From Lisbon, musician Rafael Toral presents a collection of his Space Studies, a series of works exploring different combinations of gestural control and sonic palette. Each study is an interdependent spatial and aural exploration that together create an instrument of Toral's own design. These instruments require visible performance techniques that in many cases are more akin to dance than to what we think of as part of a laptop or electronic music performance (clicking, knobbing, mousing, buttoning).

Is listening to a recording of a bottle somehow still listening to a bottle? What about the wind around a glacier or a hammer? New works using up to eighteen loudspeakers by composers Doug Henderson (Berlin), Seth Cluett (Paris), and Natasha Barrett (Oslo) lead the listener into questions of what is real,true, or important in identifying the concrete origin of a sound used in the work. What are the possible, or meaningful, transferences of time and place in audio works beginning with documentary-style sound recording? Is it possible to deliver an acoustic photograph? Is that the intention of the composer? And in either case, can we perceive it like that? Or what is it all about? Zeroth Channel is a series of concerts using a variety of approaches to "multichannel sound diffusion" an area of musical practice since the 1950s where composers have used space, the location and way a sound literally takes up space. .. where a sound comes from as important to the art as pitch, rhythm, timbre, or other traditionally "musical" concerns. In the past decade many techniques have come to the fore, several quite mathematically complex, that allow composers greater amounts of control, both compositionally and in performance, over the soundfield and the possibility to create a three-dimensional sense of aural place. The series title, Zeroth Channel, refers to the ears and the mind of the listener. This is the “zero”. So the listener can be seen as the “zeroth channel”— amongst all the other audio streams, the one where it all comes together. And while the technological setup in this kind of music is often dauntingly elaborate, the technology should “disappear”, and the audio streams, however many there are, give way to the role of the zeroth. The title serves as a reminder that even when lots of technology is used to create the possibility of experience, we are our own, active mediation, to it. The “zeroth channel” is you, the listener.

“Bobby McFerrin’s greatest gift to his audience may be changing them from spectators into celebrants and transforming a concert hall into a playground ... ” – Los Angeles Times

A solo performance by the inimitable vocalist, improvisor, conductor and musical enigma whose singular career includes performances with major symphony orchestras, several unusual ensembles of his own design, audience-participatory improvisations, 10 Grammies and one of the most popular songs of the 20th century. McFerrin, the son of two opera singers (his father, Robert McFerrin Sr. was the first African American soloist at the Metropolitan Opera) is perhaps most widely known for the 1988 hit song Don't Worry, Be Happy. The popularity of that song—which won Grammies for both Record of the Year and Song of the Year, and hit #1 in nearly every country in the world—was astounding. Not to mention, a little unlikely for a tune created on the spot in the recording studio. But McFerrin's reaction to the song's mammoth success was in keeping with the spontaneous nature of its composition: He took a sabbatical from touring and recording to seriously study conducting, working with mentors such as Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. From his early career as a pianist, through his groundbreaking work as a vocal improvisor, to his stint as a pop superstar, to his conducting of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and his appointment as creative director of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and beyond, McFerrin's life in music has transcended expectation. This concert at EMPAC will be no exception.

Composer Sean Griffin has created large and small-scale concert works, collaborative sound and video installations, film scores, and many projects in between. While in residence at EMPAC, Griffin created and then presented Hitting Things, Saying Things, an evening of performances that spans work that Griffin refers to as “percussion theater.” These staged compositions use ploys such as an aurally driven, virtuosic game of pattycake, theatricalized misuse of household objects, and other dissolutions of music performance into the terrain of theater.

Performers included Don Nichols, Greg Stewart, and Aiyun Huang and the show featured the premiere of a new work for Huang, an acclaimed soloist from Montreal whose theatricality as a performer blends music with theater. Encompassing many languages, styles, media, and forms, Griffin states that his unique compositional works “rely on interdisciplinary incongruities positioned at the intersection of sound, image, performance, and the archive.” His works have been commissioned and presented internationally; Griffin lives and works in Los Angeles.

Along his unusual path for a composer, Sean Griffin has created large and small-scale concert works, collaborative sound and video installations, film scores, and many projects in-between. This spring Griffin will be in-residence twice, working on two new projects and each time sharing some of his recent work with the public. Hitting Things, Saying Things is an evening of performances that spans work that might best be called percussion theater. These pointedly staged compositions use such ploys as an aurally-driven, virtuosic game of pattycake, theatricalized misuse of household objects, and other dissolutions of music performance into the terrain of theater. The show will feature the premier of a new work for Aiyun Huang, the acclaimed soloist, finished as part of Griffin’s residency at EMPAC. Performing will be Don Nichols, Greg Stewart and Aiyun Huang.

Best known for his darkly humorous stop-motion animated films that touch on themes of love, death, salvation and the underworld, filmmaker Brent Green will perform live with a series of his recent short films. Guest musicians, including the extraordinary Brendan Canty (Fugazi), Howe Gelb (Giant Sand) and Jim Becker (Califone) will accompany Green’s intense narration, which ranges from quiet, vulnerable storytelling to cathartic fumes bordering on the evangelistic. The self-taught animator is part 21st-century folk artist, part rock star, part confessional poet and part Blakean visionary. In live performance he screens a stop-motion autobiography of rich, idiosyncratic symbology to an accompaniment of raw Americana, harrowing and beautiful in its fragility. Green’s work lives in, exemplifies and tests that very trait, human fragility: We are by no means sound, he keens over Telecaster strain, not even weatherproof.

The new early music ensemble Quicksilver presents a concert of brilliant and virtuosic music from the avant-garde of the 1600s. Italy in the early 17th century was not just the home of the new science of Galileo, but of a nuove musiche or new music as well. Composers were experimenting with the emerging genre of the sonata — an abstract work for instruments — and discovering ways of creating elaborate and theatrical musical conversations between the players. This new music is full of abrupt contrasts, dramatic shifts of texture, and spectacular solo writing, as well as infectiously rhythmic dance movements and heartbreakingly beautiful melodies.

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 Premiere 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.