SEAMUS releases Volume 5 of its back catalog, chronicling electro-acoustic from its member composers from 1996.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 56:03 | |||
| 01 | Hothouse | Paul Koonce, electronics | 8:35 | |
| 02 | Quartet for Viola, Cello, and Digital Processor | Cynthia Fogg, viola, Tom Flaherty, cello & electronics | 9:47 | |
| 03 | Reflections on a Poem by e.e. cummings | Mark Hill, english horn | 4:26 | |
| 04 | do you love me? | Bobby Lombardi, electronics | 7:22 | |
| 05 | Extensions for Solo Percussion and Tape | George A. Frock, percussion | 15:07 | |
| 06 | Rare Events | Michael Lowenstern, bass clarinet | 5:28 | |
| 07 | Vagvisa För Mitt Ofödda Barn | Lori Joachim Fredrics, soprano | 5:18 | |
Paul Koonce’s Hothouse for two-channel tape captures the rich diversity of plant life in a hothouse, taken out of their natural habitat and given life in a man made environment. Koonce establishes a dense world of varied sounds, mimicking an environment in which disparate organisms are placed together artificially. The music they make together is exotic, surprising, and colorful.
Tom Flaherty’s Quartet for Viola, Cello, and Digital Processor is a process piece centered around the viola line and subsequent delayed transpositions of its sound down a whole step in one channel and up a half step in the other. Though Flaherty keeps the transposition range and delay time fixed for the entire piece, by varying the pitch material and tempi of the live part, as well as the supportive cello part, he is able to expand into a tapestry that explores various meters and character changes.
Greg D’Alessio’s Reflections on a Poem by e.e. cummings for English horn and two-channel tape was originally composed as an interlude as part of a song cycle on Cummings’ poem And. Created in the Columbia Electronic Music Studio, the animated tape part establishes a surrealist setting through which Mark Hill’s English horn slithers and darts, sometimes in imitative dialogue with the computer sounds, and sometimes inhabiting the otherworldly and sensual environment they establish.
Bobby Lombardi’s do you love me? for two-channel tape uses two second recordings of electric guitar samples as source material, organizing them around the progression of an excerpt from a William S. Burroughs novel, The Ticket That Exploded. The urgent nature of the guitar timbres and the cut-up, collage style organization of the piece capture Burroughs’ fragmented, often violent portrayals.
Karl Korte’s Extensions for Solo Percussion and Tape experiments with hybrid timbres that merge live percussion sounds with pre-recorded samples that are reversed, creating a near perfect “panned” composite. This sensitivity to sound envelopes pervades the work, creating complementary gestures that balance out articulation with sustain and decay with intensification.
Daniel Weymouth’s Rare Events for bass clarinet and computer altered tape, featuring Michael Lowenstern, features stuttering phrases of percolating activity in dialogue with a tape part that has layers of activity which reflect acceleration, deceleration, pitch shifting, and alterations of the played material.
Howard Jonathan Fredrics’ Vagvisa För Mitt Ofödda Barn is a setting of a poem by Elsa Graves for soprano and tape, with the electronics sounds coming entirely from manipulations of a reading of the text. The fantastical sonic environment created by the tape part includes harmonic halos, textural sibilants, and searing timbres. The soprano sings through and above this immersive texture, delivering the expressionist text with dramatic intervallic leaps and rangy melismas.
– Dan Lippel
Produced by SEAMUS
Remastered by Scott A. Wyatt at the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios
Graphic design by David Colley
Paul Koonce received his M.M. in composition from the University of Illinois and his Ph.D. in Music from the University of California, San Diego. He has produced compositions in the electronic, computer and acoustic media which have been performed by the SONOR Contemporary Music Ensemble and the Diverse Arts Ensemble of Chicago. His music has been presented in the International Festival of Computer Music, Japan; the Roulette Music Series; the Darmstadt Festival for New Music, Germany; the Logos Foundation, Belgium; the Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; and New Music America, Montreal. He has received awards and commissions from the Luigi Russolo International Competition for Composers of Electronic Music, the National Flute Association, Prix Ars Electronica Electronic Arts Competition and is the recipient of a McKnight Foundation fellowship.
Cynthia Fogg has performed extensively on both viola and violin. In Boston, she played for many years with Emmanuel Music and the Monadnock Festival. Since settling in California, she has played with a variety of organizations including the Pasadena Symphony and Monday Evening Concerts and has appeared as guest violist with the acclaimed Kronos and Alexander quartets. Ms. Fogg has recorded chamber music for Naxos, Bridge, Opus One, Cambria, Klavier, and Innova, as well as soundtracks for motion pictures and television. She currently teaches at Pomona College and Pasadena Conservatory of Music.
Tom Flaherty (b. 1950) is a composer and cellist who works with music for humans and electronics. In addition to the works presented here, recent commissions include Cello Concerto for cellist Robert deMaine, Looking for Answers for the Mojave Piano Trio, Recess for the Eclipse String Quartet, and Aftermath for violinist Rachel Huang. A recent recording of his Airdancing for piano, toy piano, and electronics was nominated for a Grammy in 2015.
His composition has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Music Center, the Pasadena Arts Council, the Massachusetts Council for the Arts and Humanities, the Delius Society, the University of Southern California, "Meet the Composer," and Yaddo. His music has been performed throughout Europe and North America by such new music ensembles as Dinosaur Annex in Boston, Speculum Musicae and Odyssey Chamber Players in New York, Earplay and Volti in San Francisco, Concorde in Dublin (Ireland), Gallery Players in Toronto (Canada), Mojave Trio, XTET and Brightwork newmusic in Los Angeles; and by such performers as soprano Lucy Shelton; cellists Robert deMaine, Maggie Parkins and Roger Lebow; violinists Sarah Thornblade and Rachel Huang; and pianists Genevieve Feiwen Lee, Nadia Shpachenko, Susan Svrček, Vicki Ray, Aron Kallay, and Karl and Margaret Kohn.
Published by American Composers Editions and G. Schirmer, Inc., his compositions have been recorded on the Albany, Bridge, Capstone, Klavier, Reference, and SEAMUS labels. He earned degrees at Brandeis University, Stony Brook University, and the University of Southern California, where he studied composition with Martin Boykan, Bülent Arel, and Frederick Lesemann and cello with Timothy Eddy and Bernard Greenhouse. He currently holds the John P. and Magdalena R. Dexter Professorship in Music at Pomona College where, despite preferring humans, he happily directs the Electronic Music Studio.
Mark Hill has been invited to play with the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the San Diego Symphony Orpheus and the Orchestra of St. Louis among others and is a member of the New York Chamber Symphony. Mr. Hill is currently an Assistant Professor at Ithaca College and has also been a member of the faculty of the Mannes College of Music, Columbia University and the State University of New York at Purchase.
Bobby Lombardi is a doctoral student at Stanford University. His previous instructors include Orlando Garcia, Jon C. Nelson, Frederic Rzewski, and Daniel Weymouth. He holds degrees from SUNY Stony Brook and the Royal Conservatory of Liege, Belgium. Lombardi's music has been heard at numerous festivals, conferences, and public broadcasts throughout the United States and Europe.
George Frock is Director of the Percussion Program at The University of Texas at Austin, and from 1990-95 served as Associate Director of The School of Music. He is nationally recognized as a teacher, performer, and composer, and has served as timpanist for the Austin Symphony Orchestra since the fall of 1996. in addition to his university duties and Austin Symphony performances, he is an Educational Consultant for the Ludwig/ Musser Division of the Selmer Company. He regularly contributes reviews of percussion publications for PERCUSSIVE NOTES, the official publication of the Percussive Arts Society.
Michael Lowenstern has performed extensively throughout the United States, Canada and Europe, both as a soloist and as a member of such diverse groups as Zeitgeist, The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, and Jerome Kitzke's "The Mad Coyote." His first solo CD will be released on New World Records in the fall of 1996.
Soprano Lori Joachim Fredrics, a native of New York City, received a BM from William Paterson University of New Jersey and a MM in Voice Performance from The University of Texas at Austin.
A member of AGMA and A.E.A, Ms. Fredrics has performed many roles in opera, musical theatre and plays as well as appearing as a soloist in major international music festivals in the US, Canada, Scandinavia, Latin America and Asia in such diverse venues as the Seoul Opera House, The Banff Center for the Arts, Lincoln Center, The Barbican Centre in London and the Museo Naçional De Bellas Artes, Havana. She made her London opera directing debut in The Whitechapel Whirlwind at the Bloomsbury Theatre in 2005 and recently directed Semillas de Talento and the Teatro del Barrio in Manhattan.
Greg D'Alessio has completed degrees in composition from the University of Wisconsin (Bachelors) and Columbia University (MA & DMA) and is currently on staff at Opcode Systems in Palo Alto. He has received fellowships from the Tanglewood, Aspen, June in Buffalo and Composer's Conference festivals. During the 1994 SEAMUS national conference, he was recognized with the "Board of Director's Award of Recognition" given to a young composer having displayed significant compositional talent.
Karl Korte, a graduate of the Juilliard school, has been Professor of Composition at the University of Texas at Austin since 1971. His early training was in the areas of jazz and popular music. His music has attracted national and international attention through publication, performances and a number of significant prizes and awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, Fulbright Fellowships to Italy and New Zealand, and a Gold Medal from the Belgian government. His music has a scope and variety that makes classification of it difficult. At present he divides his time between Austin and a home in Cambridge, N.Y.
Composer/conductor Daniel Weymouth writes for a wide array of ensembles, from standard orchestra to computer-interactive instruments. He has studied and worked at several of the world's leading computer-music facilities, including Stanford's CCRMA, Pierre Boulez's IRCAM and Iannis Xenakis' CEMAMu (both in Paris). His compositions have been performed throughout Europe, Canada and the United States and appear on the SEAMUS and New World Record labels as well as MIT Press (sound and programming excerpted on CD-ROM). Commissions have come from numerous ensembles and individual performers; grants from Meet the Composer and ASCAP. Weymouth is a current member of the Stony Brook Academy of Scholar Teachers. A ten-year stint as an itinerant musician in popular genres may have something to do with his fascination with gadgets, as well as the kinetic and compact nature of much of his music, both acoustic and electronic. At Stony Brook, he has been Graduate Director, Chair and Director of Computer Music; he is now Director of cDACT, an interdepartmental consortium generating cross-disciplinary research, art, scholarship and curriculum.
Howard Jonathan Fredrics is an American composer of mostly orchestral, chamber and electroacoustic works that have been performed in Europe and North America. Mr. Fredrics studied composition with Randolph Coleman, Richard Hoffmann and Joseph Wood and electronic music with Conrad Cummings and Gary Lee Nelson at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and graduated with a BMus in composition in 1985. He then studied composition with Donald Grantham, Karl Korte and Russell Pinkston at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his MMus in 1991 and his DMA in 1998. He also studied at the Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm and composition with William Brunson at the Kungliga Musikhögskolan – Royal College of Music in Stockholm, both in 1992–93, as well as composition with Mario Davidovsky at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida in 1995. Among his honours are the ASCAP Young Composers Award (1982), the ASCAP Special Award annually since 1992, an Emmy Award (1993), the Prix du Jury in the Concours International de Musique Électroacoustique de Bourges (1993), an award from the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (1994), and a Telly Award (1994). He later received the Musica Nova Special Prize (1995), Third Prize in the competition of the Tampa Bay Composers Forum (1995) and the Premio della giuria in the competition Luigi Russolo in Varese (1998). He taught at the University of Texas at Austin in 1988–89 and in 1993–94, at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1991–92, where he also taught summer sessions from 1986–91, at the Austin Community College District in 1995–96, at Western Carolina University in North Carolina in 1996–97, and at Brown University from 1997–99. He has taught as Assistant Professor of Composition, Theory and Music Technology at Texas A&M University since 1999. In addition, he has given lectures in Finland and Sweden.
New Focus Recordings is an artist led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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