Technosonics XX - Concert II Old Cabell Hall

2020-02-22

Concert II
Saturday February 22, 2020 at 8:00 pm Old Cabell Hall
featuring Olivia Block

Zipper Music - Judith Shatin
Cameron Church and Nelly Zevitz, zippers Max Tfirn, controller

A Chinese Triptych - Juan Carlos Vasquez

Sonic Physiography of a Time-Stretched Glacier - Matthew Burtner
for percussion and computer, I-Jen Fang, percussion

palimpsest | erasedGavotte (Himno de los durmientes II or Los Olvidados) -Omar Fraire

Reverie - Leah Reid

Locked In - Michele Zaccagnini
I-Jen Fang, percussion

October, 1984 - Olivia Block

Concert II — Program Notes Zipper Music — Judith Shatin
Zipper Music is scored for 2 amplified zipper players with interactive electronics performed by either 1 or 2 MIDI controllists, each operating a Max patch. Composer/technologist Max Tfirn created the Max patch in consultation with me, a process with a great deal of delightful experimentation. Zipper Music forms part of my Quotidian Music series, embracing the musicality afforded by everyday objects, and creating accessible opportunities for performers who do not have traditional musical training.

The zipper score consists of icons on a time-line grid, with specific symbols for one to four pulls, as well as a variety of symbol groupings and movement indications. There are also theatrical directions for the players as they interact with one another. The controllist(s) score consists of a line on a time-grid, whose thickness LMH (low, medium or high) indicates levels of processing, with additional shapes designed to suggest degree of sharpness and suddenness of knob and slider change. A flat line indicates amplification without further processing. The piece is performable using a wide variety of controllers. Ideally, they should include multiple knobs for each of 4 – 7 sliders plus a master gain slider. However, it can easily be performed with fewer.

A Chinese Triptych — Juan Carlos Vasquez
A Chinese Triptych was composed with recordings from an extensive sound documentary made by the composer in the Chinese cities of Hangzhou, Suzhou, Shanghai, Wuxi, Harbin, and Beijing. The piece overlaps sonic events from the rural, the industrial, and the digital China in a single flowing musical discourse, attempting to represent the full range of highly contrasting ways of living in China. The piece lasts exactly 6 minutes, a number that is given in China the connotation of events “flowing smoothly.”
The form and proportion of the parts are inspired by the triptych, an art format comprised of three thematically-interrelated parts in which the middle panel is usually the largest.

Sonic Physiography of a Time-Stretched Glacier — Matthew Burtner
Sonic Physiography of a Time-Stretched Glacier (2014) was commissioned by Brandon Bell with support from the Presser Music Award. The music was created from a recording of Alaska’s Root Glacier. The unique and visceral presence of glaciers is disappearing across the planet because we live in a time of ice melting. Sonic Physiography of a Time-Stretched Glacier tries to stop the glacial melt through signal processing by freezing time, suspending the listener between droplets and a single droplet of melting ice.

palimpsest | erased Gavotte (Himno de los durmientes II or Los Olvidados) — Omar Fraire
As an exercise in the act of destruction as a creative input, I took Bach’s Gavotte en Rondo from the English Suite II and tried to play it as fast as possible, depressing the keys but trying not to hit the strings. This piece was the first one I learned on the piano; the exercise allowed me to realize how our compositional narratives read the tradition. The notion of removing what is supposed to be music, reveals a kind of unwanted sound activity that belongs more to the encounter of my body with the sound object. And of course, some notes appear but more like accidents.

Reverie — Leah Reid
Reverie is an acousmatic composition that leads the listener through an immersive fantasy centered around deconstructed music boxes. The work is comprised of eight sections that alternate between explorations of the music boxes’ gears and chimes. In the work, the music boxes’ sounds are pulled apart, exaggerated, expanded, and combined with other sounds whose timbres and textures are reminiscent of the original. As the piece unfolds, the timbres increase in spectral and textural density, and the associations become more and more fantastical. Gears are transformed into zippers, coins, chainsaws, motorcycles, and fireworks, and the chimes morph into rainstorms, all sizes of bells, pianos, and more.

Locked In — Michele Zaccagnini
This piece is written around the idea of rhythms oscillating around regular and irregular pulses. In particular, the different parts are generated by applying the idea of "non-linear sequencing," i.e., distorting the playback of a regular pattern by applying a non-linear time-line. There is no large structure in this piece, rather it is a collection of Etudes.

October, 1984 — Olivia Block
October, 1984 is a composition for found microcassette tape, electronically processed breath, organelle, field recordings, piano, and descending tones. Each emerging sound follows the envelope of the preceding sound, conveying a circular progression of aural cause and effect. In the logic of this sound world, breath causes a flood of water, piano causes descending tones. These processes accumulate over time into a roiling, unwieldily storm. Many of the lowest sounds are experienced in the body as vibrations. Through the course of sonic events, October, 1984 emphasizes themes related to time, loss, and memory.

Judith Shatin (Composer); Juan Carlos Vasquez (Composer); Matthew Burtner (Composer); Omar Fraire (Composer); Leah Reid (Composer); Michele Zaccagnini (Composer); Olivia Block (Composer); I-Jen Fang (Performer); Max Tfirn (Performer); Cameron Church (Performer); Nelly Zevitz (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.