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Over the past 20 years I have become increasingly receptive to the mystery of the elusive, the intangible... a distinct perception of the ineffable as experienced in my daily life. ...as it flies... is by no coincidence my first work for tape solo, a musical medium which is for me the most direct access to the world of imagination. The sound sources I have used are words extracted from a poem called "Eternity" by the English visionary, poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827). All the sounds heard in this work derive from a female - spoken - voice reciting the Blake's poem.

...as it flies... was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation, New York, and premiered at Engine 27 Sound Gallery, 173 Franklin St., New York City on 6th-9th February 2001.

The composer wishes to acknowledge Marianne Hall for the recording of the Blake's poem and all the vocal sources, David Mason for helping in the crucial stage of the tape production and Jody Elff at Engine27, New York City, for his enthusiastic assistance in the final realisation of the 8-channel version in February 2001.

The complete text of the poem "Eternity" is the following:

He who binds to himself a joy
does the wingéd life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
lives in Eternity's sunrise

This text has been explored in three ways: i) in its entirety (also as rhythmic units); ii) as single extracted words; iii) in individual sounds (i.e. phonemes, vowels and consonants, and the breathing of the speaking voice).

© John Palmer, 2001

John Palmer started playing the piano at the age of 6 and composing at the age of 15. He graduated in Piano Studies from the Conservatory of Music in Lucerne, Switzerland, having undertaken composition and experimental improvisation with Vinko Globokar and studied with Edison Denisov at the International MusikFestWoche Lucerne. He undertook postgraduate studies at Trinity College of Music, London. Further studies include composition with Vinko Globokar and Jonathan Harvey. He also completed a PhD doctorate in composition at City University, London.

In the mid-seventies he composed and performed as a pianist and keyboard player and directed several groups of experimental music and free-jazz. Since the mid-eighties he has focused on instrumental, orchestral, vocal and chamber music, and in the early nineties he extended his compositional interests with electroacoustic resources. One of the main preoccupations of John Palmer's music is the subtlety of timbral transformations. His compositional techniques vary from work to work, from the application of vigorous and precise methodologies to the most spontaneous unfolding of musical ideas based on pure intuition. From 1990 to 1995 Palmer taught at the Oxford University. From 1995 to 2000 he was a Senior Lecturer in Composition at the University of Hertfordshire, England, and since 2000 he is Professor of Music at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart, Germany. He has received international awards in London, Tokyo, Bourges, Lucerne and Klagenfurt. His music has been recorded on the Mnemosyne, Electroshock and Living Artists labels, two CDs entirely dedicated to his music have been released on the Sargasso label, London. Palmer is also active as a musicologist and his recent book on Jonathan Harvey's Bhakti has been recently published by the Edwin Mellen Press.

Sopra/Sotto, composed in 1999, is a work for amplified violin and real-time computer processing. The computer-realized sounds result almost entirely from the live input of the violin which is then processed in software in "real-time" using the SuperCollider language on a Macintosh computer. Since much of the computer part is "in-sync" with the violin, the effect is often that of a violin with an extended range and with the possibility of sounding many notes at one time. There are also moments of counterpoint between violin and computer which are also created by processing the audio signal of the violin with the computer.

This piece is, in certain ways, a return to a style that I had left for a number of years, and it draws ideas and techniques from a solo viola piece, Stream, that I composed in 1986. The opening gesture of the current work paraphrases the end of the earlier one, closing the gap in time between the two pieces.

-Richard Karpen

Richard Karpen is Professor of Music at the University of Washington in Seattle where he has been teaching composition and computer music since 1989. He is also Director the UW Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media. Karpen's works are widely performed in the U.S. and internationally. He has been the recipient of many awards, grants and prizes including those from the NEA, the ASCAP Foundation, the Bourges Contest in France, and the Luigi Russolo Foundation in Italy. Fellowships and grants for work outside of the U.S. include a Fulbright to Italy, Stanford University's Prix de Paris to work at IRCAM, and a Leverhulme Visiting Fellowship to the United Kingdom. He received his doctorate in composition from Stanford University, where he also worked at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He is a native of New York where he studied composition with Charles Dodge, Gheorghe Costinescu, and Morton Subotnick. In addition to Karpen's work in electronic media, for which he is primarily known, he has composed symphonic and chamber works for a wide variety of ensembles. Karpen is acknowledged as one of the leading international figures in Computer Music for both his pioneering compositions and his work in developing computer applications for music composition and sound design. Along with numerous concert and radio performances, his works have been set to dance by groups such as the Royal Danish Ballet and the Guandong Dance Company of China. Recent commissions include those from Swedish Radio, The Northwest Chamber Chorus, and the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges. Karpen's compositions have been recorded on CD by Le Chant du Monde/Cultures Electroniques, Wergo, Centaur, Neuma, and DIFFUSION i MeDIA.

Eric Rynes has given many national and world premieres, in venues stretching from UCSD to Berlin. These include the June in Buffalo Festival, Internationales Bodensee Festival (Konstanz), ICMC 2001 (Havana), SEAMUS 2000 (U. North Texas), and the Rotterdam Music Biennial. He has won concerto competitions in Chicago and Seattle, playing Shostakovich and Bartók. He is currently completing his M.M. in violin as a student of Ronald Patterson at the University of Washington, where he has served as concertmaster, violin instructor, researcher at CARTAH, and violinist of the Contemporary Group. He previously earned B.A. and M.S. degrees in physics from the Universities of Chicago and Illinois, and has also studied privately in Paris with Maryvonne Le Dizès of the Ensemble InterContemporain.

The Mouseketier was built in the summer of 2001, the most recent electro-acoustic sound-sculpture in a lineage that begins in 1990 with the Mousetrap, and subsequently includes the Mini-Mouse, the Duplex Mausphon, the Midi-Mouse, and 6 Micro Mice (constructed, incidentally, for the Paul Dresher Ensemble).

The Mouseketier consists of three amplified soundboards--pink, blue, and yellow triangles with piezo contact pickups--arranged as tiers. In addition to its three principal pickups are five additional ones. Although not implemented at present, they work as switches to trigger external processes or computer functions. Mounted on the soundboards (the three tiers) are junk, hardware, and found objects (combs, squeeky wheels, threaded rods, door stops, nails, springs, astroturf, ratchets, strings stretched through pulleys, and twisted bronze braising rod) which are played with the hands, chopsticks, plectrums, a violin bow, and wind-up toys. The resulting sound may be modified with a tangle of external digital and analog signal processors. The instrument sounds great, but it is intended equally for its visual allure.

Annoyed by the transportation and set-up challenges associated with the behemoth Mousetrap, I built the Mouseketier as a kind of travel model. Not only does it set up in minutes (instead of hours), its flight case--meeting the airline specifications--was designed first. Thanks go to my wife Joan for contributing the Mouseketier's basic architecture and name.

-Mark Applebaum

The Quadrachord is an instrument invented in collaboration with instrument designer Daniel Schmidt as part of my music theater work Sound Stage. This work has a "set" is made up entirely of invented large-scale musical instruments/sound sculptures and was premiered by the ensemble Zeitgeist in Minneapolis in June of 2001.

The instrument has a total string length of 160 inches, four strings of differing gauges but of equal length and an electric bass pick-up next to each of the two bridges. The instrument can be plucked like a guitar, bowed like cello, played like a slide guitar, prepared like a piano and hammered on like a percussion instrument. Because of the extremely long string length (relative to our conventional bowed and plucked instruments), the instrument is capable of easily and accurately playing the harmonic series up to the 22nd partial. In the course of composing the music for Sound Stage, I became particularly intrigued with the instrument's wide range of potential sounds and timbres, it's intonational possibilities as well as how responsive these sounds were to manipulations within the realm of digital signal processing. In addition to its inclusion in Sound Stage, I have used the instrument in the score for In The Name, a score performed live with Allyson Green Dance.

This duet with long-time friend Mark Applebaum represents the first time I have agreed to do a largely improvised performance since the late 1970's.

-Paul Dresher

Mark Applebaum received his Ph.D. in composition from the University of California at San Diego where he studied principally with Brian Ferneyhough. His solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, electro-acoustic, and electronic work has been performed throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia with notable premieres at the Darmstadt summer sessions. He has received commissions from Betty Freeman, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Zeitgeist, MANUFACTURE (Tokyo), the Jerome Foundation, and the American Composers Forum, among others. In 1997 Applebaum received the American Music Center's Stephen Albert Award and an artist residency fellowship at the Villa Montalvo artist colony in Northern California.

Applebaum is also active as a jazz pianist and builds electro-acoustic instruments out of junk, hardware, and found objects for use as both compositional and improvisational tools. His music can be heard on recordings on the Innova label. Applebaum is assistant professor of composition and theory at Stanford University. Prior to his current appointment, he taught at UCSD, Mississippi State University, and Carleton College.

Paul Dresher is an internationally active composer noted for his ability to integrate diverse musical influences into his own coherent style. He is pursuing many forms, including experimental opera/music theater, chamber and orchestral composition, live instrumental electro-acoustic chamber music performances, instrument invention, and scores for theater and dance.

His own ensemble produces experimental opera and performs concerts as the Electro-Acoustic Band utilizing a hybrid orchestration combining acoustic and electronic instrumentation. The group regularly commissions works from some of today's most innovative composers.

He has received commissions from the Library of Congress, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, SF Symphony, Spoleto Festival USA and the Walker Art Center. His works have been performed at the New York Philharmonic, BAM's Next Wave Festival, Minnesota Opera, Arts Summit Indonesia '95, Festival Interlink in Japan, and five New Music America Festivals.

The title refers to the pattern of trigrams in the I Ching known as the Primal Arrangement, based on pairs of opposites, such as Heaven and Earth, Wind and Thunder, Water and Fire, Mountain and Lake. In the musical work, this progression takes place in 8 sections, each ninety seconds in length, where each pair of four channels depicts the energy generated by these oppositions. When diffused through speakers arranged in a cube, the upper and lower sets of speakers reflect this relationship. The work is the complement to the Sequence of Later Heaven (1993) which depicts the trigrams as a periodic cycle.

The work, as with its counterpart, is entirely based on musical instruments found in Pacific Rim cultures, including the Javanese gamelan gongs, the Philippine patangok, the khaen from South-East Asia, the Korean kayageum, the Chinese guzheng and tam-tam, Japanese meditation bells, bamboo brushes, the rosewood keyed marimba from Central America, the Peruvian bombo and box drum, and the Chilean rainstick. These sounds are mixed together to form chords whose complex spectra become more apparent when the sounds are digitally resonated and/or stretched in time.

The composer is grateful to Sal Ferreras, Russell Hartenberger and Randy Raine-Reusch who provided the source material for this work, along with the Simon Fraser University gamelan, Kyai Madu Sari (The Venerable Essence of Honey). The work was commissioned with the assistance of the Canada Council by ACREQ.

The work was realized using the composer's PODX system which incorporates the DMX-1000 Digital Signal Processor controlled by a PDP Micro-11 computer. The principal signal processing technique involves digital resonators, time stretching and harmonizing of the sampled sounds with software for real-time granular synthesis and processing developed by the composer in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. The eight-channel spatial diffusion was realized with Harmonic Functions' DM-8 signal processor.

Barry Truax is a Professor in both the School of Communication and the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University where he teaches courses in acoustic communication and electroacoustic music. He has worked with the World Soundscape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, and has published a book Acoustic Communication dealing with all aspects of sound and technology. As a composer, Truax is best known for his work with the PODX computer music system which he has used for tape solo works and those which combine tape with live performers or computer graphics. In 1991 his work Riverrun was awarded the Magisterium at the International Competition of Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, France, a category open only to electroacoustic composers of 20 or more years experience. He is also the recipient of one of the 1999 Awards for Teaching Excellence at Simon Fraser University.

This is a performance work which integrates computer-generated music with video, dance, and computer graphics. The image of the performer/protagonist appears as a silhouette, sometimes stenciled from graphics, and at other times from videotape images, conveying how all the horrors of the world are experienced, quite literally, within herself. It is a cry of anguish at the realization of all the dark places of the human soul, of hunger and hopelessness, of man's inhumanity to man, and of the relentless desire to control, whatever the cost. The protagonist finally escapes into the cosmos, where she becomes one with the infinite.

The visual aspect of the piece is controlled by an Amiga 3000 computer running the CyberScape software, which allows the performer's image to become an active part of the program. The image processing also uses a genlock, a video camera, and a digital video playback device. The performer must synchronize her movements with the independent videotape, and with the music, which is generated as a sequence in Performer. The title appears as one word in deference to the DOS language in which the script is written.

This work was presented at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) held in Hong Kong in August, 1996.

-Sylvia Pengilly

Sylvia Pengilly is a composer of both electronic and acoustic music who is fascinated by the correlation between what the ear hears and what the eye sees. Willingly seduced into the worlds of video, computer graphics, and dance, her current works combine all these elements in a unique realtime multimedia performance situation which amplifies the theme of each work by introducing it to the audience through the eye as well as the ear.

She is professor emeritus of the College of Music at Loyola University, New Orleans, where she taught theory and composition for many years, and also founded and directed the electronic music composition studio. She holds the DMA degree in composition from the College/Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati, and the MA degree in composition from Kent State University. Her work has been widely presented throughout the United States and abroad.

The more time passes, the more I am fascinated with putting together musical ideas that are on the surface seemingly unrelated in order to see how they effect and transform each other, how their interactions generate form building energies. The tensions from their contrasts, the rhythms within each event, how each idea unfolds and develops, the rhythms with which the events succeed or interrupt each other... all these elements form the dynamic of my work. They are ensembles of things that generate a world of complexities, intertwinings, symmetries and asymmetries, turbulence, provocations, moods, much like the multifarious life experiences - both day to day and in the long run. The result is a unique form, a completed blend, rather like a reflection of a series (a collection) of events in life that you perceive as a local whole.

The relationship between the piano and the computer generated electronic sounds is, on the other hand, rigorously worked out with extreme precision. The pitch structure provides the basis for the sounds, or vice versa a certain kind of sound yields the basis for the intervals and their specific pitches. And they too mutually influence each other. A continuous cooperative "a due".

The electronic sounds were generated entirely by the composer's MUSIC30 program for digital sound synthesis running on the Spirit30 accelerator board for PC, by Sonitech Int'l (Wellesley, MA.).

The title of the work comes from an essay by Michel Serres, which captures rather nicely the sense of the music, the sense of the composition.

"Here is the complement of the model. Given a flow of atoms, by the declination, the first tangent to the given curve, and afterward by the vortex, a relatively stable thing is constituted. It stays in disequilibrium, ready to break, then to die and disappear but nonetheless resistant by its established conjunctions, between the torrential flow from the upstream currents and the river flowing downstream to the sea. It is a stationary turbulence."

- Michel Serres, on Lucretius

First Tangent to the Given Curve has been recorded by Daniele Roi on a Capstone CD.

-James Dashow

James Dashow has had commissions, awards and grants from the Bourges International Festival of Experimental Music, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Linz Ars Electronica Festival, the Fromm Foundation, the Biennale di Venezia, the USA National Endowment for the Arts, RAI (Italian National Radio), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller Foundation, Il Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte (Montepulciano, Italy), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Prague Musica Nova, and the Harvard Musical Association of Boston. Most recently (june, 2000), he was awarded the prestigious Prix Magistere at the 30th Festival International de Musique et d'Art Sonore Electroacoustiques in Bourges.

A pioneer in the field of computer music, Dashow was one of the founders of the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale at the University of Padova, and has taught at MIT, Princeton University and the Centro para la Difusion di Musica Contemporanea in Madrid; he lectures and conducts master classes extensively in the U.S. and Europe. He served as the first vice-president of the International Computer Music Association, and was for many years the producer of the radio program "Il Forum Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea" for Italian National Radio.

He has written theoretical and analytical articles for many professional journals including Perspectives of New Music, the Computer Music Journal, La Musica, and Interface, and is the author of the MUSIC30 language for digital sound synthesis.

Dashow makes his home in the Sabine Hills north of Rome.

Ching-Wen Chao, born in Taiwan in 1973, is currently pursuing a DMA degree in composition in the music department at Stanford University. Recently her compositions have been awarded in Asia and also performed in several major US cities and in Taiwan, China, Canada, Korea and Indonisia. In addition to her study in composition, her prominent interest in piano performance had been showed in her national awards and her collaborative performances in over 160 concerts during her college years in Taiwan. In recent years in the US, she has premiered many new music works in ALEA and CCRMA concert series and she has collaborated with local groups such as the Redwood Symphony Orchestra.