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.