The evening program’s theme is “Taking Flight” and features Ralph Vaughan-Williams’ iconic The Lark Ascending, featuring Concerto Competition winner Sarah Shiang (’22), Aaron Copland’s Quiet City, featuring soloists Gianna Scire (English horn, ’25) and Omar Williams (trumpet, Faculty Fellow).

In collaboration with Rudras, Rensselaer’s award-winning Indian Classical Dance Team, the Concert Choir will present a special story-through-dance performance with music by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail.  

Other highlights include music by Pulitzer-Prize winning composer Caroline Shaw, Bela Bartok, and film composer Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings).

Live attendance is restricted to RPI students, faculty, staff, and up to two family members of student performers. Members of the RPI community must be up to date on their DIAL check-in. For guests, a negative covid test and proof of vaccination will be required to be shown upon entry to EMPAC. We are asking the guests to arrive 30 minutes early so we can get through the inspection of the requested proof. Masks are required by all at all times. An effort to social distance should also be used.

Student performers must REGISTER their guests for this performance in advance.

The program presents 11 ensembles, comprising 30 students, including the newly formed Eclectic Ensemble, which will be performing arrangements and a new composition by music major Garrett Smelcer (’22), and the little-heard Piano Quintet in D minor by Frank Bridge, featuring Sarah Shiang (‘22) and Dr. Mary Simoni, Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Other unusual ensemble groupings in this program include piano and saxophone duo, woodwind quintet, cello duo, and trombone quartet.

Live attendance is restricted to RPI students, faculty, staff, and up to two family members of student performers. Members of the RPI community must be up to date on their DIAL check-in. For guests, a negative covid test and proof of vaccination will be required to be shown upon entry to EMPAC. We are asking the guests to arrive 30 minutes early so we can get through the inspection of the requested proof. Masks are required by all at all times. An effort to social distance should also be used.

Student performers must REGISTER their guests for this performance in advance.

In 2019 Patricia Alessandrini was commissioned by Die Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik in Germany to compose a long-scale work with electronics for JACK quartet, which initiated the collaboration between composer and quartet.

In a further development of her practice of compositionally "interpreting" works from the past (reflected by the tongue-in-cheek reference to canonicity evoked in her title) Alessandrini incorporates a variety of works from the Western classical music canon into this piece. Using live electronics, materials from the recordings appear through the playing of the quartet.

Spatial distribution of the multi-channel electronic sounds in the performance space plays a key role in the melding and separation of the various works "interpreted" and interwoven with the playing of the live quartet. These spatial elements will be developed at EMPAC in addition to the real-time processing, concatenation and filtering techniques of the recordings.

After several postponements due to the pandemic, the work is now scheduled to be premièred at Die Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik 2023. In the meantime, it will receive its first public pre-première by JACK quartet at Merkin Hall in New York City on 21 April, 2022 alongside works by Khyam Allami and George Lewis.

Centred around an audio play, a video installation, and material in vitrines, A Slightly Curving Place responds to the work of Umashankar Manthravadi, a self-taught acoustic archaeologist who has been listening to premodern performance spaces.

Nothing is not borrowed, in song and shattered light is a ritualistic installation-performance of fragmented Renaissance polyphony, spatial audio, projections, and hanging brass instrument sculptures that creates ephemeral architectural spaces using overhead wave field synthesis and recordings of performance and improvisations by American Brass Quintet. The work is rooted in the legacy of the relationship between architecture and antiphonal music practices. 

“Wave Field Synthesis offers a unique opportunity to create aural architectures using audio holograms that you can explore, physically, without relying on the ‘sweet’ spot of many spatial audio systems. You can immerse yourself in an ephemeral, morphing, virtual architecture with the agency to sculpt your own experience and personal ritual.” 
—Nina C. Young

Nina C. Young began working with EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis system in early 2020. Her first sonic composition for EMPACwave, Phosphorescent Devotion (2021)—loosely inspired by the light and color combinations of James Turrell— premiered at TIME:SPANS festival and was recently presented at EMPAC for the Rensselaer campus community. Young’s works range from concert pieces to interactive installations that explore aural architectures, resonance, and ephemera. She dialogues with natural acoustic environments, instrumental performance techniques, and digital signal processing. Nina is a professor at USC’s Thornton School of Music. She was on the faculty of Rensselaer’s Department of the Arts from 2016–18. 

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This performance is being presented for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) only at this time.

Continuing her work with EMPAC's Wave Field Synthesis Array, Nina C. Young will be in residence to develop and finalize her EMPAC-commissioned multimedia work. Nothing is not borrowed, in song and shattered light is a ritualistic installation-performance of fragmented Renaissance polyphony, spatial audio, projections, and hanging brass instrument sculptures that creates ephemeral architectural spaces using overhead wave field synthesis and recordings of performance and improvisations by American Brass Quintet. The work is rooted in the legacy of the relationship between architecture and antiphonal music practices. The residency culminates in the premiere of a new work on April 21, 2022 in the theater.

Continuing her exploration into the sculptural potential of sound, Lesley Flanigan presents a performance for voice, speakers, electronic tone, and the resonance between.

This EMPAC-commission marks a shift in Flanigan’s approach to her work. Rather than performing live, her voice exists within a cluster of small wooden speakers that act as a choral ensemble staged in the center of the room. In contrast to this ensemble of speakers, large full-range loudspeakers are positioned in the four corners of Studio 2, wrapping the space in a moving wash of pure electronic tone. Inside the installation, the audience will experience a series of compositions that act as a meditation on how we listen, and on how that listening encounters electronic tone, the physical qualities of amplification, and the fragility of voice.

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This performance is being presented for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) only at this time. Attendance is limited so please register early.

In this concert the audience will walk through "wave fields." Wave Field Synthesis is a special way of creating sounds in space. The EMPAC Wave Field Synthesis system (EMPACwave) is a unique loudspeaker set-up with hundreds of speakers that was developed and built at Rensselaer over the past several years. While Wave Field Synthesis technology is not new, the design of EMPAC’s array is acknowledged by international experts to finally allow musicians to create music to the refined degree that has been promised by this theory of sound generation for over four decades.

Four works specifically composed for EMPACwave by Miya Masaoka, Bora Yoon, Nina Young, and Pamela Z premiered last August at Time:Spans festival but covid-protocol meant these new works could not presented at EMPAC concurrently. Concert in Wave Fields is now presented for our campus community to experience the potential of EMPACwave’s 200+ speakers through the music of four acclaimed American composers, none of which had previously had the opportunity to work with such an instrument.  

The composers Miya Masaoka, Bora Yoon, Nina Young, and Pamela Z created four very different pieces and their works inaugurate an ongoing program of commissions for EMPACwave at Rensselaer.

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This concert is being presented in person for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) only. In-person attendance is limited so please register early. 

This work-in-progress performance is a culmination of two development residencies of 7NMS's multi-year live performance project, PROPHET. The project's residencies at EMPAC explores spatial audio, mobile set elements, and moving-image content. 

7NMS is at EMPAC for the first of two ten-day development residencies that will culminate in a performance of the company's multi-year live performance project, PROPHET, in fall 2022. For this first residency, the company will explore spatial audio, mobile set elements, and moving-image content for their project.