More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.

An intimate performance by composer and violinist DBR (Daniel Bernard Roumain), hailed by The New York Times as “about as omnivorous as a contemporary artist gets.”

More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.

DAVID ALAN MILLER, CONDUCTOR | REGINA CARTER, VIOLIN | MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH, SPEAKER

Adolphus Hailstork: Symphony No. 4, “Survive”

David Schiff: Selections from Four Sisters

Daniel Roumain & Marc Bamuthi Joseph: Forgiveness, Spoken Word Concerto for Orchestra (world premiere)

WHAT IS CONVERGENCE? The Albany Symphony, long known for celebrating the breadth of American culture through new music, continues its community-building work with Convergence, a three-year collaborative project through which the Symphony, Capital Region communities, and nationally acclaimed artistic partners join together in an exploration of three Black American art forms. Funded by the Carl E. Touhey Foundation, Convergence will build community-wide awareness of our contemporary world through artistic inquiry and musical creation.

More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.

DAVID ALAN MILLER, CONDUCTOR

Horacio Fernández: Unruly (world premiere)

Marie A. Douglas: The Candidate (world premiere)

Kyle Rivera: (new work) (world premiere)

Christian Quiñones: (new work) (world premiere)

Jack Frerer: TBA

Composer Patricia Alessandrini and violinist/violist Marco Fusi present two works at TIME:SPANS 2023 in New York City featuring the EMPAC Wave Field Synthesis Array. The program includes Luigi Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1988-89) and Proximity, distance by Alessandrini and Fusi. The latter is an improvisational exploration for violin, FeedBox, and the EMPAC Wave Field Synthesis Array that the artists developed while in residence at the center during the summer of 2022.

Bring your own musical instrument! Join the EMPAC Research program for a hands-on workshop exploring Pauline Oliveros’ Expanded Instrument System (EIS) with introductions by Michael Century, Stephanie Loveless, and Jonas Braasch. Under continual development since 1965, the system is a series of computer-generated delays that process acoustic and vocal sounds, offering musicians, composers, and the curious ways to explore improvisations and compositions using sonic manipulation. We invite you to try it out with us in EMPAC Studio 1–Goodman.

DeForrest Brown Jr. will be in residence in Studio 1–Goodman with CCS Bard curators Katherine Adams, Liv Cuniberti, Mary Fellios, Abel González Fernández, and Sidney Pettice. Brown will work with Higher Order Ambisonics for a performance that explores how techno’s machine-like aspects connect to embodied dance and live music histories.

Speakers that Speak To You is a newly-commissioned work by DeForrest Brown Jr., which traces the trajectory of techno’s machine-like aspects and its connection to embodied dance and live music histories. Considering the genre’s origins by activating the spatial qualities of sound, Brown extends his musical and theoretical practice through the advanced sonic infrastructure of EMPAC’s Studio 1—Goodman.

The project opens up to the implicit origins of techno that Brown traced in his book, Assembling a Black Counter-Culture (2021), wherein he has historicized techno as a genre rooted in a powerful political and cultural force that emerged within underground architectures and industrial spaces in Detroit. Brown's exposure to early Afrofuturist and jazz musicians, Black southern marching band compositions, and second-wave techno producers of the 1990s led to the development of his Black radical politics within the techno genre. The project will engage with recordings from the artist’s new album Techxodus, which operates as a musical successor to the ideas in his recent publication. Additionally, Brown plans to spend the next year developing tracks and performances around his notion of a “free-jazz”-inspired take on techno. With this new piece, Brown continues his research by reactivating cultural soundscapes and critically mapping the sounds of techno through the mode of a listening session.

DeForrest Brown Jr. is producing Speakers That Speak To You in residence at EMPAC with curators Katherine Adams, Liv Cuniberti, Mary Fellios, Abel González Fernández, Sidney Pettice, second year graduate students from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

The 2022 President’s Holiday Concert at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will take place on Sunday, Dec. 11, at 3 p.m. in the Concert Hall of the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) on campus.

The event is free, open to the public, and will be followed by a reception. RSVPs are required.

The concert, titled “Many Voices, One Song,” features a selection of music that will celebrate the diversity and shared purpose of the Rensselaer community. In addition to the Rensselaer Orchestra and Concert Choir, the program will feature the inaugural public performance of the Rensselaer Jazz Ensemble and a featured performance of Indian classical music by first-year RPI student and tabla virtuoso Vivek Pandya.

“As Rensselaer enters a new era of growth and renewal, moving forward as one community, it is wonderful to watch how our annual holiday concert is evolving,” said Rensselaer President Martin Schmidt. “This is a great opportunity to reflect on the diversity of our experiences and make new memories together in anticipation of a bright future.”

Under the direction of Lecturer Robert Whalen, the orchestra will perform Valerie Coleman’s “Seven O’Clock Shout,” a musical tribute to the service and sacrifice of health care workers in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The jazz ensemble, directed by Lecturer Jillian Willis, will offer a cross-section of jazz history, including the standards “Lullaby of Birdland” and “Nature Boy” alongside the contemporary composition “Running Out of Time.”

"During our first semester, the Jazz Ensemble students strived to understand the nuances of improvising a story through sound, revere the importance of melody, and value the art of active listening,” said Willis. “In this performance, we graciously present our lessons of the blues, the American songbook, and contemporary jazz in celebration of the President's Holiday Concert."

Other highlights of the program include works by Mxolisi Matyila, Lili Boulanger, Arvo Pärt, Edward Elgar, and an arrangement by student composer Rose Bollerman. The program will close with Antonin Dvorak’s thrilling and celebratory “Carnival Overture.”

Using the medium of music, this program foregrounds remembrance and joy; it celebrates the dedication and creativity of our Rensselaer students; and it affirms the fact that — whatever our differences — we can join together in solidarity to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Sound artist, composer, and performer Bora Yoon premieres her newest work PHONO KINETIC (formerly SPKR SPRKL) for spatial audio, interactive projections, and gestural, digital, and acoustic instruments. PHONO KINETIC is a one-woman performance and z-space poem tracing the journey of a carbon atom, articulating the many cycles, scales and recombinant alchemical forms life takes; a contemplation of time, within sonic and spatial environments and dreams visualized in an enveloping theatrical landscape.

As a multi-instrumentalist and established electronic musician, Yoon performs signature soundscapes, made up of spoken stories, hauntingly beautiful soprano vocals, synthesized music, found sounds, and unusual acoustic instruments. In PHONO KINETIC, Yoon gestures using superDraw, a custom software instrument created by visualist Joshue Ott, paired with the hardware of Imogen Heap’s Mi.Mu gloves. A powerful tool, superDraw responds to Yoon’s on-stage movements, establishing graphic digital and architectural set design and dramatic visuals in real time, animating Yoon’s temporal, sonic, and spatial compositions.

With various configurations of holographic, multi-channel audio utilizing EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array, PHONO KINETIC conjures worlds of sound through auditory dream language, shadows, and kinetic manipulation. Multimedia theatrical director Ashley Tata directs this part-electronic concert, part-sound-object theater event. Yoon premiered an excerpt of this new work, titled SPKR SPRKL at TIME:SPANS contemporary music festival in NYC, August 2021, where EMPAC presented newly commissioned musical works for the Wave Field Synthesis Array in a series of concerts.

Paper Pianos​ is a full-length theatrical work co-directed by Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian and South African-American director Nigel Maister. The work combines the testimonies of four refugees and resettlement workers with intricate hand-drawn animations of Syrian visual artist Kevork Mourad to vividly depict the dramatic emotional landscape of displacement and resettlement experienced by refugees throughout the world.

Performed live by the 18-piece contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound, Paper Pianos invites EMPAC audiences to contemplate the dislocation, longing, and optimism of refugees.