Composer Rama Gottfried and sculptor/designer/visual artist Abby Manock are in residence with contemporary music ensemble Yarn/Wire to develop the experimental music theater piece Schismogenesis.
Main Image: Rama Gottfried, Scenes from the Plastisphere, concert video still, 2020. Courtesy the Artist.
Kite’s artistic practice draws from Indigenous Lakȟóta ontologies to consider the possibility of kindred collaboration with technologies such as artificial intelligence. In this engagement, the artist centers the concept of the “visual score,” a form of experimental music notation that contains symbolic forms for performers to read and interpret.
Performance artist, visual artist, and composer Kite engages with Rensselaer student musicians in a workshop for dream scores. Audience members are invited to observe an open rehearsal as Kite leads the student ensemble in her artistic practice, discussing the musical potentials of experimental notations/scores when interpreted and embodied through sound. Attendees will also observe as Kite leads students through building scores using their own visual language, drawing on personal references and dreams. Time to be announced.
Kite’s performances often use custom-made interfaces that bring the body into contact with the machine—such as a Machine Learning hair-braid interface—to address ethical ways of being in relation with the non-human. Kite derived this performance’s graphic notation as a score from the geometric shapes and symbols of traditional Lakȟóta quillwork and beadwork, as well as shapes and symbols that appear in dreams. The performance is followed by a discussion and Q&A session with the audience.
Main Image: Kite, Listener, 2018. Performance in Linz, Austria. Photo: vog.photo.
Award-winning composer and visual artist Raven Chacon gives a talk on his recent work, which explores the sonic, visual, and thematic elements of his experimental practice.
Chacon’s work threads its way through sound, video, scores, sculpture, and performance to engage with the land and its inhabitants, and to address topics of Indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice. His compositions include orchestral instruments and instrumentalize found objects, as in his American Ledger No. 1 (2018), a large graphic score displayed as a flag which traces the history of settler colonialism in the United States. His piece Voiceless Mass (2021), for which Chacon won a Pulitzer Prize, is a work for organ and ensemble which reflects upon the relationship between the Christian church and Indigenous populations. A mass without voices, the composition gives musical form to the silencing of Indigenous expression and language, and the impossibility of their recovery.
Chacon also introduces a new EMPAC-commissioned project with San Francisco-based experimental music duo The Living Earth Show, which is being developed over the next year and includes artists and musicians based in New York’s Hudson Valley and Capital Region.
This residency continues and expands Chacon’s musical collaboration with The Living Earth Show as a follow-up to Tremble Staves, an outdoor collaborative performance with professional and student performers, which premiered at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco in 2019. Exploring issues around water usage, access, and rights, Tremble Staves was developed in collaboration with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the Art in the Parks Program in San Francisco.
Main Image: Raven Chacon. Courtesy the artist.
In this performance and video installation, Marina Rosenfeld presents her commissioned work μ (mu). Titled after the mathematical term for friction or touch, and inspired by the artist’s longstanding interest in turntablism, the work takes place along the surface of a dubplate at the moment of inscription.
In μ (mu), Rosenfeld has figured the dubplate (a one-off, hand-cut record) as a distinct audiovisual landscape--here, it is a scene that stages sonic and visual events activated by friction. Rather than merely playing the digital audio embedded in the record, μ (mu) explores surface phenomena along the material of the dubplate itself, capturing footage and images at an incredibly small scale as it traces the path of a sculptural stylus designed by Rosenfeld.
μ (mu) engages both sound’s material conditions and, through the work’s focus on touch, its social aspects. Rosenfeld has also composed a score--in part from the video's own mise-en-scene--which integrates turntable sounds and recordings that play with noise, analog synth, and forms of abrasion.
This presentation of μ (mu) includes a piano performance with a Yamaha transacoustic piano, expanding the work's exploration of the entanglement of acoustic resonance with digital sound. A transducer piano resonates any sound sent through it, digital or acoustic.
The EMPAC installation also imagines μ (mu)’s acetate dubplates as a counterpart to traditional film (of which acetate is also an important component), proposing the project as a point where the materiality of image-making, sound, and touch collide.
Main Image: Marina Rosenfeld, μ (mu), film still, 2024. Courtesy the artist.
Constants is a concert performance by musician and composer Sarah Davachi. Performing a single work of electronic analog synthesizer-based music in the EMPAC Concert Hall, Davachi fills the resonant space with gradually transforming musical strata. She invites the listener to an inner world of sonic detail informed by minimalist tenets, formal concepts from early music, and the experimental recording practices of the studio environment.
Beneath the unassuming and placid surface of Constants, intricacies of musical space weave a tapestry of complex relationships between tuning, intonation, timbre, and psychoacoustic phenomena. The slowness of Davachi’s music allows its subtle beauty to blossom and reveal itself over the course of the hour-long performance. Microtonal variations, resonant harmonics, and temporal distortions are just a few of the characteristics of her world. As Davachi suggests, “it’s like showing a painting in bits as opposed to showing the entire thing all at once.”
Main Image: Sarah Davachi, 2017. Courtesy the Artist. Photo: Joe Ruckli.
Feedback is a concert performance of charged electro-acoustic music by the duo of composer-performers Charmaine Lee and Conrad Tao. Lee and Tao combine spontaneity and playfulness with virtuosic and rigorous musicianship to create an energetic and hyper-sensorial world of electronic sounds and voice spanning genres from pop to ambient to feedback-based noise music. Surrounded by a battery of electronic, acoustic, and found instruments, the artists premiere new material designed especially for the EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman venue that expands upon sonic themes explored throughout their eight-year collaboration.
Charmaine Lee is a Cantonese Australian vocalist based in New York City, whose risk-taking practice combines extended voice techniques, feedback, and live vocal processing. Comfortable both in the concert hall and DIY basement shows, Lee’s sound is both brutal and refined. Drawing from aspects of free jazz, European improvised music, noise, ASMR, and non-music art forms, Lee channels these inspirations through the emotional and timbral immediacy of the human voice.
Pianist, electronic musician, and composer Conrad Tao has performed and curated concerts across the globe as a solo musician, as a member of the Junction Trio, and in collaborations with artists such as Charmaine Lee, the brass ensemble Westerlies, and members of the JACK string quartet. As a curator, Tao’s programming deftly and thoughtfully combines repertoire from the canon with contemporary works to create a dynamic relationship between the past and present.
Main Image: Conrad Tao, Charmaine Lee. Courtesy of artist. Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk
Composer Brigitta Muntendorf, with pianists Ning Yu and Corey Smythe and technologist Levy Lorenzo, make the US Premiere of Muntendorf’s Trilogy for Two Pianos as part of TIME:SPANS 2024 in New York City. Produced during a residency at EMPAC with the center’s audio engineers, Muntendorf’s piece combines kinetically charged electronic sounds with theatrical elements and virtuosic instrumental performances to meditate on and address the topics of presence and its disappearance.
The concert presentation is preceded by a conversation between Muntendorf and EMPAC Music Curator Amadeus Julian Regucera.
The following compositions premiere at TIME:SPANS 2024:
Brigitta Muntendorf
Trilogy for two pianos, tape, and live electronics, 2014–18
Performed by Cory Smythe, Levy Lorenzo, and Ning Yu
Duration: 70 min
Main Image: Trilogie, at Time:Spans, 2024. Photo: Jeff Svatek/EMPAC.
In this talk presentation, renowned artist and musician Laurie Anderson reveals the process behind her newest music-theater work, ARK, while at EMPAC for a final production residency in preparation for its world premiere in Manchester in November 2024.
An opera starring a host of mythical and contemporary figures, Anderson’s subjects—apocalyptic climate events, technology and information overload, American history—are warped into a story that plays with the flow of time and poses questions about the survival of the human spirit. How does humanity need to change in order to be saved?
Laurie Anderson was at EMPAC for her first residency in 2009. She was Distinguished Artist-in-Residence for three years from 2012 through 2014. In all, Anderson has developed 10 projects during residencies at EMPAC, including this season's ARK.
One of America’s most renowned performance artists, Laurie Anderson’s genre-crossing work encompasses performance, film, music, installation, writing, photography, and sculpture. She is widely known for her multimedia presentations and musical recordings and has numerous major works to her credit, including United States I-V (1983), Empty Places (1990), Stories from the Nerve Bible (1993), Songs and Stories for Moby Dick (1999), and Life on a String (2001), among others. She has taken part in countless collaborations with an array of artists, from Jonathan Demme and Brian Eno to Bill T. Jones and Peter Gabriel.
Main Image: Laurie Anderson, production still from ARK. Photo: Alvis Mosely/EMPAC.
Laurie Anderson's instagram post announcing ARK at Factory International, Manchester UK in November, 2024.
Join Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for Storytelling & Memory, a concert featuring Tanglewood Music Center’s Fromm Quartet. The event, free and open to the public, includes works by composers Tania León and Steven Mackey, as well as a conversation on the latest advances in Alzheimer’s research, and on translating memory into music, with Rensselaer faculty Dr. Chunyu Wang and Dr. Robert Whalen.
Tania León and Steven Mackey serve on Tanglewood's composition faculty and are co-directors of the Festival of Contemporary Music. Chunyu Wang is professor in the School of Science at Rensselaer, and is nationally recognized for his research in Alzheimer’s. Robert Whalen is lecturer of music and conducting at Rensselaer, where he directs the Rensselaer Orchestra, Concert Choir, and Wind Symphony.
Amadeus Julian Regucera, music curator at EMPAC, introduces the program’s discussion.
Main Image: 2023 BSO Fellows. Courtesy Tanglewood Music Center. Background extended with AI. Photo: Hillary Scott.
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.
