| FREITAG - 13 Mai 2016 -
22h - Schloss Leuk - PART 1
ARS ELECTRONICA FORUM WALLIS CALL FOR ACOUSMATIC STEREO WORKS 2016 Swiss Contemporary
Music Festival Forum Wallis
PROGRAM PART 1 Leonie Roessler Robert Fleisher Jannik Giger Dave Gedosh Bihe Wen Joseph Michaels John Nichols Marco Molteni Michael Sterling Smith Stephen Lilly
PROGRAM AS PDF
Dave Gedosh (USA) Guitar Construction #2: Progressive Fracture is the second piece in a series of a project I am currently engaged in titled Guitar Constructions, and was composed for the Cape Fear New Music Festival 2105, Methodist University, where I was a guest artist. The theme of the festival was music and metaphor. As a collective, these pieces give homage to my early musical roots and experiences. Each piece represents a specific guitar-based genre. The pieces possess a different character and utilizes a unique conceptual approach although an internal consistency exists in that they all make use of the metaphor of “construction,” contain a metaphoric use of the name of and allusion to each particular genre, and each contain stochastic elements. Dave Gedosh is a composer and sound artist on the faculty of Rose State College, where he directs the Music Engineering and Industry program and teaches courses in music production, music business, composition, and music theory and history. His compositions are as much informed by his formative musical experiences as a guitarist and his audio production background, as they are by traditional and current electroacoustic aesthetics and practices. His works include acousmatic and electroacoustic music, and intermedia; electroacoustic music with live performance, video, and dance. As well as composing electroacoustic music, Dave has composed, mixed, and produced music in a wide variety of genres, solo projects, independent artists, independent film, and radio. Many of his compositions reflect an interest in sound’s role in the dimensioning of the listener’s spatial and temporal experience. His music attempts to elicit an imagistic response through the manipulation, processing, re-contextualizing of sound objects, and the use of spatialization techniques to create what might be referred to as sound images. His music takes the listener on an introspective journey through passages of subtle nuance and ephemeral structure to passages of sonic intensity and stochastic texture. His music has been performed throughout North America and in Latin America and Europe, at festivals and conferences including Bourges Festival Synthèse (IMEB), ICMC, SEAMUS, RTVE.es. He has curated new music concerts and presented papers and lectures on sound design, electroacoustic music, and spatialization at the OK Electric Music Festival, New Genre Music Festival (Living Arts, Tulsa), and the International Jean Gebser International Society Conference (NYU, Rice Univ.). He has received awards from ASCAP, Bourges, Fresh Minds Festival, and the Greater Denton Arts Council. Dave earned a DMA in music composition with a specialization in computer music from the University of North Texas, where he studied with Jon C Nelson, Phil Windsor, Andrew May, and Butch Rovan. He earned a B.M.A. and M.M. in music composition from the University of Oklahoma, where he studied with Christian Asplund.
Bihe Wen (China) Duration: 8:01 min. Regression is an acousmatic composition exploring multiple potential of spectromorphology by using single material. The sounds in Regression are entirely derived from the “Udu.” This African clay instrument had its origins as a water and food container with ceremonial functions, and so still serves to evoke the primordial texture. In composing this work, I was searching for an organic musical language with which I could compose a piece whose structure resembled a living organism in all its dynamism. On the smallest scale, the textures of sounds that may at first seem very different often reveal close relationships. I have sought to reveal these relationships in my composition through various transformations of these different sounds. I have also attempted to embody in this work an improvisational spirit that reflects the rhythmic freedom of the original sound material. Finally, the philosophic and poetic motivation for this piece was my desire to have the sounds of the “Udu” regress back to their watery origins, not only to evoke the water that the instrument was originally made to carry, but also to honor the water and earth that together made its construction possible. Bihe Wen was born in China in 1991. His works include instrumental and electroacoustic music, and he is interested in the relationship between traditional aesthetics and music language of sound composition. He was awarded First Prize in 2011Musicacoustica-Beijing competition, Jury Special Mention for innovation in the use of the sound material in XXVIII Luigi Russolo Contest, and First Prize in Monaco International Electroacoustic Composition Competition CICEM 2014. His work has been selected as the designated work to be performed and analyzed by the participants to Concours de Spatialisation 2012 in Brussels. The piece was released on CD by Musiques & Recherches. His music has been performed at concerts and festivals in Beijing (MUSICACOUSTICA-BEIJING), Shanghai (Electronic Music Week 2015), Italy (Turin Confucius Institute), Brussels (L'Espace du Son 2012), France (UN SON PAR LA Festival 2012), Vienna (ElectroAcousticProject), Stockholm (Sound and Music Computing Conference 2013), New York (2014 NYCEMF), Monaco (Monaco Electroacoustique 2015), 41st International Computer Music Conference 2015. He began to study electronic music at Central Conservatory of Music Middle School in 2007. He studied electroacoustic music composition under Professor Xiaofu Zhang and Dr. Peng Guan, and he received Bachelor of Music from Central Conservatory of Music. Since 2016, he has studied composition under Professor Panayiotis Kokoras and is currently pursuing his master degree at University of North Texas.
Nicholas Chase (USA) In 2008, I created a 32-minute musical loop from filter modulated radio white noise with Neighborhood Public Radio at the Whitney Biennial: hai•ku was born. Inspired by African rhythms, hai•ku is "post-human funkadelica." Generated from white-noise instruments and noise samples made in my studio, each cut on hai•ku is an improvised mashup of pattern grids in 7, 12, 9, 5, 3, 15 and occasionally 4, with the underpinning pulse of each 'song' alternating between 5, 7, and back to 5 - like the lines of a haiku poem. Nicholas Chase’s music has been hailed by Strad Magazine as ‘brilliant,’ Los Angeles Times as ‘flamboyant,’ and ‘brawling...Rite of Spring meets Metallica,’ and dubbing him ‘Eye/Ear Explorer,’ LA Weekly writes of his short opera 22, ‘the human brain at its most imaginative.’ Chase studied composition with Morton Subotnick, Bunita Marcus, Stephen L. Mosko and Mary-Jane Leach. His musical escapades typically integrate electronic sounds with traditional acoustic instrumentation and have been commissioned by a list of notables including Long Beach Opera, New Zealand's 175 East, the Philadelphia Classical Symphony, California E.A.R Unit, and luminary soloists internationally. Headlining festivals in Europe and the US as composer, performer and improviser, Chase is known for integrating kinetic visuals with strong musical statements. His composition “NOVA: Transmission” for FM radio and closed-circuit TV was exhibited as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and his 32-minute piano/video ballad “Songs of the Thirsty Sword” opened the New Music+ Festival at the Janacek Academy in the Czech Republic. Chase was an inaugural Composer Fellow at the 2011 Other Minds Festival and nominated among only 20 US composers for the prestigious American Academy Berlin Prize in 2014. In 2015 he was conferred an honor for Excellence in Musical Composition from the International Center for Japanese Culture in Tokyo. Spring 2016 brings the CD release of his hour-long opus for violin and electronic fields Bhajan on Cold Blue Music (LA), as well as premieres of new chamber works in Boston, New York and Los Angeles.
Laurence Bouckaert (FR) The piece « mémoires de femmes, paysage, passage »
was created at « La Muse en circuit », december 2015 for the last
«Luc Ferrari compétition ». This pièce received a mention. The breath
enters and penetrates as in women's memories of meanders. Kicking
up dust it off some of the experiences and impressions that these
women were willing to give us . Without dwelling and the urgency of
doing, undo and redo , emotional experiences are woven , fade , run,
come back and leave again. From the story to the pain , suffering
to the joy of life sounds raged, always collide in heavy traffic movement.
Between secrets and revelations , repetition are organized without
ever being quite the same. Laurence Bouckaert is a woman composer and musician based in Paris. Her musical practice swings amid polarities. Firstly: composition & improvisation, on solo performance or collective - within the electroacoustic chamber group «ONE», «Hildegarde von Stick» or the trio « Les phonogénistes », secondly : electroacoustic devices & new digital ’lutherie’ such as Karlax, thirdly : An opening to plastic and visual arts & live performances, organized with institutional or alternative scenes. L Bouckaert’s experiments balance by twins. She also works as electroacoustic music professor at conservatories and University. Overstepping her academic background, her musical identity pushes for improvisation as a contemporary base for composition.
Michael Sterling Smith (USA) Ictus combines rapid gestural motions with moments of clarity and relative calmness. The work explores obsessive tendencies by focusing on a limited (although masked) sound source. It was composed at the University of North Texas in 2015. Michael Sterling Smith audiovisual artist based in Denton, Texas. He holds a Bachelor of Music from the University of Delaware and a Master of Music from the University of Florida. His works have recently been performed by the Quanta Quartet on their Australian tour, at the national Society of Composers, Inc. (SCI) conference, the National Student Electronic Music Event (N_SEME), and his piece Ictus was selected as a finalist for the Open Circuit festival's call for electroacoustic works. Michael is a team member of the Score Follower/Incipitsify youtube channel. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas.
Stephen Lilly (USA) In Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October,” rain and weather are metaphors for memory and time. ...in a shower of all my days... similarly plays with these themes, but here, it is the rain itself that is a recorded memory. The work features four different recordings made over the course of four years. At times, the rain is recognizable, but often it is completely transformed into abstract sound through digital processing. Intertwined with this, are the speech rhythms of “Poem in October” which modulate a soundwalk of my own—recorded in winter, the only season not explicitly mentioned in Thomas’s poem. Stephen Lilly (stephenlilly.net) is a DC-based composer, performer, audio engineer, and sound artist. Theatricality, language, and abstraction are themes that define his work, the majority of which is for chamber ensembles. Stephen has composed for CoMA Britsol, pianist Hayk Arsenyan, saxophonist Steven Leffue, and soprano Stacey Mastrian and works closely with a collective of composer-performers he helped found, the Bay Players Experimental Music Collective. Publications: Computer Music Journal, ink&coda, Organised Sound, Performance Research, and Perspectives of New Music. His music is available on SEAMUS and C7 Music recordings, and his engineering works has appeared on Neuma, Navona, and Albany Records.
Joseph Michaels (USA/D) In a passage from Harmonielehre (1922), Schönberg stated that the current tuning system, the equal tempered, is a “temporary station” or “closed truce” (“geschlossener Waffenstillstand”) that will have to be re-evaluated in terms of the natural intervals of the overtone series. In reference to this quote, ein geschlossener Waffenstillstand is the juxtaposition of chords based either on the overtone series or the equal-tempered scale highlight, whereby one immediately notes the marked differences in inflection and beating patterns, and the subtones that result from the natural tuning. Joseph Michaels is a composer, concert curator and musician based in Stuttgart, Germany. His music eatures extended techniques, alternative tuning systems, music theater, and various media, like video and the playback of prerecorded material. Michaels is also active in bringing music from other composers and performers to the stage. In January 2015, he began working as a board member for the Stuttgarter Kollektiv für aktuelle Music, whose aim is to promote experimental music in Southern Germany. His works have been performed in North America, South America, Africa and Europe by such musicians as the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo, ensemble cross.art, Invading Pleasures, Geoffrey Deibel, and the Thürmchen Ensemble at such notable venues as Acht Brücken - Köln, Curitiba Biennial for Contemporary Music, and the Gaudeamus Music Week.
Marco Molteni (IT) Rubber, Lime & Glue (ePWsM 04) has been "written" in 2012 and has been made by improvising with Live Electronics with a large gamma of sound material of different origins and, in a second moment, using the patchwork technique. It is part of a series of short electronics pieces "written" with the same technique. Marco Molteni (Italy – 1962) studied composition with L.Chailly and G.Giuliano in the Conservatory of Music of Milan; electronic music with R.Sinigaglia. He attended several perfectioning courses like : Accademia Chigiana / MC2 Musique Contemporaine (F.Donatoni); Atelier de Recherche Instrumental IRCAM - Paris; Darmstadt Ferienkurse. His music has been rewarded and recognized in international concourses (Gaudeamus Music week - Concorso Internazionale "Casella" Siena – Concorso Internazionale G. d’Arezzo etc.) and played in several places like IRCAM, Chigiana Novità Siena, Festival Antidogma Torino, Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik Darmstadt, Gaudeamus Musik Week Amsterdam, International Review of Composers Belgrade, Europe-Asia International Contemporary Music Festival, ISCM World New Music Days (Sydney), International Festival of Electroacustic Music MUSLAB, Malaysia Music Technology Festival – SPECTRA, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival etc. His music has been broadcasted by Radio France, RAI, ABC Sidney, CBC Toronto and it has been published by BMG Ricordi, Arspublica.
Leonie Roessler (D/NL) Stop en Luister, Den Haag! This piece is an excerpt of a series of six pieces documenting six different, sonically interesting locations in the city of The Hague. It includes The Hague Market, and the Torengarage, a parking garage near the big church in the city center. The two pieces are linked with a short interlude, to “clear the ear”. I carefully record my environment, sometimes returning at various times of the week and day, to be able to record all that a place has to offer. I select the most typical and interesting sounds, sometimes out of hours of material collected, and arrange it into a musical composition for the listener. I detect rhythms and patterns and layer them. I cut my sound files and use volume changes and panning, but never any effects. The goal is to provide a work that is artistically interesting while creating an authentic portrait of a place. I am preserving something that might be gone sooner than we expect, while contemplating the following questions: Will there be drones flying through my recordings in the future? Will the trams be less characteristic once replaced with more current models? Will appliances in Cafes and Bars create a different soundscape in the future? Leonie Roessler. Born in the Ruhr District (Ruhrgebiet) in Germany, Leonie relocated to Los Angeles as a teenager. She studied classical guitar at Los Angeles City College, and received a Bachelor Degree in Composition along with a Minor in Dance Performance at California State University Northridge in 2010. She moved to the Netherlands and earned her Master Degree in Composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in 2013. She completed a one-year course at the Institute of Sonology thereafter and is currently finishing the fourth and last year of the Contemporary Music Through Non-Western Techniques Program at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. She is active as a performer, composer, and sound artist in various countries and places far away and nearby, but essentially lives with her five-year-old son in the city-center of The Hague.
Robert Fleisher (USA) Loretto Alfresco. After resting comfortably in my archives for nearly four decades. this musique concrète miniature createdin my teens (c. 1970) was premiered during the inaugural New York City Electro-Acoustic Music Festival (2009), heard subsequently in the U.K. (Noise Floor Festival), Canada (Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium), and throughout the U.S., and included in the SEAMUS “Electroacoustic Miniatures” CD series. 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.” Recorded under a tree on a small Wisconsin farm, the percussionist is Thomas Loretto—whose voice may (or may not) be heard at the end, with a bit of bird song. Earlier this year, Loretto Alfresco was heard in Alabama (Cicada Consort marathon), Michigan (ÆPEX Contemporary Performance "Sound System Takeover"), and New York (Concrete Timbre). Robert Fleisher attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City, graduated with honors from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and earned his M.M. and D.M.A. degrees in composition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Author of Twenty Israeli Composers (1997), Fleisher is also a contributing composer and essayist in Theresa Sauer’s collection of new music scores, Notations 21 (2009). He has served on the music faculties of UIUC (1978-1980), UCLA (1980-1982), and NIU (1983-2014), where he is Professor Emeritus. 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 70 performances and broadcasts of a dozen works in 10 countries since 2010. Recordings are available on Capstone, Centaur, Navona, and SEAMUS labels.
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