New York City Electro-acoustic Music Festival

Corfu Concert, Friday 28-6-2013 20.30

 

 

 

Elizabeth Hoffman      Soundendipities 

 

Tae Hong Park            The Machine Stops

 

George Brunner              La Nuit dans le Marais

 

Izzi Ramkissoon          Kill Switch

 

Judy Klein                    The Wolves of Bays Mountain

 

Hubert Howe              Emergence

 

 

curation   Izzi Ramkissoon

 

 

 

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NYCEMF

The New York City Electro-acoustic Music Festival is an annual multiday event dedicated to showcasing local, national, and international artist in the field of music and technology.  The festival presents and supports  the development of an electronic music community in NYC by raising  awareness of new practices and theories in various fields determined  each year by the NYCEMF Steering Committee.  The festival is driven  by its members within the NYC community and includes collaborations  with external academic organizations to capture the spectrum of ongoing  research. The festival format provides a platform for professionals and  amateurs to exchange ideas making valuable connections within the field  of music technology and NYC.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elizabeth Hoffman    Soundendipities        

Vibrational motions pervade the texture here and suggest an external world seen too close up for one to recognize any substances themselves. This piece attempts to convey a hyper-frenetic immobility. Physical modeling techniques were used to sculpt small sections of this piece, objects which emerge out of nowhere. As embedded gestural fragments they are intriguing residue from unknown sources entangled momentarily in the sonic mesh. Soundendipities was completed in 2011 at the studio of the composer (NYC).

 

Elizabeth Hoffman lives and works in NYC. She composes for both acoustic and electroacoustic media. For her work in the latter, she was awarded a prize and a mention respectively from the Bourges (FR) (1994) and Prix Ars Electronica (AUS) (1995). She is also a recipient of recognition and support from the Jerome Foundation, and Collaborative and Humanities Grant-in-Aid awards from NYU where she currently teaches. Her electroacoustic music is available on empreintes DIGITALes, NEUMA, Centaur and Everglade labels. Recent compositional interests include a focus on live electronic instrument design, timbral and textural complexity, and spatialization as an expressive signifier. She also writes on analysis and representation in electroacoustic music, and recent articles on electroacoustic topics have appeared in Computer Music Journal and Organized Sound journal.

 

 

Tae Hong Park            The Machine Stops

The Machine Stops is an exploration of using simple DSP techniques in a musical context with an underlying narrative depicting the lifetime of machines. The foundation of the work is a single sinusoid.

 

Tae Hong Park is a composer, music technologist, and bassist. His work focuses on composition of electro-acoustic and acoustic music, machine learning and computer-aided music analysis, research in multi-dimensional aspects of timbre, and audio digital signal processing. Dr. Park has presented his music at national and international conferences and festivals including Bourges, ICMC, MATA, SCIMF, and SEAMUS. Among the ensembles and performers that have played his work are the Brentano String Quartet, California E.A.R. Unit, Edward Carroll, Ensemble Surplus, Zoe Martlew, Nash Ensemble of London, and the Tarab Cello Ensemble. Professor Park is author of Introduction to Digital Signal Processing: Computer Musically Speaking (World Scientific, 2010). He is the Chief Editor of Journal SEAMUS, serves as Editorial Consultant for Computer Music Journal, and is President of the International Computer Music Association (ICMA). He is Associate Professor of Music Technology and also Composition and Music Theory at NYU. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University

 

 

George Brunner           La Nuit dans Le Marais

La Nuit dans Le Marais is a remix of Within/Without composed at the studios of the IMEB.  Le Marais is a very special place in Bourges, France that has a unique acoustic quality.  John Cage referred to it as the most perfect acoustic space he encountered.  Le Marais is also a beautiful place that comes to life in a way that can only occur at night.  This work was made possible through a commission by the IMEB and was composed in the studios of the IMEB (Bourges, France) January and February of 2003 and remixed in NYC 2012.

 

George Brunner - American composer.  Significant residencies include: IMEB, France (2003, 2009), EMS, Sweden (1996, 1998, 2001), Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey (2002, 2004).  Significant commissions include the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin Ireland (2003, 2004), Morris Lang, principal percussionist, NY Philharmonic (1997, 2007, 2012), Relache Ensemble (2001), and 2 Short Operas produced by Remarkable Theatre Brigade (2009, 2010).  He is founder/director of the International Electro-Acoustic Music Festival at Brooklyn College since1987 and Director of Music Technology Program; and, Composition Faculty, Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College.  His music appears on Chrysopée Electronique 25 (2003), MSR Classics (2009), and MSR Classics (2010).

Izzi Ramkissoon                   Kill Switch

Kill Switch is an audio-visual composition that draws upon the idea of situations that turn out of control, blurring the lines between control and havoc into a progression towards the inevitable explosion unless avoided.  The composition was created by processing live flute, cello and percussion samples then arranging them into various patterns that develop in a specific start and stop sequence.  In other forms the composition can be performed with or without the live processing of instruments.  Kill Switch was commissioned by flutist Sarah Carrier.

 

Izzi Ramkissoon is an award-winning electro acoustic multimedia composer, performer, and sound artist. He has written works for a variety of media including theater, dance, installations, alternative controllers, and interactive multimedia. His compositions deal extensively with the use of technology in composition and have been featured at major festivals including SEAMUS, NYCEMF, SPARK, LUMEN, Look and Listen Festival, Black Maria Film + Video Festival, World Maker Faire, MATA, Make Music New York, NIME as well as numerous other venues, universities and festivals, both nationally and internationally including Italy, Mexico, Greece, and Norway. 

 

 

Judy Klein                  The Wolves of Bays Mountain

Bays Mountain Park is a nature preserve in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee.  During the 1990s, I made several trips to the park to record the wolves who were living there.  In the piece, the wolves are heard much as I heard them myself, sometimes only footsteps away, and also transformed, such as occurs in the realm of imagination, memory and dream.  For the composition I used the Csound computer music language.  All of the sounds come from the recordings, in unaltered or slightly modified form and as source material in musical settings and transitions.  The piece opens  with sounds derived from the recording of a winter chorus howl.  Over time, the voices of the wolves become distinct.  Two wolves bring the howling to an end with a sequence of short, antiphonal calls.   In the middle sections, the recordings are virtually unedited.  It’s nearly spring.  The wolves are heard in their environment, first in the early morning and then in the still of the late night.  The howling in the final section is again from winter, the mating season.  It ends with the duet of Kashtin, the alpha female of the pack, and her majestic mate, Navarro, who died the following year and in whose memory the piece was written.

 

Judy Klein received degrees in music both in the United States and in Switzerland.  She studied computer music with Charles Dodge and was an affiliate of the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music (BC-CCM) while it was under his direction.  She taught computer music composition at New York University and continues to lecture at colleges and universities in the United States and Europe.  For many years, she was the consultant for electroacoustic music at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.  Her music has received honors and performances worldwide and can be heard on the ICMA, SEAMUS, Open Space and Cuneiform labels.  She currently resides in New York City and is a guest composer at the Columbia University Computer Music Center.

 

 

Hubert Howe                Emergence

Emergence is based upon the fascinating thing that happens when a group of independent tones are played together and tuned so that they are in a harmonic relationship.  Another note, the fundamental, appears, and now we hear only that second note, while all the others are heard as the timbre of the sound.  All notes in this work are created with up to 32 independently generated harmonic partials, and they are presented in three ways:  as separately attacked tones, as continuously fading sequences, and as a complex envelope, in which each note has a separate amplitude envelope.  All notes are played with a series of overtones that begins from the sixteenth partial, states the “harmony” of the context in which the note occurs, and then introduces the other partials.  The harmony is clearly discernible at the beginning of the sound, but it later merges into the timbre.  The work concentrates on the interplay between the overtones and the fundamentals they are a part of.

 

Hubert Howe was educated at Princeton University, where he studied with J. K. Randall, Godfrey Winham and Milton Babbitt, and from which he received the A.B., M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees.  He was one of the first researchers in computer music, and Professor of Music at Queens College of the City University of New York.  He also taught at the Juilliard School for 20 years.  From 1989 to 1998, 2001 to 2002, and Fall 2007, he was Director of the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College.  Recordings of his computer music have been released by Capstone Records (Overtone Music, CPS-8678, Filtered Music, CPS-8719, and Temperamental Music and Created Sounds, CPS-8771) and Ravello Records (Clusters, RR 7817).