Elizabeth Anderson gave the avant-première of her octophonic acousmatic work Solar Winds…and Beyond at the CIME Festival 2014 at the University of North Texas on October 4, 2014. A second avant-première of Solar Winds…and Beyond took place at the X BIMESP 2014 Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Following, Solar Winds was performed at the Bernoaola Festival 2014, Espacio Sinkro, Bilbao, Spain on October 26, 2014. The world première of Solar Winds…and Beyond took place on February 11, 2015 during the concert Parmerud et Créations at the L’Espace Senghor in Brussels Belgium. The work will also be performed at the Sonorities Festival ‘Fractured Narratives’ at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s Unversity, Belfast, Northern Ireland on April 23, 2015.
Brian Belet presented a project audio demonstration followed by a formal paper at the 1st Web Audio Conference, IRCAM (in the aptly named Igor Stravinsky Room), Paris, France, on January 26 & 27, 2015 (http://wac.ircam.fr/). “Birds of a Feather (Les Oiseaux de Même Plumage): Dynamic Soundscapes using Real-time Manipulation of Locally Relevant Birdsongs,” co-authored with Dr. William Walker (Mozilla Corporation), is published in the conference proceedings. Drs. Walker and Belet also presented their paper at Mozilla’s corporate headquarters in Mt. View, CA, January 16, 2015.
More details are posted on Dr. Belet’s web site, see: www.BeletMusic.com
Christopher DeLaurenti performed with the New England Phonographers Union at Hearing Landscape Critically, a transdisciplinary conference at Harvard University on January 16, 2015. Last fall, his Silences normalized from the complete organ works of Olivier Messiaen (Disc 2) premiered at the Helicotrema Festival in Milan. A specially commissioned revised version of N30: Who guards the Guardians aired on Soundproof, a weekly radio show devoted to the audio arts on Australia’s Radio National. Christopher has just completed the installation of a recording studio at the College of William & Mary.
After finishing his term of 4 plus years as the director of the FIU School of Music, Orlando Jacinto Garcia accepted the position of Composer in Residence for the School this past May. Between April 30 and January 12 Garcia was on a research assignment completing 8 new works while realizing artistic residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Casa Zia Lina on the island of Elba Italy, and the Millay Colony in upstate NY. In addition between September and November he presented conferences about his work, conducted his music, and attended performances of his acoustic and electro-acoustic compositions at festivals and concert series in Mexico City, Merida, and Morelia, Mexico, York and Manchester universities in the UK, and Madrid, Spain. In April and May he will be in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation Center in Genoa, Italy and later in August at the VICC center in Visby, Sweden completing new works for chamber ensemble and for soloist and electronics. Garcia’s most recent solo CD was released on the Toccata Classics label this past September and features the Malaga Philharmonic with Jose Serebrier conducting.
Scott L. Miller was in Tallinn, Estonia, for the Fall 2014 semester, teaching electronic music composition as a Fulbright Scholar at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. While there, he presented a four concert series of his music. The first concert in the series was his acousmatic and ecosystemic music; the second, third, and fourth concerts featured him as composer and performer along with visiting musical collaborators Nathan Hanson (saxophones), Pat O’Keefe (clarinet/bass clarinet), and Anne La Berge (flute/electronics). Other concerts featuring his music include a concert at Splendor, in Amsterdam; a premier for organ and interactive electronics (Electro-organic Ecosystem for Lübeck) and the premier of a collaborative work with Anne La Berge (A Lovely Gesture) at KISS 2014 in Lübeck, Germany; the performance of Jardins Mécaniques by ensemble U:, in Tallinn, and the performance of Every Problem is a Nail at ICMC 2014, in Athens. As a performer and improviser of real-time electronics, Miller appeared on the Improtest series twice, first with Taavi Kerikmäe and Michel Doneda in a performance at Niguliste Church and then in concert with Pat O’Keefe; he also presented an ambient noise set with guitarist Ted Parker at Philly Joe’s Jazz Klubi. He completed his visit in Estonia with lecture/performances of his music at the Heino Eller Music School in Tartu, and at the Pärnu Days of Contemporary Music.
Steve Ricks’s composition Medusa in Fragments (2011), for amplified piano, video, and quadrophonic sound, has received several performances this year as part of Keith Kirchoff’s “The Electro-Acoustic Piano” project. Recent performances include those at Brandeis University, Miami University of Ohio, Rutgers University: Mason Gross School of the Arts, University of Utah, University of Oklahoma, University of North Texas, and University of Texas, Austin. A forthcoming portrait CD of chamber music with and without electronics is scheduled for release in June 2015 on New Focus Recordings.
Adam Vidiksis recently returned from Zürich, Switzerland, where he was Composer in Residence at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology. Vidiksis spent time there consulting on the Sensor-Augmented Bass Clarinet Research (SABRe) project, performing his solo works for percussion and live processing, and lecturing on the aesthetics of live processing at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. Additionally, he has been commissioned to write a piece for SABRe for renowned clarinetist, Matthias Mueller. Vidiksis has been active writing new music for theater and dance, including commissioned performances with Renegade Theater, the Barnes Foundation, Anne-Marie Mulgrew and Dancers Company, the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, and the Walnut Theater this season. Vidiksis’s recently completed one-hour electroacoustic opera, “On the Road for 17527 Miles”, based on the text by Gregor Weichbrodt referencing the GPS directions to all the places visited by the characters in Kerouac’s novel, will be premiered in Philadelphia in March. Vidiksis will be collaborating this spring in an art installation with composer Gene Coleman and artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla that will be performed over 70 times in the Venice Biennale this summer. Vidiksis continues his year-long artist residency at <fidget> in Philadelphia, where he recently performed a program with acclaimed new music ensemble ThingNY. This spring, Vidiksis will conduct Ensemble NJ_P, a chamber ensemble composed of traditional Japanese and Western instruments, in a studio recording for release this summer. In addition to his performances, Vidiksis continues to serve on the faculty of Temple University, where he directs the Boyer Electroacoustic Ensemble Project (BEEP). He has been actively maintaining the submission server for SEAMUS’s 2015 National Conference, where he will perform his work Things that Live in the Whirligig, and continues to maintain and develop our organization’s website, seamusonline.org. Vidiksis’s newish daughter Olivia is now 6 months old, and finally starting to sleep a little, maybe, he hopes.
