Guest Recital, Ensemble TRIOCULAR+

Live Structures

GUEST ARTIST RECITAL

Ensemble TRIOCULAR+ Linda Bouchard, composer and electronics François Houle, clarinet Lori Freedman, bass clarinet Charlotte Hug, viola

Friday, November 10, 2023 7:30 pm X-Space, William Knox Holt Memorial Library

22ND PERFORMANCE OF 2023–24 ACADEMIC YEAR

NOVEMBER 10, 2023, 7:30 PM LInda Bouchard (b. 1957)

Pandemonium (2022) Murmure à trois (2023) (World Premiere) Gathering (2020)

LIVE STRUC TURES Ensemble TRIOCULAR+ perform Live Structures Composition series, which is the culmination of four years of exploration in graphic notation by researchercomposer Linda Bouchard. Three great names in improvisation—Charlotte Hug (Zurich), François Houle (Vancouver), and Lori Freedman (Montreal)— play the game of interpreting the drawings and visual manipulations of the composer using the digital tool Ocular Scores.® We invite you to let these three giants of improvised music take you on an explosive and fascinating musical journey that pushes the boundaries of expression.

About the technology: The custom tool Ocular Scores® is built with TouchDesigner, a node based visual programming language for real-time interactive multimedia content.

This custom tool is specifically de-signed to analyze the sounds the musicians play and create images in real-time from the data extracted in the analysis of those sounds. The tool also allows the composer to manipulate several parameters of the improvisors’ performances. Therefore, software creates a interactive environment.

There are minimal technical requirements with Ocular Scores®: sound input from each musician to achieve live processing, and two surfaces for projecting the resultant graphical scores. All images are created via real-time synthesis through Ocular Scores.® The custom tool is therefore integral to the performance of these works.

Ocular Scores® was created in collaboration with designer Joseph Browne—a musician, composer, and new-media artist based out of Montreal—during a residency at Matralab, Concordia University (Montreal). In the Live Structures Series, the composer explores a different paradigm for each composition.

Ensemble Triocular+ will perform three different works this evening.

PROGRAM NOTES For biographic information about Linda Bouchard, please see Artist Biographies.

Notes by the Composer Pandemonium 2022 Written for live visual score—projected into the performance space—and three musicians, Pandemonium utilizes Ocular Scores® for its ability to draw an image from the analysis of complex sounds. In this case, a white image is projected to serve as a graphical score. This image is generated by the live processing of a sound file that you will not hear in the performance space, but that you will be able to visually experience as musical notation.

Musicians receive simple yet specific cues from their iPads that they can easily track in tandem with following the large projection.

Cues are expressed in full color-coded pages: black refers to silence, white calls for the performer to interpret the projected white score, blue asks that the performer takes the role of an accompanist to the main material, and red serves as a wildcard for the musician to freely play as a soloist. The audience will observe a white projected score, while simultaneously experiencing the edge of a sonic “pandemonium” without ever touching it. In essence, the musicians carefully guide the audience in and out of traditional concepts such as soloist playing, imitating, and accompanying in a completely novel way.

This work was composed specifically for Ensemble TRIOCULAR+ and was premiered in November 2022 in Montréal, Québec.

Murmure à trois Originally composed as a duo, Murmure à trois explores the same concept as Murmuration (premiered in 2019), but this time we are playing with different combinations of three duos. This is the world premiere of the 2023 version.

In this piece, two or three improvisors interpret each other’s music in real time. Specific to this Live Structure, the software serves as a bridge between improvisors; Ocular Scores® sends generated scores in real-time from one performer to another. In essence, the performers are playing a game of phone tag, utilizing Ocular Scores® as the proverbial “phone” transferring information. Ocular Scores® therefore is a vital component to the “structure” of this composition. This work is inspired by data derived from immigration patterns in the natural world, and by the way that birds follow one another

PROGRAM NOTES and can change direction rapidly. They are absolute avian improvisors within an ensemble—the flock that follows them.

Performers are expected to react in real time to an evolving score. Murmure à trois is a collaborative improvisation as well as a committed interpretation of the musical code set forth by Ocular Scores.® Gathering This work was premiered at University of the Pacific, in this exact room in February 2020, with performers Kyle Bruckmann and Jacob Felix Heule.

This happened three weeks before the first pandemic lockdown. Curiously enough, this piece is inspired by the importance of communities, of gathering, and of finding people with whom you share values and towards whom you commit to nurture the relationship.

In this piece, the musicians quite literally draw sounds on the projection surfaces. They are instructed to improvise on a G major scale to allow the work to be centered around the note G. Improvisation manifests mostly through unisons, textured unisons, and octaves to simulate the “gathering” around the G major.

You will also hear audio files of processed rubbed temple bowls. Gathering is partly guided by the visual interplay of their graphical scores overlapping one another in real time using Ocular Scores.® The multimedia performance also includes personal movies shot in different cities—depicting gathered crowds for political events or for simple pleasure.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES Linda Bouchard is an active composer, conductor, and researcher whose music crosses a variety of media: acoustic and electronic music, as well as multimedia performances with interactive video, theatre, and dance.

Bouchard was recently honored with the Prix Jan V. Matejcek for New Classical Music from the Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN, 2023). She lived in New York City from 1979 to 1990, where she composed, led new music ensembles, and made orchestral arrangements for the Washington Ballet, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and various churches in the New York metropolitan area. She was assistant conductor for New York Children’s Free Opera from 1985 to 1988 and was a guest conductor for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the American Dance Festival, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Absolute Music Group, and the New Music Consort. In 1991 Bouchard returned to Montréal and was composerin-residence from 1992 to 1995 with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, Canada. In 1997 she moved to San Francisco and has since been exploring the intersection of traditional artistic practices and new technologies.

Since 2017 Bouchard has presented lectures on her developing custom software tool Ocular Scores® in Australia (Melbourne), Switzerland (Zurich), and Canada (Montréal and Vancouver). Présentations were held at IRCAM and other music research centers. She currently serves as a guest researcher at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology at the University of California, Berkley.

Clarinetist François Houle has established himself as one of today’s most inventive musicians. Inspired by collaborations with the world’s top musical innovators, Houle has developed a unique improvisational language, virtuosic and rich with sonic embellishment and technical extensions.

A sought-after soloist and chamber musician, he has actively expanded the clarinet’s repertoire by commissioning some of today’s leading Canadian and international composers and premiering over one hundred new works. Houle’s contribution to the Canadian and international improvised music scene spans three decades, with extensive touring at major festivals around the world. A prolific recording artist, earning multiple

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES Juno Award and West Coast Music Award nominations, he has been listed on numerous occasions in Downbeat magazine’s Readers and Critics’ Polls as “Talent Deserving Wider Recognition” and “Rising Star.”

Lori Freedman is known internationally for her provocative and creative performances. As an interpreter of written music for clarinet hundreds of works have been dedicated to and/or premiered by her. While managing a full performance schedule (more than seventy-five concerts a year), making recordings, touring, and leading workshops, Freedman has also been receiving commissions to write music for an eclectic group of artists from all over the world.

In 2017 Freedman was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for “outstanding artistic achievement,” twenty years after having received the Freddie Stone Award (1998) for the “demonstration of outstanding leadership, integrity and excellence in the area of contemporary music and jazz.” Her most recent feature recordings include On No On (Mode Records), Bridge (Collection QB), Plumb (Barnyard Records), 3 and À un moment donné (Ambiances Magnétiques), Huskless! (Artifact Music), and See Saw and Thin Air (Wig).

Swiss-born Charlotte Hug is an intermedia artist, composer, improviser and musician of the extreme.

Her innovative solo performances in distinctive locations have created an international furore.

With her intermedial compositions, room-scores and Son-Icons (visual sounds) she created a new genre of multidisciplinary music and art. Hug has reinvented the viola. Her specialty is also a blend of viola and vocals into hybrid sounds.

Having completed her studies in fine arts and classical music, Hug won diverse awards such as artist residencies in London, Paris, Berlin, Johannesburg, and Shanghai. She was “artiste étoile” (star artist) at the world-renowned Lucerne Festival and nominated for the Classical:NEXT Innovation Award 2019. Hug is fully active as a concert performer, soloist, composer and conductor of her own works at major festivals worldwide.

She is head of the international postgraduate studies Creation & Scenario in Music at the Zurich University of the Arts.

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Coming soon . . .

Nov. 14, 7:30 pm, Recital Hall Guest Artists from Kaleidescope Chamber Orchestra Nov. 15, 7:30 pm, Faye Spanos Concert Hall Pacific Jazz Ensemble Michael Dease, trombone Nov. 16, 2:30 pm, Recital Hall Guest Artist Recital Adriana Magdovski, piano Nov. 19, 2:30 pm, Faye Spanos Concert Hall Thalea String Quartet View a digital version of this program at issuu.com/MusicatPacific.

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