CFA Arts Administration Intern Chloe Jones ’15 talks to
University Professor of Music and Director of the Electronic Music and
Recording Studios Ronald Kuivila and Assistant Professor of Music Paula
Matthusen about the conference of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music
in the United States, taking place at Wesleyan University from
Thursday, March 27 through Saturday, March 29, 2014, in this entry from the Center for the Arts blog.
Experimental music composer
Alvin Lucier
first performed at Wesleyan in 1968, just one year before the release
of his groundbreaking and world-famous sound installation,
I Am Sitting in a Room. He was teaching at
Brandeis University
at the time, but came to Wesleyan after a group of students requested
to take a class in electronic music. The class was a roaring success,
and Mr. Lucier was
hired to launch an electronic music program at Wesleyan.
More than four decades later, the electronic music scene on campus is alive and well, and this year Wesleyan hosts the
29th National Conference for the
Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States
(SEAMUS), co-hosted by University Professor of Music and Director of
the Electronic Music and Recording Studios Ronald Kuivila and Assistant
Professor of Music Paula Matthusen. Over 130 people are expected to
gather from the U.S. and abroad and join the Wesleyan and regional
community for this important series of performances, installations,
talks, and workshops. [The SEAMUS conference is being held in New
England for the first time since 1998.]
The term
“electro-acoustic” refers to music that depends on electronic technology
for its creation and/or performance. “Electronic technology”
encompasses everything from hemispherical speakers to 3D video
projection, custom software to the average laptop.
That’s not to
say electro-acoustic music is all high-tech. Ordinary objects frequently
make their way into the musical compositions, concerts, and sound
installations. Case in point: one installation work featured at this
year’s SEAMUS conference,
Urban Legend [by
Jenny Johnson, as part of David Tudor's
Rainforest in Zelnick Pavilion], invites visitors to combine
Pop Rocks candy with carbonated soda water, and then captures the sounds of the resulting chemical reaction with a small hydrophone.
Rainforest
will create a chorus of loudspeakers out of found objects in an
immersive sound installation that melds the ordinary with the
extraordinary. [Other contributors to
Rainforest include
Paula Matthusen, Nestor Prieto MA'14, Phil Edelstein, John Driscoll, Nayla Mehdi,
Stephan Moore, Jim Moses,
Doug Repetto,
Jeff Snyder, and
Suzanne Thorpe.]
In the upper lobby of Fayerweather Beckham Hall, the audio installation
SC Tweet [by
Charles Hutchins MA'05]
draws information from incoming tweets [tagged with #sc140 and that
contain executable code] to program elaborate musical scores.
And taking place in a public parking garage in Middletown [the
Middle Oak Parking Garage at 213 Court Street],
The Non-aggressive Music Deterrent
will replace the light classical music that usually plays in the garage
with a whole array of original electro-acoustic compositions [from
Friday, March 27 at 5pm to Sunday, March 29, 2014 at 12am; contributors
to
The Non-aggressive Music Deterrent include
Benjamin Zucker '15,
Jason Bolte, Julius Bucsis,
Caroline Park,
A. Campbell Payne,
Sean Peuquet,
Margaret Schedel, and
Juan Solare.]
It’s
this fusion of high-tech and low-tech that makes the field of
electro-acoustic music so compelling and innovative. “There’s a fine
tradition of doing things like circuit building and hacking, in which
you take found objects and reconfigure them,” explains Mr. Kuivila.
“It’s an approach to electro-acoustic music that dovetails with our
daily experience, in that you take something familiar and redefine it so
that it becomes new.”
Electro-acoustic music transforms an empty
film canister into a loudspeaker, or a cigar box into the body of a new
instrument. It can also transform space, an idea that has greatly
influenced Mr. Kuivila and Ms. Matthusen’s vision for this year’s SEAMUS
conference.
 |
Pianist Kathleen Supové will perform during
SEAMUS Concert #14 on Saturday, March 29, 2014 at 8pm in Crowell Concert Hall. |
In
addition to the five daily concerts [for a total of fifteen concerts
across the three days], the ongoing installations, four workshops, three
paper sessions, and two listening rooms, there are a number of special
events revolving around issues of space.
“We wanted to come up with ways to engage with the social dimension of spatiality,” says Mr. Kuivila.
One event that poses questions about space is
Rock’s Role (After Ryoanji), which draws its inspiration from a series of pieces composed by
John Cage.
Rock’s Role (After Ryoanji)
is comprised of soundworks that embrace sound leakage and overlap – the
inescapable infiltration of sound into space. Each soundwork is
intended to coexist with the other soundworks in the space [the lower
level of World Music Hall; soundworks for
Rock’s Role (After Ryoanji) contributed by
Mara Helmuth,
Jason Malli,
Maggi Payne,
A. Campbell Payne, and
Adam Vidiksis.]
From
the Memorial Chapel to the underground tunnels of the Center for the
Arts, SEAMUS is taking the campus by storm and by sound. “You will hear a
lot of different things,” says Mr. Kuivila. “It’s a smorgasbord of
sorts.”
The SEAMUS conference represents an exciting moment for the Wesleyan
Music Department
and the regional community, bringing to campus many world leaders in
the field of electro-acoustic music. For more information, as well as a
detailed listing of events, please visit the
conference website.
SEAMUS Concert #9
Friday, March 28, 2014 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown
Tickets: $8 general public; $6 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $5 Wesleyan students
Concert #9 will feature
Meditation on Pattern and Noise, a multi-modal exploration of communication and disruption, with music and language by vocalist
Jonathan Zorn '02 MA '07. This concert will also include guitarist
Bryan Jacobs performing his
Syncro-Vox and Other Cheap Animation Techniques with
Natacha Diels on alto flute (reading the music off a scrolling score on a computer display); pianist
Kari Johnson performing
time, forward by
Chin Ting Chan (with fixed sample playbacks and live processing techniques), as well as
Leander’s Swim by
Sam Wells (with live electronics, inspired by
Cy Twombley's painting
Hero and Leandro, Part I);
pianist Shiau-uen Ding performing Composition for S#!++\/ Piano with Drum Samples, Concrete Sounds, and Processing by Christopher Bailey (a percussive piece full of funky rhythms, joyous chaos, and cacophony); Motions of Maria Makiling for
four-channel fixed media by Deovides Reyes III (depicting the bodily
movements of the mythical Filipino character); and cellist Jason
Calloway performing Vanished into the Clouds by Jacob David Sudol (with live electronics, titled from a chapter in the Japanese novel The Tale of Genji).
SEAMUS Concert #14 Saturday, March 29, 2014 at 8pm Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown
Tickets: $8 general public; $6 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $5 Wesleyan students
Concert #14 will feature pianist
Kathleen Supové (pictured above) performing
Sonata for Piano and Tape by Todd Kitchen (based on the melody from the chorale
Christ lag in Todesbanden), as well as two movements from
Metal Works for piano and electronics by
Nina Young
(a suite of pieces inspired by scientific, poetic, and historic
concepts of metal). Ms. Young is the first prize 2013 ASCAP/SEAMUS
Commission Winner.
The concert will also feature the final movement of
The Chamber of False Things, from The Barnum Museum (2009–2012) for fixed media by
Barry Schrader (an electronic tone poem based on a short story by
Steven Millhauser). The winner of the 2014 SEAMUS Award, Mr. Schrader is a founder and the first president of SEAMUS, described by
Gramophone as a composer of "approachable electronic music with a distinctive individual voice to reward the adventurous."
This concert will also include
Hephaestus’ Fire: Music for Anvil and Electronics by
Paul Leary
(named after the Greek god of blacksmithing, metallurgy, and volcanoes,
and performed with keyboards, foot pedals, a gaming joystick, an anvil,
various hammers, and industrial metals);
Z-77 for paper and computer by Jennifer Hill (an interpretation of Richard Wagner’s "gesamtkunstwerk" performed along with
Ryan Fellhauer); and
N’air sur le lit, a collaboration by pianist
Jon Appleton and vocalist
Paul J. Botelho with fixed media.
