By EDWARD BILOUS AND MARI KIMURA

Eric Chasalow (Photo by Mike Lovett)

The Music Technology Center will host its annual program of electronic and interactive music, Beyond the Machine 5.0, this month in the Clark Theater. Since our first concert in 2000, Beyond the Machine has evolved dramatically—"beyond my wildest expectations," in the words of faculty member Edward Bilous, the founder of the Music Technology Center (M.T.C.) at Juilliard. This year's concert, featuring Beyond the Machine's resident performing group, the Juilliard Electric Ensemble, will include five works by a very diverse group of composers: Joan La Barbara, Eric Chasalow, David Wallace, Jacob ter Veldhuis, and Alejandro Vinao. In addition, two of the student composers at M.T.C., Brendan Adamson and Gareth Flowers, will present original interactive computer works.

The Music Technology Center gives Juilliard performers opportunities to perform works by some of today's most exciting composers from around the world, who are at the forefront of the field of arts and technology. One such composer is Joan La Barbara, legendary in new-music circles, who works as both a performer and composer. Few people have had such a profound impact on composing for an instrument—in this case, the human voice. The world premiere of La Barbara's Unseen Voices and Islands of Light (excerpts from WoolfSong, an opera-in-progress) will feature Juilliard alumna Leena Chopra as the lead soprano.

Joan La Barbara (Photo by Jeffrey Herman)

Eric Chasalow is that rare composer who is as comfortable with electro-acoustic music as he is with music for traditional ensembles. In Trois Espaces du Son, Chasalow intentionally set out to "make a piece that combines certain idiomatic ways of playing piano and percussion that feature different colors of attack." Chasalow has been on the faculty of Brandeis University since 1990, where he also directs the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio.

Nahum, written by David Wallace, is a virtuoso solo work for six-string electric Viper-Viola. The Viper series of electric string instruments was designed and built by famed rock-violin player and Juilliard alumnus, Mark Wood. Nahum places tremendous demands on the performer; indeed, it is essential that the soloist have solid classical training. It also requires an intimate understanding of rock and alternative styles of playing. Essentially, Wallace wrote the piece for himself and the few hypothetical other players in the world who possess the varied technique needed to perform it.

Wallace is a member of the Literature and Materials of Music Department at Juilliard, where he teaches music studies to dancers and Arts and Education on the graduate level in music.

Jacob ter Veldhuis (Photo by Kristien Kerstens)

Jacob ter Veldhuis began his career in rock music and studied composition and electronic music at the Groningen Conservatory in Holland. His popular CD Heartbreakers is a colorful mix of "high" and "low" culture and has received great critical acclaim. His Les Soupirs de Rameau ("The Sighs of Rameau" ), Op. 71, is a multimedia work for harpsichord, tape, and slide projection, written in 1995. The composition was inspired by "Les Soupirs," from the Suite No.2, Pièces de Clavecin (1724), by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Ter Velduis writes, "The harpsichord itself is subject of 'Les Soupirs.' It is a composition about, on, in, around, under, above and before the harpsichord, that was sampled in every possible way, by microphone and camera."

Tumblers by Alejandro Vinao is a virtuosic work for violin, marimba, and computer that was composed in London in 1989-90. The entire work is based on a brief, simple rhythmic phrase that begins the piece. This basic material is treated and developed through processes that are more characteristic of the African, Latin-American, or Asian traditions than of the concert music of Europe. For example, the initial rhythmic phrase is present throughout the piece in different forms, edited, repeated, shifted, and multiplied like a cell of a growing structure. Eventually, the apparent pulse and beat of the music becomes ambiguous and each new repetition of the rhythm reveals new and unexpected relationships at the forefront. Vinao writes, "Tumbler: one who tumbles, an acrobat, says the dictionary. The players too, like tumblers, unfold the shifting rhythms in the vertigo of a pulse that changes with every step."

Alejandro Vinao (Photo by Kicca Tommasi)

The two student composers represented on the program—Gareth Flowers and J. Brendan Adamson—are both studying interactive computer-music performance with Mari Kimura in the Music Technology Center. A virtuoso trumpeter/composer, Flowers uses his trumpet in his work titled City Spaces, processing and layering his instrument's sound in real time, combined with a processed spoken text on the subject of New York City's real-estate market and creating a truly original soundscape. Adamson, who may be remembered for his "RoboRecital" at Juilliard last year, embarks this time on an interactive work titled Study for Percussionist and Electronics, performed by Alex Lipowski. In this work, there is no written score in the traditional sense, and the performance is a discovery process nearly as much for the performer as for the audience. The percussionist will strike a silent "pad" with sensors, which will be fed into a computer, using the interactive computer system MaxMSP. Every aspect of the music then heard through the speakers will be governed entirely by the performer's actions.

Beyond the Machine 5.0 Clark Theater, Rose Building Wednesday-Thursday, April 12-13, 8 p.m. Free; no tickets required.

At the Music Technology Center, we let students explore composing and performing using today's cutting-edge technology. Our students have gone through rigorous classical training all their lives, mastering the art of music-making at the highest level. They don't use technology as a "shortcut" or as a substitute for musical ability, but to extend and expand their musical vocabulary. Our students can truly explore technology as a tool; they are not engineers and technologists making music on the side. Nor are they seduced by the mere possibilities of technology itself. As always at Juilliard, the music comes first; after all, we go Beyond the Machine.

The M.T.C. faculty at Juilliard—Edward Bilous, Gregory Boduch, Milica Paranosic, Michael Czajkowski, and Mari Kimura—would like to thank the members of the 2006 Juilliard Electric Ensemble. They are Michael Caterisano, Naha Greenholtz, Arianna Kim, Julianna Lin, Phoebe Lin, Alex Lipowski, Christina McGann, Nicholas Ong, and Alexandra Snyder.

Edward Bilous is chair of the L&M Department and director of the Music Technology Center. Mari Kimura (D.M.A. '93, violin) has been a faculty member in music technology since 1998.