Pianist Mabel Kwan was in residence in the Concert Hall to record, edit, mix, and master Georg Friedrich Haas’ Trois Hommages, a composition for two pianos played by one performer. She performed the piece on Sept. 22.

Ipsa Dixit is an evening-length work of theatrical chamber music by American composer Kate Soper. Exploring the intersection of music, language, and meaning, the piece blends elements of monodrama, Greek theater, and screwball comedy to skewer the treachery of language and the questionable authenticity of artistic expression. Each of the piece’s six movements draw on texts by thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato, Freud, Wittgenstein, Jenny Holtzer, and Lydia Davis, delivering ideas from the linguistic disciplines of poetics, rhetoric, and metaphysics through extended vocal techniques and blistering ensemble virtuosity. Developed in pieces since 2010, Soper’s EMPAC residency culminated in the first performance of the work’s entire cycle.

After premiering at EMPAC, Ipsa Dixit was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music. 

Origin can mean everything and nothing in today’s electronic music, where sounds are sourced, combined, and distributed on digital terrain. While their personal geographies and artistic methods place them worlds apart, Jlin and Qrion each create dance music perfectly suited to the contemporary moment, when regional flavors and the tension between sampled material and self-composed sounds are finding common other-worldly ground. 

Jlin is one of the most prominent female electronic producers of the current generation. She grew up in Gary, Indiana, and made her first tracks while working at a steel mill. Drawing on the legacy of RP Boo and DJ Rashad, she has advanced the Chicago-oriented style of footwork into dark and creative new dimensions. Though her earlier work relied on sampling—often from horror movies—she now refuses to, opting instead to compose her dense, frenetic tracks from all original source material. Her 2015 debut record Dark Energy was named the year’s best by a number of publications, including The Wire.

Hailing from Sapporo, the snowy capital of Japan’s northernmost island, Qrion released her first two EPs via SenSe while still attending high school. Internet acclaim and the anticipation of her softly-lit, melancholic melodies eventually led to SenSe’s servers being overloaded during the free release of 2014’s sink, a download-only mini album. Later that year, a high-profile collaboration with electronic producer Ryan Hemsworth exposed Qrion’s music to a global audience.

Two of the most progressive voices in American jazz piano joined forces for a performance that blurred the line between composition and improvisation. Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn have each risen to prominence within the jazz scene by expanding the boundaries of the genre and establishing a highly personalized approach to improvisation. Together, the two drew on an evolving sketchbook of compositional ideas, developed through earlier iterations of the project, to continue a musical conversation that defies the notion of completion. 

Vijay Iyer was born in Albany, NY and has become “one of the most interesting and vital young pianists in jazz today,” according to Pitchfork. A Grammy-nominated recording artist on the ECM label, Iyer has a PhD in Technology and the Arts and undertook pioneering scholarship on the “embodied cognition” of musical performance. Interested in what happens to a listener “from the shoulders down,” Iyer approaches jazz from this level of direct vibrational experience. As a leader and sideman, he’s collaborated with artists as diverse as Roscoe Mitchell, Dave Douglas, Amiri Baraka, Das Racist, and most recently Wadada Leo Smith.

Detroit native Craig Taborn is one of the most sought-after sidemen and sessioners working today, having recorded more than 100 albums with artists such as Evan Parker, Tim Berne, and Steve Coleman, and touring with the likes of Dave Holland, Bill Frisell, Ches Smith, and Paul Motian. Known for his work on electric piano and organ as well as acoustic piano, he has topped critics’ and readers’ polls in jazz publications such as Downbeat and JazzTimes. In addition to recording with his own ensembles for ECM and Tzadik, Taborn regularly performs solo.

Considered “one of the finest producers of the moment,” London-based artist Lapalux (AKA Stuart Howard) is a rising star of electronic music. Mixing R&B, IDM, and a penchant for sci-fi with woozy, glitched-out beats, his early work caught the ear of LA mastermind Flying Lotus, whose forward-listening hip-hop label, Brainfeeder, has subsequently released Lapalux’s first two records. Lustmore (2015) was inspired by the experience of hypnagogia, the transitional state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep, with each track aspiring to create a liminal world populated by enigmatic characters and cinematic plotlines.

Taking movie soundtracks and visual ideas as inspiration, Lapalux creates dance music for both the body and the imagination. For this performance, he explored a new audio-visual experience.

Performing on two pianos simultaneously, Mabel Kwan took on Trois Hommages, the virtuosic opus of contemporary composer Georg Friedrich Haas. Haas dedicated the work to three of the 20th century’s most influential composers—György Ligeti, Josef Matthias Hauer, and Steve Reich—and each of the piece’s three movements are played in their respective homage. While one of the pianos is tuned in a conventional manner, the second is detuned by a quarter-tone, creating 176 different pitches for the performer. Unfolding over an hour, this rarely performed composition requires incredible mental focus and physical stamina on the part of the player.

This performance was part of a residence in which Kwan recorded Trois Hommages for future release.

Program

• hommage à györgy ligeti (1984) 
• hommage à josef matthias hauer (1982) 
• hommage à steve reich (1982) 

In Spring 2016, EMPAC completed construction on a 496-channel wave field audio system, one of the most extensive in the world. Consisting of very small speaker heads oriented very close together, the system produces a 3D audio environment by localizing the source of individual sounds with an extreme level of precision. 

For the wave field array’s inaugural performance, Rensselaer Professor Rob Hamilton created a running installation and performance (on Sept. 2) to explore and demonstrate advanced concepts of spatialized sound. Using a Disklavier piano, Hamilton transformed digitally recorded notes and distributed them across each of the independently controlled speakers in the system. Audiences were encouraged to physically explore the resulting environment much like a giant sonic hologram. The live performance was realized by pianist Chryssie Nanou. 

Dr. Rob Hamilton, a composer, performer, researcher and software designer, explores the cognitive implications of the spaces between interactive game environments, network topographies, and procedurally-generated sound and music. Dr. Hamilton joined the Department of Arts at Rensselaer as an Assistant Professor of Music and Media in 2015.

Cellist Mariel Roberts was in residency to record, mix, and edit her second solo album, Cartography. Released in 2017 by New Focus Recordings, the album contained works by George Lewis, Eric Wubbels, Davi∂ Brynjar Franzson, and Cenk Ergün in collaboration with Roberts herself.

Roberts has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician across four continents, most notably as a member of the Mivos String Quartet, as well as Wet Ink Ensemble and Ensemble Signal. She has been featured as a chamber musician on recordings for Innova, New World Records, New Amsterdam, New Focus, and Urtext Records.

The final EMPAC presentation of sound artist Tarek Atoui’s multi-year research and performance project to develop tools and techniques for performing sound to a hearing-impaired audience.

Atoui has been working in collaboration with Distinguished Research Professor of Music Pauline Oliveros and her students from the New Instrumentation for Performance seminar to think through propositions for new instruments and performance techniques. Several instruments that Atoui has been developing concurrently will be played throughout the public spaces of EMPAC and broadcast into the Concert Hall. The audience will be encouraged to explore the acoustic relationships between individual instruments and the architecture that they inhabit.

During this time, Atoui has also worked in partnership with UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Center for New Media at University of California, Berkeley, and Meyer Sound to develop the Zero Point Nine an instrument that was premiered in a series of performances presented by BAMPFA in November 2015. The Zero Point Nine will be traveling to EMPAC for this presentation to be played alongside a new prototype interactive square wave synthesizer The Sit-thesizer by Julia Alsarraf, and the SubBassProtoTon developed by Johannes Goebel. The instruments from these two research and development phases in Troy and Berkeley respectively, will be presented together during Norway’s 2016 Bergen Assembly, organized by Atoui as artistic director.

Atoui presented the project’s first incarnation, WITHIN, as a series of performances and workshops during the Sharjah Biennial in 2013 and has continued to research principals of sonic architecture (in particular, the system of DeafSpace, developed by Hansel Bauman at Gallaudet, Washington) in the development of instrument-building techniques.

WITH:

• Julia Alsarraf
• Jad Atoui
• Johannes Goebel
• Jeff Lubow
• Matt O'Hare
• Pauline Oliveros
• Evan-Daniel Rose-González

SubBassProtoTon

This musical instrument was invented by director Johannes Goebel and has been installed for this performance. When inside, you can experience frequencies that dip below the human audible limit.

Sit-Thesizer

Rensselaer Arts grad Julia Alsarraf, has developed the Sit-thesizer as part of this performance.

Zen-like concentration. Meticulous execution. Tight grooves that inexplicably lie way back in the pocket while simultaneously pushing incessantly forward. Nik Bärtsch’s Swiss jazz quartet MOBILE uses these basic musical concepts within a ritualistic framework to produce a sound that is sometimes funky, sometimes ambient, and always obsessively charged.

Recording for ECM since 2006, bandleader and pianist Bärtsch has quickly become a respected figure for his mixture of funk, new classical music, as well as elements of Japanese ritual music. Along with drummer Kaspar Rast, reed player Sha, and percussionist Nicolas Stocker, MOBILE belongs to the new generation of modern musicians who naturally combine a competence for classical interpretation, improvisational dexterity, and the ability to groove.