NEW YORK, NY.- The Juilliard Music Technology Center presents its 10th annual festival of electronic and interactive music, Beyond the Machine 10.0, featuring five world premieres and other works created and performed by Juilliard alumni and guest composers and musicians during two weeks, March 17-20 and March 25-28, 2010. This year marks the 10th year of Beyond the Machine concerts featuring established and emerging composers who use technology in their work. Additionally this year, Juilliard unveils its new state-of-the-art theater, the Rosemary and Meredith Willson Theater, featuring advanced performance technologies and electronics. Juilliard’s new Music Technology Center is connected directly to the advanced sound capabilities of the theater, allowing for sophisticated performances of works using electronics. Many of the works on Beyond the Machine 10.0 were developed in the new Music Technology Center. The MTC features a recording studio and production suite for creating and mixing recorded music, including film scores. Students interested in using technology in live performance can develop projects in the Play Room, a laboratory for interactive and multimedia projects.
Juilliard’s current chairman of the Department of Literature and Materials of Music, Edward Bilous, is founding director of the Juilliard Music Technology Center and the Juilliard Electric Ensemble, and co-founder of the Beyond the Machine series.
The first week of the festival, InterArts, four concerts on Wednesday through Saturday, March 17-20, all at 8 PM in the Willson Theater features Edward Bilous’ Night of the Dark Moon; Paolo Prestini’s Listen, Quiet (world premiere); Kirsten Kelly’s Tongues; Michelle DiBucci’s Helikopters; Milica Paranosic’s Akpe! (world premiere); and Synched, a new world-premiere work by Blind Ear (composers Jakub Ciupinski and Cristina Spinei).
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 is for live vocalist, live flutist, dance, and electronic sound-design. Three dancers (choreography by Yara Travieso) will be triggering both audio and video cues via theremin interaction. There will be both video and lighting design.
Italian born composer and Juilliard alumna Paolo 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.
