Download Tape Fest 2015 Program SUNDAY

THE
SAN FRANCISCO
TAPE MUSIC
FESTIVAL
2015
program 4
THE SAN FRANCISCO TAPE MUSIC FESTIVAL
is presented by the
San Francisco Tape Music Collective and sfSound
funded in part by:
The San Francisco Grants for the Arts,
The French-American Fund for Contemporary Music, The Zellerbach
Family Foundation,
and individual contributors.
equipment kindly provided by:
The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
(CCRMA), Stanford University.
sfSound/SFTMF is an affiliate of,
and is fiscally sponsored by, the San Francisco
Friends of Chamber Music, a not-for-profit
organization dedicated to the service of
chamber music in California.
THANK YOU
Wendy Carlos, Byron Evora, Matthew Goodheart, Grux, Benjamin Kreith,
Charles Kremenak, Dianne Lynn, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano,
John MacCallum, Hadley McCarroll, Collin McKelvy,
Sam Nichols, Eric Seifert, and Erik Ulman
SUNDAY
JANUARY
11
2015
VICTORIA THEATER
8PM
PROGRAM 4
Accidents / Harmoniques (1973)
Anthèmes II (1997)
Bernard Parmegiani
Pierre Boulez
Benjamin Kreith, violin
Sam Nichols, live electronics
Préludes Suspendus III (2009)
Archives Sauvées Des Eaux (2000) Horacio Vaggione
Luc Ferrari
sfSoundGroup, acoustic instruments
Cliff Caruthers, tape preparation
interval
Still Air 3 (2014)
Hans Tutschku
Kyle Bruckmann, oboe
Matt Ingalls, bass clarinet
Synchronisms #2 (1964)
Mario Davidovsky
Diane Grubbe, flute . Matt Ingalls, clarinet . Benjamin Kreith, violin
Monica Scott, cello . Kyle Bruckmann, technician
John Ingle, conductor
Pacific Sirens (1969)
Robert Erickson
sfSoundGroup
CrusT (1997) Matt Ingalls, clarinet
Matt Ingalls
SFSOUNDGROUP
Monica Scott, cello
Brendan Lai-Tong, trombone
Benjamin Kreith, violin
John Ingle, alto saxophone/conductor
Matt Ingalls, clarinet
Diane Grubbe, flute
Joel Davel, percussion
Tom Dambly, trumpet
Kyle Bruckmann, oboe/technician
SAN FRANCISCO TAPE MUSIC COLLECTIVE
Kent Jolly . Matt Ingalls . Cliff Caruthers . Thom Blum
BERNARD PARMEGIANI
Accidents / Harmoniques (1973 :: 5 min :: stereo tape)
Accidents / Harmoniques is the second movement of Parmegiani’s magnum
opus De Natura Sonorum. This hour-long work for tape explores relationships
between electronic and instrumental sounds. As in many musique concrète
compositions, the artificial sounds are often created out of recordings of socalled “natural” sounds. Parmegiani wonders: “Does listening to this constant
transition from one state to another tell us anything about the nature of
sound?“ The Accidents / Harmoniques movement features very brief events of
instrumental recordings whose harmonics are manipulated to create electronic
timbres. Parmegiani tries to minimize pitch material to help listeners focus on
other phenomena of the instrumental sounds generally masked by their use in
acoustic music.
BERNARD PARMEGIANI (1927 - 2013) was a French composer best known for
his over 70 works of acousmatic music. He began his career as a sound
engineer for radio and TV. Between 1957 and 1961 he studied mime with
Jacques Lecoq, a period he later regarded as important to his work as a
composer. He joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1959 for
a two-year master class shortly after its founding by Pierre Schaeffer. After
completing his studies with Lecoq, he was employed as a sound engineer,
eventually leading the Music/Image unit for French television (ORTF). In the
1970s he started writing acousmatic pieces for performance in the concert hall:
examples are Capture éphémère (1967), which deals with the passage of time,
and L'Enfer (1972), a collaboration with the composer François Bayle, based
on Dante's Divine Comedy. In 1992 Parmegiani left the GRM and set up his
own studio in Saint Rémy. Parmegiani has been cited as a major influence by
younger experimentalists like Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Sonic Youth.
PIERRE BOULEZ
Anthèmes II (1997 :: ~20 min :: violin and live electronics)
The original version of Anthèmes for unaccompanied violin was performed for
the first time on the 19th of November, 1991 during a concert in honor of
Alfred Schlee, former director of Universal Edition and long-time friend of
Pierre Boulez. The musical origin of Anthèmes is to be found in an unused part
of one of the earliest versions of ...explosante-fixe... This practice is in keeping
with Boulez's more general approach to musical composition which involves
taking a small musical idea and making it ‘proliferate.' Typical also in
Anthèmes is Boulez's habit of creating a small number of families of musical
writing from which the piece is created in a sort of braided fashion. A musical
family will typically be based on a type of writing (based on rules, a method of
proliferation, or a principle of generation) which guarantees the family's
musical identity and cohesion. Strands of the material corresponding to a given
family can then be found woven throughout the composition. In 1995 Pierre
Boulez decided to compose an electro-acoustic version of the piece called
Anthèmes II. The first performance of Anthèmes II took place at the
Donaueschingen Festival in October, 1997 by the violinist Hae Sun Kang of the
Ensemble Intercontemporain.
— excerpted from Andrew Gerzso's notes to the score, 2005.
ANDREW GERZSO'S AND GILBERT NOUNO’S COMPUTER MUSIC
DESIGN (MAX/MSP) FOR “ANTHÈMES II” PROVIDED BY IRCAM
Composer and conductor PIERRE BOULEZ was born March 26, 1925,
Montbrison, France. Originally a student of mathematics, he later studied with
the composer and organist Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory.
Inspired by the works of Anton Webern, in the 1950s he began to experiment
with total serialism; his serialist music is marked by a sensitivity to the nuances
of instrumental texture and color. In 1954 he founded a series of avant-garde
concerts, the Domaine Musicale. By the 1960s he had gained an international
reputation not only as a composer but also as a conductor, particularly of the
20th-century repertoire. He was chief conductor of the BBC Symphony
Orchestra (1971-74) and the New York Philharmonic (1971-78) and guest
conductor of symphonies and opera companies around the world. In 1974 he
founded the French national experimental studio IRCAM. Violinist BENJAMIN KREITH has premiered solo works at the Strasbourg and
Marseille festivals, given recitals in Madrid and New York City, and played
string quartets in natural concert halls throughout Grand Canyon. For several
years he was a member of the Cascade Quartet and concertmaster of the
Great Falls Symphony. His solo recordings include works by Christian Lauba on
the Accord/Universal label and by Luciano Chessa, forthcoming on
Stradivarius. Interested in words as well as music, Ben made the first English
translation of Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s novel Flower of Sanctity, which will be
published by Aris & Phillips, Oxford, in 2015.
SAM NICHOLS is a composer who lives and works in Northern California. He
has received commissions from a number of ensembles and organizations,
including the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, the Left Coast
Chamber Ensemble, Earplay, the Empyrean Ensemble, and the Composers
Conference at Wellesley College. His string quartet Refuge (a Left Coast
commission) was selected for performance at the ISCM’s “World Music Days
2014” in Wracłow, Poland. He's received awards from Composers, Inc. (Lee
Ettelson Prize), the League of Composers, the University of Illinois (3rd prize,
2010 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Prize), and the Third
Millennium Ensemble, among others. Upcoming projects include a cello
concerto for David Russell and the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra. Born in
Maine, he attended Vassar College (BA, 1994) and Brandeis University (MA
1999, PhD 2006). He works as a lecturer in the UC Davis Department of
Music; he also teaches in collaboration with the Cinema and Technocultural
Studies program. In 2011 he received the UC Davis Academic Federation
Award for Excellence in Teaching.
HORACIO VAGGIONE
Préludes Suspendus III (2009 :: 10 min :: stereo tape)
Préludes Suspendus III (2009) is an electroacoustic composition based on a
small collection of sounds (instrumental and natural). These sounds were
processed by digital means (analysis and resynthesis) using mainly granular
techniques, as well as convolution and micro-montage. Thus the primary sounds
developed into many derivations, some of which retain certain original
morphological and energetic features, while others constitute radical mutations.
Overall, the work essentially plays with contrasts between textures composed
of multiple strata with detailed articulation of sound objects at different time
scales. Preludes Suspendus III was commissioned by the French Ministry of
Culture. The premiere took place at the Synthèse Festival, Bourges, in June
2009.
HORACIO VAGGIONE was born in Argentina in 1943. He studied piano and
composition at the National University of Cordoba, Argentina, and then
musicology and aesthetics at the University of Paris, where he received a
Doctorate. Computer Music studies were at the University of Illinois (Fullbright
grant, 1966). He co-founded the Experimental Music Center of the University
of Cordoba, Argentina (1965-68), and was a member of the Madrid based
ALEA live electronic music group (1969-73). He also worked in the Computer
Music Project at the University of Madrid (1970-73), and at IRCAM, the INAGRM, the IMEB, and the Technical University of Berlin. His music
(electroacoustic and instrumental) is regularly played worldwide in major
centers of contemporary music and has received numerous awards. Since 1978
Vaggione has lived in Paris, where he is currently Professor of Music and
director of the Doctorate Studies Program in Music Composition and
Technology at the University of Paris VIII. He is also director of the CICM
(Centre de Recherche Informatique et Création Musicale).
LUC FERRARI
Archives Sauvées Des Eaux (2000 :: 11 min :: ensemble and 2 CDs)
Winner of the "In memoriam" award of the "Académie Charles Cros",
2005, Archives sauvées des Eaux represents the encounter between a
pioneer of concrete music, who died of late, and two live sounds manipulators,
Otomo Yoshihide and eRikm. In the last six years of his life, Luc Ferrari worked
on a series of compositions to explore, in every direction, the totality of the
concepts with which he experimented from the beginning days of his work in
the middle 1950s. An idea arose as some water damaged a collection of
Luc Ferrari's original magnetic tapes, where his works from the 1970s were
recorded. The author decided to compose using what had been saved and he
proposed to eRikm and Otomo Yoshihide that they participate in a re-building
project in Milan. The resulting concept was commissioned by Hermès ensemble
and composed in 2000. It premiered in Gent (The Netherlands) May 2000.
The US premiere took place on March 13th 2003 at the Kitchen, in New York
City. The work is dedicated to Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari
PERFORMANCE MATERIAL PROVIDED BY BRUNHILD MEYER-FERRARI
LUC FERRARI (1929-2005) was a true pioneer of musique concrète, found
sound usage, and avant-garde music in general. In the early days of musique
concrète, working by the side of Pierre Schaeffer, who coined the term, he was
director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (1959 to 1960), and his music
played a decisive role in defining the range of musique concrète. But he went
further to become one of the most radical composers of our time. He did not
rest in one genre, and several times during his career he set aside one form or
technique that he had mastered in order to venture into uncharted territories
and find new musical goldmines.
Luc Ferrari possessed a sparkling sense of humor and quality of focus or
presentness that, for anyone lucky enough to have enjoyed his company, will
be impossible to forget. In this lifetime, you might meet a handful of individuals
whose work really speaks to you. Really sparks you… (Right now I¹m thinking
about periods spent listening to Presque Rien No.1, Tautologos 3
and Unheimlich Schön over and over again.) But when you meet one of those
people, how often do you find that person’s company an equally profound
pleasure?
When I think of Luc, I think of his laugh and the musicality with which that
laugh punctuated his storytelling. I think of the directness and concision with
which he talked about music. I think of him as setting the terms by which his
work succeeds or fails, and of him as being almost comically (hilariously,
excellently, inspiringly) impervious to competing ideologies in contemporary
music, and I think of what a force of nature he and his wife Brunhild
together constituted. "Impossible to forget" is a tall order, hope against hope…
but it’s a way of saying that I want to be able to continue to savor the lovely,
resolutely one-of-a-kind person that Luc Ferrari was.
— excerpted form David Grubbs's personal recollections at blog.wfmu.org
HANS TUTSCHKU
Still Air 3 (2014 :: 12 min :: oboe, bass clarinet, and iPads)
Still Air 3 is part of a cycle for wind instruments and electronics. These
compositions explore the sonorities of quiet, but complex sounds and blend the
live instruments with prepared electronic sounds. As a stark contrast to many of
my other compositions which explore speed and density, this cycle is meant to
search for musical expression with very little activity. Still Air 3 unites the two
solo pieces. The first piece, Still Air 1, for bass clarinet, explores the sonorities
of quiet, but complex sounds and blends the live instrument with prepared
electronic sounds. It’s the first of a series of pieces for wind instruments and
electronics. As a stark contrast to many of my other compositions which
explore speed and density, this cycle is meant to search for musical expression
with very little activity. The second solo piece, Still Air 2 for oboe, explores the
sonorities of quiet, but complex sounds and blends the live instrument with
prepared electronic sounds.
HANS TUTSCHKU was born in 1966 in Weimar. He has been a member of the
"Ensemble for intuitive music Weimar" since 1982. He studied electronic music
composition at the Dresden College of Music and since 1989 has participated
in several concert cycles of Karlheinz Stockhausen to learn the art of sound
direction. From 1991-2 he further studied sonology and electroacoustic
composition at the Royal Conservatoire in the Hague. 1994 followed a one
year’s study stay at IRCAM in Paris. From 1995-6 he taught electroacoustic
composition in Weimar. In 1996 he participated in composition workshops with
Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough. From 1997 to 2001 he taught
electroacoustic composition at IRCAM in Paris, and from 2001 to 2004 at the
Conservatory of Montbéliard. In May 2003 he completed a doctorate (PhD)
with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham. During the spring term
2003 he was the "Edgard Varèse Guest Professor" at the Technical University
of Berlin. Since September 2004, Tutschku has been a composition professor
and the director of the electroacoustic studios at Harvard University. He is the
winner of many international composition competitions, among others:
Bourges, CIMESP Sao Paulo, Hanns Eisler prize, Prix Ars Electronica, Prix
Noroit and Prix Musica Nova. In 2005 he received the culture prize of the city
of Weimar. Currently he holds a Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study and will have a stipend from the Japan-U.S. Friendship
Commission.
MARIO DAVIDOVSKY
Synchronisms #2 (1964 :: 5 min :: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and tape)
When Davidovsky came to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in
1960, he became a central part of a community of composers seeking new
expressive means and willing to use their highly developed musicianship as the
point of departure. When first confronted with electronic sounds, Davidovsky
heard, not something exciting and new, but something very crude, especially
when compared to the highly refined, two hundred plus year old tradition of
western instruments that was already in his ear. To begin to approach the
sensitivity of traditional instruments, Davidovsky spent countless hours listening
to each sound. He painstakingly constructed phrases made up mostly of short
articulated events, accepting nothing that did not have a convincing dramatic
shape.
Still, composers primarily write music for concert performance, and it was
natural for Davidovsky to begin to think about combining electronic sounds
with live instruments. It is for his work in this area that Davidovsky is certainly
best known: his series of Synchronisms. In these pieces he achieved the first
true “hyper-instruments” where the live and electronic modulate one another
and become something totally new, joined in one expanded acoustical space;
a kind of musical virtual reality. To this day he remains the acknowledged
master of the medium of electronically manipulated instruments and these
pieces are touchstones for anyone trying to work in this area.
— text excerpted from Mario Davidovsky: An Introduction (1999) by Eric Chasalow
MARIO DAVIDOVSKY is a renowned composer who is best known for his
series of twelve Synchronisms that combine live instrumental performances with
pre-recorded electronic sound. Born in Argentina, Davidovsky traveled to the
U.S. in 1958 to study with Aaron Copland, who was not a fan of electronic
music, believing it to be limited by its reliance on electronic media. Milton
Babbitt encouraged Davidovsky to permanently move to New York City in
1960. Since coming to the U.S., he has taught at the Manhattan School of
Music, Yale University, City University, CUNY, the University of Pennsylvania,
and the University of Michigan. He also was a visiting professor at the Di Tella
Institute in Argentina, and in January 1994, he joined the music department at
Harvard University.
In 1997, Davidovsky received the honored Christopher and Stephan Kaske
Foundation Music prize for his contributions in developing contemporary
music. His many commissions have come from such prestigious institutions as
Harvard's Fromm Foundation, the Julliard String Quartet, the Pan American
Union, the Koussevitsky Foundation, Yale University, the Emerson String
Quartet, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, and the Philadelphia
Orchestra. In addition, he has received commissions from Speculum Musicae,
the Naumburg Foundation, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Davidovsky
is currently the Fanny P. Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University. He
received the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for his Synchronism No. 6 for piano and
tape.
ROBERT ERICKSON
Pacific Sirens (1969 :: 14 min :: ensemble and tape)
Pacific Sirens was commissioned by the Contemporary Group of the University of
Washington in 1969. Ever since childhood I have wondered about the song of the
sirens who sang to Ulysses and his men. I became more intrigued when I read an
account of a certain cliff in southern Italy where passing sailors often hear quasimusical moans and sighs. I decided to do something with the “whispered” and
“half-voiced” sounds which some musical instruments are able to produce. I set
out to make a piece which used “singing” waves together with conventional
instruments. The tape portion of the music was produced from a tape recording of
the waves at Pescadero Beach, about fifty miles south of San Francisco. These
natural sounds were electronically filtered to make sixteen different pitch bands,
which were retuned, equalized and remixed to produce the performance tape.
The players play into the wave sounds, sometimes matching and sometimes in
counterpoint to the sounds on the tape, to produce a continuous, seamless siren
song.
ROBERT ERICKSON (1917–1997) is one of the more unjustly neglected
American composers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Early in his
career, under the guidance of his teacher Ernst Krenek, he flirted with then
abandoned atonality. After relocating to California in 1956, he developed the
characteristics for which his work became most recognized: a heightened
interest in the atmosphere of a piece, an obsession with timbre, ways of
varying the sound of a work with experiments in new technique, and
explorations into the new worlds uncovered through the invention of tape
recording. He was one of the first American composers to work extensively
with sounds recorded on tape, both for its own sake and as combined with live
performers on conventional instruments; and he wrote distinguished music
requiring improvisation, by both solo instruments and ensembles. In later years
he moved away from the pioneering experiments of the 1960s and '70s
toward a simpler, ultimately stripped-down style, characterized by frequent
drones, long slow passages, and hypnotic rhythms which were influential on a
number of younger "minimalist" composers.
Erickson taught at the College of St. Catherine's in St. Paul, the University of
California at Berkeley, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, before
becoming one of the founders of the Department of Music at the University of
California, San Diego, in 1967. He also served as Music Director of KPFA
Radio in Berkeley from 1955 to 1957 and as a director of the Pacific
Foundation, KPFA's parent body, for several years thereafter. He was the
teacher of Paul Dresher, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Loren Rush, Charles
Shere, and Morton Subotnick, among others. Erickson published two books:
The Structure of Music: A Listener's Guide in 1957 and Sound Structures in
Music in 1975.
MATT INGALLS
CrusT (1997 :: 10 min :: clarinet and tape)
CrusT, for clarinet and computer generated tape, was realized in Studio 4 at
the University of Texas at Austin and the Center for Contemporary Music at
Mills College. The tape part is derived from my own clarinet samples
manipulated by Csound scores I generated with algorithms written in C.
MATT INGALLS is a composer, clarinetist, and computer musician from
Oakland. He is the founder and co-director of the San Francisco Tape Music
Collective and its parent organization, sfSound. Matt received the Deuxiéme
Prix (Catégorie Humour - Puy) in the 1994 Concours International de Musique
Electroacoustique de Bourges and was the first recipient of the ASCAP/
SEAMUS Commission and Recording Prize. Matt is well known for his
computer music software. He created the Soundflower audio routing tool for
Cycling74 and his Csound version for Macintosh, MacCsound won an
Electronic Musician Magazine "Editor's Choice Award" in 2004. He has taught
digital audio synthesis at USF and is currently a freelance MacOS and iOS
engineer. mattingalls.com
email [email protected]
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