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1962 Dartington summer school. Later, in collaboration with Brian Hodgson and David Vorhaus, she set up Kaleidophon, an independent studio where she worked on the classic
album Electric Storm (1968), which
was credited to White Noise and released on Island Records. This studio continued to put together electronic music for the London theatre of the late 1960s. In 1973 she left the BBC and after a short period with a private studio she gave up compositional work for many years.
Recently, she had returned to take an interest in electronic music, encouraged by members of a younger generation, such as Sonic Boom and Aphex Twin, to whom she had become a cult figure. Her works from the 1960s and 1970s continue to be used on radio and television some 30 years later. Delia Derbyshire used an analytical approach to synthesize complex sounds from electronic sources. The mathematics of sound seemed to come naturally to her, but she believed that the way the ear and brain perceive sound should have dominance over any basic mathematical theory.
France). The Gold Pierre was
Delia Derbyshire (1937–2001)
awarded to Ludger Bru¨ mmer (Germany) for Nyx, and the Silver Pierre to Jonty Harrison (UK) for Abstracts for tape and large orchestra. No magisterium was awarded. Residencies went to Abdul Wahid Hasnizam (Malaysia) for Fatihah, Paavo Impio (Finland) for Kaleva, Mei-Fang Lin
Delia Derbyshire, British pioneer of electronic music, died in Northampton, England, on 3 July 2001, aged 64. Born in Coventry, England, she was educated at Coventry Grammar School and Girton College, Cambridge, graduating in music and mathematics. She joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1960 as a studio manager and transferred in 1962 to the Radiophonic Workshop, where she remained until 1973. During that time she produced music and sound for almost 200 radio and television programs. In 1963, she realized one of the first electronic signature tunes ever used on television: Ron Grainer’s score for the science fiction series, Dr Who. Using concrete sources and the Workshop’s oscillators and filters, she produced what is probably one of the most famous television themes ever. Although Dr Who made the Radiophonic Workshop nationally famous, it was Derbyshire’s other drama and features work that showed her greatest talent, particularly her 1964 collaborations with the poet and dramatist Barry Bermange (The
Dreams and Amor Dei) and her work
for the documentary series The
(Taiwan) for Interaction, Felipe Perez
Santiago (Mexico) for Ofaniel (angel
de la luna), Juan Pablo Sorrentino
(Argentina) for Mi Primer Cello, and
Rogelio Sosa (Mexico) for Tenso II.
In the category for electroacoustic music alone, prizes were awarded to Natasha Barrett (UK) for Utility of Space and Suk-Jun Kim (Korea) for Midong. Mentions were made of Werner Cee (Germany) for Cities’
drift and Blas Payri (France) for Pay- sage enseveli. Prizes for electro-
acoustic music with instruments were awarded to Mathew Adkins (UK) for Noumena for cello and tape, and Pinter Gyula (Hungary) for Les
cloches de flammes roses for soprano
and tape. Mention was made of Rob Wright (UK) for Arco for cello and tape. Under sonic art, prizes were awarded to Nicholas Parkin (UK) for Magmas and Andrea Szigetvari (Hungary) for Mandala 1. Mentions were made of Marc Beugnies (France) for
Incidences et R e ´ fl exions sur la Naissance d’une Etoile, and Michele
Biasutti (Italy) for Deep Sea. No prize was given for a piece for dance or theatre but mention was made of
. . . s eine hohle for m . . . by Butch
Rovan (USA). Similarly, in the installation category only one piece re-
ceived a mention: Potential
Difference by Ted Apel (USA). Prizes for multimedia works went to Miguel Hernandez (Mexico) for El Santo Cuantico and Andrea Szigetvari
(Hungary) for The Priest and the Shell.
Bourges Competition Awards, Synthe`se Festival and Journe´es d’Informatique Musicale, June 2001
World About Us. In 1967, she
worked on Guy Woolfenden’s electronic score for Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company production of
Macbeth, and on Hall’s film Work is a Four Letter Word.
In the mid 1960s she worked extensively with Peter Zinovieff, the synthesizer pioneer. During this time, she also worked with a wide range of composers and musicians including The Beatles, Ianni Christou,
Roberto Gerhard (on Anger of Achil-
les), George Martin, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harry Nilsson, Pink Floyd, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. She was Luciano Berio’s assistant at the
Award winners of the 28th International Competition of Electroacoustic Music and Sonic Art have been announced from a total of 501 pieces, submitted from 46 countries. The jury for the 2001 competition comprised Larry Austin (USA), Gisella Belgeri (Italy), Janos Descenyi (Hungary), Dieter Kaufmann (Austria),
- and Franc¸oise Barrie`re, Thierry
- In its 31st year, the Synthe`se Fes-
tival took a new approach to its meetings and concerts. Throughout
Fournier, Jean-Michel Ponty, Pascale Pronnier, and Nicolas Thely (all of
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the ten-day festival, there was a daytime program of professional meetings and an evening program of public concerts. As part of the professional meetings, morning master classes were given by Yves Coffy, Christian Clozier, Larry Austin, James Dashow, Max Mathews, LarsGunnar Bodin, Barry Truax, and Giuseppe Di Giugno. The afternoons included ‘‘Latitude 31’’ sessions, where composers who were not otherwise programmed could play and discuss a single work with a seminar audience, the open work project The
Creation of the World, and a series
of studio concerts presenting pieces by previous Bourges prizewinners, many of the pieces receiving their French premieres. themes of formalization and representation of musical structures; formalization and modeling of musical knowledge; environments and languages for musical composition; automatic composition and arrangement systems; tools for musical analysis; musical editing and publishing systems; optical score recognition software; musical performance modeling and simulation; software and hardware interfaces for musical performance; sound synthesis systems and environments; musical instrument modeling; signal analysis and processing systems; sound spatialization and acoustic modeling; software and hardware systems for interactive music; automatic recognition and extraction of musical parameters; musical perception,
‘‘Gallery of Latin American Composers’’ in Texas, USA
The University of North Texas Composers Forum presented the third ‘‘Gallery of Latin American Composers’’ in Denton, Texas, USA in April 2001. Two concerts of electroacoustic music and multimedia works from Latin America and Spain were presented. The first concert pre-
sented Monalisa Overdrive II by
Daniel Antonio Miraglia, El Santo
Cuantico by Miguel Hernandez, Ar- gos by Martin Fumarola, La distan- cia mas recta entre dos puntos by Roberto Garcia, Orange (lima-limon)
by Juan Reyes, Kol Ha Torr by Rajmil Fischman, Chi-pa-boo by Elsa Justel,
and entre Santos y los Dioses by
Gustavo Alcaraz. The second concert included Mauricio Bejarano’s Land-
scape No. 18, Mario Verandi’s Evil Fruit, Orlando Garcia’s Como un coro de clarinetes celestiales, Rodrigo
Sigal’s Tolerance, movement 3 of Eduardo Reck Miranda’s Grain
Two public concerts were held modeling, and simulation; normalization, archiving and transmission of musical information; and real-time systems and protocols for computer music. The specialist theme for 2001 was gestural control interfaces. each evening. Friday’s contemporary dance evening presented Sisters by Wayne Siegel and Cataton by Michel Waisvisz. Saturday opened with a tribute to John Cage, following Fon- tana Mix with the world premiere of
Larry Austin’s Williams[re]Mix[er].
The late evening concert was of world premieres of pieces by Christian Clozier, Patrick Ascione, Michael Karlsson, Pierre Boeswillwald, and Ludger Bru¨ mmer. The rest of the festival paid tribute to new work and to composers honored in previous
Streams, and Ana Lucia Fontenele’s
Efeitwo.
ARTS.XXI International Electroacoustic Music
- Competition in Spain
- Boston CyberArts Festival
Finalists and prize winners have been announced from the Interna-
During spring 2001, the second Boston CyberArts Festival mounted a
Bourges competitions. After the announcement of the 2001 prizewinners, the Monday concerts were devoted to the Magisterium award winners from 2000, Beatriz Ferreyra and James Dashow, and to video art from the 2000 Trivium B. Later in the week, Mahammad Ghavi Helm (percussion) and Michel Thiolat (guitar) gave world premiere performances of pieces by Horacio Vaggione, Fabio Ciffariello Ciardi, Adolfo Nunez, and Eduardo Polonio.
The Journe´es d’Informatique Musicale (JIM), held immediately before Synthe`se, invited papers on the tional Electroacoustic Music Compe- series of events including several tition ARTS.XXI, held in Valencia, Spain. Four finalists were selected, from 60 submissions by composers from 16 countries. The winner of the prize for music for tape alone was Andrew Lewis (UK) with Cable Bay. Finalists in this category were Theodore Lotis (Greece/UK) with Shadows, Marcelle Deschenes (Canada) with Indigo, and John Young (New Zealand/UK) with Sju. No prize was awarded for music for tape and instrument but the jury special made mention of Wires for tape and piano by Rob Wright (UK). world premiere performances. Under the title ‘‘Orchestral Music at the Technological Frontier,’’ the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Artistic Director Gil Rose, in association with Immersion Music, presented a three-hour concert at Symphony Hall. This opened with the world premiere of John Oswald’s Concerto
for Conductor and Orchestra which
made use of the ‘‘Conductor’s Jacket’’ technology, developed at the MIT Media Lab by Teresa Marrin Nakra. This was followed by a performance of Andre´ Jolivet’s Concerto
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Computer Music Journal
for Ondes Martenot (1947) with soloist Genevie`ve Grenier. The second world premiere of the evening was of Eric Chasalow’s Dream Songs for orchestra and digital sound, with tenor William Hite, both the Oswald and Chasalow pieces having been commissioned for this event. The concert continued with Tod Machover’s For-
ever and Ever (1993) with Ani
Kavafian as the hyperviolin soloist. The concert ended with George
Antheil’s Ballet m e ´ c anique. Forever
and Ever is the third part of Tod Machover’s trilogy for hyperinstruments and the entire Hyperstring Trilogy was performed at the Tsai Center in Boston the following night with Ani Kavafian, Matt Heimovitz (hypercello) and Kim Kashkashian (hyperviola).
Other musical events included a
24-hour marathon of electronic music at Brandeis University, a program of ‘‘wired’’ solo performance at the Somerville Theater, ‘‘Cyber Feast’’: a concert of new digital artworks and music by Dennis Miller, Bret Battey, Bill Alves, Eric Chasalow, Craig Walsh, Paul Lehrman, and Neil Leonard, and ‘‘Moving Target’’: a concert of music and video works by Dennis Miller, Alicyn Warren, Sylvia Pengilly, Bill Alves, Brett Battey, and James Mobberley, at Northeastern University. A one-day conference entitled ‘‘Digital Polyphony’’ was held at Brandeis University on Friday 4 May in conjunction with the also received an update on MIT MediaLab Europe, along with a summary of recent work at the parent MediaLab in Massachusetts, from Sile O’Modhrain.
Sonic Arts Network Conference 2001 in Belfast
The Sonic Arts Network held its fourth annual conference at Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland, 4–6 May 2001, in association with the Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music. The conference coordinator was Michael Alcorn and the guest composer was Robert Normandeau, whose keynote address was titled ‘‘Cinema for the Ear.’’ The preconference concert of music for baroque flute, harpsichord, and live electronics, played by Eleanor Dawson and Jane Chapman, presented pieces by Evelyn Ficarra, Simon Waters, and Louis Andriessen, between the world premieres of works by Fergus Johnston, Simon Emmerson, and Mike Vaughan. The six conference concerts included music by Michael Alcorn, Iain Armstrong, Peter Batchelor, Ed Bennett, Paul Burnell, Michael Clarke, Ricardo Climent, Peter de Moncey-Conegliano, Gordon Delap, John Drever, Robert Dow, Frank Ekeberg, Roberto Filoseta, Pablo Garcia, Stelios Giannoulakis, Theodore Lotis, Alistair MacDonald, Robert Mackay, Peter Manning, Iain McCurdy, Adrian Moore, Piers Quick, Brian Robinson, Rodrigo Sigal, Ewan Stefani, Helen
Audio Engineering Society Convention in the Netherlands
The 110th Audio Engineering Society Convention was held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 12–15 May 2001. The sessions on the analysis and synthesis of sound and on multichannel sound were of particular relevance to music. Abstracts of all papers presented can be found on the World Wide Web pages of the convention: www.aes.org/events/110 /papers/.
MUTEK Returns to Montreal
MUTEK, the second annual gathering dedicated to the performance and development of popular avant-garde electronic music and sound creation, took place in Montreal, 30 May–3 June 2001. In five days of concerts and performances, MUTEK set out to illustrate the worldwide vitality of sound and music creation using digital technologies, welcoming 40 artists from 9 countries. The first two evenings were held at the Fellini Theatre at the Ex-Centris complex with the remainder of the festival taking place in the Socie´te´ des arts technologiques (SAT), which also hosted the entire, free Happy Hour series. The World Wide Web site www.mutek.ca, developed as a
Stephenson, Nikos Stavropoulos, Mark Taylor, Horacio Vaggione, and Richard Whitelaw.
CyberArts Festival. The guest
A late-night electroacoustic im-
provisation was offered by Paul Dunmall, Alistair MacDonald, and Jo Hyde. The keynote concert profiled the work of guest composer Robert Normandeau. The first half of the concert comprised Malina and the world premiere of Erinyes, commissioned by the Sonorities festival. The second half was devoted to a performance of Clair de terre. In addition to concerts, the weekend included studio reports and research and educational presentations. Delegates speaker was Alejandro Vin˜ ao, who was slated to join panelists Richard Boulanger, Paul Burdick, Eric Chasalow, Richard Cornell, Mario Davidovsky, Dennis Miller, Kurt Stallman, and Todd Winkler. More information about the festival and key participants can be found on the World Wide Web sites of the festival (www.bostoncyberarts.org), the Bos- ton Modern Orchestra Project virtual extension of the event, broadcast performances live, in partnership with Beta Lounge of San Francisco. A compilation CD of thirteen works by artists participating in
(www.bmop.org), and Immersion Music (www.immersionmusic.org).
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MUTEK was released before the festival.
Contemporary Music Group con ducted by Jonty Harrison, framed by electroacoustic pieces by BEAST composers. The evening opened with
Pippa Murphy’s Postcard from Mos- tar, Paul Dibley’s Cine, and Adrian
Moore’s Becalmed. The BCMG then presented the world premieres of the two mixed-media Sonic Arts Net-
work commissions: No Me Quedo. . .
by Rajmil Fischman, and Three Im-
ages of a Fiction by Mario Verandi.
The festival ended with the radio-art
piece Close in Distant Cold Light by
David Berezan. BEAST is on the World Wide Web at www.bham the sound material of the five musicians, including their earlier works. The MAX/MSP software used was written by David Wessel for the TEMPO performance.
The third concert was devoted to the music of Edmund Campion, Composer in Residence at CNMAT. Six works received West Coast pre-
miere performances: Sons et Lumi- e ` r es, for video, player piano and
eight-channel tape, commissioned for the TEMPO festival, Corail, for tenor saxophone and live electronics, Domus Aurea, for piano and vibra-
phone, Natural Selection V, for MIDI
piano and reactive computer, Name Calling, for poet and sampler keyboard (with John Campion), and l’Autre, for ensemble with multichannel tape and live electronics. Concert Four presented khyal singer Shafqat Ali Khan with David Wessel, Matthew Wright, and Ali Momeni on computer-based musical instruments designed and implemented specifically for that performance. Each made use of a different gestural interface: David Wessel’s, a Buchla Thunder; Matthew Wright’s, a Wacom tablet; and Ali Momeni’s, a pair of joysticks controlling the real-time sampling, processing, and replay of the voice. The Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players, under conductor David Milnes, continued the festival with a concert of works featuring technology by young composers: Metallics, for trumpet and
PORTALS: World Premieres in Birmingham, UK
The Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) presented a three-day festival at the CBSO Centre, Birmingham, UK, 1–3 June 2001, featuring guest composer Javier Alvarez. The final concert included the premieres of two pieces for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group by Rajmil Fischman and Mario Verandi, commissioned by the Sonic Arts Network. The first evening of the festival comprised two concerts of music for tape alone. ‘‘Openings’’ presented Iannis
Xenakis’s Orient-Occident, Gilles Gobeil’s Le vertige inconnu, Jon
Aveyard’s D’p. Pippa Murphy’s Post-
card from Paris, Carya Amara’s Or-
thodox Sea, and Natasha Barrett’s
Utility of Space. Late-evening ‘‘Re-
flections’’ offered Hildegard
.ac.uk/music/ea-studios/BEAST/.
TEMPO Features Computer Music Using MAX/MSP
TEMPO, the Berkeley Festival of Contemporary Performance, ran from 1–9 June 2001, at the Hertz Hall, University of California, Berkeley, USA. The opening concert featured saxophonist Steve Coleman and the ensemble Five Elements performing using Rameses, a computer system developed by Steve Coleman and colleagues over many years and now implemented using the MAX environment. After further development at IRCAM in 1999, this was in many respects a debut appearance in the USA of the latest version of Rameses, which its creator still describes as a work in progress. The second concert brought together five composers and musicians who have worked collaboratively in different line-ups for many years: Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis, Thomas
Westerkamp’s Cricket Voice, Simon
Hall’s Dhyana, Nizam Wahid’s
Asian Breath, and Adrian Moore’s Ethereality.
Saturday opened with ‘‘Meetings’’: music for tape, percussion, and electronics by Javier Alvarez, and pre-
sented Overture, Asi el Acero for
steel pan, Shekere for shekere,
Mambo a ` la Braque, Offrandes for
two steel pan players, and Temazcal for maracas. The percussion soloist was Simon Limbrick, joined by Florent Jodelet in Offrandes. The later concert ‘‘Interiors’’ was of pieces for tape alone: Surface Ten- electronics, by Yan Maresz, Medita- tions, for tape, by Ronald Bruce Smith, Hysteria, for trombone and electronics, by Cindy Cox, Flecte Lapis, for sampler keyboard, by Atli
Ingo´lfssohn, and Monedas de Hierro,
for ensemble with electronics, by Martin Matalon were performed alongside purely instrumental works by Philippe Leroux, Jorge Liderman, and Michael Jarrell. The TEMPO sion by Jonty Harrison, Inner City by Buckner, George Marsh, and David Iain Armstrong, Deinz by David Shepherd, [o] by Dugal McKinnon,
and Invisible Tattoos by Antti
Saario. Sunday’s event ‘‘Distant Regions’’ featured the Birmingham
Wessel, Director of the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at Berkeley. The computer material for this concert was performed live and derived entirely from Festival concluded with a two-part
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Computer Music Journal
concert featuring innovative guitar technologies developed at CNMAT by Matthew Wright and Ahm Lee. The first part of the concert was entirely devoted to improvisations by John Schott on solo guitar and electronics. The concert concluded with a jazz performance by John Abercrombie, George Marsh, Rich Fudoli, and Mel Graves. TEMPO has a World Wide Web site, www.tempo festival.org, and more information about CNMAT can be found by visiting www.cnmat.berkeley.edu. portion of acoustic tones’’; Hideki Kawahara and Haruhiro Katayose: ‘‘Scat singing generation using a versatile speech manipulation system’’; and Uipil Chong and Changwon Lee: ‘‘Enhanced digital music glove.’’
The session examining 3-D Spatialization for Musical Applications was chaired by Gary Kendall and heard papers by Durand Begault: ‘‘Compositional spatial sound manipulation: Historical overview and analyses’’; Gary Kendall, David Mann, Scott Rovvin, and Alan Kendall: ‘‘Musical considerations in the design of 3-D-sound rendering software’’; Annabel Cohen, Reina Lamothe, Robert MacIsaac, Richard Fleming, and Michael Lamoureux: ‘‘Does proximity govern judgments of auditory direction in the azimuthal plane?’’; Charles Thompson, Max Dennis, Jing Tsui, and covery of artistic works’’ was held as part of the Agora Festival, 6–8 June 2001, at IRCAM in Paris, France. The colloquium was organized by Stephen McAdams (IRCAM-CNRS, France) and Roger Reynolds (University of California at San Diego, USA). The colloquium sought to move the focus of attention on the form of artistic works away from the abstract and into a consideration of the concrete temporal dimensions in which the perception of time-based arts such as music must exist. It aimed to present the points of view of artists in the fields of music, film, and dance alongside the work of researchers from the cognitive sciences, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science, and cognitive musicology.
The colloquium was associated with the world premiere of The An- gel of Death, a concerto for piano, ensemble, and computer-processed sounds, by Roger Reynolds. The public performance was the subject of real-time experiments that sought to understand how the public perceives dynamic form. Two artistic works, one musical, one video, were also the subject of open debates. The colloquium program included presentations by Ge´rard Assayag (computer scientist), Benoit Bardy (cognitive psychologist) and Susan Buirge (choreographer), Alain Berthoz (neuroscientist), Emmanuel Bigand (cognitive psychologist), Antonio Damasio (neurologist), Ralph Ellis (philosopher), Franc¸ois Madurell (musicologist), Michael Snow (film maker and musician), Charles Tijus (cognitive psychologist), and Lorraine