Kristen Starkey & Phuc Phan

Cort Lippe

[Chris Howard, hi-hat]

David Morneau

Dan Abatemarco (Speak Onion)

[Bruce Drummond (bruzed), video]

Douglas DaSilva

[Yumi Suehiro, piano]

Pierre Jodlowski

[Shiau-uen Ding, piano]

Margaret Schedel

[Jaram Kim, violin; Phuc Phan, cello]

Leigh Landy

Kristin Starkey is a Mezzo-Soprano who is currently working on her Master of Music degree in Vocal Performance at Stony Brook University. She completed her Bachelor of Music in Music Education with classical guitar as her concentration at Long Island University. In addition to playing guitar, she teaches band and orchestral instruments to children and adults throughout Long Island. The piece you are hearing tonight is her first stab at composition! She has recently sang various chamber repertoire in Austria with AlpenKammerMusik, a young artist program. She made her opera debut in the spring as Mrs. Grose in Britten’s Turn of the Screw with Stony Brook Opera, and has had partial roles as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier, La Voix in Les Contes d'Hoffmann, and Arsamene in Serse. She has also performed solo, choral, and chamber repertoire throughout Italy, Germany, and Quebec. Notably, she has sung in the chorus for Verdi's Requiem with the Cecilia Chorus of NY at Carnegie Hall and with opera company Teatro Grattacielo at Lincoln Center. She is looking forward to her role as Alisa in Lucia di Lammermoor in the spring of 2015.

Vietnamese-born cellist Phuc Phan is currently working toward his Masters Degree at Stony Brook University. Besides studying under private instruction from Colin Carr, he is also receiving regular chamber music coachings with members of the Emerson String Quartet, pianist Gilbert Kalish, flutist Carol Wincenc, among others. Before leaving his country in 2007, Phuc had completed the intermediate performance degree from the Hanoi National Conservatory of Music. Since then, he received full scholarships to study at the United World College of the Adriatic, Italy where he studied chamber music with members of Trio di Parma and Trio di Trieste. In 2009, he attended Luther College in Iowa, USA where he studied with Dr. Eric Kutz. As an orchestral musician, Phuc was selected from his country to participate in the Southeast Asian Youth Orchestra in 2006 and the Asian Youth Orchestra in 2007. He was the principal of the Luther College Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra for three years during which he was selected as the soloist to perform the first movement of the Dvorak Cello Concerto with the Symphony Orchestra. He was also selected as principal cellist for the Napa Valley Institute Orchestra during the summer of 2013. At Stony Brook University, he was occasionally appointed assistant principal cellist. Having a special passion for teaching and music education, Phuc has been teaching many young students. In the summer of 2014, he was invited to be the Teaching Assistant of Cello an American Experience, a highly regarded cello festival for young professionals. Phuc is currently playing on a Zimmerman 1919 cello, generously loaned to him by the Carlsen Cello Foundation in Seattle.

Épisode de la vie d'un artiste Kristin Starkey: This piece came about in an atypical way. Two vastly opposing pieces were composed completely separate from each other - with two different ideas in mind. Upon hearing these two pieces, the wonderful Margaret Schedel advised that we should merge our two ideas as one! What came about was something quite unique yet oddly connected. For my side of the piece, which comprises of the more mechanical and non-tonal sounds, was really a class experiment for me to see what I can do with various software and sounds. As a singer and classical guitarist, Interacting with computer music (and composing in general) was completely new territory for me. I was actually inspired by horror video games - the atmospheric, creepy ambiance sounds that one usually relates to the horror genre. I hope to invoke similar feelings with this piece – especially at the transition areas where Phuc’s part of the piece comes into the foreground (similar to transitioning spots in video games). At the same time, I also wanted to include classical structure and elements to relate a little bit to home – which merging with Phuc’s original piece did for me. Enjoy the experiment!

Phuc Phan: Initially, my “half” of this work was merely a mixture of different beats/rhythms in the software (Ableton Live 9) library, which I found extremely fascinating and exotic. It was in fact Meg Schedel’s idea after hearing my rhythmic mash-up and Kristin’s “creepy, atmospheric ambiance sound” that combining the two works into one would potentially lead to an amusing outcome. Both Kristin and I agreed that in order for this to work, there needed to be an overall structure. Since Kristin’s composition was extremely colorful and provocative, perhaps the piece needed a story. We were convinced a programmatic nature would really evoke the audiences to utilize their own imagination; and at the same time provided that necessary linking thread for the whole work. Prior to our first presentation of the piece, we had asked our fellow classmates to come up with their own stories and the result was definitely amusing, if not hysterical! Tonight we invite you to do the same and please, do let us know afterward your own version. Enjoy an Episode in the Life of an Artist!

Cort Lippe studied Renaissance music in Italy for a year, composition and computer music with Larry Austin in the USA, and followed composition and analysis seminars with various composers including Boulez, Donatoni, K. Huber, Messiaen, Penderecki, Stockhausen, and Xenakis. From 1980-83 he studied and did research in The Netherlands, at the Instituut voor Sonologie with G.M. Koenig and Paul Berg in the fields of computer and formalized music. From 1983-1994 he lived in France where he worked for three years at the Centre d'Etudes de Mathematique et Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu), founded by Iannis Xenakis, while following Xenakis' courses on acoustics and formalized music at the University of Paris. Subsequently, he worked for nine years at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), founded by Pierre Boulez, where he gave courses on new technology in composition, developed real-time computer music applications, and was part of the original development team for the software Max. His research includes more than 35 peer-reviewed publications on interactive music, granular sampling, score following, spectral processing, FFT-based spatial distribution/delay, acoustic instrument parameter mapping, and instrument design. Since 1994 he has taught in the Department of Music of the University at Buffalo, New York where he is an associate professor of composition and director of the Lejaren Hiller Computer Music Studios.

Christopher Howard is a percussionist from St. Louis, MO who is currently based in Long Island. He enjoys exploring a wide range of musical styles with many different groups. He has performed in New York City with Iktus Percussion Group and the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, with a focus on electro-acoustic works that include performances at conferences such as the Percussive Arts Society International Conference, Machine Fantasies, and the New York City Electronic Music Festival. He has played jazz and explored free improvisation with world-renowned trombonist Ray Anderson and others around the Long Island area. He has also performed, toured, and recorded with the award-winning Fountain City Brass Band multiple times in Europe. This varied background has made him a versatile musician interested in crossing the boundaries between these many different genres. Chris has a BM in Percussion Performance from the University of Missouri-Kansas City where he studied with Nick Petrella, and is currently working on his DMA at SUNY Stony Brook under Eduardo Leandro, where he also earned his Masters Degree.

Music for Hi-hat and Computer (1998) was commissioned by the American percussionist J. Landy Cosgrove, and premiered in Denmark in March of 1998. Technically, the computer tracks parameters of the hi-hat, such as pitch, amplitude, spectrum, density, rests, articulation, tempi, etc., and uses this information to trigger specific electronic events, and to continuously control all the computer sound output by directly controlling the digital synthesis algorithms. Thus, the performer is expected to “interact” with the computer triggering and continuously shaping all of the computer output. Some of the sounds in the electronic part come directly from the composed hi-hat part, so that certain aspects of the musical and sound material for the instrumental and electronic parts are one and the same. Sound material other than the hi-hat is also manipulated in the time domain via time-stretching and granular sampling. Frequency domain FFT-based cross-synthesis and analysis/resynthesis using an oscillator bank, as well as more standard signal processing such as harmonizing, frequency shifting, phasing, spatialization, etc. are all employed. The instrument/machine relationship moves constantly on a continuum between the poles of an “extended” solo and a duo. Musically, the computer part is, at times, not separate from the hi-hat part, but serves rather to “amplify” the hi-hat in many dimensions and directions; while at the other extreme of the continuum, the computer part has its own independent “voice”.

David Morneau is a composer of an entirely undecided genre. Described by Molly Sheridan as a “shining beacon” of inspiration, his diverse work illuminates ideas about our culture, issues concerning creativity, and even the very nature of music itself. His eclectic output has been described as “elegantly rendered”, “happily prissy”, “impressive”, “unusual, esoteric, and offbeat”. His recent album, Broken Memory, “absolutely wrecks shop…For that David Morneau wins.” Learn more at http://5of4.com

in8 was created using a vintage Nintendo Gameboy running a loop sequencer called Nanoloop. 8bit music feels like a natural choice for an 8channel sound system. The numerology doesn’t stop there. There are 8 movements – each is 8^2 seconds long. Each movement has an 8 letter title. in8 is a piece I’ve been making (off and on) for the past 8 years. Different iterations have appeared in public at different moments. At this point, most of the original ideas are long gone, lost in a haze of revisions and resets. The original program notes remain relevant though: “This music exists at the nexus between the Credo of John Cage and the Legend of Zelda, between the sonic structures of Edgard Varèse and the geometric structures of Tetris, between the electronic world of Kraftwerk and the mushroom fueled world of Mario. It is the gateway to a dreamworld of two-dimensional perfection complete with powerups, extra lives, and vicious turtles. It is the soundtrack for a left to right path toward enlightenment. It is Terry Riley vs. Donkey Kong. And it blasts at you in glorious 8bit sound.”

As Speak Onion, Dan Abatemarco treads on, then completely explodes, the line between producer and noisician. He spews seething noise, giant deformed beats and absolutely wrong atmospheres in fits and starts until nothing sounds like what it sounds like anymore. Breakbeats and basslines enter innocently but end up processed beyond recognition and drowning in feedback. Synth sounds are stretched, manipulated, and left ruined as chilling shrieks. The resulting sonic abomination slips between the dimensions of experimentalism, harsh noise, and beat-bashed breakcore. Dancefloor? Maybe. Slaughterhouse floor? Yes, definitely.

Bruce Drummond (bruzed) is an artist and musician based in NYC, currently developing software at Potion. He works with a variety of different tools and programming languages to create engaging sensory experiences. He has also taught as Part-Time Faculty at the MFA D+T program at Parsons the New School for Design. He has done live audio/visual performances with Analogue Transit, Speak Onion, and exhibited his work at Parsons, MIT and UCLA.

The Ovoid Chamber is a place where all is visible and audible; all is known. No edges, no shadows, no breaks between fields. One experiences the totality of the chamber at once and constantly. The only possible organization is post-hoc and externally applied. Bruzed and Speak Onion’s Ovoid Chamber is not a manifest experience of the chamber, but rather a reminder that the chamber exists created using manic pixels, cut-up drums, distorted bass, and manipulated field recordings.

Douglas DaSilva is a composer, guitarist, educator, curator, filmmaker and clarinetist in New York City. As Artistic Director for the Composer’s Voice concert series “DaSilva knows just how to tempt you with a delicious array of musical desserts that titillate your ear.” NM421 Much of his composing is influenced by Brazilian music and self-inflicted stress. His compositions have been described as “very individual, and to us has a very clear personality” in Classical Guitar Magazine. His electronic works have been featured on Vox Novus’ projects. DaSilva’s Stabat was composed for and performed by Serban Nichifor on the 2013 George Enescu Festival. In 2014, his Rondellhund was performed by Trio Bateira at Weil Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. His works have been performed in Brazil, England, Italy, Germany, Romania, Brazil & throughout the USA. His documentary “My Dad’s Violin” will be released in 2014.

Pianist Yumi Suehiro began studying both piano and marimba at an early age. In her native Japan, Ms. Suehiro won numerous competitions, including the top prize at the Kobe International Competition as the youngest winner. As a pianist, she has performed at New York City’s Weill Recital Hall (Carnegie) as an AMTL Audition Winner, and at Steinway Hall, presented by the Amati Music Festival. She also was the featured marimba player in Latin percussionist Victor Rendon's recording of “Fiesta Percussiva”. Ms. Suehiro graduated from Lehman College (CUNY) and the Manhattan School of Music. While at Manhattan, she won second prize in the school’s 2010 piano concerto competition, and in 2011 was chosen to perform Richard Wilson’s “Flashback” for Pierre Aimard’s master class. Her teachers have included Morris Lang, John Corigliano, Peter Vinograde, and Zenon Fishbein. Currently Ms. Suehiro is a pianist of ensemble mise-en and enjoys playing contemporary music.

It’s What’s on the Inside That… (I-Flatters II. Shatters III. Splatters)
Mvt I-Flatters: A rather conventional and innocent jaunt, until the last moment when the electronics are introduced. Is this the fruit from the tree of wisdom being plucked by the innocent Yumi? Can you sense the presence of the serpent?
Mvt II-Shatters: More cachexia than metamorphosis. Take yesterday’s soul, place it in a crystal vessel and toss off a building.
Mvt. III: Splatters: Guts everywhere.

Pierre Jodlowski is a composer, performer and multimedia artist. His music, often marked by a high density, is at the crossroads of acoustic and electric sound and is characterized by dramatic and political anchor. His work as a composer led him to perform in France and abroad in most places dedicated to contemporary music as well as others artistic fields, dance, theater, visual arts, electronic music. His work unfolds today in many areas: films, interactive installations, staging. He is defining his music as an "active process" on the physical level [musical gestures, energy and space] and on the psychological level [relation to memory, and visual dimension of sound]. In parallel to his compositions, it also occurs for performance, solo or with other artists. Since 1998 he is co-artistic director of éOle (studio and production center based in Odyssud - Cultural center in Blagnac) and Novelum festival in Toulouse.

A native of Taiwan, pianist Shiau-uen Ding is an energetic performer of traditional and contemporary repertoire. She studied piano with Eugene Pridonoff, Elizabeth Pridonoff, and Lina Yeh, computer music with Mara Helmuth and Christopher Bailey, and contemporary improvisation with Alan Bern at National Taiwan Normal University and University of Cincinnati, where she received her doctoral degree. She has performed in France, Germany, and throughout the US and Taiwan. She was called a "daredevil" by New York Times for her performance at Bang on a Can Marathon and "a powerful force on the new music scene" by Array for her performance at Spark Festival in Minneapolis. She has collaborated with internationally renowned performers and composers, including Steve Reich, Michael Kugel, George Tsontakis, who refers to her rendition of his Ghost Variations as a "monster performance," and Moritz Eggert, who dedicated his Hämmerklavier XIX: Hymnen der Welt (Afghanistan bis Zimbabwe) to her. She has recorded for Capstone, Centaur, Innova, and Electric Music Collective.

Série blanche belongs to the "series" cycle devoted to piano works. This cycle which started with " Série noire" in 2005 was commissioned by the Orléans International Piano Competition. In this cycle, each colour provides an opportunity to investigate a particular link of music with image. The latter may be cinematographic or mental ; it is a reference space, the writing starting point. This project based on a cumulative writing principle develops the feeling of a meaningless, rather mechanical world. It might be considered as a possible transcription of "Un Roi Sans Divertissement ", a novel by Jean Giono that was published at the end of The Second World War. In this book and its film adaptation by François Leterrier, absurdity and violence are the result of man boredom. There are pictures of white snow-covered landscapes around a grey village with its black figures. Red is added to this colour range only when blood is shed as if it were the only possible way of solving an absurd situation. Music, therefore, is characterized by an apparent nonchalance, by a sort of very simple sweetness, but the layers stack on, every recorded sign (ou mark ?) remaining and weaving the line of a crescendo that ends in excess. As Albert Camus did in "L’Etranger ", Giono wrote this book to say the people’s lack of understanding when concentration camps were discovered. I have written this music to tell the relentless mechanism, which implies the disappearance of our perceptual processes and the gradual erosion to which we are submitted.

Margaret Anne Schedel is a composer and cellist specializing in the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media whose works have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. While working towards a DMA in music composition at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, her interactive multimedia opera, A King Listens, premiered at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and was profiled by apple.com. She holds a certificate in Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and has studied composition with Mara Helmuth, Cort Lippe and McGregor Boyle. She sits on the boards of 60x60 Dance, the BEAM Foundation, Devotion Gallery, the International Computer Music Association, and Organised Sound. She contributed a chapter to the Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, and her article on generative multimedia was recently published in Contemporary Music Review. She has been commissioned by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra and the percussionensemble Ictus. In 2009 she won the first Ruth Anderson Prize for her interactive installation Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair. Her research focuses on gesture in music, and the sustainability of technology in art. She ran SUNY’s first Coursera Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in 2013. As an Associate Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, she serves as Co-Director of Computer Music and is a core faculty member of cDACT, the consortium for digital art, culture and technology.

A laureate of the 2000 Yehudi Menuhin International Young Violinists Competition, Jaram Kim made her debut at the age of six in GwangJu Namdo Art Concerto Hall. The following year Ms. Kim won the Gold Medal in the GwangJu HoNam Art Competition and at the age of ten, she performed Wieniawski Second Violin Concerto with the Seoul Chamber Orchestra. After receiving the Keum Ho scholarship, Ms. Kim came to the United States to study at the Juilliard Pre-College in the studio of Hyo Kang. Ms. Kim made her New York orchestral debut performing as a soloist with the Jupiter Symphony under the baton of Maestro Jens Nygaard. Ms. Kim graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music with a Bachelor of Music in 2007 under the tutelage of Ida Kavafian–there she performed under the baton of conductors such as Christoph Eschenbach, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Otto-Werner Mueller. As of 2010, Ms. Kim joined the studio of Mº Salvatore Accardo at the Accademia Walter Stauffer Fondazione in Cremona, Italy. In 2011, Ms. Kim won the position of Primo Violino (concertmaster) of the orchestra La Verdi. She was invited to be a violin faculty member at the Conservatory Music in the Mountains Festival in Colorado for three consecutive years, as well as faculty for the Manhattan in the Mountains festival in the summer of 2013. Ms. Kim holds a violin faculty position at Gracias Music and Mahanaim in Huntington, NY and she is invited to Manhattan in the Mountains again for this Summer 2014.

Three Darks In Red is the second work of Schedel’s using Tom Erbe’s recursive spiral stretcher, which he programmed to her specifications. The recursive nature of the stretcher allows sounds to be stretched more the longer they are played; the performers control how long to let the electronics ring. The electronics range from short almost reverberated sounds, to long distortions of the original timbres. The piece is dedicated to Mary Eleanor Pitcairn.

Leigh Landy holds a Research Chair at De Montfort University where he directs the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre. His compositions include several for video, dance and theatre. He has worked extensively with the late playwright, Heiner Müller, the new media artist, Michel Jaffrennou and the composer-performer, Jos Zwaanenburg and was composer in residence for the Dutch National Theatre during its first years of existence. Currently he is artistic director of Idée Fixe – Experimental Sound and Movement Theatre. His publications focus on the studies of electroacoustic music, in particular issues related to making this music accessible. He is editor of “Organised Sound: an international journal of music technology” (CUP) and author of six books including “What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music?” and “Experimental Music Notebooks”. “Understanding the Art of Sound Organization” (MIT Press) and “La musique des sons/The Music of Sounds” (Sorbonne MINT/OMF) both appeared in 2007 and his latest book, “Making Music with Sounds” (2012). He directs the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS) projects and is a founding member of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (EMS Network).

To BBC or Not This eight-channel work is the British follow-up of the 2007 GRM commissioned work, Oh là la radio and the predecessor of the 2011 ZKM commissioned Radio-aktiv (24-channels) and Chinese Radio Sound (2013, made in collaboration with Shenyang Conservatory students). Like many of my recent works, it focuses on recycling sounds (aka appropriation, plundering, sampling, etc.). Both works use diverse radio broadcast recordings covering very few days as source material taken from BBC radio stations. Other than the final manipulated sound, all sounds are presented in their original state. The role I chose was simply to re-compose this sound material. For those familiar with the BBC, many familiar voices and logos can be heard. The piece works both at the level of heightened listening – understanding every word spoken if that is what you want to pay attention to – and reduced listening – catching the occasional phrase, but listening to the work as organised sound. The piece seeks to take the known, tilt it ever so slightly and re-present it as a sound-based artwork.