Juilliard Music Technology Center Presents "Beyond the Machine 10.0": A Festival of Electro-Acoustic and Multimedia Art for Two Weeks, March 17-20 and March 25-28, 2010 in Juilliard's Willson Theater
Five World-Premiere Performances to Highlight Festival Celebrating 10 Years of Music Technology at Juilliard
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The second week of the festival, Juilliard Plugged In, with concerts on Thursday through Saturday, March 25-27, all at 8 PM, and Sunday, March 28 at 7 PM in the Willson Theater features Kinan Azmeh's Walls and Towers (world premiere); Mari Kimura's Phantom (world premiere); Karen Tanaka's Wave Mechanics II; Cornelius Dufallo's Suite for Electric Violin; Spencer Topel's Cyclone's Needle; Judith Shatin's Spring Tides; and Marcelo Zarvos' Rounds.
Beyond the Machine concerts are FREE, but tickets are required. A very limited number of FREE tickets will be available beginning March 3 at the Janet and Leonard Kramer Box Office. Box Office hours are Monday through Friday from 11 AM - 6 PM. For more information, call (212) 769-7406 or go to www.juilliard.edu.
Edward Bilous's Night of the Dark Moon was the second of four works commissioned by Alison Chase and Pilobolus Dance Theater. It is based loosely on the myth of Orpheus; it is the story of two lovers on a journey through the Underworld where they encounter the shadow side of their passionate romance. Orpheus, child of the Muse Calliope and ‘father of songs' guides the lovers back from the darkness of the Underworld with his soulful music.
The work marries music, movement and light to evoke a dream-like world in which human bodies and voices drift between different states of awareness. In this production, the vocalist cues a chorus of distant voices and controls their dynamics with electronic sensors. Similarly, a dancer's movement affects the color and luminosity of the video and projection design. The excerpts, performed on these concerts, were reinterpreted by Yara Travieso, choreographer. Katy Tucker is the video and projection designer, and Paul Hudson is the lighting designer.
Italian born composer and Juilliard alumna Paola Prestini is the director and co-founder of the award-winning interdisciplinary performing collective, VisionIntoArt (VIA). VIA has performed in theaters, museums, and clubs all over the world and specializes in creating collaborations that stem from new music. Ms. Prestini's work, Listen: Quiet is based on private conversations that form part of the recorded backing tracks. The work, which is for percussion, cello and electronics, is divided into two halves and tells a story of the memories she had of her childhood. Technically, the work explores electronics through recorded resonances, the KBOW, and a Boss RC-20XL Phrase recorder Loop Station.
Director Kirsten Kelly's credits include Measure for Measure with Shakespeare's Motley Crew, The Hairy Ape and The Gut Girls with Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company, and The Shadow of the Gunman with Ulysses Theatre. She is a member of the education department at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Ms. Kelly directs Tongues, a work by playwright, actor, and television and film director, Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin, founder of the Open Theater. As a director, she wanted to look at how the voice could be music and percussion, and how percussion could speak. Ms. Kelly also wanted to explore the interplay between live and recorded voice and live and recorded percussion.
Juilliard faculty member and alumna Michelle Di Bucci is most active as a composer for the theater. She has composed music for over 30 theatrical productions and has collaborated with some of the leading figures in experimental theater, including Leon Katz, Radu Penciulescu, and Gerald Thomas. She is presently working on a new opera, commissioned by Meet the Composer, based on the life and work of the German artist, Charlotte Salomon. Ms. DiBucci is reconstructing Stockhausen's iconoclastic Helikopter String Quartet. The original 31-minute work has been rearranged and edited to 17 minutes. All audio and visual elements are linked by a click track.
Juilliard faculty member and alumna Milica Paranosic is a composer, performance artist, sound designer, producer and educator. Born in Belgrade and now based in New York City, Ms. Paranosic is the recipient of many international awards, grants, and honors. Her compositions include concert pieces, mixed media, interactive works, as well as music for dance, stage and film. She teaches composition and music technology at Juilliard. In the summer of 2009, Ms. Paranosic spent a month in Kopeyia, a small village in Ghana, studying drumming and volunteering as a teacher. Her work, Akpei!, is a result of that experience. The multimedia performance piece leans on Ewe tradition and depicts a day in Kopeyia, through music, movement, poetry and visuals.
Juilliard alumnus Jakub Ciupinski is working on new compositions fusing classical contemporary music with non-classical genres and live electronics. He has collaborated with a variety of artists, musicians, choreographers and film directors, including the Oscar-winning director Andrzej Wajda, and at the age of 18, signed a contract with Sony Music Poland. Juilliard alumna Christina Spinei is in demand from choreographers, film directors, and musicians. Her compositions have been commissioned by the Ebony String Quartet, the ETA3 Trio, Kathleen Dyer Dance New York, London Center School, and others. Blind Ear Music was founded in 2009 by Jakub Ciupinski and Christina Spinei. Their concerts incorporate live composition, electronics, and improvisations to create an ever-changing soundscape. Blind Ear has been featured at the World Technology Awards, on YouTube's "Spotlight on Music" section, and most recently on BBC's "World Today." The new work by Blind Ear, Synched, explores the many layers of inter-disciplinary communication together with choreographer and Juilliard alumna Andrea Miller and Gallim Dance. The entire performance is based on loops, short fragments that repeat, both musically and physically. It is a demonstration of the symbiotic relationships of the arts: dance, lighting, video, and music are all synchronized to particular cues from each other. Jakub Ciupinski and Cristina Spinei control the music by operating two laptops that send music to eight players. The music is all based on loops and can be sent in any combination to any musician; the dancers are also connected to the system. Lights and video projections are connected to the laptops that are controlled by the composers. The performance will be one large multi-disciplinary conversation.
Juilliard alumnus Kinan Azmeh is one of Syria's rising stars. He was the first Arab to win the premier prize at the 1997 Nicolai Rubinstein International Competition in Moscow. He currently is a doctoral music student of clarinetist Charles Neidich at the City University of New York. Mr. Azmeh's work, Walls and Towers, was commissioned for Beyond the Machine. It is scored for clarinet, violin, viola, cello, tape, and video. The video was done by Mr. Azmeh's longtime collaborator and friend, Syrian artist Kevork Mourad. Mr. Azmeh says of his work: "The piece is inspired by what walls and towers represent in our collective memory, by the view of an endless gray wall crossing a beautiful landscape, and by those towers from which different lives from only one side of the wall are being watched closed."
Mari Kimura is widely admired for her revolutionary extended technique "Subharmonics" and for the solo performances of diverse programs, including her works with interactive computer music. She has won numerous awards both in her native Japan and in the U.S. and has been invited to international festivals around the world. Ms. Kimura teaches a graduate class in Interactive Computer Music Performance at Juilliard. Her work, Phantom, is a solo violin version of her collaborative project with media artist Toni Dove entitled, Lucid Possessions, commissioned by the Culturemart '09 Festival at HERE Arts Center in New York City. It is her first work using spoken texts as one of the musical materials, creating a virtual dialog interactively with the violin.
Karen Tanaka's work has been performed around the world, including in the U.K., the United States, France, Scandinavia, and at five ICSM festivals. She is co-artistic director of the Yatsugatake Kogen Music Festival, previously directed by Toru Takemitsu. Between the spring and summer of 1994, Ms. Tanaka had written a piece for 20 instrumentalists entitled, Wave Mechanics, for the Ensemble Kanazawa. In this piece, each instrument was used in a soloistic manner, with special importance given to the first violin part. This part has been extended into this new solo violin piece, Wave Mechanics II. Wave mechanics refers to a technical term of physics.
Cornelius Dufallo is a composer, improviser and director of the creative music ensemble Ne(x)tworks. He has worked with artists Ornette Coleman, Oliver Lake, Butch Morris, Bryan Adams, Lenny Kravitz, and Queensryche. His solo CD, Dream Streets, features music for electric violin on the Innova label. Mr. Dufallo's Suite for Electric Violin was written in 2008 for the UnTapped Festival in New York City. The six movement piece (featured on his recent CD, Dream Streets) alludes to Baroque forms, while also employing loops and digital effects to evoke quasi-hallucinatory soundscapes. He presents two movements on the concert: Prelude and Passacaglia.
Juilliard alumnus Spencer Topel's music has recently appeared on concert programs in major venues such as the Chiesa di Santa Caterina Treviso in Venice, Italy, and the Istanbul Technical University, the 2008 Aspen Music Festival, and Chigiana Festival in Siena, Italy in 2007, at Alice Tully and Weill Concert Halls in New York and in Tokyo City Opera Hall. In 2009-10 his music will be performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, the American Modern Ensemble, and the Holden Gallery. Mr. Topel's Cyclone's Needle is a fantasy of sorts on John Cage's Construction, Edgar Varese's Ionisation, and his own fascination with the timbre of reinforcing bars (rebar). The work was written for two percussionists and electronics.
Judith Shatin's music is renowned for its dramatic shape and imaginative blending of acoustic and digital media. She composes in genres ranging from chamber, choral and orchestral to electro-acoustic, interactive media, installation and film. Her work, Spring Tides, was scored for the Pierrot Ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano) and interactive electronics and was inspired by the pull of the moon and sun on the flow of the tides, highest when the moon and sun are directly lined up with the earth. In Spring Tides, this phenomenon metaphorically animates the pull between acoustic and digital sound, between controlled improvisation and exactly specified elements, between slow and surging motions, and between shifting fields of timbre and pitch. Spring Tides was commissioned by and dedicated to the DaCapo Chamber Players.
Brazilian pianist and composer Marcelo Zarvos has written for virtually every medium from the concert stage to film, television, theater and dance, and is currently working on a NYSCA commission for the Quintet of the Americas. Rounds was born out of conversations with members of ETHEL after their first collaboration, Nepomuk's Dances. The new piece is scored for two string quartets, in this case, one of the quartets is pre-recorded while the second quartet plays with it live during the performance. Rounds is part of a larger work-in-progress entitled, Double Quartet.
About Beyond the Machine
Beyond the Machine was started in 2001 to provide Juilliard students with opportunities to explore the use of technology in their work as performing artists and to collaborate on the creation of multimedia and interdisciplinary art. The first concerts in 2001 took place in a small rehearsal studio at Juilliard and featured students from Juilliard's Dance, Drama and Music Divisions, who shared a sense of artistic adventure. Since then, Beyond the Machine and resident performing group, the Juilliard Electric Ensemble have performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, the Clark Theater at Lincoln Center and most recently at the Orpheum Festival for Young Artists in Zurich. This year, the Music Technology Center is proud to present Beyond the Machine 10.0 in the new Rosemary and Meredith Willson Theater at Juilliard. The Theater was designed with Music Technology events in mind and is intended to inspire composers, choreographers and directors to create new works that utilize digital technology in performance. To celebrate the 10th anniversary, a group of alumni of the program were invited to create new works for the two concerts - Juilliard InterArts and Juilliard Plugged In.
About the Juilliard Electric Ensemble
Juilliard students performing on the concerts are collectively part of the Juilliard Electric Ensemble, a group dedicated to the use of new technology in performance. This year, Juilliard has a group of extraordinary alumni coaching and playing with the Juilliard Electric Ensemble. They include composer/musicians Kinan Azmeh, Jakub Ciupinski, Cornelius Dufallo, ETHEL, Clarice Jensen, Judith Shatin, Cristina Spinei, Spencer Topel, Airi Yoshioka, and Jeffrey Ziegler and directors Ian Belton and Kirsten Kelly, actor Samantha Soule and choreographer Yara Travieso.
About Juilliard's Rosemary and Meredith Willson Theater
Juilliard's new Rosemary and Meredith Willson Theater is located on the third floor of Juilliard's new wing. It comprises more than 2,000 square feet of performance space with an additional 2,000 square feet of production support space, including a state-of-the-art lighting grid, a permanently-installed sound system, a removable dance floor, and video project capabilities. Juilliard's new Music Technology Center also is connected directly to the advanced sound capabilities of the theater, allowing for sophisticated performances of works using electronics.
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