The Juilliard Music Technology Center presents "Beyond the Machine 8.0: The Art of the Groove," an evening of electronic and interactive music, featuring conductor Jeffrey Milarsky and AXIOM on Saturday, May 3 at 8 PM at the Miller Theatre

Free concert includes new compositions by Jakub Ciupinski, Jeremiah Duarte Bills, Scott Johnson, Ryan Francis, JacobTV (Jacob Ter Veldius), and Ron Ford

The Juilliard Music Technology Center presents its eighth annual festival of electronic and interactive music, Beyond the Machine 8.0: The Art of the Groove, featuring works by current Juilliard composers, alumni, and guest composers, on Saturday, May 3 at 8 PM in the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, 2960 Broadway (at 116th Street). The program includes Jakub Ciupinski’s Elvex (world premiere); Jeremiah Duarte Bills’ Incantation (world premiere); Scott Johnson’s Americans (U.S. premiere); Ryan Francis’ Music for Strings (world premiere); JacobTV’s Lipstick; and Ron Ford’s Salome First. Jeffrey Milarsky conducts the ensemble AXIOM in the evening of new compositions. Beyond the Machine concerts strive to represent a balance of established and emerging composers who use technology in their work. This concert is FREE; no tickets are required. For more information, call (212) 769-7406 or go to www.juilliard.edu.

This year, Beyond the Machine 8.0 features composers who are exploring ways to merge classical craft and sensibilities with the rhythmic language and energy of modern culture. From earliest times, composers used popular rhythms and dance forms in concert works. Many masterworks of classical music are inspired by the vernacular of their time. In this sense, Art of the Groove is an exploration of a musical tradition that goes back several centuries and still continues today. Edward Bilous, a faculty member of Juilliard and chairman of the Department of Literature and Materials of Music, is founding director of the Juilliard Music Technology Center and the Juilliard Electric Ensemble, and co-founder of Beyond the Machine, A Festival of Electronic and Interactive Music.

The title for Jakub Ciupinski’s Elvex (world premiere) comes from the short story by Isaac Asimov, Robot Dream, in which a robot named Elvex (or LVX-1) is being interviewed by scientists. After he tells them his unusual dream, they immediately annihilate him in fear. The composer found this story intriguing because it reveals something about human beings – that we are afraid of strangers who look different, but we all feel and dream alike. The 11-minute piece features piano and vibraphone with their electronic counterparts: e-piano and e-vibraphone. In addition, there is an electronic improvised part played on a gesture controlled music system that the composer designed and programmed especially for this piece.

Jeremiah Duarte Bills’ Incantation (world premiere) was written for flute, Kenyan noisemaker and interactive computer and was inspired by the idea of a modern day or futuristic shaman. This shaman is only equipped with a rattle and bells – traditionally used to call helping spirits, a flute, and a laptop. The piece begins as a ritual ceremony where the shaman with the help of the laptop uses an incantation to enchant the flute to provide the necessary sounds and instruments for the journey such as whistles, drums, and didgeridoo to help the shaman reach a state of ecstasy. The journey ends as the shaman enters a dream state. The piece uses Max/MSP and all of the sounds are generated by the flute and Kenyan noisemaker.
    
Scott Johnson’s Americans receives its U.S. premiere at this performance. (The world premiere by Sentieri Selvaggi took place on May 7, 2007 in Milan.) The work is about the collision of America and the rest of the world in three movements: “Universal Phenomenon,” “Your Host,” and “Continental Divide.”  “Universal Phenomenon” reflects a very real effect, verified in cross-cultural scientific studies: people tend to more reliably recognize and remember faces from their own racial group. “Your Host,” is built around a former radio DJ’s recitation of his introduction to the “oldies” pop show he once hosted in Romania. The composer removed the old music from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, and substituted the names of 30 places around the world in many voices. “Continental Divide” recounts the painfully conflicted feelings of an Afghani immigrant who has long resided in the U.S. After the 9/11 attacks, she was torn between the impulse to avenge the death of innocents, and an invasion that would bring the inevitable death of more innocents. 

In Ryan Francis’ Music for Strings (world premiere), the work’s electronic component plays at least as crucial a role as the live ensemble contrary to what is inferred by the title. The electronics are drawn from rather marginal materials, largely sine-waves, sawtooths, clicks and pops, and often allude electronic sub-genre of IDM (intelligent dance music). The piece is in a rigid four movement symphonic structure, condensed into nine minutes, in hopes of subverting the expectation of an expansive exploration of the texture of each movement. 

JacobTV’s Lipstick (1998) is for amplified flute/alto flute and boombox. The soundtrack is based on audio from American talk shows: desperate conversations about human relationships, and an interview with Billie Holiday, in which she recites the words to “Don’t Explain,” about a woman deceived by her lover. Lipstick has three movements: fast – slow – fast.  

In Ron Ford’s Salome Fast, libretti of several key operas are used as frames for music pieces with a dramatic, but non-operatic character. Salome Fast is based not on Strauss’ opera, but on its libretto. Strauss’ inspiration was the theater version by Oscar Wilde, who in turn was inspired by the Bible. In the work, the story is pulled both into the future and backwards in time to its most original form. The libretto was translated into English and reduced to the minimum of text. This version was used as a strict frame for composing the instrumental music. Melodic length, shape, instrumentation and form were derived directly from this shadow libretto.

BIOGRAPHIES 

Jeremiah Duarte Bills, a native of Northern California, is a flutist and composer. Mr. Bills has been influenced and inspired by his maternal ancestry, which reaches back to the Azores Islands of Portugal. He is a master of music degree student at Juilliard. In addition to his performances at Juilliard, he has performed with a multimedia group, Vision into Art, and with composer Milica Paranosic. He received his bachelor’s degree from the San Francisco Conservatory. While in California, he was a soloist with various orchestras, such as the Sacramento Philharmonic, the Diablo Symphony, the California Wind Orchestra, and he has premiered solo and chamber works by Mogens Christensen, Adina Izarra, and JooWan Kim. He has given solo recitals at The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC and in San Francisco. 
       
Polish composer Jakub Ciupinski has studied with Krzysztof Penderecki, Zbigniew Bujarski, Edwin Roxbrough, and
Joe Cutler. While he writes chamber and symphonic concert music – including his Oratorio for the Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust for symphony and orchestra and two choirs, premiered in Cracow in 2003 – his stylistic influences run across many genres. Mr. Ciupinski has collaborated with a variety of artists, musicians, choreographers and film directors, including Oscar-winning director Andrzej Wajda, and at the age of 18, he signed a contract with SONY Music Poland. His electronica-infused world music has frequently been played on Polish radio and aired on music channels such as MTV and VIVA. Mr. Ciupinski’s works have been performed at Carnegie Hall, as well as in Poland, France, Italy, England, Scotland, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Hungary, Canada, and the U.S. He is currently in his second year of the master of music degree program, studying composition with Christopher Rouse at Juilliard. 

Ron Ford hails from Kansas City and studied composition, piano, and computers from 1978 until 1983 at Duke University in North Carolina. In 1982 and 1983, he was theory instructor at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. In 1983, he moved to The Netherlands where he finished his piano and composition studies at the Sweelinck Conservatorium and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. His teachers included Robert Heppener and Louis Andriessen. In 1984, he attended composition classes with Franco Donatoni at the Chigiana Academy in Sienna. In 1994, he was composition fellow at the Tanglewood Festival where he studied with Mario Davidovsky. In 1998, he was awarded the Mathijs Vermeulen Prize for Salome Fast. His works have been performed by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, ASKO Ensemble, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Thomas Hampson, Dawn Upshaw, Stefan Asbury, and Oliver Knussen.
       
Composer Ryan Francis, a native of Portland, Oregon, has received commissions from the Columbia Symphony in Portland, Metropolis Ensemble, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the New York Youth Symphony, New Juilliard Ensemble, the Fireborne Trio, and FearNoMusic Ensemble. His works have been performed in such venues as Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall. In 2005, he received the Juilliard School’s top compositional prize, the Palmer-Dixon Prize, as well as the prestigious Charles Ives scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mr. Francis is currently a C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at Juilliard, where he also received his master of music degree in composition. He holds a bachelor of music in composition from the University of Michigan. His teachers have included Robert Beaser, Bright Sheng, George Tsontakis, Steven Stucky, Susan Botti, Erik Santos, and
Evan Chambers. 
       
Scott Johnson has been a pioneering voice in the new relationship being forged between the classical tradition and the popular culture that surrounds it. Since the 1980’s, he has played an influential role in the trend towards incorporating rock-derived instrumentation into traditionally scored compositions, and the use of taped, sampled and MIDI-controlled electronic elements within instrumental ensembles. His music has been heard in performances by the Kronos Quartet, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Bang On A Can All-Stars, and his own ensembles; in dance works performed by the Boston Ballet, the London Contemporary Dance Theater, and the Ballets de Monte Carlo; in Paul Schrader’s film Patty Hearst; and in recordings on the Nonesuch, CRI, Point, and Tzadik labels. His recent concert appearances include Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, the Japan Society, the Lincoln Center Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, Yale University, and the Schlesig-Holstein Festival. His awards include a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and Koussevitsky commission. He has lectured at leading conservatories and universities. 
       
Dutch ‘avant pop’ composer JacobTV (Jacob Ter Veldhuis) started as a rock musician and studied composition and electronic music at the Groningen Conservatoire, where he was awarded the Dutch Composition Prize in 1980. During the 1980’s, he made a name for himself with melodious compositions, straight from the heart and with great effect. ‘I pepper my music with sugar,’ he says. JacobTV is preoccupied with American media and world events and draws raw material from those sources. His work possesses an explosive strength and raw energy combined with extraordinarily intricate architectural design. He has become one of the most popular European composers with hundreds of performances each year. His works were recently performed by such orchestras as The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Russia State Academy Orchestra, and by soloists such as Branford Marsalis, James Galway, and Evelyn Glennie. His so-called boombox works, based on speech melody, became world famous. He strives to liberate new music from its isolation by employing direct – at times provocative – idiom that spurns; the dissonant,’ which in TV’s view reflects a completely devalued means of musical expression. His ‘coming-out’ as a composer of ultra-tonal, mellifluous music reached its climax with the video oratorio Paradiso, released on CD and DVD by Chandos and Basta. In May 2007, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized a three-day festival about JacobTV in New York City. 
       
Conductor Jeffrey Milarsky is music director of AXIOM, Juilliard’s newest contemporary music ensemble and has been conducting Juilliard’s annual presentation of new works by the School’s composers since 1991. As a conductor of contemporary music, he has premiered and recorded works by contemporary composers, including Charles Wuorinen, Fred Lerdahl, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Lasse Thoresen, Gerard Grisey, Jonathan Dawe, Tristan Murail, Ralph Shapey, Luigi Nono, Mario Davidovsky and Wolfgang Rihm. His wide ranging repertoire, which spans from Bach to Xenakis, has brought him to lead such accomplished groups as the American Composers Orchestra, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Manhattan Sinfonietta, Speculum Musicae, Cygnus Ensemble, The Fromm Players at Harvard University, The Composers’ Ensemble at Princeton University, and the New York Philharmonic chamber music series. He is a member of the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music as artistic director and conductor of the percussion ensemble. He has been a regular guest conductor of the Stony Brook Orchestra. 

Mr. Milarsky also is professor of music at Columbia University, where he is the music director/conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra. He is the music director and conductor of the newly-formed Manhattan Sinfonietta which will concentrate on 20th and 21st century scores. This ensemble, in residence at Columbia University, will perform, tour and record throughout the United States and abroad. Recent highlights include conducting the Cygnus Ensemble in the world premiere of Milton Babbitt’s Swansong, conducting the world premiere and recording of Mario Davidovsky’s Flashbacks, and several area premieres of the music of Gerard Grisey: Les Espaces Acoustiques (New York premiere) for Columbia University’s “Music for a New Century” series and Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (U.S. premiere) with Speculum Musicae. With the Ensemble Sospeso, he has conducted three United States premieres by Wolfgang Rihm, and two by Tristan Murail.

Mr. Milarsky received his bachelor and master of music degrees from Juilliard. He is a member of the Pre-College percussion faculty at Juilliard. As an active chamber and orchestral musician, Mr. Milarsky performs and records regularly with the New York Philharmonic, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the American Composers Orchestra, the Stamford Symphony and Concordia. He has recorded extensively.

The newest addition to Juilliard’s roster of performing ensembles is AXIOM, which was formed by student initiative in 2005. This new chamber ensemble, lead by Music Director Jeffrey Milarsky, is dedicated to performing the masterworks of the twentieth-century repertoire. AXIOM is comprised of a flexible roster of current Juilliard students and recent graduates. In December 2006, James Conlon conducted the ensemble’s debut performance in Avery Fisher Hall featuring the music of Schoenberg and Debussy. AXIOM has been a featured instrumental ensemble for the Alice Tully Vocal Arts Debut Recital, performing Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs with soprano Sarah Wolfson in 2005 and the world premiere of Josef Bardanashvili’s Three Scenes with soprano Raquela Sheeran in 2006. 
       
AXIOM was selected to collaborate with the Juilliard Dance Division as part of their “Spring Dances at Juilliard” performances in March, 2007. These concerts featured choreographer Jirí Kylián’s Soldier’s Mass  (set to Bohuslav Martinu’s work by the same title) and choreographer Susan Marshall’s Name by Name (set to David Lang’s this was written by hand) and collaborated with the Juilliard Music Technology Center for the annual “Beyond the Machine” concert series in Lincoln Center’s Clark Studio Theater. As part of these presentations of electronic and interactive music, AXIOM performed Ed Bilous’ Lucid Dreams, which was composed for and premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in Zankel Hall, and the world premiere of John King’s Trilogic Unity. AXIOM was the featured ensemble for Miller Theatre’s celebration of Elliott Carter’s 99th birthday in December, 2007, performing the New York stage premiere of his opera, What Next?