Frieder Weiss, creator of the interactive media environment in Chunky Move’s Glow, will talk about his participation in and observations of the ‘dance tech’ genre over the last 15 years. Weiss calls himself an ‘engineer in the arts’. In an entertaining yet critical review, he will describe developments and achievements in the genre of interactive performance, illustrated with numerous videos of works from the recent years. As he will show, not only has the technology changed in this time period, but also the very paradigms of using interactivity have shifted tremendously. Weiss will describe a recipe for successful interactive experiences, including brief overviews and demonstrations of software and hardware systems. Artistic implications will be addressed. Weiss will also be giving an introductory workshop exploring artistic uses of video motion sensing technologies on Saturday December 5th. The workshop is FREE but limited to 15 participants and requires a reservation

For nearly 40 years, Aretha Franklin has been an icon of contemporary pop music, known around the world as the “Queen of Soul.” With her extraordinary range and incendiary gospel-inspired phrasing, Franklin exploded onto the music scene in the late 1960s becoming the country’s leading female vocalist and one of the first female performers to inject the rhythms and intensity of black gospel music into mainstream pop.

Her greatest achievement, perhaps, has been the ability to break down boundaries, to appeal to this country’s vast range of musical tastes.

Per Tengstrand, who was a featured performer at the inaugural concert for EMPAC’s opening, is a Swedish concert pianist who has performed internationally and has a special interest in the relationship between the evolving technology of the piano and development of piano repertoire. During this residency he recorded work for solo piano by Beethoven—an emblematic body of work that evolved in relation to technological shifts in piano design—as part of Tengstrand’s effort to record the complete piano sonata cycle for his Mindfeel label.

Tengstrand performed the complete Beethoven cycle in a number of cities and venues, and blogged extensively about his artistic approach to learning and recording all 32 sonatas, posting detailed analyses of each work demonstrated with short sound files. An advocate of Scandinavian repertoire, in 2005 Tengstrand was decorated by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden with the Royal Medal Litteris et Artibus for outstanding service to the arts, the youngest recipient ever to be so honored.

One the world’s few virtuosos of the viola, Garth Knox is known for playing some of the most demanding music written for that instrument with elegance and dash. For this concert, he also performed pieces for the viola d’amore, a 17th century instrument with resonating strings mounted beneath its bowed ones. The program ranged from Tobias Hume’s 1605 Pavane to one of Knox’s own compositions to the world premiere of a new piece for viola d’amore and electronics by English composer James Dillon. A talk with the artist preceded the concert.

Knox studied viola at London’s Royal College of Music and has been a member of Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble InterContemporain and the Arditti String Quartet. As a soloist, he has premiered works by Henze, Ligeti, Schnittke, Ferneyhough, James Dillon, George Benjamin, and many others. Knox was in residence at EMPAC as well to record a work for viola d’amore by the British composer Ed Bennet for My Broken Machines, a CD released in 2011 by NMC Recordings.

One the world’s few acknowledged virtuosos of the viola, Garth Knox is known for playing some of the most demanding music written for that instrument with elegance and dash. On November 14, he’ll also perform pieces for the viola d’amore, a period instrument with resonating strings mounted beneath its bowed ones. The program ranges from Tobias Hume’s 1605 Pavane to one of Knox’s own compositions from his CD Viola Spaces. The evening’s highlight will be the world premiere of a new piece for viola d’amore and electronics by English composer James Dillon under a commission from the French band Art Zoyd. The artist will give a talk before the concert.

In response to the (age-old) complaint that there’s nothing new happening in music, EMPAC modestly announces New Nothing, a series of concerts featuring national and international musicians working in the hybridized terrain of experimental-leaning popular music. These groups exemplify a global reality in which music hasn’t just crossed borders but made them irrelevant, with results that include Nigerian pedal steel guitarists and kora players from Nebraska. Popular music will never be the same. The Brooklyn-based Skeleton$ are not so much a band as “a musical personality,” fronted by founder Matt Mehlan and including a classically-trained trombonist and punk-rock drummers. They’ll be playing their ebulliently noisy music, which Pitchfork magazine characterized as “an outsize global-a-go-go mélange of unceasing polyrhythms, Afrobeat guitars, free jazz, and Timbaland’s approach to kitchen-sink percussion.” The evening also includes a performance by the protean Italian composer and multi-instrumentalist (piano, musical saw, and the Vietnamese dan bau) Luciano Chessa. Among its highlights will be a reading of Futurist poetry and a composition for piano and stuffed animals.

“These days, anything goes…” Zs, the scariest band from EMPAC’s Between a Rock and a Tiny Bell concert, returns on Halloween for a careening set of “[sputtering] Morse code dots of percussion and saxophone” (Ben Sisario, New York Times) as part of the New Nothing series. Opening will be Little Women, a quartet whose ghost notes and violent disassembling of their instruments concoct riotous sets that run the gamut from pop to free jazz to noise and back again.

After performing in EMPAC’s opening festival, International Contemporary Ensemble returned to EMPAC’s state-of-the-art recording venue to record The Bright and Hollow Sky, an album of the electro-acoustic music of Nathan Davis.

Davis is a New York City-based composer and percussionist whose work blends acoustical and electronic sound sources with fascinating results. Davis has studied at Rice University and, while on a Fulbright Fellowship, at the Rotterdam Conservatorium; he has also explored the philosophies of meditation and tonalities of Karnatic music. Davis has composed pieces for ensembles, including the Calder Quartet and the Ethos percussion ensemble, which have also been featured at the Ojai Festival and at performances of the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Flux Quartet have championed the works of the American composer Morton Feldman for over a decade, finding a way to even perform his second quartet whose duration is six hours. In collaboration with EMPAC, a new recording of Feldman’s first quartet was made to highlight the delicate physicality of the music, specifically recorded to accompany the 3D video project Upending by OpenEnded Group, an EMPAC commission.

Strongly influenced by the irreverent spirit and “anything-goes” philosophy of the fluxus art movement, violinist Tom Chiu founded FLUX in the late ’90s. The quartet has since cultivated an uncompromising repertoire that follows neither fashions nor trends, but rather combines yesterday’s seminal iconoclasts with tomorrow’s new voices. Alongside late 20th-century masters like Cage, Feldman, Ligeti, Nancarrow, Scelsi, and Xenakis, FLUX has premiered more than 100 works by many of today’s foremost innovators, including Michael Byron, Julio Estrada, David First, Oliver Lake, Alvin Lucier, Marc Neikrug, and Matthew Welch.

Listening is an art, and in search of the perfect environment in which to practice it, humans have devoted millions of hours and the heroic efforts of architects, engineers, and craftspeople. EMPAC is a product of that quest. Commemorating his solo performance at EMPAC’s opening last year—Swedish pianist Per Tengstrand will give a recital and talk that reveal the technological breakthroughs that gave rise to Beethoven’s piano sonatas, as well as the innovations that followed from them. The evening will combine musical virtuosity with a provocative, witty take on the relationship between technology and creativity, as evidenced by the way the rapid evolution of the piano summoned forth new kinds of music.