As part of the lengthy production process for this EMPAC-commissioned opera, composer Sean Griffin worked in residence with staff as well as auditioned regional actors. He also developed the Cold Spring set by researching, and acquiring on loan, artifacts drawn from the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, NY, the General Electric Company collection, and from several other historic collections of upstate New York industrial history. Griffin worked in collaboration with EMPAC engineers on integrating the computer-based lighting system and cue-based computer-controlled rigging with his compositional approach, blending these technologies with dancers, musicians, actors, and a roller derby team.

Sean Griffin’s unique compositional works rely on interdisciplinary incongruities positioned at the intersection of sound, image, performance, and the archive. His works manifest as music, large and small-scale operas, collaborative installations, historically weighted musical performance works, and numeric choreographies. His pieces have been commissioned and presented internationally by venues including LA’s REDCAT, Hammer Museum, and Contemporary Museum of Art, London’s Royal Academy and Tate Modern, among others. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

When composer Maryanne Amacher passed away in October 2009, she had been working for two years on an EMPAC-commissioned piece in residence. During the residency, she created an ethereal space for floating sounds with 30-plus loudspeakers, most hidden in rooms distant to the performance space. In 2010, the air plenum beneath EMPAC’s Theater—a space for circulating air, which inspired Maryanne and which she called The Star Room—was named in her honor. 

Amacher was a major innovator in the field of 20th-century electronic music. A rigorously perceptive mind and uncannily sensitive listener, she created powerful situations for listening that broke new ground in areas of telematics with her CityLinks series in the 1960s, sound spatialization with her unique approach to structure-borne sound, and the creative use of otoacoustic emissions (sounds self-produced by the inner ear). Her work has been produced at festivals worldwide since the late 1960s and, until her death in 2009, she traveled extensively, continuing to research, compose, and inspire those around her.

Presenting Daniel Teiges' mix of Iannis Xenakis' Persepolis, the epic composition commissioned in 1971 by the then dictator of Iran, Muhammad Reza Shah. Created for an Olympics-scale spectacle celebrating the 2500th Anniversary (twenty-five-hundredth!) of Iran's founding by Cyrus The Great, it took place in the middle of the desert at the archaeological site of the former city of Persepolis. It was a synesthetic enormity with 92 spotlights, 100 loudspeakers, lasers, and processions of torch-bearing children crossing the landscape. The sonic remains of this “polytope”, what Xenakis called his interdisciplinary, synesthetic spectacles, will be presented in its entirety. In addition to the Xenakis, we are presenting the USA Premier of Hans Tutschku's ZWEI RÄUME (Two Spaces), which had its first performance in Berlin this past August. This new work takes an entirely different approach than the Xenakis, presenting divergent timbres from voices to the unknowable, and a sense of ever-changing acoustic “place” within the piece itself. The work reconciles or transcends opposites; sparse passages of sound that seem nearly within the ear escape to and from resonances that emanate from spaces seeming miles away. Tutschku will be in attendance, and will present his piece and talk about its making.  

Zeroth Channel takes place in Studio 1 - Goodman with a 28 channel audio system distributed in three rings from the floor to the 32 foot grid.

Zeroth Channel is a series of concerts using a variety of approaches to multi-channel sound
diffusion, an area of musical practice since the 1950s where composers have explored how sound literally takes up space. 

The Arraymusic ensemble is an eight-member performing group from Toronto recognized worldwide for its innovative programming and virtuosic performance. Their extensive repertoire includes a library-like collection of pieces they have commissioned from composers with highly individual voices from around the world. They will perform a program of Canadian composers whose works were composed specifically for the ensemble: Claude Vivier’s Et Je Reverrai Cette Ville Etrange, James Tenney’s Spectrum 1, and a selection of recent Arraymusic Miniatures.

Maryanne Amacher and The OpenEnded Group collaborated on plans for a new, immersive multimedia performance with the working title Lagrange: a Four Part Mini Series. The piece was inspired in part by the evolutionary novels of British author and philosopher Olaf Stapledon that reflect on both humanity’s past and possible futures. Amacher and The OpenEnded Group drew on their respective histories in technological and perceptual innovation to consider how advances in media and performance technologies—performed in real-time—could generate a new kind of non-literal narrative, populated by visual and sonic characters. Their goal was a serialized narrative that would be experienced by audiences over a period of several weeks in a non-traditional space where, by moving from location to location, they would explore the story in a physical way. The collaboration reflected the artists’ mutual interest in immersive experiences.

The OpenEnded Group (Paul Kaiser, Marc Downie, and Shelly Eshkar) has worked to define a new kind of 3D space that does not aspire to photorealism, while until her death in 2009, Amacher explored the acoustic dimensions of sound propagated through walls, floors, rooms, and corridors (as opposed to sound projected by loudspeakers only).

Per Tengstrand is one of today’s most exciting pianists and already a legend in his native Sweden. For this unique solo recital he will perform works chosen specifically for three of EMPAC’s grand pianos: Salonen's Dichotomie on the deep clarity of the Bösendorfer, a selection of Ravel’s Miroirs on the delicate precision of the Fazioli, and Liszt’s Apres une lecture de Dante on the massive sound of our Hamburg Steinway.

Per Tengstrand regularly performs with orchestras in Gothenberg, Malmö, Helsingborg, Stockholm, Tapiola, with the Huarod Chamber Orchestra, and Swedish Radio Orchestra. He has appeared as soloist with the Orchestre National de France, French Radio Orchestra, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Orchestra National de Lille, National Symphony of Taiwan, Singapore Symphony, New Japan, and Osaka Philharmonic Orchestras. As recitalist, he has performed internationally in such venues as Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Zurich’s Tonhalle, Paris’s Salle Gaveau and the Nice Opera House, as well as in Geneva, Bordeaux, Bergen, Norway, the Montpellier Festival, Poland’s Chopin Festival and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall.

Throwdown at our late-night party capping the first day of EMPAC’s public opening. Starting at 11:00 PM and going into the wee hours, dance and hang out under our 360° screen (suspended overhead) with Madlib’s fused strata of encyclopedic beats, the turntable mastery of J. Rocc, the 8-bit hip-hop antics of Juiceboxxx, and live video projections by lmnopf. Be sure to catch a nap somewhere in the midst of the packed schedule of the EMPAC opening, or at the very least save that third wind so you can see what the crew at Open Late are cooking up for you.

About MADLIB:

From the unlikely beach town of Oxnard, 40 miles north of Los Angeles, the multi-dimensional Madlib rose to prominence as one of the most interesting figures in late-’90s. In particular, his expansive style and deft touch for composition made him one of hip-hop’s most sought-after producers. With each year Madlib has continued to expand his abilities beyond the core of hip hop, creating projects ranging from remixes of Indian pop to a jazz record where he plays every instrument (with deep reverence for the 1960s Blue Note releases).

Robert Normandeau will explore for the first time the Concert Hall’s ideal design for multichannel electronic music. Using an orchestra of over forty loudspeakers hung from the ceiling and surrounding the audience both horizontally and vertically, he will perform an evening of his recent work, rarely heard in the United States.

About:

Normandeau is one of the most celebrated living composers within the “acousmatic” strand of electronic music: a compositional and performative approach that started in France during the 1950s and has been evolving since with a particularly vibrant scene in Montreal. Normandeau has been central to this community and Canadian electronic music in general. He was a founding member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community, the national organization for electronic music composers, and a founding member of Réseaux (1991), a concert society who has produced innumerable concerts and festivals of multichannel electronic music, including the Akousma festival of acousmatic music held for the past four years. He has been Professor of Electroacoustics Composition at Université de Montréal since 1999.

Between a Rock and a Tiny Bell is a night of bands and solo performances whose work creates unlikely, powerful, and in many cases loud, synergies between divergent musical legacies.

The Lineup:

• Black Moth Super Rainbow
• Han Bennink + Peter Brötzmann
• ZS
• Blarvuster
• Health

These are people who have gone beyond “fusion” or “polystylism” to create a new identity from seemingly irreconcilable forces. Spend an evening with new alchemies of punk, heavy metal, complexity, Scottish traditional music, 70s psychedelia, and (gasp) gritty minimalism. This concert is part of Rensselaer’s celebration of the 50th Anniversary of granting degrees in the Humanities.

Data Speaks. Are you listening? is a lecture, that will share Berger’s latest research and discuss the creative potentials for experiencing and analyzing data with our ears rather than our eyes.