PRESIDENT

Ted Coffey, President

Statement:

The SEAMUS Board is very much a team, and it has been an honor and a pleasure to serve with this particular team of dedicated and effective colleagues. I am proud of the work we have accomplished since March 2018, work focused primarily on providing increasing benefits to current membership, and on creating a dynamic, welcoming environment to engage new membership. These are the priorities I would continue to pursue over the next term.

There has been substantial change-over since March 2018. We are fortunate indeed to have added Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, Konstantinos Karathanasis, Lyn Goeringer, and Olga Oseth to key positions on the Board. Additional appointments include Eli Stine to Journal SEAMUS Editor as Tae Hong Park stepped down after many years’ service, Cecilia Wu (Wu Xiao Ci) to Editor of the SEAMUS Newsletter as Steven Ricks stepped down after many years’ service, and Ico Bukvic to a new role coordinating archive and preservation efforts.

Working with Diversity Officer Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, I formed an ad hoc Committee on Diversity and Inclusion whose members currently include Caroline Louise Miller, Cecilia Wu, Mark Vaughn, Monisola Gbadebo, and Ralph Lewis. This committee has developed and distributed sociodemographic surveys to help assess our present moment and recommend how best to rebalance our resources toward an increasingly just future, an effort that is very much ongoing. As the data we’ve collected reveals significant disparity of institutional support granted our members for attendance at the annual conference, this year we will explore targeted subsidies for attendance. More to the outreach side (as well as simple benefit), we will soon be soliciting requests for small grants for producing local community events throughout the year, for printing posters, providing snacks, &c.

Through the initiative of Kostas Karathanasis and Scott Miller in particular, SEAMUS has established connections to the international organizations CIME / ICEM and ISCM, creating new opportunities for musical performance and circulation. This outward affirmation of ‘open borders’ maintains our core strengths while affirming the organization’s participation in an expanded field of aesthetic practices and communities.

Biography:

Ted Coffey makes acoustic and electronic music, sound installations, and songs. His work has been presented in concerts and festivals across North America, Europe and Asia, at such venues as Judson Church, The Knitting Factory, Roulette, Symphony Space, and Lincoln Center (NYC), The Lab, New Langton Arts, Zellerbach Hall, and The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Wolf Trap and The Kennedy Center (DC), the Korean National University of the Arts (Seoul), The Carre Theatre (Amsterdam), and ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany). He studied composition with Jon Appleton, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and Paul Lansky, among others, receiving degrees in music from Dartmouth (AB), Mills College (MFA) and Princeton (MFA, PhD). Since 2011, Coffey has collaborated with the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company on several projects, including the evening-length work Story/Time, which he toured widely with the Company. Other dance projects include works made with Abigail Levine, Paul Matteson, and Jennifer Nugent. Coffey is active in national and international academic communities associated with music and technology, and currently serves as President of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS). His writings on aesthetics and politics in the performing arts have been honored with significant awards from the Josephine De Kármán and Andrew C. Mellon Foundations. Recordings of his work are available on the Ellipsis Arts, Everglade, Innova, Audition Records, SEAMUS, crackletimesfavor, EcoSono, and Ravello labels. Coffey is currently a College Fellow and Professor of Music at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses in composition, music technologies, music aesthetics, and pop.

VICE PRESIDENT FOR MEMBERSHIP

Kostas Karathanasis, VP Membership

Statement:

SEAMUS is the biggest and most diverse electroacoustic community in the country. It has been a great privilege and responsibility to serve as the VP for Membership during the last couple of years.

One of the most meaningful experiences in my early career as a composer was during my first ever participation in a SEAMUS National Conference (Baton Rouge, LA, 2001). I came in contact with diverse aesthetics and styles, high production standards, and voices of members I wasn’t aware of. Since then, every National Conference reaffirmed to me this experience of inspiring artistic exchanges and music of the highest standards.

One of my most gratifying moments of service in my term was the fulfillment of my idea to register SEAMUS as a National Member of the International Confederation of Electracoustic Music (ICEM/CIME) of the International Music Council-UNESCO. SEAMUS members will now have the opportunity to present their music at the ICEM/CIME annual conference and listen to selected electroacoustic music by members of other National Confederations.

I am really looking forward to offering back to SEAMUS by serving the membership at my best capacity for a second term.

Biography:

Konstantinos Karathanasis as an electroacoustic composer draws inspiration from modern poetry, artistic cinema, abstract painting, mysticism, Greek mythology, and the writings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. His compositions have been performed at

numerous festivals and received awards in international competitions, including Bourges, Musica Nova, SEAMUS/ASCAP, SIME and Música Viva. Recordings of his music are released by SEAMUS, ICMA, Musica Nova, Innova and HELMCA. Konstantinos holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University at Buffalo. He is a Professor of Composition & Music Technology at the University of Oklahoma. More info at: http://karathanasis.org

MEMBER-AT-LARGE

Eli Fieldsteel, Member-at-Large

Statement:

Having served as the SEAMUS Member-at-Large for the past four years, I am pleased to continue the work that this position entails, particularly the collaboration with adjudicators to help ensure that conferences run smoothly, and interacting with student awardees to foster the creation and performance of new electroacoustic works. I look forward to the opportunity to continue serving the society in this capacity, and extend my thanks to the membership for their support over the past four years.

Biography:

Eli Fieldsteel, serving as Director of the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios since 2016, is a composer specializing in music technology with a diverse history of cross-disciplinary collaboration. He is the recipient of the 2018-19 Klingler Electro-Acoustic Residency at Bowling Green State University, the 2014 James E. Croft Grant for Young and Emerging Wind Band Composers, first prize in the 2012 ASCAP/SEAMUS Student Commission Competition, as well as awards and recognition from other organizations, including the Bandmasters Academic Society of Japan and the Frank Ticheli Competition. His music has been performed nationally and internationally by ensembles such as the Dallas Wind Symphony, the North Texas Symphony Orchestra, the Kawagoe Sohwa Wind Ensemble of Tokyo, and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Wind Ensemble. His music is published under Lovebird Music, and has been recorded on the SEAMUS and Aerocade Music record labels.

Fieldsteel’s music and research engages with the intersection between music technology, instrument design, and performance, focusing on topics such as human-computer improvisation, interactivity, and sensor-driven music. Utilizing new technologies and real-time environments, his works are highly gestural, expressive, and richly detailed. As an active collaborator, he has worked closely with dancers, choreographers, lighting designers, architects, and video artists, resulting in a variety of unique and site-specific installations and performances. He is fluent in several contemporary music programming languages, and maintains an active teaching presence online through a well-trafficked series of SuperCollider tutorials.

Robert McLure, Member-at-Large

Statement:

I am interested in the nomination for Member-at-Large due to my desire to serve an organization that I believe in as well as to be a representative for the membership. The Member-at-Large position has the unique responsibility of being the ear and voice for the membership. I feel I would be an effective listener and communicator for the membership as well as being able to adapt to the changing responsibilities of the position as the membership grows and evolves. It is this growth and change that I am beginning to see take shape and the primary reason I would like to be involved with the SEAMUS Board of Directors.

Biography:

Robert McClure’s music attempts to discover beauty in unconventional places using non-traditional means. Visual art, poetry, the natural world, neurological and mathematical concepts are all elements that influence McClure’s works. His work has been featured at festivals including NYCEMF, the Beijing Modern Music Festival, the Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium, SEAMUS, IDRS, ISCM, and ICMC.

His works may be found through ADJ·ective New Music LLC, Bachovich Music Publications, Imagine Music Publications, Innovative Percussion, Media Press, Inc., Resolute Music Publications, and Tapspace Publications as well as on the ABLAZE, Albany, and New Focus Record labels.

In addition to his composition activities, Robert is the host/producer of the ADJ·ective New Music podcast, Lexical Tones; a weekly conversation with a guest composer, performer, and/or artist creating new works of contemporary art/music that focuses on aesthetics, technique, process, meaning, perception, and the musical origins of the featured guest. The podcast can be found on iTunes and Soundcloud.

Robert received his doctorate from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University where his primary mentors were Shih-Hui Chen, Arthur Gottschalk, and Kurt Stallmann.

Robert has previously held positions at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and Soochow University in Suzhou, China. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Composition/Theory at Ohio University.

For more information, please visit www.robertwmcclure.com