CCRMA Colloquium with Joan La Barbara

NOTE: Exceptionally, this week's Colloquium will be on MONDAY, not on Wednesday. NEW LOCATION: CCRMA Stage (3rd floor)

Joan La Barbara’s career as a composer/performer/sound artist explores the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument, expanding traditional boundaries in compositions for multiple voices, chamber ensemble, music theater, orchestra and interactive technology, using a unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques - multiphonics, circular singing, ululation and glottal clicks - that have become her "signature sounds", influencing several generations of composers and singers.

Joan will talk about her works at 5:15pm on Monday. This CCRMA Colloquium ends at 6:30pm and is followed by a lecture/demo with Morton Subotnick at 8pm.

FREE ADMISSION
Parking is free at Stanford after 4pm

www.joanlabarbara.com

BIOGRAPHY:

Joan La Barbara’s career as a composer/performer/sound artist explores the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument, expanding traditional boundaries in compositions for multiple voices, chamber ensemble, music theater, orchestra and interactive technology, using a unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques - multiphonics, circular singing, ululation and glottal clicks - that have become her "signature sounds", influencing several generations of composers and singers.

The American Music Center conveyed its 2008 Letter of Distinction Award to La Barbara for her significant contributions to American music. Awards include Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition; DAAD Artist-in-Residency in Berlin; National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in Music Composition, Opera/Music Theatre, Inter-Arts, Recording, Solo Recitalist and Visual Arts; NYSCA Music Composition; ISCM International Jury Award for sound sculpture; Meet The Composer commissions; ASCAP Composer and numerous commissions for concert, theatre and radio, including Saint Louis Symphony, European radio and Live Music for Dance. She was Artistic Director of the Carnegie Hall series “When Morty met John”; co-Artistic Director of New Music America festival in LA; co-founded the performing composers collective ensemble Ne(x)tworks; has produced 11 recordings of her own works, including, "ShamanSong" (New World) and “Voice is the Original Instrument” (a 2-cd set of her seminal works from the ‘70s for Lovely Music); served as producer and performer on internationally-acclaimed recordings of music by John Cage and Morton Feldman; produced and hosted “Sonic Lives” a series of composer portraits for Netherlands radio. Hailed as “one of the great vocal virtuosas of our time” (San Francisco Examiner), she premiered landmark compositions written for her by Robert Ashley, David Behrman, John Cage, Charles Dodge, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Steve Reich, Morton Subotnick, and James Tenney.

 

La Barbara creates sound scores for video, dance and film, including a score for voice and electronics for "Children's Television Workshop/Sesame Street", broadcast worldwide since 1977. "73 Poems", her collaboration with text-artist Kenneth Goldsmith, was included in The American Century Part II at The Whitney Museum of American Art. The award-winning interactive media/performance work "Messa di Voce" premiered at ars electronica festival in Linz, Austria. Composer and publisher member of ASCAP, La Barbara received a NYSCA commission to create the musical score for “An American Rendition” with Jane Comfort and Company, which premiered at the Duke Theater in September 2008, and she is currently composing a new opera exploring the artistic process, the interior dialogue and sounds within the mind. Exploring various ways of immersing the audience in her music, she most recently placed Ne(x)tworks musicians and actors in the many rooms of the Greenwich House Music School for her music/theater piece “Journeys and Observable Events”, allowing the audience to explore the building and create an individual sonic experience, and in March 2011, seated the musicians of The American Composers Orchestra around and amongst the audience in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel auditorium, building her sonic painting “In solitude this fear is lived”. Upcoming premieres this season include “Storefront Diva”, composed for pianist Kathleen Supové.