North Carolina Computer Music Festival
Rodney Waschka II, Director
Fractures by Ronald K. Parks
The sound of something about to break is distinctive. It elicits alarm and can trigger a flight reflex. Such sounds are also fascinating sonically. Some imply motion, such as the sound of fractures splintering along wood or glass. Some signal danger, such as the sound of a tree losing integrity just before it falls. Fractures is the creation and exploration of a sound world in which the listener is immersed, and sometimes saturated with sounds that embody stress and pressure acting on objects at or near their breaking point. Fractures was realized at the Winthrop University Computer Music Studio and was written for the 14th Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival. The sound sources were produced and recorded in the Winthrop University Sculpture Studios.
Ronald Keith Parks, born in Waynesville, NC, is an active composer of acoustic and electronic music. His music is available on the Electronic Music Foundation label (CD 031) and the Society of Composers, Inc. Student Chapter CD Volume 1 from the University of Florida. His electroacoustic works, non divisi and Sul C are featured on the 2005 and 2006 60X60 CD. Dr. Parks received the BA in composition from the North Carolina School of the Arts, an MM in composition from the University of Florida, and a Ph.D. in composition from the University at Buffalo. He is currently an assistant professor of music technology, theory, and composition and Director of the Winthrop Computer Music Labs at Winthrop University.
SLAMMED by James Paul Sain
solo soprano saxophone and computer
SLAMMED (2006) - the one word title of the work can be used in many contexts such as "gee...I'm slammed," or "do you want to get slammed?" Slammed in these contexts can have any number of meanings. This work is meant to convey a sense of "slammedness" arriving at the point of psychosis. Though, this might only be the plight of a delusional composer and his personal hypnopompic hallucinations related to the melodic third. Thanks to Ron Parks for his spectral accumulation and evaporation MSP algorithm. SLAMMED was written for saxophone virtuoso Susan Fancher.
James Paul Sain (b. 1959) is Professor of Music at the University of Florida where he teaches electroacoustic and acoustic music composition, theory, and technology. He is the founder and director of the internationally acclaimed annual Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival. His compositional oeuvre spans all major acoustic ensembles, instrumental and vocal soloists, and embraces electroacoustic music. His works have been featured at major national and international societal events. He has presented his music in concert and given lectures in Asia, Europe, South America and North America. Dr. Sain is currently SCI Executive Committee chair and an American Composers Alliance board member. His music is available in print from Brazinmusikanta and American Composers Editions and on CD on the Capstone, Electronic Music Foundation, Mark Masters and NACUSA labels.
Susan Fancher
Susan Fancher's work to develop the repertoire for the saxophone has produced dozens of commissioned works by contemporary composers, as well as published transcriptions of music by composers as diverse as Josquin Desprez and Steve Reich. Her career has featured hundreds of concerts internationally as a soloist and as the member of chamber music ensembles, including the Red Clay, Amherst, Vienna and Rollin' Phones saxophone quartets. A sought after performer of new music, she has worked with a multitude of composers including Terry Riley, Charles Wuorinen, Philip Glass, Hilary Tann, Friedrich Cerha, M. William Karlins, Mark Engebretson, Ben Johnston, Ed Campion, Perry Goldstein, Olga Neuwirth, Stuart Saunders Smith, David Stock, Michael Torke, Robert Carl, Alejandro Rutty and Paul Chihara, just to name a few.
Lamentation Alphabet: Aleph by Benjamin Broening
Lamentation Alphabet: Aleph (after Tallis) is part a series of pieces that re-imagines the music of my youth in light of my current musical life. I came to these pieces at an early age as a singer interested in early music. In re-imagining this brief excerpt from TallisŐ Lamentations of Jeremiah, I explore two essential attributes of the original music - the sense of physical space in which it was performed and the registral space of the passage. This music was intended for performance in a large, reflective space: the reverberations not only contributed to the harmony through the accretion of reflected sound, but also help define that space. The passage on which Lamentation Alphabet is based expands from a relatively compact registral space at the opening to widest point in the entire Lamentations set. I explore and expand both senses of space, physical and registral, by using snippets of vocal sounds to articulate an imaginary and malleable physical space.
Benjamin Broening's compositions have been widely performed and broadcast across the United States and in Europe and Asia. He has composed works for many media including orchestral, choral, chamber and electroacoustic music. Recent commissions include a work for clarinet and piano commissioned by the Band and Orchestral Division of Yamaha Corporation of America for Arthur Campbell, a work for clarinet and electronics for F. Gerard Errante and choral/instrumental works for the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, the James River Singers as well pieces for pianist Daniel Koppelman and eighth blackbird. Broening teaches at the University of Richmond.
Djuro's Tree by Larry Austin
Djuro's Tree continues my sound and theater-piece portraits. All these portraits, since the first in 1966, have been composed for and/or about individual composers and performers. Djuro's Tree is, in contrast, a family portrait of three generations of Serbian mathematicians: Alexandra Kurepa, her father Svetozar and her great uncle Djuro (1907-1993). Alexandra speaks of Djuro's influence on her and her father's careers as mathematicians. Her son Andre tells of his fun at the Adriatic coast every summer. Djuro's family story is set in a dynamically moving octophonic "family" tree of sound, the wind moving through it, the sonic leaves and creaking limbs dramatically animating its soundscape.
Alexandra Kurepa's narrative and her son Andre's story--in both Serbian and English--were recorded by the composer at their home in North Carolina. The sounds of a tree's limbs creaking and it foliage rustling in a strong wind was taken from the BBC Sound Effects Library. The creaking limbs were "helped" by the recording of a squeaking wooden chair from the Jonty Harrison family kitchen in Edgbaston, England. All the sonic materials for the piece derive from these three sources. Materials for the piece were processed in the Electroacoustic Music Studios of the University of Birmingham in England during my June/July, 1997, Magistere de Bourges composer residency there. The work was completed in August/September, 1997, in the composer's studio, gaLarry, in Denton, Texas. Software and hardware systems used in Birmingham included Sound Designer, Soundhack, Audiosculpt, and GRM Tools, on a Macintosh computer. Systems used in Denton included Paul Lansky's rt and cmix and the audio software editors and 8-channel digital i/o programs developed for the Silicon Graphics O2 computer with an 8-channel digital i/o PCI. Djuro's Tree was commissioned by Borik Press.
Larry Austin is composer of more than seventy works incorporating electroacoustic and computer music media: combinations of tape, instruments, voices, orchestra, live-electronics and real-time computer processing, as well as solo audio and video tape compositions. He composed his first electronic music compositions in 1964 at the American Academy in Rome electronic music studio, on Paul Ketoff's prototype synthesizer, the Synket. Highly successful as a composer for traditional as well as experimental music genres, Austin's works have been performed and recorded by the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, the Cincinnati Philharmonia, the National Symphony orchestra, the National Philharmonic of Warsaw, the Ensemble Neue Musik and the Academy of Music, Cologne, as well as many other major ensembles in North America and Europe. He has enjoyed extended associations with composers John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and David Tudor. He has also worked with the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and the Artificial Intelligence Center at Stanford University.
Beondegi by James Paul Sain
solo digital media
Beondegi (2007), for solo digital media, is in homage to the wonderful and resilient people of South Korea. During one of his visits to South Korea the composer toured Seoul making many of the source recordings used in this work. From the historic beauty of the Gyeongbokgung to the modern skyscrapers reaching towards tomorrow, he has been impressed at the beauty of this ancient culture and the industriousness of her people. Beondegi is also the pupa stage of the silkworm (Bombyx mori). The silkworm, also industrious and beautiful, is not only the insect that creates the cocoon from which silk thread is woven into glorious garments but the pupae byproduct also serves as a protein-rich food. This snack food has a rather nutty flavor. This work is meant to convey the beauty of South Korea, the people and land of the morning calm.
A bio for Sain appears above.
SaxMax by Mark Engebretson
The concept behind SaxMax was to try to invest the computerŐs performance with qualities of humanness that put it on an equal musical level with a live performer. Issues that stand in the way of achieving this goal include both the computerŐs ability to be perfectly predictable, and itŐs capability to generate complete randomness. My solution here, in part, has been to place a performer at the computer, and to give both the computer operator and the saxophonist some influence over the computerŐs actions. The work pays homage to a small collection of masters of the jazz idiom: Cannonball Adderley, Michael Brecker and Miles Davis. SaxMax was written for Susan Fancher and James Romain. The two gave initial performances at UNCG, the Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival (University of Florida) and the World Saxophone Congress (Ljubljana, Slovenia). This work was funded in part by the Composers Assistance Program of the American Music Center.
Mark Engebretson is Assistant Professor of Composition and Electronic Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A 2007 Fromm Foundation Commission receipient and a former resident of Vienna and Stockholm, he has received numerous commissions from the Austrian Ministry of Culture, STIM (Sweden) and the American Composers Forum Commissioning Program. His Five Songs of Passion was recently premiered by the Eastwind Ensemble at Carnegie Hall and Duo Concertante was premiered by the Wroclaw (Poland) Philharmonic. Dr. Engebretson was formerly on the faculties of the Eastman School of Music, the University of Florida and SUNY Fredonia. He studied composition with Michel Fuste-Lambezat, M. William Karlins, Pauline Oliveros, Marta Ptaszynska, Michael Pisaro, Stephen Syverud and Jay Alan Yim.
Topsy Speaks by Rodney Waschka II
Topsy Speaks was commissioned by the Music Technology Program at the North Carolina School of the Arts for trombonist James Miller of the NC School of the Arts and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Mr. Miller gave the premiere performance in Crawford Hall in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on May 4, 2002.
Topsy, a ten-foot tall, 19-foot long elephant, was brought to the United States in 1875. She worked in various parts of the country, but around the turn of the century she was employed as a worker on the Coney Island amusement park. According to some, she grew bad tempered and began to attack her trainers. One, who offered her a lit cigarette as food, was dashed to the ground and killed. Others had also been killed. It was decided to execute Topsy, but the question was: how? Initially some people suggested strangling her, but then Thomas Edison got involved. He sent a team to electrocute Topsy. He also sent a film crew to record the event for his movie studio. On January 4, 1903, Topsy was fitted with a hawser around her neck, fed carrots laced with a massive amount of cyanide, and then electrocuted by Edison's crew. Within weeks Edison's film of the killing of Topsy was in his movie catalog available for rental to movie houses across the country.
Rodney Waschka II is known for his algorithmic compositions and theatrical works. His most recent recording is "Music for Strings", a disc containing five of his pieces performed by the Nevsky String Quartet of Russia and released on Capstone Records. He teaches at North Carolina State University.
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