Science Ficta: Works by UVa Graduate Composers - Old Cabell Hall

2020-02-29 (Creation date: 2020-02-29)

The Ten of Swords          Becky Brown

the house of the mother of the           Heather Mease

Artemisia          Ben Luca Robertson

The Mirrors of Uqbar          Juan Carlos Vasquez

~ Intermission ~

nothing but nothing          Alex Christie

A mexican intervention          Ernesto Guzmán
to be performed once and never more, 
on very traditional old european devices, 
at any usonian educational entity.
I. La escritura|bordes|huellas de un cuerpo. 
II. Anthem/end of the line.
III. (Go to I) 

Masking Songs          Daniel Fishkin

Science Ficta
An ensemble of viola da gamba virtuosi (Doug Balliett, Kivie Cahn- Lipman, Loren Ludwig, and Zoe Weiss), Science Ficta tackles the thorniest polyphonic challenges, old and new. Longtime collaborators and friends, in 2016 the four were inspired to form an ensemble dedicated to music at least as difficult to play as it is to listen to (and hopefully more so!). Science Ficta's arcane but rewarding repertory is comprised both of new commissions and a wealth of little-known sixteenth century works that have been unjustly neglected by modern performers and listeners.

Science Ficta's performances seek points of contact between contemporary music and the diverse experimental musical traditions of the late Renaissance pioneered by composers including Christopher Tye, Ferdinando de las Infantas, John Baldwin, and Johann Walter. Science Ficta has premiered new works by Molly Herron, Doug Balliett, and Cleek Schrey and members of the ensemble have performed and collaborated with composers including Donnacha Dennehy, Nico Mulhy, George Benjamin, Ted Coffey, and numerous others. Recent residencies at Avaloch Farm Music Institute and Cornell and Princeton Universities have allowed Science Ficta to work closely with student performers and composers.


Program Notes & Biographies

The Ten of Swords
The Ten of Swords is a card in the Minor Tarot. It depicts a prone man, ten swords buried in his back, a swath of red draped over his lower body (which could be interpreted as a robe, or his blood, or both). He faces away from the viewer, looking out over a dark lake, towards a distant sunrise.

Becky Brown is a composer, harpist, artist, and web designer, interested in producing intensely personal works across the multimedia spectrum. She focuses on narrative, emotional exposure, and catharsis, with a vested interest in using technology and the voice to deeply connect with an audience, wherever they are.

the house of the mother of the
The House of the Suicide and The House of the Mother of the Suicide are a pair of architectural structures by John Hejduk erected in tribute to the 1969 self-immolation of the Czech dissident Jan Palach whose death was in protest of the 1968 Soviet invasion.

Heather Mease makes sound and video! Heather Mease is often both dry and greasy at the same time! What a nightmare!!

Artemisia
In Artemisia, the composer employs an extended system of 11-Limit just intonation to model the phenomenon of “stretched” octaves and other spectral non-linearities. Contrasting with the simple, harmonic proportions exhibited by most stringed instruments (including the Viol da Gamba), we generally associate such inharmonicity with bells, gongs, and various metallic percussion. However, through the inclusion of high-order just intervals, one may construct ‘hybrid’ sonorities which embody traits of both harmonic and inharmonic timbres. Here, stretched octaves exhibit intervallic displacement equivalent to at least three forms of just commas (81/80, 45/44, 33/32). The cumulative effect for this mode of inharmonic distortion suggests the perception of an altered or otherwise ambiguous fundamental frequency—thus eliciting a sense of movement analogous to ‘Tonal Flux.’ So as to afford the precise transformations in pitch and spectra necessary in generating these phenomena, performers use custom software to process the signals from two electric instruments within the consort. Commensurate to electronic processing, the ensemble also alters the positions of frets on their instruments to accommodate new tuning schemes. From these procedures emerge a continually evolving set of 28 distinct sonorities, which constitute the structure of the piece.

Ben Luca Robertson is a composer, experimental luthier, and co- founder of the independent record label, Aphonia Recordings. His work addresses an interest in autonomous processes, landscape, and biological systems—often supplanting narrative structure with an emphasis on the physicality of sound, spectral tuning structures, and microtonality. Ben’s current research focuses upon the intersection between actuated string instrument design and just tuning practices. Growing up in the inland Pacific Northwest, impressions of Ponderosa pine trees, channel scablands, basalt outcroppings, and relics of boomtown decay continually haunt his work. Ben holds an M.A. in Music Composition from Eastern Washington University, a B.A. from the Evergreen State College, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia. In the Summer of 2015, he was appointed to a guest research position at the Tampere Unit for Computer-Human Interactions (TAUCHI) in Finland and recently collaborated with biologists from the University of Idaho to sonify migratory patterns of Chinook Salmon in the Snake River watershed. Ben’s work has been featured at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), Sound-Music Computing Conference (SMC), Northwest Public Broadcasting, MOXsonic, New York Re- embodied Sound Symposium, Third Practice, Magma-fest, and Olympia Experimental Music Festivals.

The Mirrors of Uqbar
The Mirrors of Uqbar is a piece based on the metaphor of mirrors found in the short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges. In this story, Uqbar was a fictional society where mirrors were feared in an allegory to hyperrealism, aka a simulation that takes over reality. In the piece “The Mirrors of Uqbar”, the electronics reflect and modify the melodic acoustic materials, creating a progressively independent world.

Juan Carlos Vasquez is an award-winning composer, sound artist, and researcher. His electroacoustic music works are performed constantly around the world and to date have premiered in 28 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Vasquez has received grants and commissions by numerous institutions, including the ZKM, the International Computer Music Association, the Nokia Research Center, the Ministry of Culture of Colombia, the Arts Promotion Centre in Finland, the Finnish National Gallery, and CW+ in partnership with the Royal College of Music in London, UK. As a researcher, Vasquez’s writings can be found in the Computer Music Journal (MIT Press), Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press), and the proceedings of all the standard conferences of the field (ICMC, CHI, SMC, and NIME). Vasquez received his education at the Sibelius Academy (FI), Aalto University (FI), and the University of Virginia (US). He has taken workshops with Robert Normandeau, Miller Puckette, Marco Stroppa, Steven Stucky, William Mival, Jonty Harrison and the Eighth Blackbird Ensemble, among others. Vasquez’s music is available in the catalog of Naxos, MIT Press (US), Important Records (US) and Phasma Music (Poland).

nothing but nothing
I prefer the space of uncommonly occupied hours.
Alex Christie makes acoustic music, electronic music, and intermedia art in many forms. His work has been called “vibrant”, “interesting, I guess”, and responsible for “ruin[ing] my day”. He has collaborated with artists in a variety of fields and is particularly interested in the design of power structures, systems of interference, absurdist bureaucracy, and indeterminacy in composition.

Recently, Alex’s work has explored the ecology of performance in intermedia art and interactive electronic music. Through real-time audio processing, instrument building, light, and theater, Alex expands performance environments to offer multiple lenses through which the audience can experience the work. Alex has performed and presented at a variety of conferences and festivals whose acronyms combine to spell nicedinsaucesfeeeemmmmmmnortfogascabsplot.

Alex serves as faculty, Director of Electronic Music, Director of Composers Forums, and Academic Dean at the Walden School of Music Young Musicians Program. He holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory and Mills College and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Composition and Computer Technologies (CCT) at the University of Virginia.

A mexican intervention
In the second Trattado de Glosas by the composer and music theorist Diego Ortiz (Rome 1553 ca.) probably discovered later by the African- American songwriter J. Alan Bland, an ancient practice of appropriation is depicted as being common for the Viol Consort repertoire. It is a compositional strategy consisting of taking the melody of an anthem and imposing different lyrics. Such technique has been practiced in many of the regional anthems and state songs throughout The Country. A former president of Avon Products removed the lyrics from a traditional song — where a Canadian declares his love to the daughter of the Oneida Chief Shenandoah — replacing them to make the Virginia Regional Anthem. In later apocryphal studies, it is known that in this anthem–as in the one using the phrase Sic Semper Tyrannis–some verses have been lost or omitted. Following this implanting tradition, these forgotten or forbidden verses are used here to create and add a piece to the body of composed anthems for Viola Da Gamba.

Ernesto Guzmán is an award loser composer. Strangely and recently intrigued about borders. As if they sculpted the political topographies of objects. Like a form resulting from many exclusions whose objectives do not correspond with the function of the object in question.

Masking Songs
Contrary to the masking of external sounds, it is possible to abolish the perception of tinnitus sounds by pure tones of a similar intensity regardless of their frequency (Feldmann, 1971). This proves that “masking” of tinnitus does not involve a mechanical interaction of basilar membrane movements, does not depend on the critical band principle and, therefore, has to occur at a higher level within the auditory pathways. Consequently, the elimination of the perception of tinnitus by another sound should be labeled suppression rather than “masking,” as is commonly used. Unfortunately, Feldmann’s fundamental discovery has been widely disregarded, resulting in focusing attention on masking rather than suppression and in producing tinnitus instruments tuned to the dominant perceived pitch of tinnitus.
Tinnitus Retraining Therapy, Pawel Jastreboff, 2004

Daniel Fishkin: I build instruments because I want to live in sounds, with music—I don’t want the music to stop at the end of the concert. I daydream of new machines as if they were melodies crossing my mind's ear. I don’t often sell my instruments, though I do share them with my trusted collaborators. I live with my instruments; I am responsible for my creations, and I am always thinking about how much space they take up in my life, as I carry them with me to and fro. I hear their songs ringing in my ears, even as they rest silently across the room.

Becky Brown (Composer); Heather Mease (Composer); Ben Luca Robertson (Composer); Juan Carlos Vasquez (Composer); Alex Christie (Composer); Ernesto Guzmán (Composer); Daniel Fishkin (Composer); Doug Balliett (Performer); Kivie Cahn-Lipman (Performer); Loren Ludwig (Performer); Zoe Weiss (Performer)

University of Virginia Concert Recordings

Music Library

InC - http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en Performers grant the University of Virginia permission to use, reproduce, exhibit or distribute in any medium the recorded performance for non-commercial educational, documentary, and promotional purposes.

Recorded 2.29.20 at Old Cabell Hall by Travis Thatcher