Pamela Z + fff ensemble
LIVESTREAM
Register here for an after-concert panel with Pamela Z and the members of the fff ensemble, joined by special guests Margaret Schedel and Jocelyn Ho. The discussion will begin at 6pm PDT and will focus on performance with technology from a feminist perspective, including the Women's Labor project.
Women's Labor is a feminist project by Jocelyn Ho with Margaret Schedel and Matthew Blessing that repurposes old domestic tools to become new musical instruments. Using embedded technologies, these domestic-tool-turned instruments are explored in public installations, community workshops, commissioned new compositions, and concert performance. Traditionally relegated to the private sphere, Women's Labor interrogates domesticity through public engagement and performative spectacle.
This event is made possible thanks to the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning made available by the Office of the Vice President for the Arts, as well as the entire Denning residency team, staff in the Department of Music and at CCRMA.
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist working with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. She uses MAX MSP and Isadora software on a MacBook Pro along with custom MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound and image with physical gestures. Her performances range in scale from small concerts in galleries to large-scale multi-media works in theaters and concert halls. In addition to her performances, she has a growing body of installation works using multi-channel sound and video.
Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan – performing in international festivals and venues including Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center (NY); La Biennale di Venezia; San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox, the Japan Interlink Festival; Other Minds (San Francisco); and Pina Bausch Tanztheater's Festival (Wuppertal, Germany). She has received commissions to compose live and fixed-media scores for choreographers and film/video artists. Her large-scale, performance works, including Memory Trace, Baggage Allowance, Voci, and Gaijin, have been presented at venues like the Kitchen in New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Theater Artaud (Z Space) in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, as well as at theaters in Washington D.C. and Budapest. Her one-act opera Wunderkabinet inspired by the Museum of Jurassic Technology (co-composed with Matthew Brubeck) premiered at The LAB in San Francisco, and was presented at REDCAT in LA and Open Ears Festival in Canada. She has shown work in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum (New York); Savvy Contemporary (Berlin); the Tang Museum (Saratoga Springs NY); the Dakar Biennale (Sénégal); Krannert Art Museum (IL), and the Kitchen (NY).
Ms. Z has received commissions from chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Bang On A Can All Stars; Ethel, Del Sol Quartet, California E.A.R. Unit; Left Coast Chamber Ensemble; and Empyrean Ensemble. She is currently composing a work for soprano Julia Bullock and the San Francisco Symphony. She has collaborated with a wide range of artists including Joan La Barbara, Joan Jeanrenaud, Brenda Way (ODC Dance), Miya Masaoka, Jeanne Finley + John Muse, Shinichi Iova Koga (Inkboat), and Luciano Chessa. She has participated in New Music Theatre’s John Cage festivals, and has performed with The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Her interactive web-based work Baggage Allowance can be viewed at baggageallowance.tv where it is permanently installed.
Pamela Z is the recipient of many honors and awards including the Rome Prize, the United States Artists fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; the Creative Capital Fund; the MAP Fund, the ASCAP Music Award; an Ars Electronica honorable mention; and the NEA Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
photo: rubra (courtesy of Ars Electronica)
The fff ensemble is an interdisciplinary feminist improv collective dedicated to supporting collaboration in the Bay Area and beyond.
Jocelyn Ho’s compositions have been featured internationally, including in France, Germany, Australia, and the USA. Her most recent works include multi-disciplinary collaborations with software developers and visual artists featured at the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, Stony Brook Faculty Art Exhibition, and the University of Florida Art Gallery. As a performing scholar, Jocelyn Ho has published and presented papers at international conferences in the area of performance analysis, embodiment theory, Debussy studies, and mathematics and music. She received her Doctor of Musical Arts from Stony Brook University, where her teachers include Gilbert Kalish (piano) and Arthur Haas (historical keyboards). Jocelyn Ho is an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at UCLA.
Margaret Anne Schedel is a composer and cellist specializing in the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media whose works have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. While working towards a DMA in music composition at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, her interactive multimedia opera, A King Listens, premiered at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and was profiled by apple.com.
She holds a certificate in Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and has studied composition with Mara Helmuth, Cort Lippe and McGregor Boyle. She is a joint author of Electronic Music and recently edited an issue of Organised Sound on the aesthetics of sonification. Her work has been supported by the Presser Foundation, Centro Mexicano para la Música y les Artes Sonoras, and Meet the Composer. She has been commissioned by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra and the percussion ensemble Ictus. In 2009 she won the first Ruth Anderson Prize for her interactive installation Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair.
Her research focuses on gesture in music, the sustainability of technology in art, and sonification of data. She sits on the boards of 60×60, the International Computer Music Association, and is a regional editor for Organised Sound. From 2009-2014 she helped run Devotion, a Williamsburg Gallery focused on the intersection of art, science, new media, and design. In 2010 she co-chaired the International Computer Music Conference, and in 2011 she co-chaired the Electro-Acoustic Music Studies Network Conference. She ran SUNY’s first Coursera Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), an introduction to computational arts.
As an Associate Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, she serves as Co-Director of Computer Music and is the Director of cDACT, the consortium for digital art, culture and technology.
