considered each movement to be a complete composition. Blue has been accepted into the CICTeM 2013 held in Buenos Aries, Argentina, Soundwalk 2013 held in Long Beach, California, Electroacoustic Barn Dance 2013 held in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a Composer’s Voice Modern Dance Concert held in New York City in 2014, MUSLAB 2014 held in Mexico City, Mexico, and the ICSC 2015 held in St. Petersburg, Russia.

JULIUS BUCSIS is an award-winning composer, guitarist, and music technologist. Since beginning serious efforts with composition in 2011, his works have been included in over 100 juried events worldwide. He frequently performs a set of original compositions featuring electric guitar and computer generated sounds. His compositions have been included on CDs released by Ablaze Records, Soundiff, and Electro-Music. His artistic interests include using computer technology in music composition and performance, developing musical forms that incorporate improvisation, and composing music for traditional orchestral instruments. He is currently pursuing a DA in music composition at Ball State University.

Linda Marcel Garden of Paradise (2017) Glen Rock, NJ 5’59” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

Garden of Paradise explores the sound possibilities of nature in dialogue with digitally manipulated sound materials. Sound sources include the northern mockingbird and the knocking of woodpeckers.  Places of silence are purposeful, meditative and reminiscent of a private walk in the woods where the sky is embellished by the natural images of tree tops and sky line.

LINDA MARCEL’s compositions have been performed internationally; New York City, Rome, Adria and Bevagna, Italy, Potsdam, Germany, Oxford England, Malaga & Sevilla, Spain, and also in Paris, France. She is a board member of the International Composers and Interactive Artists (iCIA) Inc http://iciamusic.org/welcome.html and CEO of International Arts Educators Forum,(IAEF) http://www.internationalartseducatorsforum.org/home.html.   Linda has presented at numerous conferences in North America and Europe.  She was awarded the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development – Excellence in Teaching Award, and was chosen for the 2006 MCFP Princeton University Fellowship Program. While a Professor of music at Bergen Community College (1982-2016),  Linda founded the Paul Marshall Memorial Scholarship, a foundation scholarship that sponsors students majoring in music at Bergen Community College. She was a leader and contributor to the Ron Mazurek Memorial Scholarship, a foundation scholarship that sponsors students majoring in Electronic Music at Bergen Community College.  For over two decades Linda directed the Ars Nova and Ars Electronica Concert Series at Bergen Community College. She now produces concerts under iCIA and IAEF inc.   Her work supports digital media, dance, drama and music performance while exploring techniques of interactive performance systems.  She is dedicated to educational collaborations with institutions world wide.

Eric Glick Rieman Carapace of Blue Uintah (2016) Berkeley, CA 5’21” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

I love the Uinta Mountains of Northern Utah, and have spent happy nights camping there with my family (and the mice running in the long grass). This piece is dedicated to those mice. We are all mice, really, and I appreciate all our tiny efforts at bliss.  “Carapace of Blue Uintah” was recorded in real time, using my prepared and extended Rhodes 43 key electric piano. My Rhodes has been re-visioned as an electronic instrument that often amplifies and emphasizes the mechanical sounds of its hammers and physical mechanism. The sounds of a standard Rhodes come from a series of (essentially) tuning forks, which are struck with hammers. My Rhodes has the capacity to use and effect all the sounds it makes in a live performance – the sounds of the forks, which are amplified by electronic pick ups, and the sounds of its mechanism.  My Rhodes has 8 outputs (instead of the usual one). I can effect and mix each output individually.  So far, I’ve made the choice to use hardware effects to augment the sound of my Rhodes. Effects used on this track include a Red Panda granular delay, and a Strymon Timeline.

ERIC GLICK RIEMAN is a composer/improviser and instrument manipulator, whose interests at the moment include the lengths of rat’s tongues, snail trails, and plate tectonics. His fascination with putting sounds into space has led him into performing with the amplified innards of a modified Rhodes electric piano, and this, as well as piano, has been his primary performance instrument for the past 17 years. He composes for instruments and ensembles, often including improvisation as part of the compositional structure.

Marc Sabat Swing in Sweetest Summer (2013) Berlin, Germany  12’17” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

“Swing in sweetest summer” (2013) is a ground written on the rising equal tempered chromatic scale, commissioned by Erik Drescher. It was originally conceived as a piece for sinewaves and glissando-flute, but since it is a five-part canon, it may also be heard without the instrumental part as purely electronic music. The flute produces a sequence of 15 fundamental pitches from B3, rising chromatically up to C#5. The possibility of extending the length of sounding tube by sliding out the head-joint lowers each of these pitches by a different interval, which gradually increases as the fundamental rises and ranges from approximately a large major second (15/17) to a small fourth (10/13). This sequence of intervals embraces all of the ‘seconds’ and ‘thirds’ which fall just outside the critical band, from the large septimal wholetone 7/8, to the very small septimal minor third 6/7, all the way to the very large septimal major third 7/9. The fact that this beautiful family of microtonally varied intervals is so readily produced on the glissando-flute suggested to me the form of a chromatic ground.

Canadian composer of Ukrainian descent MARC SABAT (*1965) has been based in Berlin since 1999. He makes pieces for concert and installation settings, drawing inspiration from investigations of the sounding and perception of Just Intonation and of various music traditions — folk, experimental and classical. He is a frequent collaborator, seeking fruitful interactions with other musicians and artists of visual and literary modes to find points of shared exploration and dialogue between various forms of experience. Sabat studied composition, violin and mathematics at the University of Toronto, at the Juilliard School in New York, and at McGill University, as well as working privately with Malcolm Goldstein, James Tenney and Walter Zimmermann. Together with Wolfgang von Schweinitz he has developed the Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation and is a pioneer of music written and performed in microtonal Just Intonation. He teaches composition and the theory and practice of intonation at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Scores and artist editions are available under a creative commons share-alike non-commercial license through Plainsound Music Edition.

Devin Maxwell BlueSnoBlues 2 (2017) Park City, Utah 3’ (PREMIERE)

DEVIN MAXWELL, PhD, is a composer, percussionist, and music technology entrepreneur. His chamber music has been described as “amiably strident…clusters hammered insistently” by the New York Times and orchestral works “a beautiful puzzle, … fitting between plucks and pedals that build pyramid melodies” by the American Record Guide. As a composer, he has recently been commissioned by the Next Ensemble (Utah), the Unheard-o//Ensemble (NYC), MMM… (Tokyo), Bent Frequency (Atlanta), Ensemble Dedalus (France), the Deer Valley Music Festival Emerging Quartets and Composers for the Skyros Quartet (Seattle) and featured at The Stone (NYC), Abron’s Art Center (NYC), the Ontological Theater (NYC), BLIM (Vancouver), ARTSaha (Omaha), the Wulf (Los Angeles), Monkeytown (NYC), Dartmouth College, NYU, Columbia University, Kenyon College, Boston Conservatory, Tage Aktueller Music (Germany), SEAMUS, ICMC-SMC (Greece), Ostrava Days (Czech Republic), among others.  Awards for composition include the Nief-Norf Composition Prize, the Leroy Robertson Prize, “Best Experimental Film” New York Independent Film Festival, New Music USA/Commissioning Music USA and an Honorable Mention at the American Composer’s Orchestra 2013 Underwood Readings. His creative work is critically examined in the book Boring, Formless Nonsense; Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure by Eldritch Priest, and the 2012 journal Postmodern Culture. Maxwell has collaborated with choreographer Jessica Gaynor Dance (NYC), filmmaker Rollin Hunt (Los Angeles), graphic designer Phillip Niemeyer (Austin), photographer Svavar Jónatansson (Iceland), clarinetist Katie Porter, and violist/songwriter Anni Rossi (NYC).  He is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Utah, Applied Instructor of composition and percussion at Westminster College, Co-Founder of the VU Symposium for Experimental, Electronic and Improvised Music in Park City, and composition instructor for Utah Youth Orchestras and Ensemble’s Young Composers Project. Maxwell is a graduate of University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of Utah School of Music. His creative work is published by Good Child Music New York and Éditions musique SISYPHE.

Lucio Capece Some Move Upward Uncertainly (for Harley Gaber) (2012) Berlin, Germany 5’38”

LUCIO CAPECE  Argentinian musician based in Europe since 2002, specifically in Berlin since 2004.  Capece followed education as a classical guitarist and jazz saxophonist finishing studies at the Ginastera Conservatory in Morón, Buenos Aires (9 years career), and took self supported private lessons in Bass Clarinet (Martin Moore) , Saxophone and Jazz improvisation (Carlos Lastra, Gustavo Alsberg, Quique Sinesi) in Buenos Aires, Lyon (France, with Louis Sclavis), New York (meetings with Marilyn Crispell, Gerry Hemingway, Tim Berne, Hank Roberts, Jim Black) and Chicago. (Lessons and concerts with Gene Coleman)  In Argentina he was part as a performer and composer of the ensemble Avion Negro and the trio Casual, working in the area of Contemporary jazz.  Since the late 90´s he offered music in the context of Electro Acoustic Improvisation, focused in quietness, attentive listening and granular material.  Since 2011 he dedicates to offer works focused in the Perception experience, that he performs mainly in solo and in the context of occasional collaborations based in the same interest. He composes his own pieces that may include improvisation and different ways of writing.  He uses tools like Flying Speakers hanging from Helium Balloons, Speakers as Pendulums, Analog synthesiser, Sine Waves and Noise Generators, Drum Machines, Ultra- Violet Lights, Sensors as much as the instruments that he has played for 25 years: Bass Clarinet and Soprano Saxophone, adding recently a 100 years old Slide Saxophone.  He has also written compositions for Ensembles working the same aspects in the context of traditional Instrumentations.  He has performed his own sound interventions in spaces like The Cathedral of Bern (Zoom In Festival, 2012) The Mambo Museum in Bologna (Live Arts week 2012),the German Pavilion built by Mies Van der Rohe in Barcelona, the Halle des Expositions built by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel in Evreux, France ( L ´Atelier series) the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, and the Colón Theatre in Buenos Aires where he offered an interactive installation for children.  Beyond instrumentation and tools, the main intention is to focus in the physical-social-spatial human experience.  Capece has played and released CD´s and LP´s with musicians like Radu Malfatti, Keith Rowe, Mika Vainio, Vladislav Delay, David Sylvian,Kevin Drumm, Lee Patterson, Christian Kesten, Sergio Merce, Toshimaru Nakamura, Robin Hayward, Taku Sugimoto, Ilpo Vaisanen, Julia Eckhardt, Tisha Mukarji, Annette Krebs, Andrea Neumann, Axel Dörner, Angharad Davies, Rhodri Davies, Burkhard Beins, among others.  He has released Cd´s and LP´s in labels like B-Boim, Editions Mego ( Austria), Another Timbre, Hideous Replica, Entr´acte, Leaf ( UK), PAN (Germany), Potlatch, Drone Sweet Drone (France), Formed ( USA), Mikroton , Intonema (Russia), Organized Music from Thessaloniki ( Greece), No Seso (Argentina), etc  His collaboration record “Trahnie” ( Editions Mego) with Mika Vainio was considered among the best 10 records of the year in the category “Outer Limits” by the magazine The Wire, in 2009.  He has worked with dancers and choreographers David Lakein (Amsterdam), Ayara Hernandez (Berlin) and doing interventions in public spaces in Buenos Aires together with the choreographer Andrea Servera (Ex member of the legendary collective “El Descueve”)  As a performer he has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Ablinger, Antoine Beuger, Michael Pisaro, Alex Arteaga, Christian Wolff, Phill Niblock as part of the Ensembles Q-O2 from Belgium, and Konzert Minimal from Berlin, together with the musicians Johnny Chang, Koen Nutters and Hannes Lingens.  He organises since 5 years the one day Festival “Perceptive Turns” in Berlin.  luciocapece.blogspot.de

4PM  NEW MUSIC FOR JIM SANTY AUDITORIUM

Ben Richter Cryptobiosis (Uncanny Sines) (2016) Berlin, Germany 12’12” (PREMIERE- CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

In cryptobiosis, an organism responds to adverse environmental conditions by entering a period of dormancy deeper than hibernation, ceasing most life functions, which can last for centuries before the creature awakens.  We humans know hypnagogia, predormitum, slumber, some of us coma. But in her frozen sleep of a thousand years, what does the tardigrade dream?

BEN RICHTER is a composer, accordionist, and founding director of Ghost Ensemble. His chamber and electronic works explore the perceptual experience of music, combining subtly shifting timbres and sliding microtonal harmonies to create sound-worlds of constant transformation. As an accordionist, he draws from experimental improvisation, Deep Listening, and the klezmer tradition. His influential teachers include Pauline Oliveros, Kyle Gann, George Tsontakis, Joan Tower, and Cornelis de Bondt. Ben Richter studied composition at Bard College and at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, where his artistic research focused on time distortion, hypnotic phenomena, and the radical aesthetics of experiential music. His album Panthalassa: Dream Music of the Once and Future Ocean was released in 2017 on the Infrequent Seams label.

Bonnie Jones The Great Train Robbery, Part II (2017) Baltimore, MA 6’ (PREMIERE)

Audio piece constructed by manipulating in live performances a cassette player and a TDK EC-6M 6 minute looping cassette tape. The cassette player is used during the performance to create feedback by indiscriminately pressing the player’s controls (record, stop, forward, rewind). These six minutes are a recombinant document of numerous source recordings and live performances over the past several years. The cassette is continually recording over itself every six minutes, an audio palimpsest of personal performance history. Three previous iterations have been presented at MICA Rosenberg Gallery, LA MOCA Storefront, and online in Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics. No iteration is ever the same.

BONNIE JONES is a Korean-American writer, improvising musician, and performer working primarily with electronic music and text. Born in 1977 in South Korea she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland.  Bonnie creates improvised and composed text-sound performances, videos, and installations that explore the fluidity and function of electronic noise (field recordings, circuit bending) and text (poetry, found, spoken, visual),  exposing the tensile nature of identity, history, form, and meaning. Bonnie has received commissions from the London ICA, Walters Art Museum, Vox Populi and has presented her work extensively in the US, Mexico, Europe, and Asia. She collaborates frequently with writers and musicians. She received her MFA at the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. https://bonnie-jones.com/

Ron Coulter Mashville Nbira (2017) Casper, WY, 7’32” (PREMIERE- CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

“Mashville Nbira” was composed on Saturday, May 20,2017 in Nashville, TN. The material of the work is six recorded improvisations using aShona Mbira resting on the playing surface of a drum. The mbira is plucked with the fingers and played with a vibraphone mallet, chain, and a small Chinese cymbal. The drum acts as an amplifier and when the mbira is pressed into the drumhead pitch bends are created.  The only electronic processing of the audio is the use of equalization and reverb. Each improvisation is of different duration and the entrance of each recording was determined through chance operations. Having had the opportunity of visiting and hearing music in the Jim Santy Auditorium I was inspired to create this work based on the auditorium’s feeling of hermitage from the world. This work seeks to embrace the large, peaceful space of the auditorium while introducing complexities that intrude like thoughts. 

RON COULTER (b. 1978) is Instructor of Percussion and World Music at Casper College and has presented at more than 90 colleges and universities internationally. He has toured internationally appearing in 49 U.S. states, Europe, Australia, Canada, and Japan with artists such as the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Chicago Chamber Orchestra, Four Aces, Sean Jones, Linux Laptop Orchestra, Al Martino, Sandy Duncan, Bolokada Condé, Music from China, Youngstown Symphony, Wyoming Symphony, Tatsuya Nakatani, Michael Zerang, and Tone Road Ramblers, among others. Ron has presented at numerous conferences including: ISIM, PASIC, NIME, JEN, LiWoLi, BMC3, CMS, a.pe.ri.od.ic, Futurisms, Soundlines, RadiaLx, Athena Festival, and the JVC and Montreal Jazz Festivals. He is co-founder of the Percussion Art Ensemble, Drm&Gtr, duende entendre, Marble Hammer, and founder of the Southern Illinois Improvisation Series. Additional interests include noise, intermedia, interdisciplinary collaboration, and organizing Fluxusconcerts. As a composer, Ron has created more than 300 compositions for various media. http://www.roncoulter.org

Byron Westbrook Intervals (2016) Brooklyn, NY 28’29”

Intervals is an audio-only work created as a translation of the installation Interval/Habitat, imagining how that installation’s approach to using sound and light to define movement and perception of audience could apply to a sound-only piece. The work focuses on perception of physical presence; exploring a dynamic between sounds intended to highlight the actual playback space versus sounds that represent or fabricate external, imaginary spaces.

BYRON WESTBROOK is an artist and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. He has been performing and showing experimental sound work internationally since 2008. His work focuses on dynamics of perception using sound, lighting and video to interact with architecture and landscape, often pursuing routes that involve social engagement. He holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, where he studied with Marina Rosenfeld, Marcus Schmickler and David Behrman. His work has been presented at ICA London, Cafe OTO (London), Fridman Gallery, Abrons Arts Center, Pioneer Works, Experimental Intermedia Foundation (NY), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Disjecta (Portland, OR), Instants Chavires Art Space (Paris), Fylkingen (Stockholm), the LAB (San Francisco), among many others. He has recorded releases with Root Strata, Los Discos Enfantasmes and Sedimental. He has previously been in residence at Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Clocktower Gallery, Diapason Gallery, EMS Stockholm. He is currently Visiting Faculty in the Fine Arts Department at Pratt Institute and an Artist in Residence with ISSUE Project Room.

Matt Smiley To Jory & Rosie (2017) Denver, CO 9’48” (PREMIERE- CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

My piece “To Jory and Rosie” started as a long distance music project, where I would send fragments of written music, audio, or visual art to my friends who lived far away, to create an exchange and collaboration.  I recorded live acoustic bass, live percussion, made electronic samples, and sent the the audio to my friends Jory and Rosie for them to work with.  When preparing the Alexis Porfiridias piece “The F Duo,” for performance at the VU symposium in 2016, I used some of these same raw audio files to perform specific written actions in the score.  My piece is an re-edited/mixed version of this raw audio, to be presented in the Jim Santy auditorium but with a different focus and concentration of materials than what was heard in the “F Duo.”

MATT SMILEY is a bassist, composer and educator who has performed in a variety of musical settings over the last fifteen years.  He has a bachelor’s degree in music industry with a jazz studies minor from James Madison University, and a master’s of music in jazz studies from the University of Northern Colorado. An avid and enthusiastic musician, Smiley has performed both nationally and internationally at universities throughout the country, and the Montreux, North Sea, and Montreal Jazz Festivals.  Currently Matt resides in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he plays jazz weekly with the Subterraneans at Ace Gillett’s. He has recently performed with legendary jazz musicians Terrell Stafford and Greg Osby, and worked with composer Alvin Lucier. For the last five years, Matt has assisted Dr. Paul Elwood with the University of Northern Colorado’s Open Space Music Festival and worked with festival artists Stephen Drury, Christian Wolff  and Jean-Claude Risset. Matt released Quartet Art on the Dazzle label in 2011 featuring David Pope on saxophone. Peaceful Contact Proved Elusive, with guitarist Alex Nauman, followed in 2014 as a limited edition vinyl. Matt is featured on several Dazzle releases including those by artists Josh Quinlan, Annie Booth and Ryan Fourt.  http://www.mattsmiley.bandcamp.com

Bryan Eubanks Object (1st permanent version) (2017) Berlin, Germany 19’57” (PREMIERE)

The series of pieces which comprise Object began in 2014 and use a system of electro-acoustic instruments, dsp, samples, and acoustic instruments. The 5 compositions, and 1 installation, that make up this series deal with the ‘frame’ of perception and the (potential) independence of sonic events from the narrative implied by linear time.  The gesture of the work is towards the perceptual slippage between narrative form and the autonomous nature of sonic events.  These sound events begin to be heard as “objective” events through the repetition and harsh juxtaposition which are the main structural characteristics of these compositions.  I am not seeking to transcend the subjective nature of perception, which seems pointless and impossible, but, instead, to embrace the pre-cognitive space between what we hear and what we process as form and material.  Object (1st permanent version) is a fixed realization of this ongoing series of works with a wide range of possibilities for interpretation.  Instrumentation:  dsp, analog synthesizer samples, metal plate transducer feedback system, clave.

BRYAN EUBANKS (b. 1977, US) is a musician composing electronic and acoustic works for small ensembles, solo instruments, and custom generative software; improvising in collaboration; and working with acoustic holography, a stereophonic recording and diffusion technique. as well as other approaches to sound spatialization. Since 2001 he has been developing electronic systems and instruments, organizing concerts, participating in collaborative projects, and presenting his work internationally.  He received an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery School of the Arts in 2012 and currently lives and works in Berlin.  www.sacredrealism.org/eubanks

5PM MORE THE PAST IS PRESENT

James Tenney Collage #1 (Blue Suede) (1961) USA, 2’24”

JAMES TENNEY (b Silver City, NM, 10 Aug 1934; d Valencia, CA, 24 Aug 2006). American composer, theorist, educator and performer. His earliest documented work (Interim, 1952), made in collaboration with the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, marks the first of several personal and artistic relationships throughout his life contributing to a body of work that extends across many styles, genres and media. He pioneered and developed many musical ideas; his research in acoustics, psychoacoustics and music cognition informed his compositional approach, particularly his formal shapes and structures, which are often based on the phenomenology of music perception. Almost all of his more than 150 compositions were performed during his lifetime. He taught at various academic institutions, including the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, the New School for Social Research (1965–70), York University, Toronto (1976–2000), and the California Institute of the Arts (1970–75 and 2000–06, as Roy E. Disney Family Chair of Music).  Tenney’s early works reflect strong influences from composers such as Cowell, Ives and Ruth Crawford Seeger. He studied the piano with EDUARD STEUERMANN at the Juilliard School before studying composition independently with Chou-Wen Chung in New York City and then later with LIONEL NOWAK and RUGGLES while attending Bennington College (BA 1958). He went on to study at the University of Illinois (MMus 1961) with GABURO (composition) and LEJAREN HILLER (information theory and electronic music). He also worked briefly with PARTCH. It was during this time that he wrote the theoretical work, META + HODOS, which uses gestalt psychology concepts to analyze music.  After graduating from the University of Illinois, Tenney moved to New York City. Between 1961 and 1964 he engaged in pioneering research at Bell Telephone Laboratories, becoming one of the first composers to work extensively in the area of digital synthesis. He also became an important member of the experimental music scene. He co-founded and directed the Tone Roads Ensemble (1963–70), performed with the Steve Reich and Philip Glass ensembles, and worked in close association with a wide variety of musicians and artists including Cage, Feldman, Varèse, Max Neuhaus, Carolee Schneeman and others. He also considered several of these figures his mentors and teachers. Tone Roads became a leading force in the Charles Ives renaissance and also performed works by Cage, Feldman, Ruggles and others. Tenney’s compositions from this time reflect his research as well as personal and artistic relationships through explorations in and experimentation with new musical methods, materials, various media, and genres from performance art to pop and ragtime music.  After 1964, most of Tenney’s works are instrumental. From the early seventies through the rest of his life, his characteristic conceptually driven experimental aesthetic continued with an increasing concentration on harmony and tuning systems based on auditory perception. He frequently employed stochastic methods and/or algorithms and, after 1980, generated the majority of his works with the aid of computers. He composed, performed, taught and conducted research until just shortly before his passing in Valencia, California. – Larry Polansky/Michael Winter

Daphne Oram Snow (1963) UK, 7’46”

DAPHNE ORAM (b Devizes, Wilts., 31 Dec 1925; d Maidstone, Kent, 5 Jan 2003). English composer, technician and inventor. Educated at Sherborne School for Girls, she turned down a place at the RCM in order to work at the BBC as a music balancer for classical music broadcasts. A pioneer in integrating music and technology, she began to experiment with sound manipulation in 1944 and in 1950 submitted her work Still Point for orchestra, five microphones and manipulated recordings to the BBC. In 1957 she established a radiophonic unit at the BBC and was one of the directors of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop when it opened in 1958. Later that year she left the BBC and set up her own studio in Kent. Her experiments in converting graphic information into sound – aided by Gulbenkian grants in 1962 and 1965 – led to the development of her Oramics system, a photoelectric digital/analogue composition machine that gives the composer control of subtle nuances in all parameters (including amplitude, envelope shaping, rhythm, timbre control, microtonal pitch and vibrato), which are drawn onto ten parallel tracks of 35mm film and then transported by a motor through the photoelectric sound-generating system. In the 1960s Oram lectured widely on electronic music and many composers, including Thea Musgrave, used her studio facilities.  In the 1990s she began to convert the Oramics system to RISC computer technology, suitable for composers to use at home. She saw music technology’s access to an immediate and complete sound world as a liberatory force, particularly for women. In 1990 she wrote about the home computer: ‘How exciting for women to be present at its birth pangs, ready to help it evolve to maturity in the world of arts. To evolve as a true and practical instrument for conveying women’s inner thoughts, just as the novel did nearly two centuries ago’ (CMR, xi, 1994).  A number of Oram’s works were composed using Oramics, including Broceleande for Oramics tape (1970) and Sardonica for piano and Oramics tape (1972, written in collaboration with Ivor Walsworth). She has created music for films, including The Innocents (1961); for television and radio; for exhibitions, including Pulse Persephone (1965); for the theatre, including the ballet Xallaraparallax (1972); and for concert performance, including Four Aspects (1960). – Sophie  Fuller

Nicholas Cline Homage to La Monte Young (2011) Chicago, IL, 6’36” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

Homage to La Monte Young explores the interacting sounds of the feedback from scordatura electric guitars and noisy amplifiers. The pervasive 60-cycle hum that permeates our daily soundscape provides the initial impetus and harmonic material for the work. Naturally, a precursor to this idea can be found in La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7 (B and F# ‘to be held for a long time’), about which he says: “Actually, the first sustained single tone at a constant pitch, without a beginning or end, that I heard as a child was the sound of telephone poles, the hum of the wires.” A second point of intersection comes from Robert Palmers’ essay, “The Church of the Sonic Guitar.” “But an electric guitar, properly tuned to resonate with everything from the [concert] hall’s acoustics to the underlying 60-cycle hum of the city’s electrical grid, is forming its massive sound textures from harmonic relationships that already exist in nature; compare this to the arbitrary ‘equal temperament’ system which causes decidedly unharmonious harmonic interference patterns and dissonances when certain tones are allowed to ring together.”

NICHOLAS CLINE writes acoustic and electroacoustic music – often a quiet music with an emphasis on subtle, nuanced sounds. Deeply influenced by the natural world, his music often draws on sensuous as well as intellectual experiences of nature with the belief that music should reveal, challenge, and shape the listener’s understanding of the world. His music has been performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Northwestern Contemporary Music Ensemble and he has been commissioned by Jeff Siegfried and Jena Gardner. His music has been presented at festivals in the US and in Europe. He is featured on the SEAMUS electroacoustic miniatures recording series: Re-Caged and is a High Concept Labs sponsored artist. He holds degrees from Columbia College Chicago and Indiana University. He is currently completing his doctorate at Northwestern University and teaching at Illinois College.

Larry Polansky Psaltery (for Lou Harrison) (1979) USA, 16’41”

LARRY POLANSKY is a composer, theorist, performer, editor, writer and teacher. He is the Emeritus Strauss Professor of Music at Dartmouth College, the co-founder and co-director of Frog Peak Music (A Composers’ Collective), and is currently Professor of Music at UC Santa Cruz. He has also taught at Bard College and several other schools. His solo CDs are available on New World Records, Artifact, and Cold Blue, and his music is widely anthologized on many other labels. His works are performed frequently around the world, and he has scored two films, one an award winning animation by Stacey Steers. Polansky is the recipient a number of prizes, commissions, and awards, including Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Mellon New Directions Fellowships (the latter for work in American Sign Language performance). He was the inaugural recipient (with David Behrman) of the Henry Cowell Award from the American Music Center. As a performer (primarily as guitarist and mandolinist), he has premiereed and recorded important contemporary works by Christian Wolff, Barbara Monk Feldman, Michael Parsons, James Tenney, Lou Harrison, Lois V Vierk, Ron Nagorcka, Daniel Goode, David Mahler, and many others.

Christina Karpodini Soundscape Kitchen (2017) Greece/ UK, 5’46” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

In our modern industrial environments, we are missing the connection to our urban soundscape. Moreover, we try to eliminate sounds by characterizing them as noise and unwanted sounds. This piece is dedicated to the combination of natural and digital sounds, of recognizable and non-recognizable, known and unknown, wanted and unwanted sounds and the transition from the one form to the other.

CHRISTINA KARPODINI is a Greek composer, based in London.  Her compositional practice focus on electroacoustic compositions with synthesized sounds, pre-recorded sounds, and instruments. She is also interested in Soundscapes studies and composition. Last years she is also practicing her composition in Music production of theatrical plays and especially in the field of designing sounds and soundscapes. She has started her music education at her 7 years with classical piano training and participation in vocal ensembles. She took her first music Diploma in Music Harmony from the conservatory in 2011 and the second Diploma in Counterpoint Music in 2013. In 2015 she took her Piano Teaching Diploma (equivalent to LRAM) and her Bachelor Degree in Music Studies, pathway Music Technology and Acoustics, with first-class Honors by the National University of Athens. In 2016 she completed her a Master Degree in Composition at City University of London.

Robert Fleisher Loretto Alfresco (1970) Dekalb, IL, 1’08” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

Created in my teens, Loretto Alfresco (1970) is a musique concrète miniature comprised entirely of “found percussion” sounds. It was recorded under a tree on a small Wisconsin farm belonging to my sister; the percussionist is my childhood friend Tom Loretto. After resting comfortably in my archives for nearly four decades, Loretto Alfresco was premiereed during the first New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (2009). It has since been heard throughout the U.S. and internationally—including the 2010 Sound Floor Festival (U.K.), 2013 Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium (Canada), and the 2016 Forum Wallis Contemporary Music Festival (Switzerland). Allan Kozinn (New York Times) has written: “Loretto Alfresco is endearingly low-tech: its sounds are drawn entirely from recordings of a friend striking pots, pans and other items, which Mr. Fleisher sped up . . . and overlaid to create a rich, tactile texture.” Loretto Alfresco is also included in the SEAMUS digital release, “Eleactro-Acoustic Miniatures 2012: Re-Caged.”

ROBERT FLEISHER is Professor Emeritus at Northern Illinois University. Author of Twenty Israeli Composers (1997), he is also a contributing composer and essayist in Theresa Sauer’s collection of new music scores, Notations 21 (2009). Fleisher’s chamber music been described as “eloquent” (Ann Arbor News), “lovely and emotional” (Toronto Musicworks), “astoundingly attractive” (Perspectives of New Music), and “ingenious” (Strad); his electro-acoustic music as “rich, tactile” and “endearingly low-tech” (New York Times). His music has been heard globally, with more than 75 performances and broadcasts in 10 countries since 2010. In 2016, these included three electroacoustic works (in Alabama, Michigan, New York, and Switzerland) and three acoustic works (in Illinois, Iowa, and Greece), including two premierees. Recordings appear on Capstone, Centaur, Navona, Sarton and SEAMUS labels.

Sarah Hennies Knees (2012) Ithaca, NY, 20’

Knees takes its name from the strange stalagmite-like formations that grow up through the ground from the roots of cypress trees in swamps. I encountered this phenomenon in the Congaree National Park near Columbia, SC. The purpose of cypress knees is unknown. The music was made using two empty beer kegs and a vibraphone with no digital processing or manipulation, these musical elements are perhaps analogous to the trees and their knees (or perhaps not).

SARAH HENNIES (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in Ithaca, NY. Her work utilizes an often grueling, endurance-based performances practice in a subversive examination of psychoacoustics, queer identity, and expressionistic absurdity. Her work has been presented in a variety of contexts including Café Oto (London), cave12 (Geneva), Ende Tymes (NYC), Festival Cable (Nantes), the Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center, O’ Art Space (Milan), and Second Edition (Stockholm) and she has composed several site-specific works for decommissioned industrial and military spaces such as Silo City (Buffalo, NY), Fort Tilden Bunker (Queens, NY) and The Monon Line Railway (Indianapolis, IN). She received her M.A. from the University of California-San Diego in 2003 where she studied with renowned percussionist Steven Schick and in 2016 was awarded a fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hennies is currently a member of improvised music group Meridian with Greg Stuart and Tim Feeney, a duo with sound/performance artist Jason Zeh, and the Queer Percussion Research Group with Jerry Pergolesi, Bill Solomon, and Jennifer Torrence. In late 2017 she will premieree the large-scale work, Contralto at Issue Project Room (NYC), a video/sound work involving strings, percussion, and a cast of transgender women.  As an educator and facilitator, Hennies has directed multiple performances of Cornelius Cardew’s monumental work The Great Learning, served as visiting faculty at the Roots & Rhizomes Percussion Residency at the Banff Center for Arts & Creativity, and has lectured or given workshops at numerous universities and independent venues.  In 2013 Hennies also founded the record label Weighter Recordings for releasing her own work and other new and unusual music by living composers.

6PM MORE CRITICAL MUSIC AND PURE SOUND

Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer Klangstudie II (1952) Germany, 4’20”

HERBERT EIMERT (b Bad Kreuznach, 8 April 1897; d Cologne, 15 Dec 1972). German composer, theorist, and critic. He studied at the Cologne Conservatory with Bölsche, von Othegraven, and Abendroth (1919–24) and then undertook musicological studies with Bücken, Kahl, and Kinsky at Cologne University (1924-30), taking the doctorate in 1931. From 1925 to 1969 (except for the years 1933–44) he wrote programme notes for the Gurzenich concerts, from 1927 he worked with Westdeutscher Rundfunk, and from 1930 he served as music specialist on the Kölner Stadtanzeiger. During the period 1935–45 he lived in obscurity as an editor on the Kölnische Zeitung. He returned to Westdeutscher Rundfunk in 1945, becoming director of the late-night music programmes (1948–65) and of the Studio for Electronic Music, which he founded in 1951 and headed until 1962. From 1965 to 1971 he held a professorship at the Cologne Musikhochschule, where he directed the electronic music studio.  Eimert’s importance rests chiefly in his foundation-laying research. In 1923, while still a student, he wrote an Atonale Musiklehre in which–under the influence of the theoretical writings of Austrian composer/theorist Josef Matthias Hauer and the 12-note works of Russian composer Jefim Golyscheff–he provided one of the earliest attempts at a systematic exposition of dodecaphonic composition. Eimert also outlines an aesthetic basis for 12-note music and provides numerous musical examples, some drawn from his own String Quartet, written during this period. He provides techniques for employing all 12 pitches melodically, harmonically, and in complexes in which aggregates are produced in both domains simultaneously–a technique that prefigures combinatoriality. Eimert, however, makes no reference to an ordered series, and Schoenberg’s 12-note method had not yet circulated beyond his closest students at this time. Eimert later came to embrace Schoenberg’s idea of the tone row, and his subsequent theoretical works such as Lehrbuch der Zwölftontechnik (1950) and Grundlagen der musikalischen Reihentechnik (1963) are founded on the serial principle. Published in 1924, the Atonale Musiklehre thus comes after Hauer’s Vom Wesen des Musikalischen (1920/1923) and Deutung des Melos (1923), but before E. Stein’s first essay on Schoenberg’s 12-note method (late 1924) and F.H. Klein’s ‘Die Grenze der Halbtonwelt’ (1925) in the history of 12-note theoretical writing.  Through his foundation of the Cologne studio, his late-night radio programmes and his work as editior of the journal Die Reihe, Eimert provided a significant stimulus in the years following the Second World War to the work of young avant-garde composers such as Stockhausen, Goeyvaerts, Pousseur, Ligeti, and Kagel. He was an important advocate of integral serialism and electronic music during these years, teaching at Darmstadt and arguing for this new music as a logical extension of Webern’s serial practice, especially in regard to what he took to be its pointillistic aspects. Of his own compositions, most noteworthy are his early String Quartet and his later electronic works, of which the Four Pieces (1952–3), partly derived from a 1948 radio score for Byron’s Cain, were among the earliest purely synthetic works on tape. – John Covach

Karel Goeyaerts Komposition No. 5 (1953) Belgium, 2’40”

KAREL GOEYAERTS (b Antwerp, 8 June 1923; d Antwerp, 3 Feb 1993). Belgian composer. After studies in composition at the Antwerp Conservatory (1943–7), he attended the Paris Conservatoire (1947–50), where he studied analysis with Messiaen, composition with Milhaud and the ondes martenot with Maurice Martenot and was awarded the Lili Boulanger Prize (1949) and the Halphen Prize (1950). The central movements of his Nr. 1, the Sonata for Two Pianos, composed during the winter of 1950–51, are among the earliest examples of multiple or integral serialism. The analysis and performance of these movements by Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen in Adorno’s composition seminar at the 1951 Darmstadt summer course were of major importance for those younger composers eager to develop serial thinking. The influence of the Sonata and subsequent works of Goeyvaerts is evident in Stockhausen’s early serial compositions; it is documented furthermore in an extensive correspondence (1951–6) from which, apart from a few exceptions, only Stockhausen’s letters survive. In 1952, Goeyvaerts wrote the first score for electronic realization, his Compositie no.4 ‘with dead tones’. Unlike that score, which was realized at the IPEM studio in Ghent in 1982 only, his Compositie no.5 (‘with pure tones’), and Compositie no.7 ‘with converging and diverging levels’) were produced (in 1953 and 1955) at the electronic music studio of the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne. After working as an officer for the Belgian airline Sabena (1957–70), Goeyvaerts resumed his musical career as a producer for Belgian radio, first at the IPEM studio (1970–74), then as the new music producer in Brussels (1975–88). In 1985 he was elected president of the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers. He was appointed professor of new music at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven in 1992.  Goeyvaerts’s development of serialism was rooted in Messiaen and Webern. From the former, he learnt the precompositional organization of the musical parameters, a principle for which he found a historical precedent in certain isorhythmic procedures of the Ars Nova. From the latter, he learnt to consider the series not as a theme but as a definition of structural qualities. His use of fixed octave positions, his first attempts to serialize duration, dynamics and timbre, and his preoccupation with symmetrical orderings can also be traced back to Webern. Analysis confirms Goeyvaerts’ Violin Concerto no.2 and his Nr. 1 as transitional works in which the strictest serial organization is aimed at but not achieved throughout. In the former, the pursuit of structural purity ultimately conflicts with the exigencies of concerto form, whereas in the latter, the harmonic stability, the gestural character and the loosely inversional relationship between the first and fourth movements contrast sharply with the rigid serial organization of the central movements. Only with his Opus 2 voor 13 instrumenten was Goeyvaerts able to create a work in which everything, from the overall form down to the tiniest detail, is governed by one and the same serial principle. Consequently, it is this work rather than the Sonata for Two Pianos that should be considered as the first thoroughgoing example of multiple serialism, along with the contemporaneous works of Babbitt and Boulez. Goeyvaerts’s serial compositions, both those written for instrumental ensemble (Opus 2, Opus 3, and Compositie no.6) and those for tape (Composities no.4, no.5 and no.7), show an unprecedented degree of abstraction. In comparison with the dramatic and poetic qualities of Stockhausen’s or Boulez’s serial output, Goeyvaerts’s works from his Opus 2 to the Compositie no.7 stake out an aesthetic position all of their own.  From the mid-1950s onwards it gradually became clear that multiple serialism was not going to produce the high degree of musical organization to which composers like Goeyvaerts aimed, especially not from the listener’s point of view. Unlike certain fellow composers, who integrated various degrees of indeterminacy into the serial system, Goeyvaerts seemed to abandon serial technique altogether. A few traditional scores notwithstanding, Goeyvaerts’s output from 1960 to 1975 can be characterized broadly as experimental music. Different possibilities were systematically explored: improvisation on the basis of pitch ‘reservoirs’ (Zomerspelen for three orchestral groups), works exploiting phonetic materials (Goathemala), the use of variable forces (Parcours), the exploration of varying degrees of integration between live instruments and pre-recorded tape (Stuk voor piano), verbal scores (Vanuit de kern), graphic scores (Actief-reactief), instrumental theatre (Catch à quatre) and works involving choice on the part of performers (Piano quartet) or audiences (Al naar gelang). To be sure, all of this is in keeping with the emancipatory quality characteristic of so much music of the sixties and early seventies. Yet on closer examination, these pieces manifest the same structural principles which had obsessed him since the early fifties: cyclic processes, inversional symmetry and a high degree of abstraction and mathematical planning underly the seemingly uncontrolled vitality and randomness on the surface of his scores from this period. From 1975 onwards, he sought the same aesthetic goal by means of a personal interpretation of minimalism, which he described as ‘evolving repetitive technique’. A rhythmic cell within a fixed time-span is repeated and a new element added with every repetition. Once the cell is complete, it starts gradually to disintegrate. This principle becomes genuinely exciting when Goeyvaerts puts several processes in motion simultaneously, as in his impressive cycle of five Litanies (1979–82).  Goeyvaerts spent the last ten years of his life working on the opera project Aquarius. Since he had not received a commission for the opera, he devised most of his compositions from 1983 onwards both as independent works (orchestral, chamber or choral) and as potential scenes within the opera. Aquarius exemplifies the utopian sociological programme of much new music, in its depiction of the gradual emergence of an egalitarian society in which everybody has a place according to his or her capacities. The texts are mainly phonetic and non-semantic, and singers (eight sopranos and eight baritones) are always employed as a group. Goeyvaerts’s correspondence reveals that the composer had an abstract, non-figurative staging in mind. The compositional language could be described as one of new tonality, but fundamental aspects of serialism nonetheless remain in operation, notably the coincidence of macro- and microstructure (the work’s unique form follows from the choice of pitch materials) and the interchangeability of the horizontal and vertical dimensions. Goeyvaerts’s frequent and abrupt changes of musical idiom (from serial via experimental to repetitive and finally new tonal techniques) can therefore be said to hide a remarkably homogeneous underlying programme, which pervades almost his entire output. – Mark Delaere

Antonio D’Amato Construction 1 (2016) Salerno, Italy, 7’05” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

Construction 1 is a piece developed as a progressive elaboration of a cue from “Sonata for Two Voices” by J. Cage, a piece composed in 1933 for two undefined monodic instruments. The original work is divided into three movements, with a central fugato in moderate tempo. The thematic cue has been taken form the first bar of the first movement (a fragment of scale consisting of three descending notes) with the add of the major 7th interval taken from the third bar. This basic material was elaborated with some of the classic methods of the Renaissance imitative counterpoint (inversion, retrogradation, retrograde inversion and so on). Then I built some clusters with all the three notes playing simultaneously with a transposition on the same three notes transposed, using the lower note of the first set as starting point for the transposed set. Afterwards these clusters have been injected into an arpeggiator with some different patterns. In the middle section these patterns have been progressively altered, firstly suppressing some notes with a scheme partially derived from a Fibonacci sequence, and then overlapping more of these “punched” sequences, in order to create a dense texture, in spite of the recurring holes in each of the single sequences. The aesthetic inspiration of the work is derived from some constructivist works by László Moholy-Nagy, who invited J. Cage to be a teacher at the Chicago School of Design in 1941.

ANTONIO D’AMATO He graduated at conservatory in Piano, Harpsichord, Music for Multimedia, Music Pedagogy and Electronic Music. He also studied Composition for eight years, Bassoon for three years, Baroque Organ, Audio Engineering, Ondes Martenot in Strasbourg and Paris, and later Sonology at ESMUC in Barcelona. Some of his instrumental works are published by Forton Music, U.K. His first electronic composition was selected for a performance during the ICMC 2012 Conference. In summer 2015 he was trainee at ExperimentalStudio des SWR in Freiburg, and in 2016 at ZKM in Karlsruhe. His works have been performed in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Slovenia, Sweden, Taiwan, UK and USA.

Tony Conrad/ Agnus MacLise/ John Cale Trance #2 (1979) USA, 5’12”

TONY CONRAD (b Concord, NH, 7 March 1940). American filmmaker, composer, violinist, and media artist. He began playing violin in his youth and studied with Ronald Knudsen. He became fascinated with the physics of sounds and interested in intonation, the harmonic series, long-held tones, and the act of close listening. He attended Harvard University and received an AB in mathematics in 1962. While at Harvard he met HENRY FLYNT and CHRISTIAN WOLFF and became involved with the post-Cagean avant garde based in New York. In 1959 Conrad met La Monte Young, who became a frequent collaborator in the mid-1960s. Conrad credits an encounter with the music of 17th-century composer and violinist Heinrich Ignaz Biber in the late 1950s with a profound transformation of his musical thinking, drawing his attention to variable tunings and the role of timbre as an aesthetic concern. Conrad’s exposure to the music of Ali Akbar Khan also heightened his interest in drones as a basis for musical performance.  Conrad relocated to New York in 1962 and began collaborating with Young, as well as Angus MacLise, Marion Zazeela, Terry Jennings, and John Cale. Together the group performed under the names the Theater of Eternal Music and the Dream Syndicate. The group performed in lofts and galleries, operating in alternative spaces that also hosted performances by the artists and musicians associated with Fluxus.  Conrad, Young, Zazeela, and Cale’s performances were built up from multiple drones. Conradplayed violin, Cale played viola, Zazeela sang, and Young first played saxophone and later joined Zazeela on vocals. Conrad brought his knowledge of alternate tunings, particularly just intonation, to the group and helped shape their sound using scales based on rational frequency ratios. The group disbanded in 1965 and a decades-long debate over the rights to that music began, with Conrad and Cale on one side and Young on the other. A recording of some of their “Dream music” was released on The Dream Syndicate Volume 1: the Day of Niagara in 1993.  Conrad’s understanding of his musical aesthetics was decidedly political and antimodernist. Adumbrated by the rhetoric of John Cage, Conrad took an anticompositional approach to sound, shifting emphasis away from score-bound performance towards improvisation, collective composition, and the use of recording technologies. Along with his friends Flynt and Cale, Conradalso sought to dethrone “high” musical culture and argued for the contiguity of vernacular and popular US traditions with contemporary experimental music-making practices.  In addition to his role in the development of early minimalism, Conrad also was involved in experimental filmmaking. He roomed for a time with Jack Smith and recorded music for Smith’s film Flaming Creatures (1963). He also provided the soundtrack to Piero Heliczer’s Joan of Arc (1968). Conrad also made his own films, including The Flicker (1966). This film marked an expansion of Conrad’s interest in perception from the aural to the visual domain, and it is among the earliest structural films to make use of the stroboscopic effects of film projectors. Conrad went on to make numerous other films, including collaborations with his wife Beverly Grant.  In the 1970s Conrad collaborated with the German rock band Faust and recorded Outside the Dream Syndicate (1973), his first studio recording. He joined the Media Study faculty of the University at Buffalo in 1976 after teaching at Antioch College. In 1987 Conrad began to document the early innovations of the Dream Syndicate music in a series of new compositions and recordings titled Early Minimalism. He also returned to a more active performing and touring schedule in the United States and Europe. His work has been included in exhibitions and retrospectives at the Whitney Museum, the Kitchen, the Venice Biennale, the Tate Modern, and Documenta. His work has been supported by the NEA, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has recorded extensively for the label Table of the Elements. – Ryan Dohoney

Anne Lanzilotti Casalmaggiore (2016) Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, 6’28” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

Casalmaggiore is an amplification of beautiful resonant construction noise, the polyrhythms of cicadas, and distant creatures and machines in motion. The live recording was taken between 2:55–3:01pm on a hot summer day in Casalmaggiore, Italy. It is from a set of pieces on Lanzilotti’s debut EP Wanderweg that explore how one lets the outside world in and the inner world out.

A fierce advocate of contemporary music, ANNE LANZILOTTI has distinguished herself premiereing works by and collaborating with composers of her generation. As a composer, this season includes a premieree of her piece birth, death (for obsidian sound sculptures, strings, and voice) at The Noguchi Museum, and Periapsis Music and Dance’s first Emerging Artist Residency for Choreographers & Composers where she will be developing a new work with choreographer Wendell Gray II. An active composer-performer, Lanzilotti has been a guest artist with Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Échappé, and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). Lanzilotti currently teaches at New York Unicersity, and will be joining the faculty at University of Northern Colorado School of Music in the fall. As a scholar, she specializes in the music of Andrew Norman: her dissertation is an analysis of Norman’s The Companion Guide to Rome, showing the influence of architecture and visual art on the work. As an extension of that research, she created Shaken Not Stuttered, a free online resource that demonstrates extended techniques for strings used in Norman’s orchestral and chamber works. Lanzilotti has also published articles in Music & Literature and Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. A native of Hawai‘i, she is a co-founder and Artistic Consultant for Kalikolehua — El Sistema Hawai‘i, a free orchestra program for underserved youth. For a complete bio, please visit: http://annelanzilotti.com

Joji Yuasa Projection Esemplastic for White Noise (1964) Japan, 7’55”

JOJI YUASA (b Kōriyama, 12 Aug 1929). Japanese composer. He studied medicine at Keio University, Tokyo (1949–51), abandoning this course for composition. From 1951 to 1957 he was active as a member of the Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop), together with Takemitsu and others. In composition he is self-taught, yet his music shows an exceptional sensitivity to sonority and an intellectual approach to the handling of materials. His compositional attitude is, however, quite unconventional, which may be due in part to his medical interest in auditory physiology as well as his experience with nō music; he is particularly skilled in distributing sounds of various tone-colours in a ‘space’ without attempting any logical formal arrangement.  The early works Yuasa wrote for the Jikken Kōbō were mainly for small forces, such as Three Score Set (1953) for piano and the 12-note Projection for Seven Performers (1955). He was one of the first Japanese composers to take an interest in musique concrète, which he attempted to combine with visual performance in several examples of ‘musique concrète with auto-slides’, among them Mishiranu sekai no hanashi (‘The Story of an Unknown World’, 1953). In 1964 he began to work frequently at NHK’s Electronic Music Studio, producing such pieces as Comet Ikeya and Ai to shura(‘Love and Asura’), both of which won Italia prizes, and Mandala, which won the Grand Prize at the Japanese government Arts Festival. His Voices Coming (1969), utilizing recorded telephone conversations and speech as its materials, provoked a dispute as to whether it is music or not; Projection (1970), for string quartet, makes effective use of noises as its principal texture. In Utterance (1971), for mixed chorus, Yuasa uses onomatopoeic sounds, with no text. Chronoplastic(1972), for orchestra, with its varied use of clusters, won both the Otaka and the Art Festival prizes. Constantly seeking new means of sonic expression, his experiments include a theatre piece (Yobikawashi, 1973), a dance piece (Ceremony for Delphi, 1979), recitations with action (Observations on Weather Forecasts, 1983) and what he calls a ‘computer-controlled live theatrical performance’ (Futurity, 1989). Further possibilities for the creation of new sonorities appeared with his first work for computer, A Study in White I (1987). In 1968 he received a Japan Society Fellowship, which enabled him to make a lecture tour of the USA and Europe. Since 1970 he has often been invited as a guest composer and lecturer to international festivals. In 1981 he was invited to be professor of composition at the University of California in San Diego, and in the following years became a professor at Nihon University and also a guest professor at the Tokyo College of Music. – Masakata Kanazawa

Otto Leunning /Vladimir Ussachevsky Incantation for Tape (1952) USA 2’

OTTO LEUNNING (b Milwaukee, 15 June 1900; d New York, 2 Sept 1996). American composer, teacher, conductorand flautist. His mother was an amateur singer and his father a music professor at the University of Wisconsin who had studied at the Leipzig Conservatory. Luening began composing as a child in 1906. In 1912 the family moved to Munich, where he studied theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik with Anton Beer-Walbrunn (1915–17) and made his début as a flautist (1916). When the USA entered World War I he moved to Zürich, where he studied at the conservatory and at the university (1919–20), and also privately with Jarnach and Busoni, who both deeply influenced Luening’s conception of music and his teaching methods. While in Zürich he played the flute in the Tonhalle Orchestra and at the Municipal Opera, and for a season was an actor and stage manager with James Joyce’s English Players Company. He made his début as composer-conductor in 1917.  In 1920 Luening came to Chicago, where he studied with Wilhelm Middelschulte. He conducted the American Grand Opera Company in performances of operas in English (including Cadman’s Shanewis). From 1925 to 1928 he was at the Eastman School as executive director of the opera department and conductor of the Rochester Opera Company (and later of its offshoot, the American Opera Company). Then, after a year in Cologne (1928–9) Luening worked in New York as a freelance composer-conductor until he was awarded two Guggenheim fellowships (1930–31, 1931–2; he was awarded a third in 1974), which enabled him to write the text and music of his opera Evangeline. In 1932 he began teaching at the University of Arizona, and in 1934 he was appointed chairman of the music department at Bennington (Vermont) College, remaining until 1944. During his tenure at Bennington, Luening also took part in the WPA programme and was associate conductor, under Hans Lange, of the New York Philharmonic Symphony Chamber Orchestra (1936–8), and from 1941 together with Alan Carter was active in the Vermont Chamber Music Composers’ Conferences. In addition Luening was a co-founder of ACA (1938) and the American Music Center (1939).  In 1944 Luening was appointed director of opera productions at Columbia University, where he developed a graduate seminar in composition, and professor at Barnard College. During his tenure at Columbia he conducted the world premières of Menotti’s opera The Medium, Thomson’s The Mother of Us All, and his own opera Evangeline. Luening was a founder of CRI (1954) and a trustee of the American Academy in Rome (1953–70), where he was also composer-in-residence (1958, 1961 and 1965). His other recognitions have included several honorary degrees as well as awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1946), the NEA (1974, 1977), the National Music Council (1985) and ACA (1970, 1985).  In 1964 Luening retired from Barnard but continued to teach at Columbia until 1960, when he became professor emeritus and music chairman of the School of the Arts until his retirement in 1970. He then taught at the Juilliard School (1971–3). Among his many students are Wuorinen, Chou Wen-Chung, Dodge, Carlos and Laderman. In 1980 Luening published an autobiography, The Odyssey of An American Composer, documenting all aspects of his career.  Luening’s early works written in Zurich, notably the Sextet, the Sonatina for flute and piano and the First String Quartet, are highly contrapuntal combining tonal and atonal languages, and using polytonal and protoserial techniques derived from the theories of Ziehn. From the 1920s his music also exhibits a lifelong interest in his concept of ‘acoustical harmony’ (using voicings involving careful aural recognition and use of overtones) and the notion of musical colour as an element of form. Luening attributed his concern with sound colour in both traditional and electronic venues to Busoni’s teachings. His earliest electronic works, Fantasy in Space (1952) and Low Speed (1952), use timbres of tape composition as a primary formal component. In 1953–4 Luening wrote Rhapsodic Variations for tape recorder and orchestra, the first of several works written in collaboration with Ussachevsky and one of the first works for this genre; they subsequently established an electronic music centre at Columbia University (later named the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center). In the late 1960s Luening renewed his interest in chamber music. A strong proponent of music education, he wrote many of these works for chamber groups with modest abilities. As in Busoni’s music, the juxtaposition of styles in these pieces is an essential forming principle. In the last part of his life Luening devoted himself to orchestral and chamber music, characterized by spare textures that are richly resonant, and by the aim of maximizing the presence and power of the single pitch. – Lester Trimble/Severine Neff

Dean Rosenthal Ear Trainer (1996), Martha’s Vineyard, MA 11’ (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

Ear Trainer (1996) is my earliest attempt at making work that still resembles some form of Pierre Schaefer’s musique concrete. Chiefly inspired by John Oswald’s Plexure, the general example of speech in Steve Reich’s Come Out and of the pulses and canons of his instrumental music, and the sound of the human voice, I composed with samples of over a dozen commercial recordings and several private ones, mashing them up with live instrumentation that included prayer bells, guitars, voice parts, and a personal interview with Canadian composer and musicologist Brian Cherney that became the source material for much play with the conceptual language of irony and exploration. If you listen closely you can hear a catalogue of music that made a difference at the time, like Three Voices For Joan La Barbara (Morton Feldman), snatches off of Loveless (My Bloody Valentine), Lontano (Gyorgy Ligeti), with a dash of Cole Porter sprinkled in, too. If you really listen closely, you might hear the modified rondo form, but that detail is not something you need to discern to enjoy listening.

DEAN ROSENTHAL is an American composer of contemporary and experimental music, field recordings, digital pastiche, sound collage, and installations; performer, writer on music, and theorist; his instrumental music has been described as “thorny” and “modernist” (The New Yorker). His works are performed, broadcast, choreographed, and installed internationally, primarily in North America and Europe at venues such as Symphony Space, Spectrum, Ohrenhoch der Geräuschladen, Electronic Music Foundation, Brooklyn Museum, Incubator Arts Project, Taipei Contemporary Arts Centre, The Wulf, La Scala de San Telmo, and at varied universities and art schools. His writings have been published in The Open Space Magazine, The Ear Reader, and other prominent contemporary music publications. Most recently he has worked closely with Guggenheim Fellow David Parker’s The Bang Group utilizing contemporary dance to express his instrumental music, chiefly performed live by noted violinist Pauline Kim Harris. Since 2012, he has made his home on Martha’s Vineyard, where he composed his ongoing international performance piece Stones/Water/Time/Breath which in 2016 was given a 10 city, 3 country performance as part of the annual international Make Music Day festival, inaugurating an annual event that will be repeated in June 2017 in over a dozen cities internationally.

Tao Li After, Drop (2016) China/USA, 4’27” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

This piece revisits and challenges traditional composition technique by having “effect” presented first and then “cause”.  The main materials that I use are marble sounds. There are several sound sources all created by the marble ball: the marble striking the metal board, the marble dropping on the pan lid then rolling, and the marble bouncing on the pan lid. I use the “developed” materials first and then reveal the original form of the sound at the end of the piece. The whole piece is reversed “logically”.

LI TAO, Chinese composer and pianist, started playing piano at age 4 and became a composer at age 11. Graduated with honors from Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing, China) and DePaul University (Chicago, IL) in music composition and received scholarships and awards from both schools. Winner of the 2013 Kleinman Composition Competition and her pieces have been performed internationally by Fifth house ensemble; DePaul University Orchestra; the Oregon Percussion Ensemble; the TaiHei Ensemble; the Ova Novi Ensemble; Percussion ensemble Implosion; the Oregon Bach Festival Composer Symposium; (2014, 2016) Music Today Festival; (2017) WOCMAT, Taiwan; (2015) New music on the Bayou; (2016, 2017) and Kyiv Contemporary Music Days, Ukraine. (2016) She is recipient of the Charles A. and Jackie Swenson Scholarship, the Music Dean’s Scholarship from University of Oregon, Brandon Scott Rumsey Award and Global Corner Scholarship from University of Oregon. Chinese traditional culture profoundly influences Tao’s music; She uses ancient Chinese ideology combined with contemporary Western techniques to create her own musical language. Tao is especially interested in exploring inner connections between composer, performer and instrument. As an interdisciplinary performer, Tao is actively performing both classical and contemporary music in concerts and music festivals as pianist, percussionist and conductor. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Music Composition as Graduate Teaching Fellow and music director of TaiHei Ensemble at the University of Oregon studying with Dr. Robert Kyr and Dr. David Crumb.

Jason Bolte Swish-Swoosh (2014), Bozeman, MT 6’32” (CALL FOR MUSIC 2017)

swish-swoosh was composed using a vintage (late 70s) Minimoog analog synthesizer owned by the Butte, MT school district (BSD#1).  The composition is the first in a series of works that explore my renewed interest in analog and modular synthesizers.

JASON BOLTE is a composer and educator. He currently resides in Bozeman, Montana with his wonderful wife Barbara, their two beautiful daughters Lila and Megan, and dog Allie.  Jason teaches music technology and composition at Montana State University where he also directs the Montana State Transmedia and Electroacoustic Realization (MonSTER) Studios and B.A. in Music Technology.  Jason’s music is available on the ABLAZE, Thrmnphon, ELECTRO<>ACÚSTICO, SEAMUS, Irritable Hedgehog, Vox Novus, SoundWalk, and Miso Records labels.

7PM PURE SOUND TO THE END

Daria Semegen Electronic Composition No. 1 (1971), Stonybrook, NY 5’46”

DARIA SEMEGEN is a composer of instrumental, vocal and electronic music. As a recognized pioneer and authority on electronic music composition, she has been the subject of many articles and several dissertations including A. E. Hinkle-Turner’s doctoral dissertation “Daria Semegen: A Study of the Composer’s Life”, Work and Music (University of Illinois-Urbana). Semegen’s writings on creative process, esthetics and pedagogy have been published in the U.S. and abroad. She studied at the Eastman School of Music, in mixed-media workshops at the Rochester Institute of Technology, at Yale and Columbia Universities and in Warsaw, Poland as a Fulbright fellow. She taught at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center from 1971-1975 and was a sound engineer at the Collection of World Music (Columbia University) working with field recordings of native musics from many continents. Her awards include six National Endowment for the Arts grants, two BMI awards, two awards from Yale University, a National Chamber Music Competition prize, an ISCM International Electronic Music Competition prize; fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Tanglewood and Chautauqua; a Pennsylvania Institute for the Arts & Humanistic Studies award; and the 1994 Alumni Achievement Award from Eastman School of Music. Prof. Semegen was the first woman awarded a McKim Commission from the Library of Congress. Semegen was awarded the 2009 Susan B. Anthony Lifetime Achievement from the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women’s Leadership. Recordings of her music include Rhapsody (for Yamaha MIDI grand piano), Electronic Composition No. 1; Arc (electronic/dance); Spectra, Music for Violin Solo; Jeux de Quatres.. Other works include Arabesque(electronic), Vignette (piano), Elegy-Caprice (toy piano- for J.Cage) , Epicycles (electronic/dance); Triptych (orchestra), Dans la Nuit (baritone & orchestra), Lieder (soprano & ensemble); virtuoso solo works including violin, contrabass and clarinet solos. A performance of Daria Semegen’s work “Bargello” for electronic sounds with live instrument(s) features Dylan Ebrahimian with electric violin improvisation and Monica Bello on effects pedal.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztM2uHbqZlU

Maggi Payne Black Ice (2014) Berkeley, CA 10’

All of the sounds for Black Ice were generated by a Moog IIIp analog synthesizer. Many are raw; some are further actively eq’d to provide a further dynamic quality to the work. As with any fine instrument, it fundamentally remains the same, but the way one approaches the instrument changes considerably over time. Its open architecture has allowed quite varied aesthetic and technical approaches to the instrument over the decades since it was first built.  This work is an exploration of space and time, and especially of depth and height. Layers frequently shift, as demonstrated in the beginning where crackling is so present—almost seeming to emanate from the listener. The underlay provides a distanced atmosphere, almost a nebula, that moves towards, through, then past the listener, passing through the crackles while modifying their molecular structure and turning them to mist as they slowly recede.

MAGGI PAYNE composes music for concert presentation, video, and dance, and is a video artist, photographer, recording engineer, flutist, and Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches composition, electronic music, and recording engineering. She creates immersive environments, inviting listeners/participants to enter the sound and be carried with it, experiencing it from the inside out in intimate detail. The sounds are almost tactile, visible, tangible.  Her works have been presented in the Americas, Europe, Japan, and Australasia. She received Composer’s Grants and an Interdisciplinary Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; video grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowships Program; and honorary mentions from Concours International de Musique et d’Art Sonore Electroacoustiques de Bourges and Prix Ars Electronica.  Her works appear on Aguirre, Innova, Lovely Music, Starkland, Asphodel, New World (CRI), Root Strata, Centaur, Ubuibi, MMC, Digital Narcis, Music and Arts, Frog Peak, and/OAR, Capstone, and Mills College labels.

Johanna Beyer Music of the Spheres (1938/realized 1970) USA 6’

JOHANNA BEYER (b Leipzig, 11 July 1888; d New York, 9 Jan 1944). American composer of German birth. She moved to the USA c1924, where she studied with Dane Rudhyar, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford. She was a close associate of Cowell’s, acting as his administrative assistant during his San Quentin years. Despite prolific composition between c1932 and 1940, she was largely ignored as a composer, even by the experimental music community in New York to which her music most appropriately belongs. Several of her works from the early 1930s, particularly those for the piano, show the influence of Crawford and Seeger in their use of dissonant counterpoint; the works for percussion are particularly innovative. Formalist tendencies are combined with a quirky sense of musical humour in the two string quartets. At the time of her death, Beyer’s compositions had received few performances. The only work published in her lifetime, IV (1936), appears in Cowell’s New Music Edition. – Larry   Polansky (with John Kennedy)

Clarence Barlow Approximating Pi (2007) Santa Barbara, CA, 8’

Point of departure: the converging series π = 4 – 4/3 + 4/5 – 4/7 + 4/9 ···

Each convergence gets a time window of 5040 samples, in which ten square waves at frequency multiples of 8¾n Hz and at amplitudes 2dn are set up, ‘8¾’ deriving from the 5040 samples, ‘n’ being the partial number and ‘dn’ the nth digit in the convergence’s decimal representation; e.g. for ‘3.141592654’, the ten partials’ amplitudes are 23, 21, 24, 21 ,25, 29 etc., thereafter rescaled by the arbitrary sawtooth spectral factor 2π/n, where ‘n’ is still the partial number. The convergences make the digits stabilize from left to right to a value approaching π , the resultant timbre moving from turbulence to constancy over 4 x109 x 5040 = 20.16 x 1012 samples or ~14½ years. The installation can be pitch-transposed (by sample dropping) and/or time-truncated. Here 16 sound channels are transposed from 8¾ Hz to frequencies 9 to 402 times higher according to the formula 9π(1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ·· + 1/X), where X is the channel number plus one); the duration is truncated to a millionth of the total, i.e. 7′ 37″, the highest transposition thereby reaching the 700,000th approximation of π, where the first six digits are already stable.

CLARENCE BARLOW 1945: born into the English-speaking minority of Calcutta, going there to school and college, studying piano, music theory and natural sciences. 1957: first compositions. 1965: graduated in science at Calcutta University, thereafter active as conductor and music theory teacher at the Calcutta School of Music. 1968: moved to Cologne, studying (until 1973) composition and electronic music at Cologne Music University. 1971-1972: studied also at the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht University. 1971: began to use computers as a compositional aid. 1982: initiated, 1986 co-founded, 1986-1993 and 1996-2002 chaired GIMIK: Initiative Musik und Informatik Köln. 1982-1994: in charge of Computer Music at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. 1984-2005: lecturer on Computer Music, Cologne Music University. 1988: Director of Music, XIVth International Computer Music Conference, held in Cologne. 1990-1991: visiting professor of composition, Folkwang University Essen. 1990-94: Artistic Director, Institute of Sonology, Royal Conservatory, The Hague. 1994-2006: Professor of Composition and Sonology at the same conservatory. 1994-2010: member of the Académie Internationale de Musique Electroacoustique in Bourges. 2005-2006: visiting professor of composition, School of Music and Performing Arts ESMAE in Porto. Since 2006: Corwin Professor and Head of Composition, Music Department, University of California Santa Barbara; concurrently also Affiliate Professor, Media Arts and Technology as well as College of Creative Studies, UCSB.

Vladimir Ussachevsky Metamorphosis (1957) USA 5’23”

VLADIMIR USSACHEVSKY (b Hailar, 3 Nov/21 Oct 1911; d New York, 4 Jan 1990). American composer of Manchurian birth. He emigrated to the USA in 1930 and received the BA from Pomona College in 1935; he later studied under Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson at the Eastman School of Music (MA 1936, PhD 1939). After wartime service in the Office of Strategic Services and State Department, he undertook postdoctoral work at Columbia University with Luening and joined the faculty, eventually becoming professor of music. In 1951 he began the earliest American experiments in the electronic medium (excluding attempts at synthetic music before the advent of magnetic tape recording), shortly thereafter collaborating with Luening in a series of electronic works, not joint compositions but rather amalgamations of independently created sections, both live and electronic, by each composer. Only later did he become aware of the slightly earlier activities of the Parisian musique concrète group. In 1959 Ussachevsky, with Luening, Babbitt and Sessions, founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (New York) and became chairman of its committee of direction. For regular periods from 1970 he served as composer-in-residence at the University of Utah (he taught there from 1980 to 1985), and in 1973 was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He retired from Columbia University in 1980 as professor emeritus. He wrote and lectured widely, in the Americas and Europe, on electronic music.  Ussachevsky’s works divide into two principal genres: the electronic and the choral. Brought up in the Russian Orthodox Church (as a youth he served as reader and altar boy), he acknowledged a profound influence from Russian liturgical music. His choral works stem directly from the 19th-century tradition of Russian choral liturgy (the tradition of Grechaninov, Tchaikovsky and Musorgsky) and in many ways offer a sharp contrast to his electronic music. The ‘stylistic’ distinction between the two genres persisted even after 20 years’ work in the electronic medium, as can be seen from the Missa brevis for chorus and brass (1972). In his electronic works Ussachevsky consistently maintained a flexible attitude towards sound sources: recordings of live sounds (‘musical’ and otherwise), analogue studio and computer-generated material all feature in his works. (This catholicity distinguished American electronic music from the originally more restrictive French and German types, and gave rise to the designation ‘tape music’.) But Ussachevsky is noted particularly for the transformation of pre-existing material rather than for electronic synthesis, and his greatest skill lay perhaps in the mutating of sound from instrumental sources, as in Piece for Tape Recorder(1956) and Of Wood and Brass (1964–5). Not surprisingly, therefore, he also tended to take over material from one work to the next – a practice that is particularly significant in ‘tape music’, for here the processes of composition and electronic realization are simultaneous: the work is created directly on tape, frequently by manual operations on the constituent recorded sound materials. This mode of electronic composition, which became known as ‘classical studio’ technique, recognizes Ussachevsky as one of its most distinguished exponents. In the late 1970s he began writing music for instruments accompanied by tapes of those same instruments (or same class of instruments) transformed through sophisticated ‘classical studio’, techniques. During his final decades he wrote several compositions for EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument), which allowed live performance in real-time within an electronic medium. He also returned to conventional media, particularly works for chorus, brass and piano. – Charles Wuorinen/Carl Rahkonen