Singer, songwriter, and paradoxical pop icon, Francis Farewell Starlite was in residence to create a new pop music spectacle commissioned by EMPAC—The White Room. The title references the small, white, environmentally controlled chamber used by NASA astronauts to make final preparations before entering the spacecraft. Starlite began developing and composing a piece that would involve extensive stage and lighting design, a steadicam operator, and a highly choreographed experience for two nights: the first for a live audience, and the second streamed online from an empty performance space.

Starlite’s background as a virtuoso jazz pianist and commitment to a disciplined, and sometimes spectacular, performance aesthetic offers an expansive view of popular culture. For several years Starlite only performed at a space in downtown Brooklyn that he had built for his band; The White Room was an opportunity to document this area of his practice.

Rainforests are inhabited by an incredibly rich variety of sounds—much like a piece of electronic music: the astonishing variety of sounds comes from sources that are concrete yet overwhelmingly invisible. Hyper-Rainforest is a monumental sound piece, both in duration and in how the sounds are projected to the Concert Hall. All music in this performance stems from field recordings—but it does not simulate the natural reality of the original locations. Instead, the work creates a sonic hyper-reality, a virtual world of sound and music that goes beyond a trip to a rainforest. The original materials are observed, analyzed, and composed to create a piece that surrounds the audience, moving deep into the sounds themselves and toward new sounds still rooted in their origins. This world premiere commission was developed in residence at EMPAC.

French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot developed two sound installations while in residence untitled (Series #3) and index (v.4)—which were then presented as a single exhibition over three floors in EMPAC’s public spaces. Together, the pieces reflect on music composition’s relation to nature and technology as well as our perception of complexity, control, and authorship in time-based art. untitled (Series #3) was comprised of three wading pools filled with bowls and wine glasses; by calibrating the temperature of the water to increase the resonance of the floating objects, and by controlling the direction of the water flow with a small pump, ongoing, resonant collisions are created. The result is a chaotic, atmospheric music with a variety of small sounds surrounding the listener. For index (v.4) software designed by the artist was installed on computers throughout EMPAC, capturing typed letters, words, and punctuation into dynamics, pitch, and chords played by two mechanically actuated grand pianos. The real-time data stream became the chaotic generator of an ongoing score, in constant performance. Like untitled, this work conflated empirical, technological gestures with chaotic “natural” elements.

A native of France, Boursier-Mougenot’s works have been exhibited worldwide.

Intermedia composer and pianist Jarosław Kapuściński creates lighthearted and fanciful pieces in which musical instruments are used to control multimedia content. In these media compositions, he controls projections of videos and computer-generated graphics as he plays piano. The images, words, and music combine to entertain, but also provide insight into the artistic relationship between words and music. The witty integration of his virtuosic piano playing—he was first trained as a classical pianist and composer at the Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw—with a precisely timed flow of images informs his latest work, Where is Chopin, in which he plays excerpts from Chopin’s 24 Preludes in conjunction with videos of people in various countries listening.

Jarosław Kapuściński is an intermedia composer and pianist whose work has been presented at New York's MoMA; ZKM in Karlsruhe; the Museum of Modern Art, Palais de Tokyo, and Centre Pompidou in Paris; and Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, among others. He has received numerous awards, including at the UNESCO Film sur l'Art festival in Paris, VideoArt Festival Locarno, and the Festival of New Cinema and New Media in Montréal. He was first trained as a classical pianist and composer at the Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw and expanded into multimedia during a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada (1988) and through doctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego (1992-1997). Kapuscinski is actively involved in intermedia education. Currently, he is an assistant professor of composition and director of the Intermedia Performance Lab at Stanford University.

Intermedia composer and pianist Jaroslaw Kapuscinski creates lighthearted and fanciful pieces in which musical instruments are used to control multimedia content. In these media compositions, he controls projections of videos and computer-generated graphics as he plays piano. The images, words, and music combine to entertain, but also provide insight into the artistic relationship between words and music. The witty integration of his virtuosic piano playing—he was first trained as a classical pianist and composer at the Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw—with a precisely timed flow of images informed his latest work Where is Chopin, in which he plays excerpts from Chopin’s 24 Preludes in conjunction with videos of people in various countries listening.

Kapus´cin´ski work has been presented at MoMA; ZKM in Karlsruhe; the Museum of Modern Art, Palais de Tokyo; and Centre Pompidou in Paris. Kapus´cin´ski’s is actively involved in intermedia education, leading the Intermedia Performance Lab at Stanford University where he is assistant professor of composition.

The OpenEnded Group created a 3D stage environment for a live chamber opera, Twice Through the Heart. Originally composed in 1997 by English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and sung by mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, the staging was newly directed by Wayne MacGregor. The English-language libretto by poet Jackie Kay depicts the misery of a working-class English housewife imprisoned for killing her abusive husband. The OpenEnded Group worked in residence to create floating imagery (viewed through 3D glasses) suggestive of the protagonist’s mental state: the suffocating fear and violence she endured for years in a cramped council flat, along with brief mirages of the happy life she had once hoped for. To create the imagery, The OpenEnded Group traveled to Dartington in the UK to photographically capture a council housing flat from the 1970s.

While at EMPAC, Francisco Lopez developed Hyper-Rainforest, an EMPAC commission that uses a unique set of field recordings that Lopez, a biologist by training, made over many years in the Amazon and other rainforests around the world. Captured with an extreme level of detail, the sounds in these recordings are often difficult to differentiate as industrial, natural, or synthesized. As a result, the music does not simulate the natural reality of the original locations, but instead creates a sonic hyper-reality, a virtual world of sound and music that goes beyond a trip to a rainforest. The original materials are observed, analyzed, and composed to create a piece that used dozens of speakers in a large dome within EMPAC’s Concert Hall, where the audience was seated on a platform in the middle to experience the work.

López has 30 years of experience in sound creation and environmental recordings, and has developed a personal and iconoclastic sound universe based on profound listening to the world. He has been involved in hundreds of sound installations, field recordings, and concerts in over 60 countries.

Nicole Beutler works with the tension between intense emotionality and cool calculation while also reflecting on the history of theater. How do we look at emotions—what moves us and what doesn't? How does the past resonate in our contemporary reality? These are issues that are at stake in Nicole Beutler's work. Always searching for new forms, she currently is drawn to working with existing texts or dances.

1: Songs

By Nicole Beutler / nb in collaboration with Sanja Mitrovic and Gary Shepherd 1: Songs is a dramatic solo performance in the style of a rock song-cycle that crosses rough terrain. Performer Sanja Mitrovic channels the final words of tragic female protagonists from the history of theater, including Antigone, Medea, and Gretchen, allowing their timeless cries of suffering to enter her body and distinctly contemporary voice. As she shouts, speaks, and sings, she violently shifts between characters, at times fragile, raw, calculating, or emotional. Created by director and choreographer Nicole Beutler, with electronic music by DJ/composer Gary Shepherd, 1: Songs asks us to reconsider the words of these classic literary heroines (and anti-heroines) in the here and now. Who is speaking? What do these words mean today? Where does the character end and the performer begin?

2: Dialogue with Lucinda

By Nicole Beutler / nb based on Radial Courses (1976) + Interior Drama (1977) by Lucinda Childs Fascinated by the radical and deceptively simple minimalism of American choreographer Lucinda Childs' early work, Nicole Beutler has remade two of her silent dance pieces, Radial Courses (1976) and Interior Drama (1977), setting the latter to specially composed music. The underlying choreographic scores used by the dancers while performing are fiendishly complex. Radial Courses is based on three movement sequences in a constantly shifting, circulatory composition. In Interior Drama, five dancers conform to an apparently perfect system, moving in repetitive and hallucinatory patterns. Childs describes her own work as an "intense experience of intense looking and listening." Beutler's reinterpretations focus on the individual dancer's roles and actions within the group patterns, revealing parallel realities and the ritualistic qualities of both dances.

Nicole Beutler is a choreographer, curator and performer based in Amsterdam. Her work is situated on the threshold of dance, performance, and visual arts. She seeks to precisely articulate sense and experience through performances, installations, and books. Her performances are composed musically, and suffused with subtle humor. They are characterized by minimal stage sets and a focus on the performer as a human being.

In 2005 Beutler co-founded LISA, the Amsterdam-based theater makers' collective. From 2008 to 2010, she was dance and performance curator at Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam. She collaborated for years with choreographer and performer Paz Rojo and has worked with David Weber-Krebs, Hooman Sharifi and the live art group Private Thoughts in Public Places. She is an artistic adviser for choreographers, and a guest teacher at the School for New Dance Development and the Mime School at the Amsterdam School of the Arts (AHK).

The minimalist music style has had a profound influence on all Western music. Not only has classical music been challenged and changed, but electronica, jazz, hip-hop, and pop have fallen under its influence, as well. Starting in the 1960s as an alternative to the "joyless" classical music coming out of academia, its pulsing rhythms, shifting patterns, focused harmonies, and mesmerizing repetitions, which move continuously through metamorphoses, spoke to listeners in a new way. Music for 18 Musicians, by Steve Reich and musicians, premiered in 1974 at The Town Hall in New York City. In 2009, Reich won a Pulitzer Prize for his piece Double Sextet, where two identical groups of six musicians each play interlocking patterns of music—and the interwoven rhythms and phrases draw listeners into a maelstrom of pulsing music. Signal, under Brad Lubman, performs these minimalist masterpieces with absolute virtuosity.

Signal is a large ensemble performing under the musical direction of Brad Lubman, which is devoted to presenting a broad range of new music with energy, passion, and virtuosity. Music for 18 Musicians is an iconic work of musical minimalism and one of the most widely appreciated compositions of American experimental music. However, there have been very few recordings of the piece and the interpretation is often disputed (the original score, for example, was a series of cued components, not a linearly notated work, and as such the piece has a more dynamic identity than is generally thought). Working in collaboration with EMPAC’s audio team, Signal used this performance and residency to produce a new recording of Music for 18 Musicians, the sixth since the first was released in 1976. Signal also performed and recorded Double Sextet; in 2009, composer Steve Reich won a Pulitzer Prize for the piece where two identical groups of six musicians each play interlocking patterns of music—and the interwoven rhythms and phrases draw listeners into a maelstrom of pulsing music.