CCRMA Concert at FEMF11  

If I were to pick a favorite jazz album of all time, it would probably be Sonny Rollins' "Saxophone Colossus" (Prestige, 1956). One thing that is so exciting about this recording is the sophisticated rhythmic interplay between Sonny Rollins and Max Roach on drums. St. Thomas Phase is a celebration of the rhythmic vitality of this music. It is both a tribute to and an extension of rhythmic tendencies perceived in this (improvised!) recording.

Rhythmic phasing relationships are formed between several characteristic percussive drum and sax motives. Each voice is placed against itself in multiple layers of nested 9/10th time. These 9:10 phase sets are then set against one another creating a multilayered polyphonic phase structure. While possibly mathematically complex, the resulting music should be completely transparent to the listener who can simply enjoy its fun and heat.

Matthew Burtner spent his early childhood in a small village on the Arctic Ocean of Alaska, and on fishing boats on Alaska's Southwest coast. As a composer his work is guided by an interest in natural acoustic processes, and a focus on music as the sonic activation of imagination through environment.

Currently Burtner is Assistant Professor of Composition and Computer Music at the University of Virginia where he is Associate Director of the Virginia Center for Computer Music (VCCM). He is also completing Doctoral work at Stanford University's CCRMA. Previous studies in computer music and composition include work at Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Conservatory (MM, 1997), Xenakis's UPIC Studios (1993-94) and Tulane University (BFA 1993).

Burtner has written for a wide variety of ensembles and media with commissions from Spectri Sonori Ensemble, MiN Ensemble, Phyllis Bryn Julson and Mark Markham, the Peabody Trio, Trio Ascolto, Noise Ensemble, and others. His commercial CD releases include "Incantations" (DACO Records 102, Germany), "Portals of Distortion", (Innova Records 526, USA), and "Arctic Contrasts", (Euridice 012, Norway).

The Captured Shadow pursues a theatrical aspect of live electronic music. Inspired by novels of Fitzgerald's, the piece experiments with the representation of literal meanings in music, such as "betrayal" and "emptiness." The work utilizes speech-like materials and the pitch flexibility of the soprano trombone to present a vague story-telling voice. This narrator, though often obscure, creates a context for the musical representation of literary ideas. I am indebted to Chris Burns for his help in every aspect of this work.

Ching-Wen Chao is currently pursuing a DMA degree in composition in the music department at Stanford University. She also studies at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Recently her String Quartet No. 2 was awarded the first prize of the Young Composers Competition in Asian Composers Leaque and of the Music Taipei Composition Competition. She has collaborated with ensembles such as the California Ear Unit, St. Lawrence String Quartet, Ju Percussion Group and members of the Eighth Blackbird, and her works have been performed in Taiwan, Korea, China, and several major US cities.

Geidai (Tokyo, 2000). This is a soundscape of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music on a typical winter week. During weekdays students are busy practicing and attending classes but in the weekend, great parties of more than musical nature are obligatory subject. As the most prestigious music school in Japan it also houses courses in traditional performance arts and instruments, thus we hear Chopin next to a Gagaku orchestra, Verdi resonating against the walls of the Noh Theater, among others. The sound localization effects were achieved using a custom piece of code written in CLM.

Rodrigo Segnini (Caracas, 1968) believes that developments in sound localization together with the ubiquity of digital entertainment are the next big thing. His creative agenda is focused on two main issues: creative uses of computers in the compositional manipulation of musical parameters, and a search for identity. The latter quest has led him into a journey of personal discovery and academic achievement over three continents. He holds a BA in Arts from the Central University of Venezuela, MAs in Computer Music from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, and in Composition from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in Japan. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford University in California.

Strata 2, for flute and interactive computer programming, is a study in obscuring and defining harmonic motion, obstructing and establishing rhythmic pulse, animating surface detail, and signal processing with modulation techniques.

The sustained notes in the piece are animated with trills and vibratos of three different speeds, flutter tongues, and sung pitches, which create interference with the timbre of the flute.

The timbre of the flute is further processed with computer programming, using amplitude- and ring-modulation, and spatialized around four speakers.

Charles Nichols received his Bachelor of Music degree in violin performance from the Eastman School of Music, and his Master of Music degree in composition from the Yale University School of Music. Currently, he is working on his Ph.D. dissertation, engineering a virtual violin bow controller human-computer interface, composing and performing interactive computer music, and serving as the associate technical director, at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University.

Realpolitik and Action... are two short self-contained sections which combined form an eight-minute piece. Both sections share sound material and sound processing techniques.

All the material for the two sections was produced using ecological models. Action... features the sound of a lit match as its basic source material, and makes use of different models of fire. Realpolitik shares elements with Action... and introduces synthetic cracking woods, shattered glass, and explosion sounds. The basic structural process exploited in this piece is the emergence of macro properties by the interaction of lower-level elements. This process can be heard in the fire sound models of Action... and in the explosion events of Realpolitik. Both models use similar short grains extracted from cracking wood sounds, but their meso-temporal patterns are designed to obtain strikingly different perceptual results.

This piece was composed during the Belgrade bombing. It is dedicated to all the victims of the last decade.

Damián Keller. Born in Buenos Aires. Doing work at CCRMA. Recent works: touch'n'go / toco y me voy [Enhanced CD earsay.com], Compositional processes from an ecological perspective [LMJ Vol. 10], Social and perceptual processes in the installation The Trade [Organised Sound 5(2)]. Projects: Paititi, a multimodal journey to El Dorado [www-ccrma.stanford.edu/~dkeller], ecological models [www.sfu.ca/~dkeller].

Fabrication begins with a series of fragments: isolated elements of trumpet technique, like breathing and tonguing, are presented divorced from ordinary playing. The acoustic study of the trumpet continues with other splinters of material. Natural harmonics are used to produce distortions of pitch and timbre, and the performer creates further acoustic disruptions with mutes, and by singing into the instrument while playing. Eventually a more normal trumpet technique emerges from the shards, and a kind of calm is achieved. If the piece begins by metaphorically constructing the trumpet from the components of technique, it ends with a more literal disassembly.

While Fabrication is obsessed with trumpet acoustics, it is entirely dependent upon electronics. Many of the sounds used in the piece are too quiet to be heard in performance. And so the microphone serves as a microscope, revealing otherwise inaudible sounds. The electronics gradually take on an active role as well - transforming and extending the sound of the trumpet beyond its acoustic limits.

Christopher Burns is a composer influenced by the diverse worlds of computer music and traditional Indonesian music. His interest in electronics dates from an early stint as a rock musician; he first encountered Balinese music while a student at Yale University, where he was a founding member of the gong kebyar ensemble Gamelan Jagat Anyar. Christopher is currently a doctoral student at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University, where he studies composition with Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, and Jonathan Berger.

In a sense of color, how much blue can be made tone of dark-grass-green with yellow, and how much the same blue can be made yellowish green with the same yellow? What makes it possible to think certain ways, and to not think other ways?

Ontological division has been an issue for the composer for last couple of years. Madness and Civilisation (Folie et Deraison ) of M. Foucault has driven the composer to portray the individual mirror image of Self and Other through the fundamental emotions of human being, which include at least these four: Pleasure, Anger, Lament, and Joie (Hee-Ro-Ae-Rok) in the piece, Idiosyncrasy. The composition draws on 3 poems as different languages, both using the essential meaning of the words and liberating their phonetics from the lexical hindrances of a given time and place. Many thanks for Sinae Kim who collaborates for video images, and also for Takayuki Nakano who lets me use a part of his poem.

*Japanese text in Anger: "Noroi ga koishii" (Spellbound), Takayuki Nakano
*Korean text in Lament: "Na-nun No Da" (I am you) 130-1, Ji Woo Hwang
*French text in Pleasure: "Oui-dire" from Matiere rire, Raymond Devos

Seungyon-Seny Lee was born in Seoul, Korea. She has studied composition at Boston University, where she had M.M. degree and she also studied with Barry Vercoe at Media Lab MIT. In D.M.A Program at Stanford University, she studied with Jonathan Harvey, Chris Chafe, and Brian Ferneyhough. Her Instrumental pieces and her collaborating multimedia projects which are animation, documentary film, dance, video and installation have been performed in U.S., Europe and Korea at festival such as Internationale Musikinstitut Darmstadt, XIII CIM l'Aquila, CCRMA, Cantor Center of visual Arts at Stanford, Sundance Film Festival in San Francisco, Centre Culturel Franco-Japonais in Paris, Seoul International Computer Music Festival, Primavera en La Habana, and Agora festival 2002 at IRCAM. She was one of 10 composers for a Year-long Course in Composition and Computer Music at IRCAM 2000-2001. As a resident artist, she has been in Paris at Cite Internationale des Arts program and Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, CA.