1. Takashi Harada Untitled 1 2:00
2. David Claman '70 (ASCAP) 10:20
3. Pamela Z Geekspeak (ASCAP) 7:32
4. Marc Ainger Dreaming Hills (BMI) 15:00
5. Paul Higham Duck Spindle Trilogy 3:48
6. Francis Dhomont Lettre de Sarajevo
(SACEM) 14:35
7. Erik Belgum Life's Big Dream Home 2:30
8. Steve Wadhams Harley 5:50
9. Dan Moses Schreier
Exotic (short version)
(ASCAP) 9:00
Untitled 1
Takashi Harada
The ondes Martenot was developed in France by Maurice Martenot from the late 1920’s. It uses an electronic tone to activate three specially-constructed loudspeakers, thereby oscillating a Chinese gong, a spring reverb unit and/or sympathetic strings. A wide range of glissandi is available to the player, who attaches a string to his/her finger and slides it along a dummy keyboard. Untitled 1 is for four ondes Martenot.
Takashi Harada, internationally-acclaimed performer on the ondes Martenot, has appeared with leading orchestras and soloists, and has had extensive involvement performing and composing for NHK (Japanese Broadcasting Corporation). His repertoire covers a wide range of 20th-century works and runs the gamut of musical genres, including rock, jazz and improvisation. He has played more than 170 new pieces for the ondes Martenot, and has received the Global Music Promotion Award, the Idemitsu Music Award and the Hida Furukawa Music Award. Takashi Harada is the only professional ondist in Japan, and one of the best in the world. His performances and compositions are released on the JVC, Fontec, Decca and other labels. Takashi Harada appears here by courtesy of JVC-Japan.
'70
David Claman
During the 1980's I lived in Boston, and was peripherally involved in its then quite active punk/underground rock scene. '70 attempts to explore and transform certain elemental aspects of this music, including its timbral spectra and visceral power, and to suggest the atmosphere of exuberance combined with danger which often suffused performances. At high volumes, sound seems to become a physical object pressing against you (thus this piece is meant to be played loud). At other times one may have a sensation of great speed but, simultaneously and strangely, stasis.
David Claman (b.1958) comes from Denver, Colorado. He received a bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University, where he studied the music of South India. He studied at the Longy School in Cambridge, Massachusets, received a Master's Degree in theory and composition from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 1993, and is currently a Ph.D candidate in composition at Princeton University. [david@silvertone.princeton.edu]
Geekspeak
Pamela Z
Geekspeak is a segment from a larger work called Parts of Speech created in 1995 for New American Radio, and presented as a performance in 1996 at New Langton Arts as part of the SoundCulture '96 Festival. It consists of the sampled voices of Joe Posner, Todd Cass, John Lamping, William Rucklidge, and Michael Black. Pamela Z recorded most of the voices in the Laboratories of Xerox PARC in Palo Alto and edited and assembled the piece in her studio in San Francisco. Parts of Speech was funded by The San Francisco Art Commission.
Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and audio artist who works primarily with voice, electronic processing, and sampling technology. In live performance, she creates lush textures and frenetic rhythmic structures by layering her voice in digital sound processors. She combines these sounds with melodic lines and spoken texts, punctuating them with found percussion objects and exquisite gestural movement. She is currently developing new solo work utilizing a MIDI controller called The BodySynth which allows her to trigger sounds with physical gestures. Pamela has a wide vocal range and employs styles ranging from experimental extended techniques to operatic Bel Canto. She also uses samples from many sound sources including human utterances, sounds of machinery and sounds from the environment to create sculpted, layered audio pieces. [pamelaz@sirius.com or visit http://www.sirius.com/~pamelaz]
Dreaming Hills
Marc Ainger
Dreaming Hills uses a number of Javanese musics as templates to guide the temporal and spectral unfolding of the work. A powerful metaphor which is central to this work is the idea that the music never actually ends; rather, it is always playing "somewhere" — the performers merely summon it. This metaphor is used here, as the music arises from the aether, then slowly recedes back into it...... Dreaming Hills was composed in 1995 and realized in the composer's home studio using the Super Phase Vocoder from IRCAM, and C-sound (granular synthesis and various combinations of additive and FM synthesis). The work was premiered in November 1995 at the Janacek Hall in Prague, where it received a Musica Nova award.
Marc Ainger is a composer and sound designer whose works have been performed throughout the world. Recent performances of his work include: Royal Danish Ballet, 1995 Klang Arts Festival, Musica Verticale, Janacek Hall in Prague, the Joyce Theater in New York City, Museum of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles, and the American Film Institute. Recent awards included the Musica Nova Competition in Prague, the Irino International Chamber Music Competition (Tokyo), the Esperia Foundation, Meet the Composer, Ohio Arts Council, and the Boulez Composition Fellowship. As a sound designer, Dr. Ainger has worked with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Pacific Coast Soundworks. [ainger.1@osu.edu]
Duck Spindle Trilogy™ (Hoben Aragoto Series)
Paul Higham
As part of the Aragoto series of works, this piece is pervaded by Kabouki and Noh forms of Japanese theatre of the 17th century. Heavily stylized Logomodels™ of sound schemata are reified (REITY™), yoked and predicated sequentially upon iconic tableaus — Kyogen Kigo (floating phrases and fictive utterances).
Paul Higham is a multi-media artist from England who is currently a Visiting
Research Fellow Artist at the Advanced Visualization Laboratory, University of
Minnesota, Minneapolis. Higham is working with Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality modeling systems of synthetic topologies in both sound and 3-dimensional form. In the late 1970's he pioneered the idea of animatronic electroacoustics; cartoon graffiti font sound sculpture, working alongside the early development of digital sampling. In 1986 Higham entered a Tibetan Buddhist monastery where he spent several years studying sound theory and Tibetan logic; performing his 'Mythic Axiom Sound' and V.R.M.A. installations combining computer-generated projection and schematic dioramas across Europe and the USA.
Lettre de Sarajevo (Letter from Sarajevo) (1996)
Francis Dhomont
To the victims from everywhere, deluded, despised, decimated.
What remains to be said about Sarajevo? In response to the torrent of triumphant cynicism, I could not, this time, be satisfied with traditional formal games that seem essential to the composer. Perhaps this musical narcissism, this superb indifference (visible, surely, and yet...) to our time, this elegant withdrawal, all become quite pathetic and, in the end, unbearable. Naïvely, I decided to speak of shame. The title sprang out, obvious: Letter, that which tells of the dimension of the disaster and sends, at the time, a message in response to the cowardice of nations; from Sarajevo, because this city has now become a symbol for our period's tragically incoherent return to barbarism. Though they may be trivial, I yield to such intuitions. All the sounds of this piece have been produced or treated with the SYTER real-time sound synthesis system of the INA-GRM (Paris, France).
Francis Dhomont has worked in electroacoustics from the very beginnings of this art. Five-time winner at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition (France) — where he was also awarded the Magisterium Prize in 1988 — he has received numerous international distinctions and awards (Ars Electronica ‘92 and ‘93, The Stockholm Electronic Arts Award 1991 and 1992...). An author of theoretical texts and essays, he has also produced radio programs for INA-GRM (Radio France, Paris) and co-produced with Diane Maheux the radio series Voyage au bout de
l'inouï (Journey to the Unheard-of) (Radio Canada, Montréal). Convinced of the originality of acousmatic art, his work (since 1963) is comprised essentially of works for tape bearing witness to his continued interest in morphological interplay and sense/sound ambiguities. Since 1978, he has divided his time between France and Québec, where he teaches electroacoustic composition at the Université de Montréal. He is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre and a Founding Member and Honorary Member (1989) of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC). [dhomont@ere.umontreal.ca]
Life's Big Dream Home
Erik Belgun
Recorded and mixed in 1995 during a residency at STEIM (Studio for Electro Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam, Life’s Big Dream Home uses heavily processed synthesized speech to articulate the unspoken subtext of this dream home.
Erik Belgum’s book Star Fiction was published in 1996. Over the past 10 years, his writing has been published in over two dozen literary journals. The Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes calls him “Among the best of the younger writers of fiction, let alone experimental fiction.” His opera Retirement Fund, written in collaboration with composer Eric Lyon, was released on CD at the end of 1996, and Retirement Fund II: The Audit premieres at the BONK! Festival in Florida in March, 1997. [belgu003@gold.tc.umn.edu]
Harley
Steve Wadhams
It started with that signature engine sound — potato-potato-tato-tato potato-potato-tato-tato — which flooded my left ear at a traffic light. He was a heavy-set man with tattooed forearms as thick as my thigh. Riding behind him was a slim woman in leather with her hands planted in her man’s ample belly. Months later a Toronto humourist suggested a new city by-law: “Only people in possession of an authentic criminal record shall offer for sale or operate any Harley Davidson motorcycle.” Enough! Harley is a sound portrait of ‘myth-understood’ men and their machines.
I created Harley using voice tape borrowed form a documentary by my colleague Gerry Amey. Laurence Stevenson was the sound engineer and keyboard player. Almost all the noises were created in the CBC’s Experimental Audio Room, using the sounds of the Harley bike. Additional extracts from: The Holy Ranger’s Free Hand by Martin Jack Rosenbloom (Flying Fish Records) and Harley Davidson: America’s Motorcycle (Video). I’ve been a radio and TV documentary maker at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for over 20 years. For me all documentary is music.
Exotic
Dan Moses Schreier
Exotic is a tribute to isorhythmic motets where the number of beats in the
talea is identical to the number of notes in the color. Dedicated to Natasha
Katz and Gemma Josephine.
Dan Moses Schreier works as a composer and sound designer in New York City.In 1996 he co-composed the music and designed the sound for George C. Wolfe's production of The Tempest, starring Patrick Stewart, and designed the sound for Mr. Wolfe and Savion Glover's production of Bring In 'Da Noise, Bring In 'Da Funk on Broadway. His music-theater compositions include Dan Hurlin's Quintland-The Musical, Suzan-Lori Perk's The Death Of The Last Black Man..., Write If You Get Work-A Horse Opera and Love Trouble with Jeffrey M. Jones, Brecht's St. Joan Of The Stockyards (Yale Rep) and Anne Bogart's production of Another Person Is A Foreign Country. He recently received the 1996 Drama Desk Award for his work on Adam Guettal and Tina Landau's Workshop for chamber opera with Dan Hurlin calledThe Shoulder. He has received an OBIE Award for sustained excellence, an AUDELCO Award and NEA Opera/Music Theater InterArt grants and a Drama Desk nomination for his work on John Leguizamo’s Spic-O-Rama. [DMSound@aol.com]