Composer Brigitta Muntendorf, with pianists Ning Yu and Corey Smythe and technologist Levy Lorenzo, make the US Premiere of Muntendorf’s Trilogy for Two Pianos as part of TIME:SPANS 2024 in New York City. Produced during a residency at EMPAC with the center’s audio engineers, Muntendorf’s piece combines kinetically charged electronic sounds with theatrical elements and virtuosic instrumental performances to meditate on and address the topics of presence and its disappearance.

The concert presentation is preceded by a conversation between Muntendorf and EMPAC Music Curator Amadeus Julian Regucera.

The following compositions premiere at TIME:SPANS 2024:

Brigitta Muntendorf
Trilogy for two pianos, tape, and live electronics, 2014–18
Performed by Cory Smythe, Levy Lorenzo, and Ning Yu

Duration: 70 min

In this talk presentation, renowned artist and musician Laurie Anderson reveals the process behind her newest music-theater work, ARK, while at EMPAC for a final production residency in preparation for its world premiere in Manchester in November 2024.

An opera starring a host of mythical and contemporary figures, Anderson’s subjects—apocalyptic climate events, technology and information overload, American history—are warped into a story that plays with the flow of time and poses questions about the survival of the human spirit. How does humanity need to change in order to be saved?

Laurie Anderson was at EMPAC for her first residency in 2009. She was Distinguished Artist-in-Residence for three years from 2012 through 2014. In all, Anderson has developed 10 projects during residencies at EMPAC, including this season's ARK.

One of America’s most renowned performance artists, Laurie Anderson’s genre-crossing work encompasses performance, film, music, installation, writing, photography, and sculpture. She is widely known for her multimedia presentations and musical recordings and has numerous major works to her credit, including United States I-V (1983), Empty Places (1990), Stories from the Nerve Bible (1993), Songs and Stories for Moby Dick (1999), and Life on a String (2001), among others. She has taken part in countless collaborations with an array of artists, from Jonathan Demme and Brian Eno to Bill T. Jones and Peter Gabriel.

Join Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for Storytelling & Memory, a concert featuring Tanglewood Music Center’s Fromm Quartet. The event, free and open to the public, includes works by composers Tania León and Steven Mackey, as well as a conversation on the latest advances in Alzheimer’s research, and on translating memory into music, with Rensselaer faculty Dr. Chunyu Wang and Dr. Robert Whalen.

Tania León and Steven Mackey serve on Tanglewood's composition faculty and are co-directors of the Festival of Contemporary Music. Chunyu Wang is professor in the School of Science at Rensselaer, and is nationally recognized for his research in Alzheimer’s. Robert Whalen is lecturer of music and conducting at Rensselaer, where he directs the Rensselaer Orchestra, Concert Choir, and Wind Symphony.

Amadeus Julian Regucera, music curator at EMPAC, introduces the program’s discussion.

• Fromm Quartet
• James Gikas, violin
• Tiffany Wee, violin
• James Cunningham IV, viola
• Benjamin Lanners, cello

Program

• CUARTETO NO. 2 (2011) — Tania León (b. 1943)
• I. Soy (I am)
• II. De vez en cuando (Once in a while)
• III. Son retazos (They are fragments)
• THE GIFT OF TIME
• A conversation between Dr. Chunyu Wang and Dr. Robert Whalen on the latest advances in Alzheimer’s research and translating memory into music. Introduction by Dr. Amadeus Julian Regucera.
• ONE RED ROSE (2013) — Steven Mackey (b. 1956)
• I. Five Short Studies
• II. Fugue and Fantasy
• III. Anthem and Aria

Brushing Improvisation – N°2 is the latest work in an ongoing brushing project that has utilized brushes in electronic music improvisation performances. While the previous performances of Brushing Improvisation focused on the nuanced materiality of the brush and translated brushing gestures into musical/sonic expression through specific mediated technology, a process formulated through continuous interaction between myself as both an instrument maker and performer, this particular piece also delves into the cultural universality inherent in the brush. This exploration fosters theatricality, gestural performance, and an organic integration between composition and improvisation.

Composer-performers Antonia Barnett-McIntosh and Jessie Marino’s Susceptible Chambers is an EMPAC-commissioned performance, which draws lines between the worlds of sound art, handcrafts, and experimental theater. It begins with the re-construction of a simple microphone.

Musicians have historically augmented familiar musical instruments with alternative materials to change their, and the audience’s, relationship to that object from a sonic and cultural standpoint. By designing and building specially-crafted objects, and experimenting with instrumental expansion, we can hear these materials interacting with one another—and experience the possibilities of a completely new sonic landscape, which can be discovered by playing with (a) particular combination/s of materials.

Developed during a series of residencies, Antonia and Jessie have laid the groundwork for an audio-visual performance that is both whimsical and rigorously executed. Composed from manifold permutations of “extended” microphones, the composer-performers experiment with different microphone filters and casings as well as speakers, light, and color arrangements.

Susceptible Chambers collects technologies from bygone eras—pulley systems, pianolas, needlepoint, sodium vapor lamps—and places them in conversation with bespoke, handmade and electronic objects. Antonia and Jessie's newest production draws the audience into an unusual, idiosyncratic, and playful sonic and visual world, experimenting with and challenging generally accepted practices of today’s electronic music, and contemporary music more broadly.

Jlin and Florence To will be in residence in Studio 1—Goodman to workshop and develop the visual language for Jlin’s upcoming tour for the new album Akoma.

Pioneering electronic musicians John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein will be in residence with Rensselaer Arts Department undergraduates from Professor Matthew Goodheart’s electronic music course to mount a new version of David Tudor’s Rainforest IV—a seminal work of transducer-based art which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023. Over the period of a few weeks, Driscoll and Edelstein, who developed Rainforest IV with Tudor in the 1970s, will coach RPI students on how to prepare and mount Tudor’s work in EMPAC’s Studio 2 as part of the Reembodied Sound 2024 symposium and festival.

Rosenfeld is in residence to develop her project μ (mu) into a video installation. Building on the artist’s prior work on the video component, this residency focuses on developing presentation formats for the work’s video and sound elements, as well as extending its imagery into experimental prints.

Pianist Conrad Tao will be in residence in the EMPAC Concert Hall to record works for solo piano and perform a brand new program of piano repertoire in a public recital.

Pioneering electronic musicians John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein will be in residence with Rensselaer Arts Department undergraduates from Professor Matthew Goodheart’s electronic music course to mount a new version of David Tudor’s Rainforest IV—a seminal work of transducer-based art which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023— as part of the Reembodied Sound 2024 symposium and festival.