Séverine Ballon - Chaise Électrique/Electric Chair Music
Date:
Tue, 04/19/2016 - 7:30pm - 9:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Stage
Event Type:
Concert 
“Electric Chair Music”, the working title for Brian Ferneyhough’s landmark Time and Motion Study II for singing cellist and electronics, was written in 1973-76. Already nearly forty years old, where is the medium of violoncello and electronics now? How is a younger generation of composers responding to this most traditional of instruments when confronting it with alien worlds of electronic sound?
Featuring music by:
Aaron Einbond
Franck Bedrossian
Eoin Callery
Alec Hall
and
Bryan Jacobs
Bios:
Séverine Balloon is currently a visitng scholar/artist at CCRMA. More information about her performances, recordings, and other activities can be found at www.severineballon.com/
///
The music of Alec Hall is driven by the use of representational sound materials in order to create destabilizing musical situations out of familiar contexts. Located at the intersection of the absurd and the profound, Hall’s work is as aesthetically detached as it is politically engaged. He has had notable premieres by the Ensemble SurPlus, Ensemble Intercontemporain, the JACK Quartet, ICE, Talea and Ensemble Pamplemousse. He has won six prizes in the SOCAN competition for young composers, and was also a finalist for the Jules Leger Prize in 2011. He was a guest composer at the 2015 Beijing Modern Music Festival, and the Ensemble Contemporain de Montreal recently toured his violin concerto throughout Canada as part of the 2014 Géneration project. Hall’s most recent string quartet, 28 Hours - a reflection on the police killings of African-Americans - was recently selected to represent the Canadian section of the ISCM World Music Days in 2016.
He is the co-founder and present co-artistic director of Qubit, a New York-based group dedicated to presenting events that highlight new and experimental works with electronics. He is also an active violinist, participating most recently in The Art of Violin Playing, an experimental, evening-length work by Alwynne Pritchard, premiered in Norway in September 2015. Alec was educated at McGill University, the University of California, San Diego, and at Columbia University, where he studied with George Lewis, Tristan Murail and Fred Lerdahl.
///
The works of composer/guitarist Bryan Jacobs have been performed in the US and internationally by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Wet Ink Ensemble, Meitar Ensemble, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Talea Ensemble, the pianist Xenia Pestova and more. He has received awards and commissions from La Muse en Circuit, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Bourges International Electroacoustic Music competition, MATA, Centre for Computational Musicology and Computer Music, and RTÉ Lyric FM, and his work is available on a recording put out by La Muse en Circuit. Jacobs’ teachers include Denys Bouliane, Fred Lerdahl, Fabien Lévy, George Lewis, and Tristan Murail. He holds graduate degrees from McGill University and Columbia University.
////
Aaron Einbond’s work explores the intersection of instrumental music, sound installation, field recording, and technology, bringing the spontaneity of live performance together with computer interactivity. His recent work has focused on audio transcription as the center of a creative process bridging composition, improvisation, and interpretation, questioning the thresholds of perception between instrument, stage, room, and loudspeaker. Recently Chicago-based Ensemble Dal Niente released his portrait album Without Words on Carrier Records, and SWR Experimentalstudio produced his Giga-Hertz prizewinning Cartographies for piano with two performers and electronics for the 47-loudspeaker Klangdom at ZKM in Karlsruhe. Upcoming projects include a new work for cellist Séverine Ballon and the TAK Ensemble, a concert-installation for Yarn/Wire, and a collaboration with OperaLab Berlin. He is Co-Artistic Director of Qubit New Music Initiative with whom he curates and produces experimental media in New York.
Einbond has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and an Artistic Research Residency at IRCAM in Paris; taught at Columbia University, the University of Huddersfield, and Harvard University; and currently teaches at City University London. He was born in New York in 1978 and studied at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, the University of California Berkeley, and IRCAM with teachers including Mario Davidovsky, Julian Anderson, Edmund Campion, and Philippe Leroux.
///
After initial studies in orchestration, and analysis at the Regional Conservatory of Paris, Franck Bedrossian studied composition closely with Allain Gaussin. He continued his studies at the Paris Conservatory (seminars with Gerard Grisey and later Marco Stroppa), where upon graduation he received unanimously the first prize for Analysis, and the first prize in Composition. In 2002–2003 he was in the IRCAM ‘cursus’ for computer music and composition, taught by Philippe Leroux, Brian Ferneyhough, Tristan Murail, and Philippe Manoury. He also studied with Helmut Lachenmann at Centre Acanthes in 1999 and at the Ensemble Modern Academy in 2004.
His works have been played in Europe and recently in the USA by ensembles such as l’ Itineraire, 2e2m, Ictus, Court-Circuit, Cairn, Ensemble Modern, Alternance, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Orchestre National de Lyon, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Danel string quartet, the Diotima string quartet. His works have been performed at festivals such as Agora, Resonances, Manca, the RTE Living Music Festival, l’Itinéraire de nuit, Ars Musica, Nuova Consonanza, Le Printemps des Arts de Monte-Carlo,le Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence, Fabbrica Europa, and Wien Modern. In 2001, he received a grant from the Meyer Foundation, and in 2004 won the Hervé-Dugardin prize of Sacem. In 2005 the Institut de France (Académie des Beaux-Arts) awarded him the “Prix Pierre Cardin” for music composition.
Franck Bedrossian has also received the young composer prize from Sacem in 2007. He was a Rome Prize Fellow at the Villa Medicis from April 2006 to April 2008. Since September 2008 he has been Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of California-Berkeley. His works are published by Editions Bilaudot.
///
For more information on Eoin Callery please see - eoincallerysound.com
FREE
Open to the Public
