SEAMUS Member News — Winter 2016
Christopher Bailey released the album Glimmering Webs on the NewFocusRecordings label. It is a collection of solo piano music. Most of it is acoustic, but the first track Composition for S#!††¥ Piano, Drum Samples, Concrète Sounds and Processing features live MAX/MSP engine(s), and was performed on SEAMUS 2014. (A somewhat different version of the piece (which is somewhat indeterminate) was featured on the recent SEAMUS Interactions! album.)
Glimmering Webs can be found on the NewFocusRecordings site, or on Bandcamp.
http://www.newfocusrecordings.com/catalogue/christopher-bailey-glimmering-webs/
https://christopherbailey.bandcamp.com/album/glimmering-webs
Brian Belet’s composition Ion Trails (Cloud Chamber Storms), for percussion and Kyma, was performed by Andrew Spencer at San Jose State University, CA on November 3, 2015. Language is (slithering) in no particular order, (text-sound composition co-written and performed with Stephen Ruppenthal), for two voices and Kyma, is included in the Digital Poetry Exhibition (part of the Studio 300 Exhibition) at the BYTE Gallery, Transylvania University, Lexington, KY, ongoing 2015-16. Cross-Town Traffic 2.0, for any number of smartphones and tablets (co-composed with William Walker), was premiered at San Jose State University on February 23, 2016. Walker and Belet will present a technical paper and also perform the work again in early April at the Web Audio Conference [WAC 2016] in Atlanta, GA. [http://webaudio.gatech.edu/home] Kai Schumacher is performing Summer Phantoms: Nocturne, for piano and computer-processed piano sounds, in planetariums throughout Germany on February 20, 25, 28, March 3, & 6 (YouTube trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDGiJ9Lu_Uc&feature=youtu.be)
See: www.BeletMusic.com for details.
Orlando Jacinto Garcia’s Conversations with Harry for bass clarinet and fixed media will receive it’s world premiere at Jorge Variego’s solo recital being held on March 8 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and will receive it’s Latin American premiere at the Festival Latinoamericano de Musica taking place in Caracas, Venezuela, May 22 through 29. The work was completed at the Visby International Centre for Composers (VICC) on the island of Gotland Sweden as part of a residency realized by the composer last August. The work consists of samples of Harry Sparnaay’s playing as referenced by the title.
Garcia also recently received a Knight Foundation Arts Challenge grant to create a new evening long interdisciplinary work focusing on the theme of sea level rise. The work which will be premiered during Art Basel 2017 in Miami Beach will include video, electronics, instruments, voices, and movement and will be created by an interdisciplinary team that in addition to Garcia includes a choreographer, video artist, architect, and poet.
Mitchell Herrmann was awarded the Marshall Scholarship, the most competitive undergraduate fellowship in the United Sates. As a Marshall Scholar, Herrmann will spend two years in the UK studying electroacoustic music at the University of Manchester and De Montfort University. Herrmann’s previous awards include the SEAMUS Allen Strange Award, the Franz Liszt Scholarship, and the Klang International Competition, as well as a recent publication in the journal Organised Sound.
February 22 – 27, Scott Miller and Kristian Twombly of St Cloud State University hosted the third annual MNMade Festival, a celebration of handmade electroacoustic music. This year again featured SCSU alum and music roboticist Troy Rogers, who was in residence for the entire week, working with students, faculty, and community members on composing for and with musical robots. This year included Per Bloland as guest composer and presenter, who gave lectures on his Electromagnetically-Prepared Piano project. The culminating concert presented Bloland’s Of Dust and Sand, performed by pianist Shannon Wettstein Sadler and saxophonist Kyle Hutchins, the premier of Kristian Twombly’s as if it possessed no self-induction, for fixed-media and robots, and Scott Miller and Troy Rogers’ Finally, Détente, and ecosys temic improvisational composition for Kyma and
musical robots.
Scott L. Miller‘s new CD, Diary of a Left-Handed Sleepwalker, will be released on the
Panoramic label April 8, 2016. The recording is being released as the work of Three Free Radicals, which is Miller and guitarist Mart Soo, a major figure in the Estonian free improv community. Miller and Soo recorded the album at Peeter Salmela Studio in Tallinn, Estonia during an epic day of improvising, recording, and bitter cold weather in January 2015.
On March 11, Benjamin O’Brien presented his paper “From Instrument to Controller,” which discusses digital technology and its effect on the electric guitar, at the 4eme Journée des Jeunes chercheurs du GREAM in Strasbourg, France. While there, he also co-conducted a SuperCollider workshop at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg. On April 1, Benjamin will present “Inscribing Sound Forms,” a paper based on doctoral research, at the Journées d’Informatique Musicale, Centre National de Création Musicale d’Albi-Tarn. He will premiere a new vidéomusique work at the Cité de la Musique in Marseille (April 26). His work For Borges will be at the “Dada Lives!” exhibit in Cincinnati, Ohio (April 29-June 3). From August 11-28, Benjamin will be at the OMI International Arts Center in Ghent, NY, as part of the International Music Residency program. His chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality is now available at Oxford University Press, Amazon, and other registered vendors.
2015 was a very eventful year for Sylvia Pengilly. Just to hit the highlights, her video, “The Syntax of Chaos” was presented at SEAMUS 2015, then “Sometimes I Forget to Breathe” was presented at NYCEMF 2015 with virtuoso Esther Lamneck playing the tarogato. Esther also played the same piece at Molloy College in November. “Maze” was included in the NOMADES concert, curated by Claudia Robles-Angel, at ONOMATO art gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany, in July, 2015. In September, 2015, “Maze” was screened at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Los Angeles, and in October, it was awarded first prize in the “Fresh Minds” festival at Texas A&M University. This was particularly exciting to me since the students, rather than the faculty, get to judge the videos as part of their course work. Many kudos to Jeff Morrison for initiating such an innovative program. Also in October, “Maze” was shown in Juarez, Mexico, as part of the “MUSLAB” festival.
(Images from Pengilly’s piece Maze)
Moving into 2016, “The Syntax of Chaos” has been accepted for the Mediawave Festival in Hungary.
Another, as-yet-unperformed high light of last year was collaborating with Dr. Hubert Howe in creating a video for his “Inharmonic Fantasy #4.” This piece will be presented at the National Sawdust Festival, part of NYCEMF 2016, June 5-7 in New York.
(Images from the video Pengilly created for Inharmonic Fantasy #4)
Gil Trythall’s piece Rima’s Song for fixed media and wind controller synthesis was performed by soloist Matthew Swallow on Jan. 16, 2016 at the 38th International Saxophone Symposium at Shenandoah University in Winchester Virginia. His work Tropes, a poetic sound collage for laptop controller using Live9 software with simultaneous laptop screen projection was premiered by Gil Trythall on February 19, 2016 at the Southeastern Composer’s League Forum at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina.