Around Tappan Square BLAME IT ON THE JUICE
All TIMARA’s Parties BY ERICH BURNETT
oberlin’s ties to computer music extend to the late 1960s and to groundbreaking faculty composer Olly Wilson, who established a forward-looking curriculum that far surpassed the sounds emanating from most other college campuses of the era. In 1969, the first courses that would eventually become TIMARA—shorthand for Technology in Music and Related Arts—were offered at Oberlin. Twenty years later, TIMARA conferred its first degree. Now, 50 years after those initial courses, TIMARA is celebrating its milestone anniversary with events throughout the academic year and involving many TIMARA devotees, from faculty to alumni to current students. These included a symposium in the fall coordinated by TIMARA technical director and lecturer Abby Aresty called Crafting Sound, which cast a critical eye toward the technologies of sound, including an examination of value systems that tend to accompany these technologies and exploration of various alternatives to traditional sound technology and the ways they might engage new audiences. The weekend event opened with Sonic Super-Buffet, a celebration of interactive exhibits, instruments, and installations by TIMARA faculty, students, and other local artists in the Birenbaum Innovation and Performance Space. “The maker movement in general has been criticized over time for emphasizing particular kinds of makers over another…a sort of male nerd culture,” says Aresty, who taught a fall course called Reimagining Maker Culture(s): from Fabrication to Curation. The class is part of Oberlin’s StudiOC Learning Community, which offers innovative curricular study opportunities that unite disciplines from across the college and conservatory. Aresty coordinated the symposium with Kyle Hartzell, an educational technologist and digital media engineer who works in Oberlin’s cinema studies program and the Center for Information Technology. The celebration continued with the free, four-and-a-half hour Kaleidosonic Music Festival, which featured nearly 500 musicians performing a variety of styles—gospel, classical, rock and roll, jazz, early music, marching band, serious, funny, and avant-garde, in Finney Chapel in November. Oberlin Choristers, Oberlin College Black Musicians Guild, the Oberlin Sonny Rollins Jazz Ensemble, Oberlin High School Marching Show Band, and Northern Ohio Youth Orchestra were among the musicians, drawn from the college and community, who performed. Tom Lopez ’89, professor of computer music and digital arts and chair of TIMARA, organized the festive evening as a way of celebrating the legacy of Wilson and John Clough ’53, an early champion of computer music at the conservatory.
4