CNMAT/CCRMA 1999 Concert CNMAT/CCRMA 1999 ConcertAdmission: $5
For information, call CNMAT at (510) 643-9990.
| Program Friday, May 14 @ 8pm | |
| Program Saturday, May 15 @ 8pm | |
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Escuela for piano and live electronics Christopher Jones, piano | Chris Burns |
Escuela is the second in a series of piano pieces which somehow refer to places where I've lived - in this case, my first home in California, on Escuela Avenue. The piece is also bound up in my early experiences as a graduate student, thereby enriching the meaning of the title. In Escuela, a computer is employed to modify the sound of the piano during the performance. The performer controls this process from the piano keyboard, applying ring modulations which precisely reflect the pitch structure of the original piano music. The result is a kind of mirroring - the electronics describe the piano's music in the way that they alter its sound. Thanks to Juan Pampin for assistance with the software, and especially to Chris Jones, who provided invaluable advice on early drafts of the piece. -- Chris Burns | |
Christopher Burns is a graduate student at CCRMA. A founding member of the Balinese gong kebyar ensemble Gamelan Jagat Anyar, his compositions reflect his experiences with Indonesian music as well as his study of computer techniques. | |
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Esquisse for flute and electronics Mathew Krejci, flute | Ronal Bruce Smith |
Ronald Bruce Smith studied composition at the University of Toronto, McGill University and the University of California, Berkeley from which he received the Ph.D. in Music Composition. He has also studied in Paris with Tristan Murail and at IRCAM. He has received many awards and commissions for his works. Recent performers of his music include the Aitken/Tureski Duo, the Arraymusic Ensemble, Artemis, the California E.A.R. Unit, Cikada Ensemble, Continuum Ensemble, Earplay, Pierrot Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Sirius Ensemble, Sonus Imaginorem, New Works Calgary Ensemble,Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and at festivals in Europe, the Americas and Australia. | |
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20 Questions for four channel tape | Jonathan Norton
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What is a question? How are questions formulated? As the mind wrestles to grasp the concept of a subject, inevitably, questions begin to form . But not all questions are created equal. Some may be ill-conceived and make no sense, resulting in more confusion. Some well thought out questions, once asked, can be enlightening but raise yet further questions. Some are really not questions at all, but simply a reiteration of the subject in the inquirer's own words in an attempt to understand. Sometimes frustration ensues, and the inquiry must be reapproached. From thought to vocalization this piece explores the musical texture of a question. This piece was realized through the use of granular synthesis, spectral reshaping and the re-sampling of vocal samples and computerized instruments. All signal processing was done on a Apple PowerPC. -- Jonathan Norton | |
Jonathan Norton (b.1966) Jonathan Norton (b.1966) He is currently finishing a Ph.D. in computer-based music theory at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University. During his time at Stanford he studied with John Chowning, Julius Smith, Max Mathews, Chris Chafe, and Jonathan Harvey. He received his masters in music composition at Northwestern University. His works for dance, acoustic instruments, tape, and soundtracks have been performed and heard throughout the world in festivals and on television in the USA, Russia, Spain, Japan, Monaco, Italy, France, and Switzerland. For a full list of his compositions can be seen at this site | |
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Incantation S4 for tenor saxophone and computer-generated tape Matthew Burtner, saxophone | Matthew Burtner |
Incantation S4 explores the integration of the saxophone and electronics as equal elements within a single, non-narrative sound-space. Techniques of digital audio synthesis such as granular synthesis, spectral mutation, and spectral resonance influenced the compositional approach to the saxophone while the electronic part was inspired by a natural and organic conception of sound. "Incantation S4" is dedicated to Barry Truax and was composed during a residency at Simon Fraser University using the PODX system for quasi-synchronous granular synthesis. It was recently released on a solo CD of Burtner's music, "Portals of Distortion: Music for Saxophones, Computers, and Stones" from Innova Records (Innova 526). -- Matthew Burtner | |
C. Matthew Burtner (1970) is a doctoral student in composition at Stanford. A native of Alaska, he studied philosophy at St. Johns College, composition at Tulane University (BFA 93), computer music composition in Paris at Xenakis's CEMAMu/UPIC studios, and computer music at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University (MM 97). His pieces, commissioned by performers such as Phyllis Bryn-Julson, the Spectri Sonori Ensemble, Norway's MiN Ensemble, the Peabody Trio, and the Quiescence Dance Ensemble, have been performed throughout the United States and Europe as well as in Japan, Canada, Australia, and Brazil. As a saxophonist Burtner is interested in experimental electroacoustic music and enjoys performing works which explore the unique acoustical properties of the saxophone. | |
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String X-ing for violin and tape Tom Swafford, violin | Tom Swafford
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My goal in writing String X-ing was to combine my interests in composed and freely improvised music. I recorded myself playing short improvisations (the longest was about 2 minutes) and organized the material by category (pizzicato, glissando, lyrical melody, etc.). I used this palette of musical fragments to create the tape part. The live violin part (which is partly improvised itself) is made up of material derived from transcriptions of the original improvised fragments. The name String X-ing is an abbreviation I used to label one of the categories of musical fragments. I also like the X because it conjures up the name Xenakis, whose use of extended technique for strings inspired me during the composition of this piece. -- Tom Swafford | |
| Tom Swafford is pursuing a Ph.D. in composition at U.C. Berkeley. He grew up in Seattle and studied violin with Bryan Boughten and Karla Kantner. He also was a member of the Seattle Youth Symphony under V. Sokal. In addition to composition, Tom is active as an improviser in the Bay Area. He plays with the not24c improvisation ensemble and has performed with Bay Area improvisers John Schott and Dan Plonsey. In 1997 he received an Eisner Prize, the most prestigious prize in the arts given at U. C. Berkeley, for his orchestra piece Friend or Fiend. His compositions have been performed in Boston, Berkeley and Seattle. | |
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Fracture for tenor saxophone and electronics Gary Scavone, tenor saxophone | Bruce Christian Bennett |
Fracture, for tenor saxophone and four-channel signal processing, was commissioned by Michael F. Zbyszynski during the Fall of 1995. The signal processor used in this work is the ensoniq DP/4, controlled by a Macintosh computer running MAX software. I programmed MAX to change presets on the DP/4 and to control various parameters of the signal processing and the midi-mixer in real time. The performer uses a midi-foot switch to trigger the events stored in the computer. Most of the musical material of Fracture is derived from the opening measure; my intention was to fragment and elaborate the opening gesture over the course of the work in a way that was interactive with the electronics. The signal processing is carefully prepared to respond dynamically to the performer's playing. I was not interested in merely composing a piece for saxophone and electronic accompaniment; rather, I hoped to effectively allow the electronics to influence the musical material of the saxophone itself. For example, nearly two-thirds of the way into the piece, the saxophone line dissolves into noise and an exploration of harmonics; also, at various points throughout the piece the opening motif fragments and is offset by fractions of the beat in play with delays spatialized across all four channels. In this manner I hope to have more fully integrated the saxophone and its electronic complement into a more unified whole. -- Bruce Christian Bennett | |
Bruce Christian Bennett (b. 1968) is a native of Seattle who has lived in San Francisco since 1991. He is a Ph.D. candidate in music composition at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is a student of Richard Felciano and is involved in research and composition at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). He received his M.M. in composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1993, where he studied composition with Andrew Imbrie and Elinor Armer, and his B.A. in music from Reed College in 1990, where he was a student of David Schiff. He is active not only as a composer, but also as a conductor and presenter of new music, an improviser, a vocalist, pianist, and an electro-acoustic musician. His works have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. | |
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iICEsCcRrEeAaMm for four channel tape | Fernando Lopez-Lezcano
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iICEsCcRrEeAaMm is now definitely in beta test. As in the software world, Marketing informs me that in future versions bugs will be squashed and new features will be added for the benefit of all listeners. "iscream" refers to the origin of most of the concrete sound materials used in the piece. Screams and various other utterances from all of Chris Chafe's kids were digitally recorded in all their chilling and quite upsetting beauty. They were latter digitally fed into the "grani" sample grinder, a granular synthesis instrument developed by the composer. "ICECREAM" refers to the reward the kids (and myself) got after the screaming studio session. The piece was composed in the digital domain using Bill Schottstaedt's Common Lisp Music. Many software instruments and quite a few other samples of real world sounds made their way into the bit stream. -- Fernando Lopez-Lezcano | |
| Fernando Lopez-Lezcano (Buenos Aires, 1956) received both a Master in Electronic Engineering (Faculty of Engineering, University of Buenos Aires) and a Master in Music (Carlos Lopez Buchardo National Conservatory, Buenos Aires). He started working with electroacoustic music by building his own analog studio and synthesizers around 1976. After graduating he worked for nine years in industry as microprocessor hardware and software Design Engineer while simultaneously pursuing his interests in electroacoustic music composition. His 1986 piece "Quest" won a mention in the 1990 Bourges Competition. He spent one year at CCRMA as Invited Composer, as part of an exchange program between LIPM in Argentina, CCRMA at Stanford and CRCA at UCSD, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. He latter did research and taught for one year at the Shonan Fujisawa Campus of Keio University, Japan. He is currently Lecturer and Systems Administrator of the computer resources at CCRMA, where he splits his time between the company of good friends, keeping computers and users at CCRMA more or less happy and enjoying the arts of composing music and writing software. His music has been released on CD's and played in the Americas, Europe and East Asia. | |
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Broken Thoughts for MIDI piano and computers John McGinn, piano | Keeril Makan |
Some Thoughts on Broken Thoughts: Technology can extend the acoustic experience. The timbres, gestures, and the very space from which the sound emanates should originate in the acoustic instrument, in this case, the piano. All sounds are based on piano sounds. I was able to separate the percussive, hammer attack from the longer, resonant decay of the struck piano note. All sounds are created in real time in response to the gestures of the pianist. The MIDI piano in combination with both a sampler and a real time, software based, additive synthesis engine make this possible. All the computer-generated sound is localized by placing one speaker under the piano, blending together the sound of the piano and the synthesis. Being unable to continue and develop a train of thought, musical ideas repeat and change, but ultimately their physicality is more compelling than their meaning. As the pianist's gestures become disassociated from the sounds they produce, the music becomes strangely emotive, as memory is foregrounded and the pianist's presence diminishes. Broken Thoughts was realized at CNMAT (The Center for New Music and Audio Technology), with the assistance of Amar Chaudhary, through the support of a Garrett W. McEnerney Grant. Special thanks to Edmund Campion, David Wessel, Matt Wright and Richard Andrews. -- Keeril Makan | |
Keeril Makan has completed his M.A. in Composition at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently in the Ph.D. program, where he has studied with Jorge Liderman, Richard Felciano and Edwin Dugger. In the spring of 1998 he received a grant to work at CNMAT (Center for New Music and Technology), where he studied with Edmund Campion and David Wessel, and created a new work (Broken Thoughts) for MIDI piano and computers. He received a B.M. in Composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and a B.A. in Religion from Oberlin College. Keeril has received awards from the ASCAP Foundation and from the University of California, Berkeley. His music has been performed by the New York New Music Ensemble, the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, the Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players and the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, among others, and has participated in June in Buffalo, the Advanced Master Class at the Aspen Music Festival and the Composers' Workshop in Long Beach. | |
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Toco Madera for wooden percussion duo and computer generated sounds Vanessa Tomlinson, Ivan Manzanilla, percussion | Juan Pampin
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North of San Francisco, near Point Arena, the sea transforms the beach into a beautiful, constantly evolving mile long sculpture. On the beach hundreds of wood logs are washed onto the coast by the Pacific Ocean. I discovered this sculpture (or is it an installation?) while beginning work on Toco Madera. The dense textures created by drift wood of all sizes inspired the from and process of the piece. I realized that my compositional work had to be similar to the role of the sea, which not only placed the objects in textural combinations, but transformed their surfaces and matter to create new complex morphologies. I sculpted new sounds with the computer from a set of nine wooden percussion instruments recorded in the studio. I wanted to keep the rustic quality of wood sounds, to operate on them respecting their soul. This task was achieved using spectral analysis of the instrumental sounds to extrapolate their salient acoustic qualities, and digital filters to carve their matter. Throughout the piece, these transfigured wood sounds interact with the original instrumental set, performed by two percussion players, to create a multi-layered musical space that reflects the textural traits of the natural wooden sculpture. Toco Madera is the second of a cycle of percussion works exploring what philosopher Valentin Ferdinan calls "materiality" of sound. For this work (as for Metal Hurlant, the first piece of this cycle) a qualitative logic that guided the compositional process was inferred from the acoustic structure of the material used. In Toco Madera music becomes the expression of wood. The analysis and spectral transformations of the instruments were done using ATS, spectral modeling software custom designed by me. All the digital signal processing for the piece was performed with Bill Schottstaedt's Common Lisp Music. -- Juan Pampin | |
| Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Juan Pampin has studied composition with Oscar Edelstein and Francisco Kröpfl. He holds a Master in Computer Music from the Conservatoire Nationale Supérieur de Musique de Lyon, where he studied with Denis Lorrain and Philippe Manoury. As a Visiting Composer at CCRMA in 1994, he composed the tape piece "Apocalypse was postponed due to lack of interest" that received an award in the Concours International de Musique éléctroacoustique de Bourges 1995. He has been composer in residence at the LIEM-CDMC studio in Madrid, and guest lecturer at Quilmes National University in Argentina. As a Ph.D student at CCRMA, Juan Pampin has collaborated with professor Jonathan Harvey creating the electronic sounds for his pieces "Ashes Dance Back" (1996), and "Wheel of Emptiness" (1997). As part of his research work he has developed the ATS spectral modeling software used both for Harvey's pieces and for his own compositions. He has created a computer-based version for the live electronics of Karlheinz Stockhausen's piece "Mantra", performed by Tom Schultz and Joan Nagano in the Alea II concert series. In the present, Juan Pampin's main composition project is a cycle of percussion pieces with electronics. This cycle will be completed with a percussion sextet, comissioned by "Les Percussion de Strasbourg" for the "Musiques en Scène" festival in france, to be premiered in March 2000. This work is also the final project for his DMA in composition at Stanford. Mr. Pampin's music includes works for acoustic instruments, computer music and mixed media, that have been performed in the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia. | |
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Spin Cycle/Control Freak for interactive electronics Amar Chaudhary, interactive electronics | Amar Chaudhary
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What began as a series of short pieces became a bit muddled along the way. The result is a single large-scale work in which notes played on toy instruments give way to rhythmic grooves and loops, and finally to a single continuously-changing tone. An unintended unifying factor of this work is the use of sounds from the past: the toy instruments are modeled from actual toys of mine; the final section is reminiscent of early experiments in electronic music; and throughout, the sounds of classic analog synthesizers rear their ugly heads. This performance uses software developed at CNMAT for additive synthesis, resonance modeling and real-time control. I would like to thank Adrian Freed, Matthew Wright and David Wessel for all their help along the way. -- Amar Chaudhary | |
| Amar Chaudhary (b. 1973) has long pursued both musical and technological interests. Amar grew up in suburban New York, where he studied piano and composition with Ruth Schonthal at the Westchester Conservatory of Music, and also spent countless hours playing around with the family computer. Honors for his early musical work include a 1991 National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts award in music, and a 1992 premier of his clarinet quartet at Weill Recital Hall in New York. He received a B.S. with honors in Music and Computer Science from Yale University in 1995, and is now a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. As a researcher at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), he is developing advanced software for music composition and performance. In his bountiful spare time, Amar continues to compose independently. | |
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Three Sketches for cello and electronics Hugh Livingston, cello | Bruce Christian Bennett |
This work in progress for cello and electronics represents the initial sketches of a collaboration between composer Bruce Bennett and cellist Hugh Livingston. These sketches outline a few of the many possibilities for Mr. Livingston's repertoire of extended cello techniques to interact with the MAX/MSP digital signal processing environment. The composer controls live signal processing (ring modulation, digital delays, reverb, harmonization, etc.) of the performance by the cellist. The cellist, in turn, responds to the presence of the live signal processing. The result is that the musical material of the cello, both notated and improvised, is directly influenced by the nature of the signal processing; likewise, the signal processing is directed towards accentuating the musical material and sonic characteristics of the cello. The goal is to present the cello and the electronics as a single, whole, and unified instrument. -- Bruce Christian Bennett | |
Bruce Christian Bennett (b. 1968) is a native of Seattle who has lived in San Francisco since 1991. He is a Ph.D. candidate in music composition at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is a student of Richard Felciano and is involved in research and composition at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). He received his M.M. in composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1993, where he studied composition with Andrew Imbrie and Elinor Armer, and his B.A. in music from Reed College in 1990, where he was a student of David Schiff. He is active not only as a composer, but also as a conductor and presenter of new music, an improviser, a vocalist, pianist, and an electro-acoustic musician. His works have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. | |
the players |
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| ©1999 CCRMA, Stanford University. All Rights Reserved. Created and mantained by Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, nando@ccrma.stanford.edu
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