~ The University of Memphis ~ Department of ... ., ~ ~ trJ<:tp~ presents IMAGINE '96 SCI NATIONAL CONFERENCE CONCERT I V March 28, 1996 3:00 P.M. University Gallery Long into the Night, Heavenly Electrical Music Reynold Weidnaar , flowed out of the Street (a video presentation) Jennifer Taylor, piano The Artist and His Model Charles Mason Craig Hultgren, cello Therapy John Serry Monte Coulter, percussion drowningXnumbers Dorothy Hindman Craig Hultgren, cello Times Two Daniel Adams Alan Compton, Jeremy Kunkel, percussion IMAGINE '96 SCI NATIONAL CONFERENCE CONCERT IV PROGRAM NOTES LONG INTO THE NIGHT, HEAVENLY ELECTRICAL REYNOLD WEIDENAAR MUSIC FLOWED OUT OF THE STREET Long into the Night... portrays an event in the history of musical technology that took place on October 21, 1907. On that day, electricians of the New York Electric Music Co. were servicing a transmission wire that ran underneath Broadway and which connected the output of the Telharmonium--the first electrical music synthesizer--to subscribers. At quitting time, the men left a receiver in a manhole connected to the wire. The music emanating from the manhole was so strange, and the resulting rush-hour traffic jams in busy Madison Square so immense, that these happenings made front-page headlines in all the papers. The work begins with a brief, straightforward explication of the event. Then the key visual and musical elements are reconstructed as pictorial/aural rhythms of layered fragments--symbols of memory. Their continua having been ruptured, the dismantled images on the monitor become ephermeral. Yet their period context secures these shattered fragments in an encased reality of suspended time, conveyed as an exaggerated morphology, a fantasy of early technology. Reynold Weidenaar, born in 1945, is a composer and video producer. He began composing electronic music in 1965 upon taking the first factory seminar on the Moog synthesizer. He remained in Trumansburg, NY, to found the Independent Electronic Music Center with Robert Moog and to become editor of Electronic Music Review. He later worked in Cleveland as a recording engineer, recording the weekly concerts of the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell for broadcast syndication. He received a B. Mus. degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1973, where he was valedic1orian. After several years of working with electronic images on film, he moved to New York to pursue this interest. His second film, Wavelines II, received 15 awards. After receiving an M.A. from New York University in 1980, he began to work with video. His first concert video, Love of Line, of Light and Shadow: The Brooklyn Bridge, for clarinet, color video, and electronic sound, received the Grand Prize at the Tokyo Video Festival and numerous other awards. Since then he has produced five more concert videos; these works have received over 300 live performances and over 2,000 screenings and broadcasts in their tape versions. He received a Ph.D. from N.Y.U. in 1989 and has been awarded an NEA Composer Fellowship, and Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships in video. He is Assistant Professor of Communication at William Paterson College, Wayne, New Jersey. THE ARTIST AND HIS MODEL CHARLES MASON The Artist and His Mode/was commissioned by Craig Hultgren. In creating the work, the composer worded very closely with Craig; in fact, he is the cellist on the tape. There are three elements to the piece: the synthesized string and percussion sounds, the taped cellist (performing to a click track) and th elive cellist. As in Mason's other works involving tape and acoustic instruments the challenge of the disparate acoustic and electronic sound sources provides the compositional philosophy behind the piece. Additionally, the piece exhibits a "buffer zone" between machine time and performer time that the composer finds fascinating. The tension casue by the performer attempting to bend his natural performing rhythm to that of the machine time, which in turn was bent subtly by the composer at the time he tape was realized, is quite intense at times and creates a highly-charged atmosphere of almost magical coercion. The title captures an important real ambiguity of perspective that permeates the piece. The artist in this work could be the live cellist, and the tape his model, or the artist could be the tape, which was the original voice, and which requires the cellist to model it in each performance. The piece opens with a motivic figure consisting of a minor 6th, minor third, perfect 5th, tritne, minor third, and another tritone. The entire piece is then tightly buitl on the opening motive. Charles Mason was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and studied composition at the University of Miami with Dennis Kam and at the University of Illinois with Ben Johnston, Salvatore Martirano, and John Melby. His compositions have received several awards including a Broadcast Music Inc. Award for Young Composers for his wind ensemble piece Shiftings, First Prize in the Panoply of the Arts competition for Three Hopkins Songs, First Prize in the City Stages Classical Music competition for The Caged Skylark, and his tape piece Some Find Me was a finalist in the lnternaitonal Bourges Electro-Acoustice Composition Competition and was featured in an article by Barney Childs in The Comtemporary Music Review. Among the gants he has received is a 1994 National Endowment of the Arts Individual Composer Grant, several Meet the Composer Grants, a composition grant from the Alabama Council on th eArts, a creative leadership grant from 3M, a faculty development grant from Birmingham-Southern College, and a research grant form the University of Illinois. His music has been performed throughout the US as well as in Europe and Latin American. His composition The Blazing Macaw for piano and tape was recorded by Max Lifchitz on CD (N/S Recordings #1002) and by Tom Bagwell for Volume 3 (1995) of the Music from SEAMUS CD series and The Artist and His Model recorded by Craig Hulgren will be released this month by NEUMA Records. Dr. Mason is chairman of the music department at Birmingham-Southern College and is Managing Editor of the international jounal, Living Music. His music is available from American Composers Edition (NY) . DROWNING X NUMBERS DOROTHY HINDMAN drowningXnumbers (drowning by numbers) was written during a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in December, 1994 for cellist Craig Hulgren, who requested a piece for amplified cello. The piece exploits the effects made possible by amplification, and also incorporates virtuosic effects which were inspired by Craig himself. It is a continuous, fifteen minute work divided into three main sections, each with a faster tempo but longer note durations than the preceding. The first section is unforgivingly aggressive, the second is more percussive but less frantic, and the third is increasingly, quiet, desolate and still. The work is the composer's reaction to the large amount of aggressive music being composed by her colleagues, and reflects some of her own beliefs about beauty, emotion and profundity in music. While the title suggests an obvious metaphor for the work, it is a reference to a film by Peter Greenaway, and even more a reference and grateful acknowledge to composer Louis Andriessen. Dorothy Hindman is a professional composer and music theorist whose works have been performed both nationally and internationally. Her commissions include works for soloists, small and large ensembles, and commercial productions. In 1987, she was commissioned to compose and realize the electronic score for the play "PAPA", which later received a South Florida Carbonell Award for best actor and a nomination for best play. She received an honorable mention in the 1992 Percussive Arts Society International Solo Marimba Composition Competition, for her work Bey0nd the Cloud of Unknowing, written for Scott Deal. • Recently, she was commissioned to compose Chemistry, a work for chamber orchestra, for the Levico Conservatorio Exchange program, which was premiered in March, 1994 in Miami, Florida, and in June, 1994 in trento, Italy. Her latest commission, "drowning Xnumbers" for amplified cello, was premiered in April, 1995 by cellist Craig Hultgren. Other commissions which have received their premieres include Soliloquy for Double Bass for Ed Allman, and Slow Dance for Uncommon Practice_New Music Ensemble. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and scholarships, and in addition to her awards for her commissioned works, she took a prize in the 1993 Abraham Frost Composition Competition for her wind octet, Fury's Chalice. She has also been invited to attend many professional composers' conferences and workshops, including most recently the Society of Composers region IV Conference, the MAY IN MIAMI Young Composers Workshop,, the JUNE IN BUFFALO Festival, and the Czech-American Summer Music Institute program in Prague. In November-December of 1994, she completed a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where she studied with composer Louis Andriessen and completed "drowning Xnumbers". Later in December, she was a resident Fellow at the Hambidge Center for the Arts, where she began her current work in progress: a song cycle collaboration with composer Charles Norman Mason which explores gender expectations in the works of male and female composers. This past April, she was a featured guest composer and master class lecturer at Florida State University's Two Days of Contemporary Music, sponsored by the Tallahassee Composers' Guild. She is active in creating and supporting many artistic projects serving new music. She is co-founder of and composer-in-residence for Uncommon Practice New Music Ensemble. She was coordinator and executive producer of the SCI-UM CD project, which features her solo marimba work, Beyond the Cloud of Unknowing. She is also Assistant Editor of LIVING MUSIC, a quarterly newsletter featuring articles, reviews, competitions and opportunities for composers, which goes by subscription to composers, ensembles and others interested in new music.