"CURRENTS -Electronic Music" is a collection of 14 pieces of fixed media works by ACA affiliated composers, in stereo audio format. Works on the album cover a 50-year span of time, beginning with 1960s tape pieces yet unreleased, to new works from the past year. All works are by various composers working in the United States in the electroacoustic medium. Natural and synthetic sounds are featured in these pieces which cover a broad range of styles. This double album (CD and Digital) of music by ACA composers, now available on iTunes and other online services, as well as physical CD format (available 1/5).
Album curated by Scott Miller, Daria Semegen, and Harvey Sollberger
Mastered by Oktaven Audio, New York
Produced by American Composers Alliance Inc. New York, NY www.composers.com
©2018 by the individual composers
℗2018 American Composers Alliance Inc.
All Rights Reserved
[email protected]
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Volume 1
Kinetics I and Kinetics II (1969)
Preston Trombly
These pieces are examples of what was then called “tape music”: using electronic sounds generated and manipulated by electronic devices, recorded on magnetic tape with different sounds spliced together. Then the magnetic tape segments were further manipulated - played forwards, backwards, upside down, slower and faster - the same techniques that Bach used - to create a finished work.
In those days, the electronic music studio (at Yale School of Music) was my ‘instrument’ in the same way that the piano was the instrument of Beethoven, Chopin and Thelonious Monk. To make a parallel comparison to the visual arts, think of the electronic music studio as my palette and the tape as my canvas. The analogy is strengthened by the fact that the composer actually produces the end result, just like a painter.
Traditionally composers create a ‘plan’ (score) that is then executed by the performer(s). As I worked on these pieces, I began to realize that I was creating a musical world of motion and direction, a “Kinetic” music that didn’t rely on the traditional means of harmonic progression to do so. Kinetics II was the first purely electronic piece of music to receive the Student Composer Award from Broadcast Music, Inc. in 1969.
Preston Trombly has been an artist for most of his life. His first artistic successes were as a musician—composer, performer, and conductor. Recently he has been working in the visual arts. Trombly says about his work, “For me, the need to make art has been a driving force in my life. Whether it’s working with and organizing sounds over time, or more recently colors, materials and shapes in space; my work is about turning initially vague, fleeting and amorphous ideas into solid, concrete and comprehensible works of art. My experiences composing and creating musical structures inform my current work in the visual arts. Whether painting and drawing or working with found objects - pieces of metal, wood, fabric - sometimes combined with more traditional art materials, each piece begins when a particular juxtaposition of elements intrigues me enough to start working.”
Preston Trombly received his visual arts education at New York’s Art Students League. He received his Master of Musical Arts degree from Yale University's School of Music, was a Fellow in Composition and Conducting at the Tanglewood-Berkshire Music Center, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He earned his Bachelor of Music degree with Honors from the University of Connecticut.
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Nullius in Verba (2018)
Robert Scott Thompson
2-channel stereo, 9 minutes. Nullius in Verba translates from the Latin as “on the word of no one.” This acousmatic composition incorporates field and studio recordings and their transformation and elaboration. Sound sources include vocal, percussion, flute and ‘cello sources together with mechanical and environmental sounds. The music is conceived as a kind of “song without words,” and in working on it, I was reminded of Mendelssohn: “What the music I love expresses to me, is not thought too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.” Techniques used for the work include ambisonic spatialization and spectral transformation methods. Tools used include Kyma, Csound, Metasynth, Cecelia, Trajectory and Spat Revolution.
Robert Scott Thompson is a composer of instrumental and electroacoustic music and is Professor of Music Composition at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is the recipient of several prizes and distinctions for his music including the First Prize in the 2003 Musica Nova Competition, the First Prize in the 2001 Pierre Schaeffer Competition, and awards in the Concorso Internazionale "Luigi Russolo", Irino Prize Foundation Competition for Chamber Music, and Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges - including the Commande Commission 2007. His work has been presented in festivals such as the Koriyama Bienalle, Helsinki Bienalle, Sound, Présences, Synthèse, Sonorities, ICMC, SEAMUS and the Cabrillo Music Festival, and broadcast on Radio France, BBC, NHK, ABC, WDR, and NPR. His music is published on numerous solo recordings and compilations by EMF Media, Neuma, Drimala, Capstone, Hypnos, Oasis/Mirage, Groove, Lens, Space for Music, Zero Music, Twelfth Root, Relaxed Machinery and Aucourant record labels, among others.
Thompson’s work in the area of computer music is oriented toward high modernism in the tradition of the founders and pioneers of the field such as Pierre Schaeffer, Stockhausen, and Xenakis. His music is also informed by the naturalistic soundscape and importantly notions of contemporary expressions in chamber and orchestral music. Thompson’s aesthetics attempts to blend and meld the real and imaginary into a musical context that invites deep listening and engagement in the listener. The music – the tonality, sonority, transformation of materials – is the primary focus rather than the outworking of a specific technique or technology. In recent years Thompson has become an adherent of the techniques of ambisonic spatialization and increasingly creates work that is based in this approach to both multi-channel and stereophonic presentation.
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Arabesque (1992)
Daria Semegen
Arabesque is a classic analog studio electronic music composition using analog studio sound sources, modification devices, editing and mixing techniques. Buchla 200 Electric Music Box synthesizer was used to create some of the source sounds. These sounds were then modified, edited and mixed on other analog studio devices to transform their originally coarser aesthetic qualities into musically more expressive sonic personas for this piece.
Arabesque was commissioned by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center-NYC. It was completed at the Stony Brook University Electronic Music Studio in 1992. The work is dedicated to the memory of electronic music pioneer Bülent Arel whom Vladimir Ussachevsky invited to worked at CP-EMC. Arel designed and installed the first electronic music studios at Yale University and Stony Brook University. He was a colleague and friend of Edgard Varèse. In 1962 they collaborated in the creation of the electronic-music portions of Varèse’s landmark work Deserts for wind ensemble and percussion.
Arabesque was premiered at Columbia University’s Miller Theater at a 1992 ISCM concert during which composer Milton Babbitt was honored with the William Schuman Prize for Outstanding Achievement and Leadership in Music. The New York Times wrote that Semegen’s “Arabesque avoided electronic cliché through lighthearted inventiveness and showed an interesting sonic imagination at play.”
Daria Semegen’s solo, chamber, orchestral, vocal, dance, film and electronic music tends toward the experimental. In 1965 she created a work for six instruments and musique concrète tape. In 1995 it was the subject of an international seminar at King’s College, Univ. of London UK with participants from seven nations. Since 1965 her pioneering work in electronic music was the subject of articles, book chapters and graduate theses including Hinkle-Turner’s 1991doctoral dissertation. In 2015 Semegen was honored along with computer music pioneers Jean-Claude Risset and John Chowning, at an international electroacoustic music conference featuring a CD release with works by the trailblazers.
The Washington Post wrote, “her music has a wide dramatic range from powerful sound images to subtly shifting timbral colors and sonorities handled with skill, imagination and an ear for details.
Forced Exposure (alt-music) described her electronic works as “heterodyning stereo-heavy monsters as vital as any of the GRM/STEIM/SECAM Darmstadt/Mills output.“
Artbyte’s DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) wrote, “the dynamic range of sounds on this CD is absolutely refreshing, flying in the face of most of what’s going on in contemporary music culture.”
Semegen’s awards include the ISCM International Electronic Music Prize, several ISCM commissions, six National Endowment for the Arts grants, the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences prize, Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center Commission; Fulbright grant, BMI awards in chamber and orchestral music, a National Chamber Music Competition prize, a dozen Meet The Composer grants, the George Peabody Award for an experimental score, Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships, Yale University prizes in orchestral and chamber music, Columbia’s Rappoport Prize; the Pennsylvania Institute Arts & Humanities award, 1994 Alumni Achievement Award from Eastman School of Music; 2009 Susan B. Anthony Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anthony Center for Women's Leadership. Semegen was the first woman awarded a McKim Commission from the Library of Congress for the Kennedy Center Chamber Players.
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SonAR Study I: St. Cloud State University (2018)
Scott L. Miller
The Sonic Augmented Reality (SonAR) project [designed by the composer] explores the artistic potential of smartphone-based music connected to the environment of its locale. This connection is inspirational, logistic, and literal.
The music of SonAR Study I is composed of 11 different audio tracks. Each track is inspired by the actual ambient sound(s) that dominate various locations on the St. Cloud State University campus. These sounds were identified and selected by conducting soundwalks, documenting what I heard and what my ear was drawn to. In response to these soundwalks, I created synthesized sound tracks (with the exception of the piano track, recorded in the Performing Arts Center Ruth Gant Recital Hall).
The smartphone version is experienced by downloading an app, which includes a map displaying the listener’s physical position on the campus during playback. Each track plays back from virtual speakers located in different campus locations, generally corresponding to the source of the individual inspirational sounds. As the listener navigates campus, GPS tracking compares the phone location relative to the virtual speaker locations. The 11 audio track levels are adjusted based on the listener’s proximity to the virtual sound sources, changing the “mix” of the tracks. Some locations on campus will completely obscure the presence of some tracks. Different paths through campus will produce unique musical experiences with the same audio tracks. This recording is one possible realization of the piece.
Scott L. Miller is a composer described as ‘a true force on the avant-ambient scene’ and of ‘high adventure avant garde music of the best sort’ (Classical-Modern Music Review). Best known for interactive electroacoustic chamber music and ecosystemic performance pieces, his recent work experiments with virtual reality applications in live concert settings. Raba is his latest album of audio visual (and VR) music, available on New Focus Recordings. Three time McKnight Composer Fellow and Past-President of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the U.S., his work is frequently performed by soloists, ensembles, and festivals throughout North America and Europe. Recordings of his music are available on New Focus Recordings, Panoramic, Innova, Eroica, CRS, rarescale and SEAMUS, and his music is published by ACA (American Composers Alliance), Tetractys, and Jeanné.
Miller is a Professor of Music at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, where he teaches composition, electroacoustic music and theory. He is Past-President of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the U.S. (SEAMUS) and presently Director of SEAMUS Records. He holds degrees from The University of Minnesota, The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill and the State University of New York at Oneonta, and has studied composition at the Czech-American Summer Music Institute and the Centre de Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis.
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Transcendental Assembly (2016-2018)
Matthew Greenbaum
Transcendental Assembly (2016-2018) is an electronic work for fixed media. It is derived from an earlier chamber work, a setting of a Ralph Waldo Emerson text, Wild Rose, Lily, Dry Vanilla for soprano and five instruments. The older work is treated as an abstract sound source from which Transcendental Assembly was made. The source material was reworked and distorted to create the sense of a choral work in which the voices are made of instrumental as well as vocal timbres. The title refers to the Transcendentalist Emerson, as well as the “assembly” of the derived sound material.
Matthew Greenbaum was born in New York City in 1950. He studied composition with Stefan Wolpe and Mario Davidovsky and holds a Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center. Greenbaum’s awards, fellowships and commissions include the Serge Koussevitzky Music Fund/Library of Congress, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Meet the Composer, the Fromm Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund and the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Penn Council on the Arts. Performances of his works include the Japan Society of Sonic Arts (Tokyo), the BEAMS Festival (Brandeis University), the Darmstadt Summer Festival, the Leningrad Spring Festival, the Jakart Festival (Indonesia), Hallische Musiktage, Ensemble SurPlus (Freiburg), Nuova Consonanza (Rome), Ensemble 21 (Odense), the Da Capo Chamber Players, Cygnus, Parnassus, Fred Sherry, Marc-André Hamelin, David Holzman, Stephanie Griffin, the Momenta Quartet, Network for New Music, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Group for Contemporary Music, Orchestra 2001, Christopher Taylor and the Riverside Symphony,CounterInduction, Ensemble Mise-En, and the Houston Symphony. His works are published by American Composers Alliance. Recordings are available from Antes and CRI. All-Greenbaum recordings are available on the Centaur and Furious Artisans labels. Greenbaum is also a video animation artist. Works in this medium include Effacement for piano, video animation and electronic sound, and I Saw the Procession of the Empress on First Avenue for fixed media.
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Quarter Tone Fantasy (2018)
Hubert Howe
Like my other inharmonic fantasies, this work consists of tones with different components that fade in and out over the course of the duration. In this work, however, all the components are quarter tones, or notes that are squeezed between the half steps of the 12-tone tempered scale. The background structure of the piece is based on tempered pitches and can be perceived on the entrances of the notes. The components both fade in and out or are attacked individually. The piece was synthesized using the program Csound.
Hubert Howe was born in Portland, Oregon and grew up in Los Angeles, California, where he began his musical studies as an oboist. He was educated at Princeton University, where he studied with J. K. Randall, Godfrey Winham and Milton Babbitt, and from which he received the A.B., M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees. He was one of the first researchers in computer music, and became Professor of Music and Director of the Electronic Music studios at Queens College of the City University of New York. He also taught at the Juilliard School from 1974 through 1994. In 1988-89 he held the Endowed Chair in Music at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. From 1989 to 1998, 2001 to 2002, and Fall 2007, he was Director of the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. He has been a member of the Society of Composers, Inc. since its founding in 1965 and served on the Executive Committee from 1967 to 1971. He served as President of the U.S. section of the League of Composers/International Society for Contemporary Music from 1970 until 1979, in which capacity he directed the first ISCM World Music Days in 1976 in Boston, the first time that festival was ever held in the United States. In 1980, he received a commission from the CSC at the University of Padua, Italy, for his composition Astrazioni (Abstractions), which was presented at the Biennale of Venice.
He is a member of the International Computer Music Association and directed the International Computer Music Conference at Queens College in 1980. In 1994, he was the composer-in-residence at the Third Annual Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He is also a member of SEAMUS. He has been a member of BMI and the American Composers Alliance since 1974 and served as President from 2002 to 2011. He is a member of the New York Composers Circle and has served as Executive Director since 2013. In 2009, he founded the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, and he continues as Director. Recordings of his computer music have been released by Capstone Records (Overtone Music, CPS-8678, Filtered Music, CPS-8719, and Temperamental Music and Created Sounds, CPS- 8771), Ravello Records (Clusters, RR 7817), and ABLAZE Records (Electronic Music Masters Vol. 2, ar-00013).
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Volume 2
White Heron Dance (2017)
Alice Shields
The original White Heron Dance (Sa-gi Mai) is a 600 year old Shinto rite held at Yasaka Shrine in Japan, in which dancers dressed as white herons perform an elegant dance as a prayer for good harvests and health. The Noh Theater performer Mayo Miwa with whom I study the music and chant of Noh, suggested this Shinto ritual to me. I created my White Heron Dance to be a ritual in sound in which a human being experiences a moment of union with nature in the form of a Great White Heron. In the piece you can hear Mayo’s electronically transformed voice singing the ritual song in simple folk style, and then in elaborate Noh recitational style. The words mean: “Something landed on the bridge --- it’s a bird. ---Which bird? Oh, it’s a heron. ---Yes, it’s a heron, a heron crossed the bridge. The bird is wet with gentle rain. Yes, it’s a heron, a heron crossed the bridge.”
There are four sections in the piece: Entrance, Song, Union and Exit. The Entrance music gradually builds in intensity over 5 minutes; then we hear the heron’s raucous voice. The soft, gentle Song follows, inviting the heron to communicate. The tension heightens into the Union, and we are for a moment overwhelmed by the sounds of nature – herons, hawks, eagles, songbirds, frogs, crickets. Then the heron flies away, the sounds of nature disappear, and the Exit takes us back where we came from. In the piece I use ProTools and GRM Tools plug-ins, Csound, and samples of natural sounds. The heron samples come from Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; the eagles, song thrushes and wing flaps from Freesound.org.
Alice Shields (b.1943) is considered one of the pioneers of electronic music. She creates operas, vocal music, chamber music and music for dance and is involved in the study and performance of forms of world music theater, particularly the Noh Theater of Japan and the Bharata Natyam dance-drama of South India. Shields’ electronic operas are some of the earliest created: Shaman (1987) and Mass for the Dead (1992), both for the American Chamber Opera Co., Apocalypse (1993 New World Records) and Shivatanz (1994 Akademie der Künste, Berlin). Electronic works for dance include Dust (2001) for Dance Alloy of Pittsburgh and Arangham Dance Theatre of Madras, India and The Mud Oratorio (2003) for Frostburg State University, with choreographer Mark Taylor.
Current projects include a Chamber Music America commission to create The Wind in the Pines (2018) for soprano, alto recorder, alto flute, harp, theorbo, oud and percussionist for the Eurasia Consort in Seattle, based on the Noh play Matsukaze; the concert premiere of the acoustic opera Zhaojun – The Woman Who Saved The World (2018) by the Association for the Promotion of New Music, and the premiere and recording of Larynx (2018) for piccolo, piano and three percussionists by the Iktus Ensemble. Shields received the doctorate in composition from Columbia University, served as Associate Director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center where she taught electronic music techniques to composers from 1963-1980 and composed many works, and was Director of Development of Columbia’s Computer Music Center from 1995-1996.
Mayo Miwa, whose voice is heard electronically transformed in White Heron Dance, majored in Noh Theater at Tokyo University of the Arts, and trained at Kanze School. Since moving to New York she has been collaborating with artists from different media to develop the art of Noh in contemporary forms and to explore the physicality of traditional Noh theater. Since she joined the Noh Society in New York, she has been actively facilitating educational programs by Noh and Kyogen actors from Japan.
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Recollections of Gifts (2018)
Burton Beerman
Recollections of Gifts is a digital fixed media composition that draws some of its source material from live performances of Gifts an original composition for violin piano and dance ensemble. Recollections of Gifts exists as an acoustic memory of Gifts and it quickly interweaves to another dream-like world of suggestive memories of the violin and piano then reverts to its original source material. Much of it is digitally modified but some is presented as unprocessed fragments, keeping true to its organic form. The open musical structure of Gifts was influenced by the music of John Cage, whose open-form and improvisation were guided by arbitrary aides such as I-Ching. In the case of Gifts, the choices are given by the composer. Rather than avoiding compositional decisions, a range of choices is given to infuse the performance with a sense of an innate organic spontaneity. Recollections of Gifts is not bound by order or content but has only one arrangement since it is digital fixed media and is intended to be available as digital fixed media.
Burton Beerman’s music is “spicy, captivating, and filled with exotic sounds and lush textures” (Los Angeles Times). Beerman, a composer and clarinetist, composes music that spans many media, including, solo, chamber, orchestral music, interactive real-time electronics, interactive video art, theatre, dance, and musical scores for documentary films. His works have been recognized by over thirty professional journals and publications and have been the subject of international, national and public television and radio broadcasts such as LIVE! with Regis & Kelly Television Show (ABC), The Eastern European Talk Show “RTL-Klub Reggeli”, HEAR Radio, (Hungarian-Austrian Radio), and the week-long Pepsi Sziget International Festival (broadcast at Margit Island in Budapest, Hungary, which annually attracts over 500,000 people).
Beerman's music has been presented at prominent venues and festivals worldwide, such as the Edinburgh International Art Festival in Scotland, New York’s Carnegie Hall, The Chicago Sinai, Martin Luther King International Center in Atlanta, Rudolfinum Performing Center, Prague, the Haag, Amsterdam, OrfRadioFunkhaus, Vienna, Het Concertgebouw, Gaudeamus International Festival, Heineken Music Hall, Amsterdam, Chopin Hall, Mexico City as well as throughout Australia, Hawaii, Canada , Europe and Asia. Lauded by a recent New York Times review at Symphony Space, “ Burton Beerman’s work, A Still Small Voice for cello and interactive video and solo dance was the most interesting, and by far the most elaborate display of imagination.”
He has appeared on CNN and CNN International, FutureWatch, and The World Today broadcasts reaching millions of viewers, in a show featuring his own music, video, dance and interactive technology used in his Virtual Video Opera, Jesus’ Daughter. The opera addressed a critical social issue of Violence against Women/ Children-at-Risk and was chosen as a Video Installation ArtWork exhibited in Switzerland and Italy endorsed by UNESCO-CIRET and sponsored by the United Nations and at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (MOMA), Lincoln Center Gallery, and Dance on Camera Festival.
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Interactions (2018)
Mark Thome
My idea for Interactions was to assemble sounds recorded on my iPhone into a composition. For the piano sounds, I sat at the piano and played random notes, chords, and short phrases. The remaining sounds were from objects inside and outside my home as well as the surrounding neighborhood. I wanted to search for sounds with no preconceived idea about the theme or overall goal at first. After gathering sounds for a few weeks, I examined each sound and edited out all unusable parts. I was then left with a palette from which to begin creating my composition. No digital effects were used to manipulate the sounds except for volume and panning. Digital software was used to isolate the portions of each sound incorporated in the composition.
Mark Thome is a Pacific Northwest composer/arranger whose music, ranging from chamber ensemble, orchestra, opera, big band, jazz, and rock, has been performed nationally and internationally.
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Private Practice (2017)
Joel Gressel
Aside from all technical and theoretical pursuits, most importantly, the computer allows me to play my own music. Settling on a final performance seems very much like practicing pieces on the piano used to be: How should phrases be shaped? Which voices should be brought out? How fast should the music go? For the last four decades I have been playing with three primary tools, two of which can only be done with computers: 1) Shaping melodies, on the beat and measure level, with an interrelated set of ratios; and playing them, often overlapped, at different speeds. 2) Using twelve-tone sets that order and reorder three ascending diminished-seventh cycles rather the chromatic scale. Transpositions of themes are more like cousins to one-another than siblings. 3) Generating sounds by pure mathematical processes, many of which produce a wide range of timbres.
For its first few minutes Private Practice works with a number of themes with increasing complexity and intensity. It then settles into what seems an inescapable trance, only to be interrupted, Surprise Symphony – like, by a return to the beginning material, and then proceeding to a close.
Joel Gressel (b. Cleveland, 1943) received a B.A. from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in music composition from Princeton University. He studied composition with Martin Boykan and Milton Babbitt, and computer music with Godfrey Winham and J.K. Randall. His computer music has been recorded on the Odyssey and CRI labels. He currently lives in New York, working as a computer programmer, maintaining and extending software that models tax-exempt housing-bond cash flows. Several recent works can be heard on his Soundcloud (link is external).
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Almost an Island (2018)
John Gibson
Almost an Island is the product of my visit to a wooded peninsula at a nearby lake. An early spring morning, the wind was up and driving small waves into the sandy shore at the tip of the peninsula. Such furious action, but somehow it sounded only in miniature and failed to disrupt the calm of the scene. The piece represents these small, but vigorous, waves in an imaginary close-up view, colored with superimposed harmonies. This vision clears briefly in the middle to reveal the natural soundscape.
All audio comes from the recorded water, even when explicit water sounds are absent. Instead, spectral audio analysis of the water yields streams of notes that mimic the dynamic shape of the waves.
John Gibson composes electronic music, which he often combines with instrumental soloists or ensembles. He seeks to complement and extend the musical inflections of performers with electronic sound, sometimes generated in real time by the software he develops. Originally a composer of purely acoustic music, he retains in his electronic work an obsession with harmonic color and rhythmic pulsation, along with a timbral sensitivity born of his early years as a rock guitarist. His music embraces influences ranging from contemporary classical to jazz, funk, and electronica.
Gibson’s portrait CD, Traces, is available on the Innova label, along with other recordings on the Centaur, Everglade, Innova, and SEAMUS labels. Audiences across the world have heard his music, in venues including the D-22 punk rock club in Beijing, the Palazzo Pisani in Venice, and the U.S. Botanic Garden. His instrumental compositions have been performed by the London Sinfonietta, the Seattle Symphony, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Speculum Musicae, Earplay, and at the Tanglewood and Marlboro festivals. Presentations of his electroacoustic music include concerts at the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, the Bourges Synthèse Festival in France, the Brazilian Symposium on Computer Music, the Australasian Computer Music Conference, the Third Practice Festival, and many ICMC and SEAMUS conferences.
Significant awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Paul Jacobs Memorial Fund Commission from the Tanglewood Music Center, and a residency in the south of France from the Camargo Foundation. He was a Master Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in May 2017. Gibson holds a Ph.D. in music from Princeton University. He has taught composition and computer music at the University of Virginia, Duke University, and the University of Louisville. He is now Associate Professor of composition and electronic music at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
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Electronic Miniature (2014)
Arthur Kreiger
“Electronic Miniature” had its origins in a small collection of exercises designed to demonstrate various electronic music possibilities to students who were encouraged to explore audio suite plug-ins in my Electroacoustic Music course.
The emerging composition became a brief study in musical contrasts: pitch vs. noise, soft vs. loud, tune vs. chords, simple sine waves vs. layers of timbral complexity, sustained lines vs. rapid rhythmic interjections, agitation vs. calm, violence vs. peace. The work was realized at the Cummings Electronic and Digital Sound Studio at Connecticut College where it was completed in January of 2014. “Electronic Miniature” received its premiere performance in late February of that year at the 14th Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut.
Arthur Kreiger has been composing for four decades. Performed worldwide, his catalog of works contains pieces for orchestra, chorus, mixed chamber ensembles, solo instruments and the electronic medium. Kreiger was invited to Salt Lake City in November, 2013, to participate as the Maurice Abravanel Distiguished Visiting Composer in a festival named for the late orchestra conductor. He coached composition students from the University of Utah and later introduced his own musical works to the evening’s concert audience. Members of the Canyon Lands New Music Ensemble performed his pieces with great beauty.
Kreiger’s compositions are recorded on Odyssey, Spectrum, Finnadar, CRI, Neuma, SEAMUS, Context and New World Records. His professional honors include the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as commissions from the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has served as composer in residence at William Paterson University, The North Carolina School of the Arts and at The Composers Conference at Wellesley. The composer was the recipient of the 1993 Brandeis University Creative Arts Medal. A portion of the text of this award citing his electronic music follows.
"In contrast to the many electronic pieces that focus on technological skill, Arthur Kreiger has written a body of work in which electronic sound and acoustic instruments become equal partners in an unfolding musical narrative. In pieces like Close Encounters for flute and tape or Keeping Company for violin and tape we are not aware of a distinction between the free voice of the performer and the inflexible tape. In spite of their obvious differences, instrument and tape seem able to respond to each other, and the result is music that is deeply expressive and beautifully formed." - Walter Hinrichsen Award in Music, American Academy of Arts and Letters
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Fanfare Mix Transpose (1968)
Harvey Sollberger
Fanfare Mix Transpose is part of the music I composed for a New York City production of Sophocles' "Antigone." It was composed in 1967 and 1968 by means of the "classical" cut and splice method, the work being done in the studios of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. I haven't composed a bit of electronic music since then but am planning a new work for 2019 that will incorporate recorded and electroacoustic sounds.
Harvey Sollberger is a composer, conductor and flutist who has been active in many world musical centers. He was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1938, and holds degrees from the University of Iowa and Columbia University. Performers of his music have included Pierre Boulez, Gunther Schuller, Bruno Maderna, the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, Tanglewood, and a wide array of contemporary music ensembles and international festivals. Sollberger has received support in the form of the Award of the American Institute of Arts and Letters, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and various commissions (Koussevitzky, Naumberg, Fromm, NEA). He co-founded the Group for Contemporary Music in 1962, and subsequently led new music ensembles at the Manhattan School of Music, Indiana University and the University of California, San Diego in addition to being Music Director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus from 1997 to 2005. As a performer he has given premieres of works by Babbitt, Carter, Davidovsky, Felder, Martino, Perle, Reynolds and Wuorinen, and the American premieres of music by Feldman, Holler, Risset, Scelsi, Schnittke, Stockhausen, Tiensuu and Xenakis. His published discography currently stands at over 130 items.
