Tuning Calder’s Clouds is a series of interdisciplinary conversations with experts from acoustics, art, architecture, and music that explores the historic and contemporary resonances of the Aula Magna—the iconic hall at the heart of the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas—in which Alexander Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling (1953) is suspended. 

Artist and poet Anaïs Duplan presents a series of five radio shows broadcast weekly on Rensselaer’s WRPI Troy 91.5FM and produced at EMPAC. Based on his recent book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture  (Black Ocean, 2020), the broadcasts entwine histories of liberation movements, labor struggles, criticism, and poetry with music, soundtracks, field recordings, and Foley sound. 

Duplan takes us on a journey that follows his lyrical exploration of the political potential of aesthetic experiences, spanning from the quotidian encounter of a bakery’s smell to the transformative reckoning with an artwork. These experiences are viewed through the prism of how other artists of color are working with media technologies on their own terms to seek “liberatory possibility” through specifically aesthetic means. 

Guided by Duplan’s voice, each broadcast employs “ekphrastic” methods—vivid verbal descriptions of the actions of artworks—as well as the sensory potential of Foley sound to produce a richly evocative auditory experience. The dialogue is interwoven with audio samples from films and videos by artists such as Ephraim Asili, Deanna Bowen, Tony Cokes, Leah Franklin Gilliam, Ulysses Jenkins, and Sondra Perry, TV and movie soundtracks, and an extensive range of music from Liz Mputu, Juliana Huxtable, Perfume Genius, Actress, Mal Devisa, and Hieroglyphic Being and more. 

Blackspace will be broadcast on New York's Montez Press Radio in 2022. 

A conversation on the inventive acoustic ceiling designs of the Aula Magna at Central University of Venezuela, Caracas and EMPAC’s Concert Hall at Rensselaer.

In the early 1950s, the American sculptor Alexander Calder collaborated with acoustic engineering team Bolt Beranek & Newman and Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva on the design of an extraordinary new sculptural approach to the acoustic treatment of an auditorium. Villanueva’s iconic Aula Magna in Caracas was thus the first instance of acoustic panels suspended across the ceiling of a hall of this scale to reflect optimal acoustics. Another first shapes the exceptional sound of EMPAC’s Concert Hall: the innovative design of a fabric ceiling that spans the full-length of the hall.

The installation of Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling (1953), locally known as “nubes” (clouds) or “platillos voladores” (flying saucers), produced an acoustic environment that prompted the Aula Magna to be ranked in the top five concert halls in the world by renowned architectural acoustician Leo Beranek (1914–2016), whose professional library was presented to Rensselaer by the engineer himself in 2010.

Jonas Braasch, professor of acoustics in Rensselaer’s School of Architecture and EMPAC’s founding Director Johannes Goebel, who was deeply involved with EMPAC’s acoustic design, will have a conversation about the most important and often least discussed element of a concert hall: the ceiling.

This talk is the second in a series of interdisciplinary conversations with experts from acoustics, art, architecture, and music that will explore the historic and contemporary resonances of the iconic Venezuelan hall. EMPAC’s Senior Curator for time-based visual art, Vic Brooks, is working on a major research, commissioning, and publication project on Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling at the Aula Magna, which creates interdisciplinary connections between the visual and the auditory, between art, science, and engineering.

Tuning Calder’s Clouds, edited by Vic Brooks and Jennifer Burris, will be published in fall 2022 in a collaboration between EMPAC at Rensselaer, the Calder Foundation, and Athénée Press. It is the first book to explore the artistic, technological, and political intersections of Alexander Calder’s sculptural Acoustic Ceiling and includes contributions by Dr. Lisa Blackmore, Sylvia Hernández de Lasala, María Fernanda Jaua, Dr. Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Rafael Pereira Escalona, Dr. Juan Pérez Hernández, Jonas Braasch, Johannes Goebel, Aimon Mata, Alexander S.C. Rower, Rafael Santana, Gryphon Rue, Ana Navas, and Mirtru Escalona-Mijares.

Cuando los nubes eran las olas (When the clouds were waves) by Ana Navas and Mirtru Escalona-Mijares engages these complex legacies in the production of a new work currently in development in EMPAC’s Concert Hall and created for the Acoustic Ceiling at Aula Magna.

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This talk is being presented simultaneously in person for Rensselaer faculty, staff, and students and streamed online for the general public. In-person attendance is limited so please register early. Registration is required for both physical and virtual attendance.

Paper Pianos​ is an evening-length theatrical work co-directed by Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian, and South African-American director Nigel Maister. Performed by contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound, the work explores the dislocation, longing, and optimism of refugees. Combining the spoken narratives of four refugees and resettlement workers with the intricate hand-drawn animations of Syrian visual artist Kevork Mourad, Paper Pianos vividly depicts the dramatic emotional landscape of displacement and resettlement experienced by refugees throughout the world.

During a time when the media is saturated with sensationalist news images surrounding the refugee crisis, this piece instead highlights four human voices: the Afghan pianist Milad Yousufi, Getachew Bashir (Ethiopia), Hani Ali (Somalia), and Akil Aljaysh (Iraq); creating a space for the audience to experience empathy. Milad Yousufi fled to New York from Kabul, where he lived under the Taliban’s threat for pursuing music. His story of painting piano keys on paper to teach himself to play in silence, thus avoiding life-threatening censure from the authorities, gives the piece its name. Getachew Bashir, a high-ranking judge in Ethiopia, left his country when the judiciary and his independence threatened to become co-opted by the regime. Hani Ali was a child of the refugee experience, born on the run and coming of age as a young girl negotiating the terrors of being stateless in a displacement camp. Akil Aljaysh—from a prominent family—fled Iraq after being tortured, and worked his way through Syria and Lebanon to the US.

Kouyoumdjian’s score uses these recorded testimonies as integral compositional elements, and draws on folk-music and contemporary-music practices. She says: “I come from refugee parents forced to immigrate to the U.S. as a consequence of the Lebanese Civil War. And my parents come from refugee parents forced to escape to Lebanon from Turkey during the Armenian genocide of 1915. Experiences like Milad Yousufi’s resonate with me, and topics of wartime, genocide, and one’s relationship to ‘home’ have played a large role in my music.” Kevork Mourad’s extraordinary hand drawings animate the narrative, evoke the journeys of the participants, and serve as a physical element with which Alarm Will Sound’s musicians interact.

EMPAC has commissioned Alarm Will Sound’s staged performance of Paper Pianos and will provide the artists with multiple production residencies to develop the visual and theatrical elements. The work will premiere here at EMPAC in our 400-seat proscenium theater—a venue that incorporates theatrical technology and capabilities previously found only in the most advanced stage spectacles. As quiet as a recording studio with the infrastructure of an HD video studio, the low stage and superb acoustics allows for tangible proximity between audience and performers.

Paper Pianos​ is a vivid, compelling and evocative contemplation of global issues expressed through individual stories of loss and transcendence. The live performance of narrative, music, theatricality and visual gesture engages audiences viscerally in one of the pressing problems of today’s world, distilled down to the heartfelt immediacy of real-life experience.

Curator Nida Ghouse is in residence in Studio 1—Goodman to adapt and expand the multi-authored ambisonic audio play central to the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place. Previously commissioned and presented by Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the project responds to Umashankar Manthravadi’s practice as a self-taught acoustic archaeologist that proposes possibilities for listening to the past and its absence which remains. The audio play brings together writers, choreographers, composers, actors, dancers, musicians, field recordists and sound, light, and graphic designers who engage and transform not just each other’s work, but also that of many others.

This next iteration of the exhibition will be presented at Concrete in Dubai in March 2022 and is co-produced by EMPAC at Rensselaer and Alserkal Arts Foundation.

Poet, curator, and artist Anaïs Duplan is in residence to produce Blackspace, a new series of radio broadcasts commissioned by EMPAC to be presented in collaboration with WRPI and Montez Press Radio in November 2021. 

Each episode narrated by Duplan is inspired by music and artworks that seek to “pursue liberatory possibility” and entwine lyric poetry, criticism, music, and field recordings. Based on his recent book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture, the broadcasts similarly employ vivid description of the action of artworks—or ekphrastic technique—to explore the aesthetic strategies employed by artists of color working with digital technologies since the 1960s.

From August 12–16, three EMPAC commissions made for Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) premiered at the 2021 TIME:SPANS Festival in NYC where EMPAC audio staff were on hand for engineering and technical support. The Wave Field Synthesis system allows the artists to place sounds in space in a unique way for both composers and listeners.

The following compositions premiered at the 2021 TIME:SPANS Festival:

Miya Masaoka
Seeking a Sense of Somethingness (Out of Nothingness), 2021
Commissioned by EMPAC

Bora Yoon
SPKR SPRKL, 2021
Commissioned by EMPAC

Nina C. Young
New Work, 2021
Commissioned by The Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust

Pamela Z
SONANT TOPOGRAPHY, 2021
Commissioned by EMPAC

Concert duration: 70 min

For more information about this event please visit www.facebook.com/events.

Every year, the Rensselaer Department of the Arts programs seven events utilizing the infrastructure and support of the production teams at EMPAC. These productions often include final graduate thesis projects that are developed in the venues themselves.

Please join us for a talk by the director Lisa Rovner and producer Marcus Werner Hed of Sisters with Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines, an award-winning documentary that maps the history of twentieth century women experimental music pioneers. 

Narrated by Laurie Anderson, Sisters with Transistors features the work of visionary composer and Rensselaer professor Pauline Oliveros alongside Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Delia Derbyshire, EMPAC-alum Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel. Through rigorous research, interviews, and archival footage, the film follows the electronic music composers’ radical experimentations with machines that redefined the boundaries of contemporary music.

The talk will include an educational screening of the film in Zoom. Students, staff, and faculty at Rensselaer were able to access the film throughout the semester. 

Sisters with Transistors opened at Metrograph on April 23, 2021.

Join us for a series of lunch hour conversations with EMPAC-commissioned composers Bora Yoon, Lesley Flanigan, and Miya Masaoka facilitated by Curator of music Dr. Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti.

Korean-American composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Bora Yoon is an interdisciplinary artist who conjures audiovisual soundscapes using digital devices, voice and found objects and instruments from a variety of cultures and historical centuries—to formulate an audiovisual storytelling through music, movement and sound. Using sensory gloves to embody the sonic landscape of her compositions, she will create a work that explores the intimacy and delicacy of the human voice. Yoon will create an hour-long solo work for singer and electronics that explores the intimacy and delicacy of the human voice, using sensory gloves to embody the sonic landscape of her compositions, activating the Wave Field Synthesis Array through movement.

Lesley Flanigan is an experimental electronic musician living in New York City. Inspired by the physicality of sound, she builds her own instruments using minimal electronics, microphones and speakers. Performing these instruments alongside traditional instrumentation that often includes her own voice, she creates a kind of physical electronic music that embraces both the transparency and residue of process—sculpting sound from a palette of noise and subtle imperfections. Her work has been presented at venues and festivals internationally, including The Red Bull Music Festival at Saint John the Divine (New York), De Doelen (Rotterdam), Sonar (Barcelona), The Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park (Chicago), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), The Kitchen (New York), The Broad Museum (Los Angeles), ISSUE Project Room (Brooklyn), TransitioMX (Mexico City), CMKY Festival (Boulder), the Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art (Denmark) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Flangian's new commissioned work for EMPAC will further explore these themes within the unique acoustics of our Concert Hall.

Miya Masaoka is a composer, sound artist and musician based in New York City. Classically trained, her work operates at the intersection of spatialized sound, frequency and perception, performance, social and historical references. Whether recording inside physical objects or the human body, within architecturally resonant spaces or outdoor resonant canyons, American composer Miya Masaoka creates incongruencies that feed the paradox of the contemporary condition. Her new solo work for Wave Field Synthesis Array and solo performer will connect the artistic practices of notated composition, alternative personas, and hybrid acoustic-electronic performance on Japanese traditional string instruments such as the koto and ichigenkin.