The Department of Music and CREATE present
CreatEmotion
Thursday, 16 November 2000, 8 pm
Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall, free admission
The Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, Director) presents compositions written for the instruments and Creatophone spatialiser, a pluriphonic sound projection system developed at CREATE. It consists of an orchestra of loudspeakers under the directed by a composer operating a sound projection console. The loudspeakers are distributed in various positions around the concert stage and around the audience. Using the Creatophone, each "scene" in a composition can be enhanced by a unique spatial image. Movement within a composition (in pitch, rhythm, loudness, or timbre) can be enhanced by spatial animation.
1 Beloved Mnemosyne (2000) Anne Deane [8:00]
Mnemosyne is the Greek goddess of memory and the mother of the muses. In this work, memories of a parent's relationship are recollected by his surviving children and used to recreate a journey forgotten by Alzheimer disease. Beloved Mnemosyne combines wireless performer tracking technology and computer-controlled production equipment for the creation of an interactive sonic immersive environment about memory. This is the concert version of the installation. The installation, capable of responding to the behavior of those experiencing it, opens remarkable possibilities for artistic, entertainment and educational media makers to create smart entertainment in a ubiquitous computing environment. This concert version is an illustration of what the piece might sound like as one "performs" the work in the immersive space using the tracker and sensor technology. The first prototype of Beloved Mnemosyne was made possible by support from Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin (Director of CREATE), Professor Fabian Wagmister (Director of UCLA's HyperMedia Studio), Dean David Marshall (College of Letters & Science, UCSB)and Professor Lee Rothfarb (Chair of UCSB's Music Department). The installation premiered at the Expression Center for New Media in the Bay Area, September 2000, as a feature of the MB5 2000 conference.
Anne Deane's acoustic and computer music works are distributed internationally by Innova Recordings, Neuma Records, Computer Music Journal CDs, and Theodore Front Musical Literature. Important performances include the Electroacoustic Music Meeting in Sarvar, Hungary, the International Computer Music Conference in Hong Kong, and a solo Meet the Composer Concert sponsored by the Ojai Music Festival. The premiere of recent commission, Pharos for piano quintet, took place in Baltimore in April 1999 in celebration of Music in the Great Hall's 25th anniversary. Her work for cello and orchestra, Reaching Antares, was performed by the San Francisco Women's Philharmonic. Her latest commission, Dreams Awake for alto flute, flute, and piano, was premiered by the ZAWA! Flute Duo at Carnegie Recital Hall in February, 2000 and then recorded on Neuma Records. Dr. Deane is the Associate Director of the University of California systemwide Digital Media Innovation Program, Assistant Researcher at CREATE, and faculty member of The Walden School for young composers, a summer festival in New Hampshire.
2 osmos rhiza ordorata (hermetic segment IV) (2000) Brian O' Reilly [8:00]
osmos rhiza ordorata is a continuation on a conceptual line of thought developed by Paul Klee as "andacht zum kleninen" (a devotion to small things). From the study of the miniscule, the slightest detail, the smallest manifestation of form within the every day landscape/soundscape, it is possible to understand (in Klee's words) the "magnitude of natural order." Thus, from a study of minutiae and its interrelationships, one can deduce the unseen outlines of complex forms. The strategic fiction used to produce the structural relations in the work, is the erosion of form. Worn organic connections, self withering mechanisms, leaking detritual pools of acoustic ecosystems, weathered maps, the delicate stuttered buzz and click of insects left vibrating within glass slides, and infected water tables.
Thank you to the Centre de Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis (CCMIX, Paris, where much of the source material was generated), Eliane Radigue (who taught me the different ways to listen), Curtis Roads (for allowing me use his Constant Q granular synthesis algorithm), and Marcella Faustini (to whom the piece is dedicated).
Brian O' Reilly, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, worked for two years at the CCMIX center in Paris. There he collaborated with the composers Eliane Radique and Luc Ferrari. He also works as a video and installation artist. He is presently a graduate student in the Media Arts and Technology Program at UCSB.
3 Four Magic Sentences (2000) by Stephen Travis Pope [3:00]
Four Magic Sentences is based on voices speaking four languages (English, Swedish, German, and T'ang Chinese). It is a study for a larger work-in-progress entitled "...nor shall my sword sleep in my hand." The piece is intended to be listened to several times in succession as a chant or mantra. It was realized between August and October, 2000 at the Electronic Studio of the Technical University of Berlin and the CREATE studio in Santa Barbara. It was an invited composition for Elliott Sharp's up-coming State of the Union CD.
Stephen Travis Pope (b. 1955, USA) is active as a software developer, as a composer, and as senior research specialist at CREATE. Since 1977, he has realized his musical works at computer music studios in Austria, France, The Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Canada, and the USA. His music is available in recorded form from Centaur Records/CDCM, Perspectives of New Music, Touch Records, SBC Records, and on MIT Press CDs. For details, see www.create.ucsb.edu/~stp.
4 Five Haiku (1999) by Thom Blum [20:08]
The inspirations for this work came during sittings on top of the Broadway steps overlooking North Beach in San Francisco. Here, numerous haiku blew into mind, as effortlessly and as naturally as breathing. Written over a two-year period, each of the five pieces interprets a different poem. There are no clear divisions between the poem-pieces, instead the music illuminates each poem through the choices and relationships of the sounds, moment by moment. Rather than literal renderings of the poems’ rhythms or content, the pieces are abstract translations from the word-verbal to the sonic realm. In the end, "the voice" of the poems is preserved.
1. Old day, café
thoughts and smoke drift out the window
onto the streets below
2. Big city glowing….
fingers of light poke through
billowing fog mist
3. Bright day car
taped-up door-window
bakes in the sun
4. A pin dropping, sounds
shattering the silence that
cradles the sleeping drunk
5. Old pond
a frog leaps in
water’s sound - Basho
Five Haiku is electroacoustic music. The raw materials include field recordings made on walks in San Francisco. These were processed and mixed using a variety of computer software: U&I Software’s MetaSynth, Digidesign’s Pro Tools, Cloud Generator (Roads and Alexander), Alberto Ricci’s SoundMaker, and various signal-processing and effects software created by Muscle Fish, Steinberg, and Digidesign.
Thom Blum was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1954. For the most part he is a self-taught composer, although he studied composition briefly at California Institute of the Arts (1972-1974). He completed a degree in Computer Applications to Music Synthesis at Ohio State University (1977). Nearly all of his music is electroacoustic. Recent works include a series of audio postcards ("abstract travelogues") of Japan, Morocco and Mexico, as well as a setting for poetry by the late Bob Kaufman, To My Son Parker, Asleep in the Next Room. His music has been presented in concerts, electronic music festivals, and radio broadcasts within the United States, Europe and Asia. He has lived in San Francisco, California since 1978 and has worked as an engineer for DroidWorks, a researcher and software architect for Yamaha Music Technologies, and a cofounder of Muscle Fish, an audio signal processing and analysis software company.
5 Pulse (2000) for eight-track tape, by Bryan Brown [8:00]
Pulse is the third piece in which I continue my fascination with steady rhythms as sound textures. I began with some basic gestures, and allow the more interesting of those gestures to fall into rhythmic patterns as the piece unfolds. The rhythms are juxtaposed to highly contrasting moments, both in terms of silence and static sounds. The rhythmic sounds were conceived using convolution, granular synthesis, or a combination of both. A phase vocoder was used sporadically to manipulate some of the source material. The static sounds were generated by graphical synthesis. The source material was sampled voice and manipulated noise. The piece was realized at Studio Varèse at CREATE.
Bryan D. Brown graduated from the College of Creative Studies at UCSB in music composition. He is currently earning his M.A. in Media Arts and Technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with an emphasis in Electronic Music and Sound Design. He is also the engineer at 91.9 KCSB-FM in Santa Barbara.
6 Mixed emotions (2000) by Bebe Barron [5:44]
In June 1998, there was a showing of the science fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956) in a grand old movie theater in downtown Los Angeles. People came up to say hello at the end of the evening. After one of them introduced himself and was walking off, I did a doubletake and asked, "Did you say you are Curtis Roads? I've always wanted to meet you." When he came to visit a few weeks later, he told me about CREATE and invited me to do some work there. I jumped at the chance to find out about modern electronics. I hadn't worked since Louis died and we were still using analog electronics. In the Summer of 1999 I went to Santa Barbara. With assistance from Alberto de Campo and Bryan Brown, I began experimenting with Creatovox synthesizer until I got an idea of what it could do. All the sounds in this piece came from Creatovox. I took them home to Los Angeles and told a friend, Jane Brockman (herself a composer) that I wasn't sure how to proceed with the material. Miraculously she offered to be the engineer, and was certainly a Creative Engineer, enhancing the piece tremendously. We worked in her studio on a MacIntosh G4 with Digital Performer to assemble the sounds and a Lexicon PCM 90 reverberator. Strangely there is a resemblance to Forbidden Planet, possibly because I thought of the editing and construction in very much the same way. I wanted to prove that you can teach a few new tricks to an old dog.
Bebe Barron (b. 1926, M.A: University of Minnesota) Louis and Bebe Barron were married in l947. One of their wedding presents was a German wire recorder said to be the same model that Adolf Hitler used to prerecord his speeches. They began experimenting with it and became aware of its musical possibilities–but were also aware of wire's limitations. In 1950, they acquired the first of the tape recorders and added loops to their repertory. They decided to work together in electronic music and sound and in 1949 set up a recording studio in Greenwich Village specializing in the avant-garde. Many illustrious composers were their clients, including John Cage, David Tudor, Edgar Varese, Virgil Thompson, Moondog, Teiji Ito, and Alan Hohvaness. Cage invited the Barrons to be part of a project sponsored by Paul Williams, the architect. Out of this came Williams Mix. The Barrons began composing their own music, which Aaron Copland presented to the Bethsebee Rothschild Foundation. It was greeted with hisses. They scored many underground films and plays on Broadway. In 1956 they scored the film Forbidden Planet for which they received an Academy Award nomination. They divorced in 1971 but continued to collaborate until Louis' death in 1989.