A four-year archival, research, and multi-genre storytelling project on the life journey of a Lyricist. PROPHET: The Order of the Lyricist, illuminates the distinctive practices, systems, philosophies, and political ideologies that have shaped Hip Hop’s Emcee/Lyricists.

Tracing the evolution of artist Mental from Emcee to Lyricist, 7NMS invites audiences to enter a world of mind power, bravery, self-determination, and triumph- facets of the artist's quest for self-realization.

PROPHET makes its own imaginative evening-length performance contribution to the scholarly, civic, and ancient bodies of radical Black expression. Light and moving-image visuals as well as multi-channel audio installation will accompany the live dance and vocal performances. Such environments layering multiple media are the company's signature aesthetic; previous work like Memoirs of a Unicorn featured a built multi-sited environment of sculpture, light, sound, movement, costume, and projection. PROPHET is an extension of this practice that acknowledges the Emcee and Lyricist’s role and presence more explicitly.

While taking its primary shape as a live performance at EMPAC, PROPHET will also manifest as an ethnographic memoir, an experimental film, and an album.

Sound artist and musician Tim Bruniges will be in residence with support from the Australia Council for the Arts. Through the use of live, regenerating audio systems his performance and installation projects aim to foreground the volumetric, tactile experience of sound. During his residency Bruniges will work with live audio, tape, and EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis array to develop new work.

In 2019 Bruniges was awarded a PhD for his research on live sound installation practice and was the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award and Research Excellence award from UNSW Art & Design. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts from COFA, UNSW, and a Bachelor of Arts (Mus) with distinction from the University of Western Sydney. His works have been exhibited in Australia, USA, UK, Belgium, Germany, France, Iceland, Russia, and Dubai, and written about in Artsy, Hyperallergic, New York Magazine, and The New York Times. His work is held in private collections and at Artbank Australia. 

Supported by the Flanders Department of Culture, Youth and Media, Marco Fusi is in residence in Studio 1 with Patricia Alessandrini to work on EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis array.

Fusi’s work with Wave Field Synthesis expands his research and performance practice through a collaboration with Alessandrini that explores acoustic feedback through technological and instrumental interaction. Fusi plays the viola d'amore (VdA), a baroque instrument that can generate and control acoustic feedback through performance techniques. Working with Wave Field technology enhances the possibilities for feedback within and outside the VdA, blurring the distinction between virtual and physical sonic sources.

Collisions: Platitude New York an immersive multi-media live performance with multichannel sound and video projection. 4/28 at EMPAC A collage of personal experiences, the pinnacle of of the end of illusions, hopes and dreams.

Collisions: Platitude New York is inspired by feelings of curiosity, uneasiness and longing. This live performance in three parts submerges the audience in abstract narratives of the detriment of impulsiveness, young love and a feeling of appreciation from resignation. Tanner Pletzke (Visuals) and Ricardo Tovar Mateus (Composer/Performer) present a performance and visual work set on the platitude of the astonishing visuals of New York City, the sounds of the piano and field recordings that adapt moments of everyday life into a dreamlike experience of emotions. 

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.

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.