Program Notes

Program Notes

DAY 1:NOVEMBER 17, 2001 (Sat)

AFTERNOON CONCERT 2:00 PM, MCALPIN REHEARSAL HALL

Composition Composer Program Notes

1.5-3-4, ~20' p. j. botelho, S. Mackey, T. H. Park, , G. Wang, S. Weisman, M. Young Improvisation by students in Professor Steve Mackey's Music 534 class (2001).

2.Some Indelicately Unwrought
Granules, 6' Christopher Bailey This performance is a bit of an experiment. I have been writing some very dense music for computer. This specific kind of denseness I call "flat music", (after Feldman),
because it presents a continuously forbidding amount of musical detail, with no let-up or over-arching formal movement to "guide" the listener. A later painting by Pollock provides an analogy. We are all familiar with the widely-regarded failure of such musical forms (or lack thereof) to speak to any but a few dedicated fans. My thought is that this problem arises not necessarily from the music itself, but from the way it is presented to the listener. Since such music is so concerned with structure and architecture on the one hand, and an almost mystical contemplation of small, fleetingly momentary details (by fleetingly momentary, I mean "over all too fast") of that architecture on the other (witness all the critical texts focussing on 1 or 2 measures of such music) why
not come up with an interface for the listener that
would allow them to explore the piece as a work of architecture might be explored? I.e. through looping and live mixing, the listener would be able to do what those texts suggest--zoom in on, and take apart contrapuntally, those fleeting moments. What is experimental about this performance is that the "listener interface" is turned into a "performance interface"; essentially a kind of "DJ-machine," which, like the turntable, turns a piece of music itself into an "instrument" that I play to make music. What kind of experience this will be, whether interesting, or too-close-for-comfort-ly "voyeuristic" remains to be seen. . . or rather. . . heard.

3.Transfigured Evanescence, 3' Kyoko Kobayashi Transfigured Evanescence(2001) is an attempt to capture the sensation of obscurred distinction between reality and illusion. Thoughts, delicate and transient, transform fluidly as they disolve into opacity. This piece is composed of processed sample and sounds designed using FM synthesis technique.

4.Cassette Solo Performance, ~25' Aki Onda Onda plays portable cassette recorders with analog effect units. All sound materials were recorded by himself like an audio diary. It's a mindscape as well as a soundscape.

5.bushwacked, 4'30" Stefan Tomic bushwacked (2001) is composed of sampled speech. The speech is processed using cross-synthesis, phase shifting, pitch shifting, and time compression techniques. The piece is algorithmic and uses probability to choose the timing of many of the samples in each section.

EVENING CONCERT 8 PM, TAPLIN AUDITORIUM

Composition Composer Program Notes

1.Music for Pagans, 6~10' Matthew Smith Live improvisation involving borrowed sounds.

2.Noise~ 8' Rozalie Hirs Noise~ (2001) is entirely programmed in Max-Msp. The basic device used is the noise~ object, producing white noise, which is lead through a series of filters. Periodic modulation of all parameters of the filters produces waves of sound. Noise~ is written for the tArt-festival at the Technical University Twente, October 2001, and commissioned by the Netherlands Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst.

3.Midnight Oil, 8'30" Paul Koonce None.

4.Black Box 7'59" Keith Moore None.

5.Vox,7'20" paul j. botelho None.

6.Karaoke, 9' Reuben de Lautour Karaoke (2001) is for prepared audio and video. "What the gramophone listener actually wants to hear is himself...records are virtual photographs of their owners, flattering photographs - ideologies." -Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Thomas Y. Levin.

7.Another Day, 5' Terry Pender, Luke DuBois "Another Day" was written very recently. The video portion of the program was created in Bryce and manipulated using Nato. The mandolin is processed using MAX/MSP. This piece represents just another day in the lives of DuBois and Pender, doing what they normally do - writing, practicing and learning how to incorporate music into their everyday routine.

8.Quiff, 6'15" Jon Appleton In 1972 I composed a piece called "Stereopticon" in Bourges, France. It used sounds created on a Synthi 100 synthesizer. Shortly after I limited my synthesis techniques to the Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer and the Synclavier. My two, closest musical friends, Jean-Claude Risset and Lars-Gunnar Bodin, kept urging me to return to "pure synthesis" instead of the musical collage style which was my wont during the past four decades. Suddenly last summer I was able to get Paul Botelho to help me with some Max/MSP patches which formed the material of this work called QUIFF (2001). The word "quiff" has multiple meanings and listeners are free to attach whatever definitionthey deem appropriate.

9.Sacred Amnesia, 8' Eric Lyon Sacred Amnesia (2001) is a musical essay on the art of history creation through structured memory loss and transformation. Special programs were designed to achieve musical analogies to the historical process.

10.ABC, Movement I, 8' Paul Lansky ABC (2001) is the first of a ten-movement suite of pieces playing with the contexts of alphabet recitation, familiar to all of us, but even more so to those who in recent years either watched Sesame Street, or had children who did. This piece, in the words of Grady Klein, is a version in which "Sesame Street meets Stanley Kubrick", sort of... The letters in this movement pass by at regular intervals while Grady Klein's fanciful images 'animate' them and, we hope, give the view/listener a new way to contemplate these objects that form such a central part of everyday life. Thanks also go to Adam Finkelstein for his work in designing, facilitating and imagining the piece.

DAY 2: NOVEMBER 18, 2001 (Sun)

EVENING CONCERT 8 PM, TAPLIN AUDITORIUM

Composition Composer Program Notes

1.CFD Sound V, 5' Ed Childs The piece CFD Sound V (2001) is put together from ten different simulations of fluid flow in a horizontal duct. Each simulation comprises 10 different iterations, or musical phrases, so that 10 x 10 matrix of sound events results. The loudness, entrance time and spatialization of each event are controlled by serial procedures. The order in which each event occurs is based on an English change ringing procedure called "Plain Bob", in which adjacent bells swap positions until the order of ringing at the end of the piece is the retrograde of the beginning.

2.april, may, 8' Newton Armstrong april, may is from a series of improvisation projects concerned with systems of simulated chaotic growth.

3.Shape Up, Shape Down, 7'30" Kimo Johnson Shape Up, Shape Down (2001) is a composition that presents all possible paths from a six note ascending sequence to a six note descending sequence. Each path is a progression of shapes or contours that the performer can realize in three different domains: pitch, rhythm and dynamics. This composition was created using original algorithms and software for generating and morphing contours.

4.Abo-ji, 9'23" Tae Hong Park Speech, environmental, synthesized and processed sounds were used to compose this piece. Samples from numerous interviews comprise this composition as a whole in which the interaction, referencing, synthesis, transformation between sound objects and memory of the listener comes in and out of focus throughout the duration of the piece. Aboji (2001) is an 8 channel companion piece to Omoni.

5.Atomic Tango, 6' Douglas Geers Atomic Tango (2001) is a brief collaborative work between myself and video artist Christine Sciulli. I began it by trying to imagine what one might hear if it were possible to hold a stethoscope to a drop of water from the era of life's genesis and witness evolution happening as sound, in a time-lapse speed so that centuries were squeezed into seconds. Thus in the piece several sound "species" arise and eventually fail, by either slow withering or cataclysmic accident. Given the music, Ms. Sciulli created its video counterpoint using a combination of found film, her own video, and a few seconds from "The Atomic Cafe."

6.DGTLFloo, 8' Perry Cook Long ago the termites hollowed out the log. Much later an aboriginal went to work on it, burning an artwork into the surface, and coating the small end with beeswax. Nothing much else happened to it until it fell into the hands of Perry Cook. He has since enhanced it (taking care to not alter the original artifice itself) with various electronic sensors and signal processing circuits. The current embodiment allows the capture and control of sounds from the acoustic instrument, and also the control of a virtual flute/electric-guitar algorithm designed jointly with Dan Trueman, originally called the "BlowTar."

7.Etudes for Violin and Computer - 1st Etude, ~8' Charles Dodge I wrote the etudes for my son Baird to play at a concert of the contemporary chamber ensemble at SUNY Stony Brook in 1994. These four pieces are written in the tradition of etudes that stretch the instrumental technique of the performer in various ways. They are very difficult to play. Their duration is around 15 minutes.

8.Community Art Project, 7' David Birchfield At the heart of this piece is a unique genetic algorithm which makes all musical decisions and realizes the score in real time. The 'note' is the fundamental organism of the system and is defined by a genetic code which includes features such as amplitude, frequency, envelope, pitch salience, and time and frequency shift rates. These attributes determine not only how and when a note expresses itself, but also how a note behaves in relation to its neighbors. A hierarchical structure is also at work in the system wherein notes
belong to gestures, which belong to phrases, which belong to sections, etc... These higher levels are defined by genetic features such as density, central frequency, harmonicity, and rhythmic activity. The genetic features of these higher levels guide the broader course of the music relative to their position in the architecture in much the same way that families, communities, and nations influence their members. Depending on its genetic profile, a note can be realized in one of three ways: as a purely synthesized tone, as a filtered sample, or as a note performed by a live performer. During the performance, the performer must sightread and interpret a unique musical score from the computer monitor
which is generated in real time by the algorithm.

9.i-v-ii, 6'~7' Larry Polansky i-vi-ii (1997) is dedicated to Carter Scholz and Brian McLaren, ii-v-i is one of my works which explores real-time tuning, this time in the simplest possible fashion. The guitars are retuned three to three different harmonic series during the course of the piece. ii-v-i was remiered by the composer and Nick Didkovsky, guitars, in 1997, the solo version by Claudio Calmens, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1998. The score is published by Frog Peak Music and also in the journal 1/1.

DAY 1 AND DAY 2 (Sat & Sun)
INSTALLATIONS AND ON-GOING EVENTS, WOOLWORTH

Composition/Installation Composer Program Notes

Music For Lawn Games Ted Coffey Music for Lawn Games (2001) is a multichannel tape piece designed to be realized out-of-doors by parabolic loudspeakers that I made a couple years ago in connection with another piece. The idea is that listeners might play badminton, horseshoes- and especially croquet amidst beams of sound comprising a texture that cannot be heard all at once. If it’s November and cold, then hurriedly walking through the space will do just fine. (The installation will be setup in front of the Music Building)

Project Arbol: Installation #1, Princeton, NJ (Deer-B-Gone) Mary Wright Project Arbol (2001) is a sound installation for 46 audio channels (23 Rubbermaid speakers) and a nice group of trees. The installation plays with the notion of spectacle. Nature could be considered spectacle, if you think of majestic deciduous trees as such. Speakers strung on cables moving in a mechanical manner evoke spectacle. And the two together? (Note: If the weather is yucky, the show will still run. Warm refreshments available on site. For map to site, click here.

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Composition	Composer	Program Notes
1.5-3-4, ~20'	*p. j. botelho, S. Mackey, T. H. Park, , G. Wang, S. Weisman, M. Young*	Improvisation by students in Professor Steve Mackey's Music 534 class (2001).
2.Some Indelicately Unwrought Granules, 6'	Christopher Bailey	This performance is a bit of an experiment. I have been writing some very dense music for computer. This specific kind of denseness I call "flat music", (after Feldman), because it presents a continuously forbidding amount of musical detail, with no let-up or over-arching formal movement to "guide" the listener. A later painting by Pollock provides an analogy. We are all familiar with the widely-regarded failure of such musical forms (or lack thereof) to speak to any but a few dedicated fans. My thought is that this problem arises not necessarily from the music itself, but from the way it is presented to the listener. Since such music is so concerned with structure and architecture on the one hand, and an almost mystical contemplation of small, fleetingly momentary details (by fleetingly momentary, I mean "over all too fast") of that architecture on the other (witness all the critical texts focussing on 1 or 2 measures of such music) why not come up with an interface for the listener that would allow them to explore the piece as a work of architecture might be explored? I.e. through looping and live mixing, the listener would be able to do what those texts suggest--zoom in on, and take apart contrapuntally, those fleeting moments. What is experimental about this performance is that the "listener interface" is turned into a "performance interface"; essentially a kind of "DJ-machine," which, like the turntable, turns a piece of music itself into an "instrument" that I play to make music. What kind of experience this will be, whether interesting, or too-close-for-comfort-ly "voyeuristic" remains to be seen. . . or rather. . . heard.
3.Transfigured Evanescence, 3'	*Kyoko Kobayashi*	Transfigured Evanescence(2001) is an attempt to capture the sensation of obscurred distinction between reality and illusion. Thoughts, delicate and transient, transform fluidly as they disolve into opacity. This piece is composed of processed sample and sounds designed using FM synthesis technique.
4.Cassette Solo Performance, ~25'	*Aki Onda*	Onda plays portable cassette recorders with analog effect units. All sound materials were recorded by himself like an audio diary. It's a mindscape as well as a soundscape.
5.bushwacked, 4'30"	*Stefan Tomic*	bushwacked (2001) is composed of sampled speech. The speech is processed using cross-synthesis, phase shifting, pitch shifting, and time compression techniques. The piece is algorithmic and uses probability to choose the timing of many of the samples in each section.

Composition/Installation	Composer	Program Notes
Music For Lawn Games	*Ted Coffey*	Music for Lawn Games (2001) is a multichannel tape piece designed to be realized out-of-doors by parabolic loudspeakers that I made a couple years ago in connection with another piece. The idea is that listeners might play badminton, horseshoes- and especially croquet amidst beams of sound comprising a texture that cannot be heard all at once. If it’s November and cold, then hurriedly walking through the space will do just fine. (The installation will be setup in front of the Music Building)
Project Arbol: Installation #1, Princeton, NJ (Deer-B-Gone)	*Mary Wright*	Project Arbol (2001) is a sound installation for 46 audio channels (23 Rubbermaid speakers) and a nice group of trees. The installation plays with the notion of spectacle. Nature could be considered spectacle, if you think of majestic deciduous trees as such. Speakers strung on cables moving in a mechanical manner evoke spectacle. And the two together? (Note: If the weather is yucky, the show will still run. Warm refreshments available on site. For map to site, click here.