On Saturday, April 6, RMA will be hosting our annual Pops Concert! It will be from 2-5pm in EMPAC Concert Hall. The theme this year is SPACE in honor of the solar eclipse! Symphonic Band, Percussion Ensemble, Flute Choir, Studio Orchestra, Experimental Music Quintet, and Sax Ensemble will all be performing. The livestream link will be available a few days before the concert.
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Rensselaer Dance Club presents an evening full of dance, featuring guests from Gajjde Sher Bhangra, RPI Ballroom, and Eighth Wonder. Visit us at https://dance.union.rpi.edu/ for more information about ticket sales.
Main Image: Photo: Clayton Pruitt
Brushing Improvisation – N°2 is the latest work in an ongoing brushing project that has utilized brushes in electronic music improvisation performances. While the previous performances of Brushing Improvisation focused on the nuanced materiality of the brush and translated brushing gestures into musical/sonic expression through specific mediated technology, a process formulated through continuous interaction between myself as both an instrument maker and performer, this particular piece also delves into the cultural universality inherent in the brush. This exploration fosters theatricality, gestural performance, and an organic integration between composition and improvisation.
Main Image: Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Andrea Avezzù.
If sound is a force, what is its edge? EMPAC’s four main performance venues—its concert hall, theater, and two studios—are designed as isolated acoustic environments that are structurally separated from each other as well as from the façades of the building. How much sonic energy can they contain?
CONDICIÓN_1023 was conceived in response to EMPAC’s material, spatial, and conceptual scaffolding. Hugo Esquinca upends the acoustic divisions between the discrete sound chambers and EMPAC’s negative spaces—transitional areas such as lobbies, stairwells, hallways, atriums. In activating these in-between areas, the artist sonically excites a spatial field that lies inside the building but that normally remains outside its primary centers of sound amplification. He saturates the entire building with sound until the exterior layer turns into its own sonic architecture.
Esquinca works with sound sources that originate from the concert hall, theater, the public address system, and an array of subwoofers. Two vinyl elements mark a diagonal axis on the surface of the building. Through interventions that originate from the unique acoustic profile of each sound source, the artist blurs and merges their sonic emissions, resulting in the dislocation of both the audio events themselves and the experience of listening. One loses track of the respective points of amplification until the building becomes dense with resonance.
An installation which runs every night of the exhibition after the building closes. For Extrude, the sounds play for no one. The excessive energy that is unleashed inside and that should not be experienced directly manifests a vibrational presence that rests on the edges of audibility.
A performance which takes place when the exhibition ends but to which the audience is invited. The building’s glass skin pulsates inward, making the presentation spaces cites of extreme reverberation that resist audience access.
Main Image: Hugo Esquinca, CONDICIÓN_1023, 2023. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy the Artist. Photo: Michael Valiquette/EMPAC.
Elemental View is a musical work in six movements by pioneering composer Ellen Fullman for her Long String Instrument and the experimental music duo The Living Earth Show—guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson. The expansive installation inhabits EMPAC Concert Hall with its 136 strings, precisely tuned and configured for this multi-movement piece. Elemental View invites the listener to discover, as if with a magnifying glass, the details of the physics of string vibration itself.
Invention and discovery are at the core of Fullman’s work. The artist brings her remarkable instrument to life using her fingertips, unfolding the physical sound spectrum of the strings as she walks, and producing undulating waves of continually shifting musical overtones. Additional tools developed and crafted by Fullman expand the possibilities of the instrument, allowing her to play three, six, or nine strings at once and to expand the timbre of the instrument while infusing its drone texture with rhythmic variation.
With their laser-focused precision and virtuosic ensemble playing, The Living Earth Show brilliantly executes the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of Fullman’s composition using specially-tuned instruments tailored to Andrews and Meyerson—a lap-steel guitar and hammered dulcimer.
Listening to the music of Fullman’s singular creation is akin to standing inside a giant musical instrument. The result is at once ancient and utterly new, environmental, and folk-like yet orchestral.
This presentation continues The Living Earth Show’s multi-season residency at EMPAC, offering engaging and exciting large-scale work from artists with whom they work closely. The Living Earth Show is a megaphone and canvas for the world’s most progressive artists, seeking to push the boundaries of technical and artistic possibility while amplifying voices, perspectives, and bodies that the classical music tradition has often excluded.
Main Image: Ellen Fullman and Living Earth Show in the concert hall on October 24, 2023. Photo: Michael Valiquette/EMPAC.
Ellen Fullman, Elemental View. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Robert Szkolnicki.
Sustained Surface Distant View excerpt
Salon Mondialité is an electro-acoustic musical performance and video installation by musician, producer, and vocalist Miho Hatori that explores themes of memory, identity, and colonialism through kaleidoscopic and expansive dream-pop atmospheres and hypnotic rhythms. Hatori combines composed and improvised music, experimenting with the structure of a “talk-show” to create a listening environment where nostalgia for the past and possibilities for the future co-exist. Hatori’s “talk show” substitutes traditional segments with “sound stories” and features onstage collaborations with Hatori's friends and invited guests.
For this performance at EMPAC, Hatori’s guests include musicians Patrick Higgins and Michael Beharie, and cross-media artists Steffani Jemison and Cole Lu.
A pre-show conversation between Miho Hatori and music curator Amadeus Julian Regucera begins at 7PM.
Inspired by the writing of Martinican poet-philosopher Édouard Glissant and his conception of an “interconnected identity,” Salon Mondialité ultimately takes on the mood of a funeral: laying to rest outdated and colonial ideas of “identity” and a “requiem” for those who died through forced or involuntary exile.
Previously performed at venues such as The Broad in Los Angeles and The Kitchen in New York City, Hatori transforms the EMPAC Theater into the eponymous salon, welcoming audience members to a new version of this show.
Hatori is a Japanese-born and New York City-based vocalist, musician, and producer who performs widely and gained popularity in the 1990s with the legendary band Cibo Matto. Most recently, she released a solo album Between Isekai and Slice of Life and has recorded music under the pseudonyms New Optimism and Miss Information. Additionally, she produces music for soundtracks, films, commercials, and web content.
Main Image: Miho Hatori, Salon Mondialité. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Hassan Ali Khan and Miho Hatori.
More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.
Main Image: Albany Symphony Orchestra in the Concert Hall. Photo: Courtesy ASO.
More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.
Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Hip-Hop with a love song set list spun by DJs from Collectiveffort.
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More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.
An intimate performance by composer and violinist DBR (Daniel Bernard Roumain), hailed by The New York Times as “about as omnivorous as a contemporary artist gets.”
More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.
DAVID ALAN MILLER, CONDUCTOR | REGINA CARTER, VIOLIN | MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH, SPEAKER
Adolphus Hailstork: Symphony No. 4, “Survive”
David Schiff: Selections from Four Sisters
Daniel Roumain & Marc Bamuthi Joseph: Forgiveness, Spoken Word Concerto for Orchestra (world premiere)
WHAT IS CONVERGENCE? The Albany Symphony, long known for celebrating the breadth of American culture through new music, continues its community-building work with Convergence, a three-year collaborative project through which the Symphony, Capital Region communities, and nationally acclaimed artistic partners join together in an exploration of three Black American art forms. Funded by the Carl E. Touhey Foundation, Convergence will build community-wide awareness of our contemporary world through artistic inquiry and musical creation.