THE SAN FRANCISCO TAPE MUSIC FESTIVAL 2015 program 4

THE SAN FRANCISCO TAPE MUSIC FESTIVAL is presented by the San Francisco Tape Music Collective and sfSound

funded in part by:

The San Francisco Grants for the Arts, The French-American Fund for Contemporary Music, The Zellerbach Family Foundation, and individual contributors.

equipment kindly provided by: The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University.

sfSound/SFTMF is an affiliate of, and is fiscally sponsored by, the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the service of chamber music in California.

THANK YOU Wendy Carlos, Byron Evora, Matthew Goodheart, Grux, Benjamin Kreith, Charles Kremenak, Dianne Lynn, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, John MacCallum, Hadley McCarroll, Collin McKelvy, Sam Nichols, Eric Seifert, and Erik Ulman S U N D A Y J A N U A R Y 11 2 0 1 5 8 P M V I C T O R I A T H E A T E R

P R O G R A M 4

Accidents / Harmoniques (1973) Bernard Parmegiani

Anthèmes II (1997) Pierre Boulez Benjamin Kreith, violin Sam Nichols, live electronics

Préludes Suspendus III (2009) Horacio Vaggione

Archives Sauvées Des Eaux (2000) Luc Ferrari sfSoundGroup, acoustic instruments Cliff Caruthers, tape preparation

interval

Still Air 3 (2014) Hans Tutschku Kyle Bruckmann, oboe Matt Ingalls, bass clarinet

Synchronisms #2 (1964) Mario Davidovsky Diane Grubbe, flute . Matt Ingalls, clarinet . Benjamin Kreith, violin Monica Scott, cello . Kyle Bruckmann, technician John Ingle, conductor

Pacific Sirens (1969) Robert Erickson sfSoundGroup

CrusT (1997) Matt Ingalls Matt Ingalls, clarinet SFSOUNDGROUP Monica Scott, cello Brendan Lai-Tong, trombone Benjamin Kreith, violin John Ingle, alto saxophone/conductor Matt Ingalls, clarinet Diane Grubbe, flute Joel Davel, percussion Tom Dambly, trumpet Kyle Bruckmann, oboe/technician

SAN FRANCISCO TAPE MUSIC COLLECTIVE Kent Jolly . Matt Ingalls . Cliff Caruthers . Thom Blum

BERNARD PARMEGIANI Accidents / Harmoniques (1973 :: 5 min :: stereo tape)

Accidents / Harmoniques is the second movement of Parmegiani’s magnum opus De Natura Sonorum. This hour-long work for tape explores relationships between electronic and instrumental sounds. As in many musique concrète compositions, the artificial sounds are often created out of recordings of so- called “natural” sounds. Parmegiani wonders: “Does listening to this constant transition from one state to another tell us anything about the nature of sound?“ The Accidents / Harmoniques movement features very brief events of instrumental recordings whose harmonics are manipulated to create electronic timbres. Parmegiani tries to minimize pitch material to help listeners focus on other phenomena of the instrumental sounds generally masked by their use in acoustic music.

BERNARD PARMEGIANI (1927 - 2013) was a French composer best known for his over 70 works of acousmatic music. He began his career as a sound engineer for radio and TV. Between 1957 and 1961 he studied mime with Jacques Lecoq, a period he later regarded as important to his work as a composer. He joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1959 for a two-year master class shortly after its founding by Pierre Schaeffer. After completing his studies with Lecoq, he was employed as a sound engineer, eventually leading the Music/Image unit for French television (ORTF). In the 1970s he started writing acousmatic pieces for performance in the concert hall: examples are Capture éphémère (1967), which deals with the passage of time, and L'Enfer (1972), a collaboration with the composer François Bayle, based on Dante's Divine Comedy. In 1992 Parmegiani left the GRM and set up his own studio in Saint Rémy. Parmegiani has been cited as a major influence by younger experimentalists like Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Sonic Youth. PIERRE BOULEZ Anthèmes II (1997 :: ~20 min :: violin and live electronics)

The original version of Anthèmes for unaccompanied violin was performed for the first time on the 19th of November, 1991 during a concert in honor of Alfred Schlee, former director of Universal Edition and long-time friend of Pierre Boulez. The musical origin of Anthèmes is to be found in an unused part of one of the earliest versions of ...explosante-fixe... This practice is in keeping with Boulez's more general approach to musical composition which involves taking a small musical idea and making it ‘proliferate.' Typical also in Anthèmes is Boulez's habit of creating a small number of families of musical writing from which the piece is created in a sort of braided fashion. A musical family will typically be based on a type of writing (based on rules, a method of proliferation, or a principle of generation) which guarantees the family's musical identity and cohesion. Strands of the material corresponding to a given family can then be found woven throughout the composition. In 1995 Pierre Boulez decided to compose an electro-acoustic version of the piece called Anthèmes II. The first performance of Anthèmes II took place at the Donaueschingen Festival in October, 1997 by the violinist Hae Sun Kang of the Ensemble Intercontemporain. — excerpted from Andrew Gerzso's notes to the score, 2005.

ANDREW GERZSO'S AND GILBERT NOUNO’S COMPUTER MUSIC DESIGN (MAX/MSP) FOR “ANTHÈMES II” PROVIDED BY IRCAM

Composer and conductor PIERRE BOULEZ was born March 26, 1925, Montbrison, France. Originally a student of mathematics, he later studied with the composer and organist Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory. Inspired by the works of Anton Webern, in the 1950s he began to experiment with total serialism; his serialist music is marked by a sensitivity to the nuances of instrumental texture and color. In 1954 he founded a series of avant-garde concerts, the Domaine Musicale. By the 1960s he had gained an international reputation not only as a composer but also as a conductor, particularly of the 20th-century repertoire. He was chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1971-74) and the New York Philharmonic (1971-78) and guest conductor of symphonies and opera companies around the world. In 1974 he founded the French national experimental studio IRCAM.

Violinist BENJAMIN KREITH has premiered solo works at the Strasbourg and Marseille festivals, given recitals in Madrid and New York City, and played string quartets in natural concert halls throughout Grand Canyon. For several years he was a member of the Cascade Quartet and concertmaster of the Great Falls Symphony. His solo recordings include works by Christian Lauba on the Accord/Universal label and by Luciano Chessa, forthcoming on Stradivarius. Interested in words as well as music, Ben made the first English translation of Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s novel Flower of Sanctity, which will be published by Aris & Phillips, Oxford, in 2015. SAM NICHOLS is a composer who lives and works in Northern California. He has received commissions from a number of ensembles and organizations, including the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Earplay, the Empyrean Ensemble, and the Composers Conference at Wellesley College. His string quartet Refuge (a Left Coast commission) was selected for performance at the ISCM’s “World Music Days 2014” in Wracłow, Poland. He's received awards from Composers, Inc. (Lee Ettelson Prize), the League of Composers, the University of Illinois (3rd prize, 2010 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Prize), and the Third Millennium Ensemble, among others. Upcoming projects include a cello concerto for David Russell and the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra. Born in Maine, he attended Vassar College (BA, 1994) and Brandeis University (MA 1999, PhD 2006). He works as a lecturer in the UC Davis Department of Music; he also teaches in collaboration with the Cinema and Technocultural Studies program. In 2011 he received the UC Davis Academic Federation Award for Excellence in Teaching.

HORACIO VAGGIONE Préludes Suspendus III (2009 :: 10 min :: stereo tape)

Préludes Suspendus III (2009) is an electroacoustic composition based on a small collection of sounds (instrumental and natural). These sounds were processed by digital means (analysis and resynthesis) using mainly granular techniques, as well as convolution and micro-montage. Thus the primary sounds developed into many derivations, some of which retain certain original morphological and energetic features, while others constitute radical mutations. Overall, the work essentially plays with contrasts between textures composed of multiple strata with detailed articulation of sound objects at different time scales. Preludes Suspendus III was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture. The premiere took place at the Synthèse Festival, Bourges, in June 2009.

HORACIO VAGGIONE was born in Argentina in 1943. He studied piano and composition at the National University of Cordoba, Argentina, and then musicology and aesthetics at the University of Paris, where he received a Doctorate. Computer Music studies were at the University of Illinois (Fullbright grant, 1966). He co-founded the Experimental Music Center of the University of Cordoba, Argentina (1965-68), and was a member of the Madrid based ALEA live electronic music group (1969-73). He also worked in the Computer Music Project at the University of Madrid (1970-73), and at IRCAM, the INA- GRM, the IMEB, and the Technical University of Berlin. His music (electroacoustic and instrumental) is regularly played worldwide in major centers of contemporary music and has received numerous awards. Since 1978 Vaggione has lived in Paris, where he is currently Professor of Music and director of the Doctorate Studies Program in Music Composition and Technology at the University of Paris VIII. He is also director of the CICM (Centre de Recherche Informatique et Création Musicale). LUC FERRARI Archives Sauvées Des Eaux (2000 :: 11 min :: ensemble and 2 CDs)

Winner of the "In memoriam" award of the "Académie Charles Cros", 2005, Archives sauvées des Eaux represents the encounter between a pioneer of concrete music, who died of late, and two live sounds manipulators, Otomo Yoshihide and eRikm. In the last six years of his life, Luc Ferrari worked on a series of compositions to explore, in every direction, the totality of the concepts with which he experimented from the beginning days of his work in the middle 1950s. An idea arose as some water damaged a collection of Luc Ferrari's original magnetic tapes, where his works from the 1970s were recorded. The author decided to compose using what had been saved and he proposed to eRikm and Otomo Yoshihide that they participate in a re-building project in Milan. The resulting concept was commissioned by Hermès ensemble and composed in 2000. It premiered in Gent (The Netherlands) May 2000. The US premiere took place on March 13th 2003 at the Kitchen, in New York City. The work is dedicated to Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari

PERFORMANCE MATERIAL PROVIDED BY BRUNHILD MEYER-FERRARI

LUC FERRARI (1929-2005) was a true pioneer of musique concrète, found sound usage, and avant-garde music in general. In the early days of musique concrète, working by the side of Pierre Schaeffer, who coined the term, he was director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (1959 to 1960), and his music played a decisive role in defining the range of musique concrète. But he went further to become one of the most radical composers of our time. He did not rest in one genre, and several times during his career he set aside one form or technique that he had mastered in order to venture into uncharted territories and find new musical goldmines.

Luc Ferrari possessed a sparkling sense of humor and quality of focus or presentness that, for anyone lucky enough to have enjoyed his company, will be impossible to forget. In this lifetime, you might meet a handful of individuals whose work really speaks to you. Really sparks you… (Right now I¹m thinking about periods spent listening to Presque Rien No.1, Tautologos 3 and Unheimlich Schön over and over again.) But when you meet one of those people, how often do you find that person’s company an equally profound pleasure?

When I think of Luc, I think of his laugh and the musicality with which that laugh punctuated his storytelling. I think of the directness and concision with which he talked about music. I think of him as setting the terms by which his work succeeds or fails, and of him as being almost comically (hilariously, excellently, inspiringly) impervious to competing ideologies in contemporary music, and I think of what a force of nature he and his wife Brunhild together constituted. "Impossible to forget" is a tall order, hope against hope… but it’s a way of saying that I want to be able to continue to savor the lovely, resolutely one-of-a-kind person that Luc Ferrari was. — excerpted form David Grubbs's personal recollections at blog.wfmu.org HANS TUTSCHKU Still Air 3 (2014 :: 12 min :: oboe, bass clarinet, and iPads)

Still Air 3 is part of a cycle for wind instruments and electronics. These compositions explore the sonorities of quiet, but complex sounds and blend the live instruments with prepared electronic sounds. As a stark contrast to many of my other compositions which explore speed and density, this cycle is meant to search for musical expression with very little activity. Still Air 3 unites the two solo pieces. The first piece, Still Air 1, for bass clarinet, explores the sonorities of quiet, but complex sounds and blends the live instrument with prepared electronic sounds. It’s the first of a series of pieces for wind instruments and electronics. As a stark contrast to many of my other compositions which explore speed and density, this cycle is meant to search for musical expression with very little activity. The second solo piece, Still Air 2 for oboe, explores the sonorities of quiet, but complex sounds and blends the live instrument with prepared electronic sounds.

HANS TUTSCHKU was born in 1966 in Weimar. He has been a member of the "Ensemble for intuitive music Weimar" since 1982. He studied electronic music composition at the Dresden College of Music and since 1989 has participated in several concert cycles of Karlheinz Stockhausen to learn the art of sound direction. From 1991-2 he further studied sonology and electroacoustic composition at the Royal Conservatoire in the Hague. 1994 followed a one year’s study stay at IRCAM in Paris. From 1995-6 he taught electroacoustic composition in Weimar. In 1996 he participated in composition workshops with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough. From 1997 to 2001 he taught electroacoustic composition at IRCAM in Paris, and from 2001 to 2004 at the Conservatory of Montbéliard. In May 2003 he completed a doctorate (PhD) with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham. During the spring term 2003 he was the "Edgard Varèse Guest Professor" at the Technical University of Berlin. Since September 2004, Tutschku has been a composition professor and the director of the electroacoustic studios at Harvard University. He is the winner of many international composition competitions, among others: Bourges, CIMESP Sao Paulo, Hanns Eisler prize, Prix Ars Electronica, Prix Noroit and Prix Musica Nova. In 2005 he received the culture prize of the city of Weimar. Currently he holds a Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and will have a stipend from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. MARIO DAVIDOVSKY Synchronisms #2 (1964 :: 5 min :: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and tape)

When Davidovsky came to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1960, he became a central part of a community of composers seeking new expressive means and willing to use their highly developed musicianship as the point of departure. When first confronted with electronic sounds, Davidovsky heard, not something exciting and new, but something very crude, especially when compared to the highly refined, two hundred plus year old tradition of western instruments that was already in his ear. To begin to approach the sensitivity of traditional instruments, Davidovsky spent countless hours listening to each sound. He painstakingly constructed phrases made up mostly of short articulated events, accepting nothing that did not have a convincing dramatic shape.

Still, composers primarily write music for concert performance, and it was natural for Davidovsky to begin to think about combining electronic sounds with live instruments. It is for his work in this area that Davidovsky is certainly best known: his series of Synchronisms. In these pieces he achieved the first true “hyper-instruments” where the live and electronic modulate one another and become something totally new, joined in one expanded acoustical space; a kind of musical virtual reality. To this day he remains the acknowledged master of the medium of electronically manipulated instruments and these pieces are touchstones for anyone trying to work in this area. — text excerpted from Mario Davidovsky: An Introduction (1999) by Eric Chasalow

MARIO DAVIDOVSKY is a renowned composer who is best known for his series of twelve Synchronisms that combine live instrumental performances with pre-recorded electronic sound. Born in Argentina, Davidovsky traveled to the U.S. in 1958 to study with Aaron Copland, who was not a fan of electronic music, believing it to be limited by its reliance on electronic media. Milton Babbitt encouraged Davidovsky to permanently move to New York City in 1960. Since coming to the U.S., he has taught at the Manhattan School of Music, Yale University, City University, CUNY, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan. He also was a visiting professor at the Di Tella Institute in Argentina, and in January 1994, he joined the music department at Harvard University.

In 1997, Davidovsky received the honored Christopher and Stephan Kaske Foundation Music prize for his contributions in developing contemporary music. His many commissions have come from such prestigious institutions as Harvard's Fromm Foundation, the Julliard String Quartet, the Pan American Union, the Koussevitsky Foundation, Yale University, the Emerson String Quartet, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In addition, he has received commissions from Speculum Musicae, the Naumburg Foundation, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Davidovsky is currently the Fanny P. Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for his Synchronism No. 6 for piano and tape. ROBERT ERICKSON Pacific Sirens (1969 :: 14 min :: ensemble and tape)

Pacific Sirens was commissioned by the Contemporary Group of the University of Washington in 1969. Ever since childhood I have wondered about the song of the sirens who sang to Ulysses and his men. I became more intrigued when I read an account of a certain cliff in southern Italy where passing sailors often hear quasi- musical moans and sighs. I decided to do something with the “whispered” and “half-voiced” sounds which some musical instruments are able to produce. I set out to make a piece which used “singing” waves together with conventional instruments. The tape portion of the music was produced from a tape recording of the waves at Pescadero Beach, about fifty miles south of San Francisco. These natural sounds were electronically filtered to make sixteen different pitch bands, which were retuned, equalized and remixed to produce the performance tape. The players play into the wave sounds, sometimes matching and sometimes in counterpoint to the sounds on the tape, to produce a continuous, seamless siren song.

ROBERT ERICKSON (1917–1997) is one of the more unjustly neglected American composers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Early in his career, under the guidance of his teacher Ernst Krenek, he flirted with then abandoned atonality. After relocating to California in 1956, he developed the characteristics for which his work became most recognized: a heightened interest in the atmosphere of a piece, an obsession with timbre, ways of varying the sound of a work with experiments in new technique, and explorations into the new worlds uncovered through the invention of tape recording. He was one of the first American composers to work extensively with sounds recorded on tape, both for its own sake and as combined with live performers on conventional instruments; and he wrote distinguished music requiring improvisation, by both solo instruments and ensembles. In later years he moved away from the pioneering experiments of the 1960s and '70s toward a simpler, ultimately stripped-down style, characterized by frequent drones, long slow passages, and hypnotic rhythms which were influential on a number of younger "minimalist" composers.

Erickson taught at the College of St. Catherine's in St. Paul, the University of California at Berkeley, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, before becoming one of the founders of the Department of Music at the University of California, San Diego, in 1967. He also served as Music Director of KPFA Radio in Berkeley from 1955 to 1957 and as a director of the Pacific Foundation, KPFA's parent body, for several years thereafter. He was the teacher of Paul Dresher, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Loren Rush, Charles Shere, and Morton Subotnick, among others. Erickson published two books: The Structure of Music: A Listener's Guide in 1957 and Sound Structures in Music in 1975. MATT INGALLS CrusT (1997 :: 10 min :: clarinet and tape)

CrusT, for clarinet and computer generated tape, was realized in Studio 4 at the University of Texas at Austin and the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. The tape part is derived from my own clarinet samples manipulated by Csound scores I generated with algorithms written in C.

MATT INGALLS is a composer, clarinetist, and computer musician from Oakland. He is the founder and co-director of the San Francisco Tape Music Collective and its parent organization, sfSound. Matt received the Deuxiéme Prix (Catégorie Humour - Puy) in the 1994 Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges and was the first recipient of the ASCAP/ SEAMUS Commission and Recording Prize. Matt is well known for his computer music software. He created the Soundflower audio routing tool for Cycling74 and his Csound version for Macintosh, MacCsound won an Electronic Musician Magazine "Editor's Choice Award" in 2004. He has taught digital audio synthesis at USF and is currently a freelance MacOS and iOS engineer. mattingalls.com

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