CHICAGO CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY COMPOSITION 2019-20 CONCERT SERIES
CHIMEFest February 28 & 29, 2020 Logan Center for the Arts
INSTALLATIONS Friday, February 28, 2020 Saturday, February 29, 2020 MAAD Center Presented in collaboration with Commiserate: New Media Art Festival JASON CHARNEY
Equivocation
SEAN RUSSELL HALLOWELL Autocymaticon PÉTUR EGGERTS
Electronic Music For People & Other Objects: Lyricism
Saturday, February 29, 2020 / 5:30-7:30 pm Logan Center for the Arts, 802
PAULA MATTHUSEN & OLIVIA VALENTINE
between systems and ground performance
BIOS Jason Charney
Sean Russell Hallowell
Jason Charney is a composer and sound artist in Baltimore, Maryland. He writes music for instruments and electronic media and is also an active electroacoustic performer and improviser. As an artist, Jason creates multimedia works which use sound, light, and sculpture to explore the unreliable translations among humans and machines in digitally-mediated systems. Jason holds degrees in music theory and composition from the University of Kansas and Bowling Green State University, and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He serves as the Technical Director of Mind on Fire, a contemporary chamber orchestra based in Baltimore.
Sean Russell Hallowell is a musician and composer living in San Francisco, CA. His compositions have been featured at such events as the Convergence Festival at De Montfort University, the Open Circuit Festival at the University of Liverpool, the Sound/Image Colloquium at the University of Greenwich, Electro-Acoustic Mini-Fest at Washington State University, the Charlotte New Music Festival, and the annual meeting of SEAMUS. He holds degrees in music from Brown University (AB) and Columbia University (PhD), where he wrote his dissertation on the metaphysical dimensions of compositional techniques employed — and aesthetic traditions upheld — by Medieval European musicians. CHIMEFest | 2
BIOS Since 2017 he has held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University.
Pétur Eggerts Pétur Eggerts is a young composer from Reykjavík, Iceland. After an upbringing playing classical violin and later coming across a world of experimental and DIY music and art, Pétur felt a need to create his own unique form of musical composition, questioning both classical culture and new music, searching for a conceptual link between music performance and everyday life. His pieces have cross-disciplinary results and through them, Pétur researches how other materials than sound, like images, physical gestures and objects, can be used in the act of making music. Visual art, theatre and other practices blend with the music and add new dimensions, beyond sound and harmony, even becoming independent musical material. A transformation of sound through an arbitrary translation into different mediums (or vice versa) has been a focus in many, if not most pieces. Additionally, the roles of the performer and audience are investigated and augmented: the audience may influence the progression of a piece and musical performers may end up using different instruments or objects than they started out with. Pétur graduated with a BA degree in composition from the Icelandic University of the Arts in 2018 where he studied with Einar Torfi Einarsson and Jesper Pedersen. He now studies in the MA program in composition at Mills College with prof. Zeena Parkins and Laetitia Sonami. His music has been performed in Denmark,
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Estonia, Iceland, the Netherlands, Sweden, UK, and USA; at the Cycle, LungA, Tut Töt Tuð and Ung Nordisk Music festivals and he has performed and worked with artists and musicians such as Bergur Thomas Anderson, Caput Ensemble, Daníel Bjarnason, David Behrmann, Eclipse Quartet, Ensemble Adapter, Gígja Jónsdóttir, Goodiepal, Hjálmar H. Ragnarsson, Lilja María Ásmundsdóttir, Matt Robidoux, MOCREP and S.L.Á.T.U.R. www.petureggerts.com
Paula Matthusen Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. In addition to writing for a variety of different ensembles, she also collaborates with choreographers and theater companies. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space — real, imagined, and remembered. Her music has been performed by Dither, Mantra Percussion, the Bang On A Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), orchest de ereprijs, The Glass Farm Ensemble, the Estonian National Ballet, James Moore, Kathryn Woodard, Todd Reynolds, Kathleen Supové, Margaret Lancaster and Jody Redhage. Awards include the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Grant, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Awards, First Prize in the Young Composers’ Meeting Composition Competition, the MacCracken and Langley Ryan Fellowship, the “New Genre Prize” from the IAWM Search for New Music, and recently the 2014 Elliott Carter Rome Prize. Matthusen completed her Ph.D. at
New York University – GSAS. Matthusen is currently Associate Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, where she teaches experimental music, composition, and music technology.
Olivia Valentine Olivia Valentine is an interdisciplinary visual artist working primarily in textile construction, drawing, and photography, and in collaboration with composers, architects, and designers. Recent exhibitions include Museum of Arts and Design (New York), the Danish Royal Academy (Copenhagen), The American Academy in Rome (Italy), and the Rijswijk Museum (The Netherlands). Olivia received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for Installation Art in Turkey and the Brandford/Elliott Award for excellence in Fiber Arts. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture at Iowa State University.
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PAPER SESSION 1: FEEDBACK IN CONTEXT Friday, February 28, 2020 / 10:00-11:20 am Logan Center for the Arts Performance Penthouse
10:00 am
Florian Hollerweger Controlled resonance: A sound engineering perspective on feedback
10:40 am
Ted Gordon No Idea But In Things: Cybernetics and Materiality in Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer and Vespers
PAPER SESSION 2: FEEDBACK IN PRACTICE Friday, February 28, 2020 / 1:00-3:00 pm Logan Center for the Arts Performance Penthouse
1:00 pm
Sam Pluta Multi-mapped Neural Networks for Control of Multidimensional Crossfeedback Synthesis Systems
1:40 pm
Ted Moore Interference Patterns: analysis of interacting feedbacks in “hollow”
2:20 pm Alexandria Smith Chaos and Compromise: Experimentations with Flugelhorn and Feedback
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BIOS Florian Hollerweger Florian Hollerweger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Audio Arts and Acoustics at Columbia College Chicago. Before joining the College, Florian was a Lecturer in Music Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2013-17) and at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (2011-12), and worked for the automatic audio post production web service Auphonic (2012-13). An artist and scholar of sound, Florian develops artistic strategies for aestheticizing everyday aural experience in the context of sound installations and public listening interventions and does research on 3D sound spatialization by means of binaural room impulse responses and Higher-Order Ambisonics. Florian has performed, exhibited, and otherwise presented his work across Europe, the British Isles, the United States, Mexico, New Zealand, and Australia. He holds a Ph.D. in Music and Sonic Arts from Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland (Sonic Arts Research Centre), and a Diplomingenieur (M.Sc.) from the Graz University of Technology, Austria (Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics).
Ted Gordon Ted Gordon is a musician and musicologist whose work lies at the nexus of experimental music studies, critical organology, and science & technology studies. His current book project, The Composer’s Black Box: Cybernetics & Instrumentality in Postwar American Music explores new aesthetic, social, and technical imaginaries produced through the embrace of cybernetics and
information theory at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, where the metaphor of the “black box” produced different philosophical understandings of humaninstrument interaction, leading to diverging political and social agendas for the future of music. His writing has appeared in Current Musicology, Cultural Anthropology, and on the web-publishing platforms of the American Musicological Society and the Library of Congress. Ted defended his PhD in the History and Theory of Music from the University of Chicago in 2018, and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Columbia University.
Sam Pluta Sam Pluta is a composer and electronics performer whose work explores the intersections between instrumental forces, reactive computerized sound worlds, traditionally notated scores, improvisation, audio-visuals, psycho-acoustic phenomena, and installation-like soundscapes. Since 2009, Sam has served as Technical Director and composing member of Wet Ink Ensemble. He has also received commissions and written music for groups like Yarn/Wire, Ensemble Dal Niente, International Contemporary Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, Mantra Percussion, Spektral Quartet, TAK, and the New York Philharmonic. Laptop improvisation is a core part of Pluta’s artistic practice. Performing on his custom software instrument, he has toured internationally with Rocket Science, the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, and the Peter Evans Ensemble. Sam appears as a composer and performer on over thirty albums of new music and jazz, many of which are released on his label, Carrier CHIMEFest | 6
BIOS Records. Prof Pluta is currently Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago, where he teaches composition and directs the CHIME Studio.
Ted Moore Ted Moore is a composer, improviser, intermedia artist, and educator based in Chicago. His work focuses on fusing the sonic, visual, physical, and acoustic aspects of performance and sound, often through the integration of technology. Ted’s work has been described as “frankly unsafe” (icareifyoulisten.com), “an impressive achievement both artistically and technically” (VitaMN), and “epic” (Pioneer Press). Ted’s work has been premiered by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, Line Upon Line, The Dream Songs Project, Yarn/Wire, and others, and has been performed around the world including at South by Southwest (Austin), The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), STEIM (Amsterdam), Spectrum (NYC), NUNC! (Chicago), New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, CubeFest (Blacksburg, VA), Whatever Works! (Finland), Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (Germany), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), among others. Ted also frequently performs on electronics using his laptop, modular synthesizer systems, resonant physical objects, lighting instruments, and video projection. He has been featured as an installation artist at New York University, Northern Spark Festival (Minneapolis), Studio 300 Festival of Digital Art and Music (Lexington, KY), and St. Paul Public Library. As an improviser, Ted is one half of Binary Canary, a woodwinds-laptop improvisation duo alongside saxophonist Kyle Hutchins. 7 | Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition
As a theater artist, Ted has worked with many independent companies, notably with Skewed Visions and Savage Umbrella. He has taught in a variety of capacities, including at The Walden School’s Young Musicians Program and Creative Musicians Retreat (Dublin, NH), MacPhail Center for Music (Minneapolis), Slam Academy (Minneapolis), and McNally Smith College of Music (St. Paul). Currently, Ted is a doctoral fellow in Music Composition at the University of Chicago.
Alexandria Smith Praised by The New York Times for her “appealingly melancholic sound” and “entertaining array of distortion effects,” Alexandria Smith is a trumpeter, composer, curator, and multimedia artist studying at the University of California San Diego. Her current projects focus on the use of biofeedback as an interfacing tool for musicians, interactive media (audio and visual), and performance based research. Previous engagements include her week (curation) at the Stone, performances at the La Semana Internacional de Improvisación, trumpet and electronics Luminous Tubes Concert at the FONT Festival 2019, performing as a soloist in the Martha Graham Dance Company 90th Anniversary Concert, Anthony Coleman’s 60th Birthday Concert, John Zorn’s Improv Night at the Stone, performances with her duo, a&k (with bassist Kathryn Schulmeister), and as an ensemble member of Lorin Maazel’s Castleton Festival.
COLLOQUIUM Friday, February 28, 2020 / 3:30-5:00 pm Logan Center for the Arts Performance Penthouse Reception following 3:30 pm
Cathy van Eck, keynote speaker From Mistake to Music: Composing with Acoustic Feedback
Microphones are circling round, placed in water or put in a jar. Loudspeakers are carried by performers, positioned in a piano or put in a bamboo tube. By turning up the amplification level of these set-ups an acoustic feedback sound occurs. The movement of the microphones and loudspeakers, the material they are attached to, and the space they are placed in, colour this feedback sound. During more than 50 years artists created many different set-ups using acoustic feedback in manifold ways to produce sound. In this talk I would like to examine different examples of acoustic feedback in contemporary works. I focus especially on how acoustic feedback is integrated in these performances, compositions and installations. I explore not only how the acoustic feedback is produced, but also why composers and sound artists use feedback, how its use influences the composition process, and what the aesthetic implications of composing for feedback are. Furthermore, I will discuss how this “misuse” of equipment can be placed in a broader framework of fruitful failures in music.
Cathy van Eck Cathy van Eck (1979 Belgium/Netherlands) is a composer, sound artist, and researcher in the arts. She focuses on composing relationships between everyday objects, human performers, and sound. Her artistic work includes performances with liveelectronics and installations with sound objects which she often designs herself. She is interested in setting her gestures into unusual and surprising relationships with sounds, mainly by electronic means. The result could be called “performative sound art”, since it combines elements from performance art, electronic music, and visual arts. Her work transcends genres and is presented at occasions as diverse as experimental or electronic music concerts, open air festivals, sound art gallery venues,
digital art events, or performance art festivals. Since 2007, Cathy has a teaching position at the Department for Music and Media Arts of the University of the Arts in Bern, Switzerland. She is a regular guest lecturer at other art and music universities. In her PhD-research Between Air and Electricity (supervisors Richard Barrett, Marcel Cobussen and Frans de Ruiter; accepted in 2013 by the University of Leiden, The Netherlands), she investigated the use of microphones and loudspeakers as musical instruments. Her book Between Air and Electricity — Microphones and Loudspeakers as Musical Instruments has been published in 2017 as a hardcover, a paperback follows in 2018.
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CONCERT 1 Friday, February 28, 2020 / 7:00-8:30 pm Logan Center for the Arts Performance Penthouse
CHRIS HADLEY
touch network
Chris Hadley, percussion Alex Lough, electronics
KRISTOPHER BENDRICK
Semi-Human//Semi-Sentient
Kristopher Bendrick, voice, no-input mixer, fixed media, and video
JOO WON PARK
Large Intestine
SCOTT L. MILLER
Joo Won Park, no-input mixer
This Strange Fine-Tuning of Our Universe II
Cole Pulice, saxophone Scott Miller, Kyma
BIOS Chris Hadley Chris Hadley is a percussionist, composer, and instrument builder from Dallas, Texas. He holds degrees in percussion performance from Southern Methodist University and Stony Brook University. With a focus on interdisciplinary performance practices, Chris has performed and collaborated with So Percussion, Matmos, members of Room Full of Teeth, Margaret Schedel, Michelle Lou, and Ray Anderson. Recently, he premiered his piece “Pushing (Pulling)� for handmade electronics at the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice at the New England Conservatory. 9 | Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition
In 2018 he helped to develop new analog synthesizer circuits for new media duo LoVid. Chris is currently pursuing a PhD in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology at the University of California in Irvine. His current research is in electronic instrument design with a focus on improvisation and embodied cognition.
Alex Lough Alex Lough is a composer, performer, and multimedia sound artist. His work focuses on implementing experimental technology in order to discover new performance contexts with particular attention given to
the body and the physicality of sound. His research is primarily concerned with the new taxonomic distinction of “performed electronics” and embodied performance practices as an electronicist. He is currently a PhD candidate at UC Irvine in the new Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology program where he studies with Mari Kimura, Nicole Mitchell, Simon Penny, and Chris Dobrian.
Kristopher Bendrick Kristopher Bendrick’s acoustic and electronic compositions explore a balance between the seriousness of academic processes and the levity of absurdism. Often working in extremes, he asks his performers to create complex sounds with flailing gestures while his electronic music works with shaping harsh noise aggregation, which, at times, grates against the comfort level of his audience Kristopher is a Kalamazoo based composer pursuing a Master’s of Music Composition at Western Michigan University, with a Bachelor’s of Music from Columbia College Chicago. At Columbia, he studied with Kenn Kumpf, Eliza Brown, and Ilya Levinson and is currently studying with Christopher Biggs and Lisa Coons at Western Michigan University. He has worked with many performers and ensembles including the Dutch/American Trio Sonic Hedgehog, the Atar Piano Trio, members of Mocrep, members of Fonema Consort, and members of Ensemble Dal Niente. He is a winner of the MTNA National Composition Competition, the recipient of the Turner Award, and a Hokin Award nominee.
Joo Won Park Joo Won Park loves to create music that makes people laugh like a mad scientist. He performs live with toys, consumer electronics, vegetables, and other nonmusical objects by digitally processing their sounds. He also makes pieces with field recordings, sine waves, and any other sources that he can record or synthesize. Joo Won draws inspirations from swamps, skyscrapers, his two sons, and other soundscapes surrounding him. He has studied at Berklee College of Music and the University of Florida, and currently teaches Music Technology at the Wayne State University. Joo Won’s music and writings are available on ICMC DVD, Spectrum Press, MIT Press, PARMA, Visceral Media, MCSD, SEAMUS, and No Remixes labels. joowonpark.net
Scott L. Miller Scott L. Miller is an American composer described as “a true force on the avantambient scene” of “high adventure avant garde music of the best sort” (ClassicalModern Music Review). Best known for his electroacoustic chamber music and ecosystemic performance pieces, his music is characterized by collaborative approaches to composition and the use of electronics, exploring performer/computer improvisation and re-imagining ancient compositional processes through the lens of 21st century technology. Inspired by the inner-workings of sound and the microscopic in the natural and mechanical worlds, his music is the product of handson experimentation and collaboration with musicians and performers from across the spectrum of styles. His recent work
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BIOS experiments with VR applications in live concerts, first realized in his composition Raba, created for Tallinn-based Ensemble U:. Three time McKnight Composer Fellow, his work is frequently performed by soloists, ensembles, and at festivals throughout North America and Europe. Recordings of his music are available on New Focus Recordings, Innova, and other labels, many featuring his long-time collaborators, the new music ensemble Zeitgeist (and whose albums he produces). His music is published by the American Composers Alliance, Tetractys, and JeannĂŠ. Raba (NFR198) is his most recent album, a collection of audio-visual music drawn from collaborations with six film and video artists. Miller is a Professor of Music at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, where he teaches composition, electroacoustic music and theory. He is Past-President (2014-18) of the Society for ElectroAcoustic Music in the U.S. (SEAMUS) and presently Director of SEAMUS Records.
Cole Pulice Cole Pulice is a saxophonist and improviser based in Minneapolis, MN. Cole creates electroacoustic drone and ambient pieces through combining extended saxophone technique with dynamic electronic systems. Beyond his solo work, Cole loves collaboration, and has worked with Bon Iver, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and many others.
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CONCERT 2 Saturday, February 29, 2020 / 11:00 am-12:30 pm Logan Center for the Arts Performance Penthouse
BRETT MASTELLER WARREN unsound Brett Masteller Warren and Julie Licata, percussion instruments, filters, and surface transducers VIOLA YIP
Lazy Studies
Viola Yip, “Susan” OTHER PLASTICS improvisation MARCEL ZAES
Hunter Brown and Dominic Coles, hacked instruments, no-input mixer, and salvaged appliances
Setting #26
A mediated performance with a found stage, performers with sound-making phones and megaphones, directed by a site-specific instruction score From the series “Setting” (ongoing since 2015)
Megaphone Ensemble Alejandro T. Acierto Darlene Castro Oliver Hickman Stephan Moore Olivia Valentine Cathy van Eck Viola Yip
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BIOS Brett Masteller Warren Brett Masteller Warren (b. 1975) is a sonic artist whose additional monikers include: composer, audio engineer, sound designer, performer, programmer, hacker, builder, and appropriator. Currently teaching as a Lecturer at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, he has previously taught at Northwestern University, SUNY College at Oneonta, Ramapo College of New Jersey, Flashpoint Chicago, The Illinois Institute of Art Chicago, DuPage College, and Canisius College. He studied composition and computer music with Cort Lippe, Christopher Alan Mercer, Richard Dudas, Gary Kendall, and Jonathan Golove.
gestures, instruments, space, as well as her own composer-performer body as an intersectional work-in-progress. Viola’s instruments and performances has been presented in major music festivals and concert series in New York, Missouri, Chicago, San Diego, Boston, Bowling Green (Ohio), Pittsburgh, Ithaca, Saratoga Springs, Los Angelos, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Belfast, Manchester, Huddersfield, Madeira, Ghent, Amsterdam, the Hague, Brussels, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Berlin and Darmstadt.
Other Plastics is the duo improvisation project of Hunter Brown & Dominic Coles.
Julie Licata Julie Licata (b. 1980) is a chamber musician, percussionist, noisemaker, and educator. With a focus on commissioning and premiering works by rising composers, her performances include anything from improvisational soundscapes and feedback to solo marimba to works with live computer processing. Julie also performs with numerous regional ensembles and her duo partner flautist, Ana Laura González. Julie is currently Associate Professor of Percussion at SUNY Oneonta.
Viola Yip A Native of Hong Kong, Viola Yip is a New York-based experimental composer, performer, sound artist and instrument builder. Her recent interests fall on designing new experimental instruments to explore the sonic materiality through found objects, the interactive relationships between performative
Hunter Brown Hunter Brown (b. 1994) is a composer, music technologist, and percussionist based in Chicago Illinois. His musical practice focuses on creating fluid musical spaces by enabling unpredictable, spontaneous, and idiosyncratic interactions between human performers and digital media. In particular, his work explores democratic creative agency, machine autonomy, and human-machine collaboration through a synthesis of improvisation, indeterminate composition, and computer programing. Hunter holds a Bachelor’s of Music in Percussion Performance with a Minor in Technology in Music and the Related Arts (TIMARA) from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and a Masters of Arts in Digital Musics at Dartmouth College. He is currently studying towards a PhD in Music Composition at the University of Chicago.
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Dominic Coles Dominic Coles (b. 1994) is a composer and artist working across media, at the intersection of sound, video, and sculpture. In a diverse body of work that investigates the multivalent hybridity of listening to post-colonial technologies and spaces, Dominic’s sound and installation pieces manifest a complex and noisy interaction of the foreign, distant, and familiar. His work has been presented as part of the Chance & Circumstance Festival curated by Ensemble Pamplemousse and his installative work has been exhibited at the Black Family Visual Arts Center and at Areté Venue and Gallery. He received an MA at Dartmouth University’s Digital Musics program studying with Ashley Fure and Michelle Lou, and received a BA in Music from Yale University.
Marcel Zaes Marcel Zaes (b. 1984 in Bern, Switzerland), is an artist and scholar, holding degrees from Bern University of the Arts and Zurich University of the Arts, and has studied composition with Alvin Curran in Rome and with Peter Ablinger in Berlin. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD in Music & Multimedia Composition at Brown University. Marcel explores the ways in which rhythm forms the basis for community, that is, rhythm affords the sociality that is traditionally called “making music together,” or “dancing together,” even if no such action is involved at all. He investigates rhythm with an interdisciplinary framework that encompasses the socio-cultural background of “groove,” critical race
studies, African American musical heritages, performance, sound, media and dance studies, and the politics of playing along mechanical time. Marcel’s artistic practice encompasses installation pieces, “living installations” with human performers, concert music for ensembles and electronics, and multimedia solo performances that he calls “post techno beat music.” His works consist of assemblages of self-made software codes that act as mechanical time keepers and human performers who “play along.” Most of his pieces harbor an affective potential to perceive and re-think the gap between what is congenitally conceived of as “human,” versus what is conceived of as “mechanical” temporality. For his work, Marcel Zaes has been awarded a number of grants and prizes, has played numerous concerts and taken part in exhibitions internationally, worked numerous times as artist in residence, has had his works played by ensembles internationally, and he has published nine albums to date. Most recently, his work has been showcased at the Center for New Music San Francisco, at the Biennial of Contemporary Arts Lisbon, at ISEA Hong Kong, at Goethe Institute New Delhi, at Cabaret Voltaire Zurich, and at Columbia University in New York. Additional artist bios can be found throughout the program book.
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PAPER SESSION 3: FEEDBACK ECOLOGY Saturday, February 29, 2020 / 1:30-3:30 pm Logan Center for the Arts Performance Penthouse
1:30 pm
Daniel Belgrad Ecological Implications of Live Audio Feedback
2:10 pm
Volker Straebel When acoustic feedback left the stage
2:50 pm
Lauren Hayes Sounding Out Spaces
BIOS Daniel Belgrad Daniel is an American historian specializing in cultural and intellectual history, particularly that of the second half of the twentieth century. He is generally interested in tracing how outsider ideas or attitudes have been articulated and spread as currents in the popular culture. Having been trained in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, he relies on various kinds of textual evidence in piecing together this history, including film, music, literature, painting, and dance, in addition to nonfictional and scientific primary texts. He believes he has done his best work by recovering for intellectual historians some powerful strains of belief in American culture that were flying under the radar, so to speak, because of their resistance to conventional intellectual discourses and because of the diverse forms of expression that they correspondingly took. By tracking down the discursive genealogies of these seemingly scattered cultural
practices and explaining their fundamental commonality, Daniel has been able to bring their underlying ideas into focus in a way that allows us to see how important they really have been. This is the strategy that he has used (and is using) to write his books: The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (1998); The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in Seventies America (2019); and Hearing Voices: Multiplicity and Identity in Seventies America (in process).
Volker Straebel Prof. Volker Straebel is a musicologist focusing on experimental music and sound art, the American and European avantgarde, music aesthetics, and media studies. Since 2015, he is the director of the Sound Studies and Sonic Arts Master’s program at the Berlin University of the Arts after he had served as director of the Electronic Music Studio at the Technical University
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Berlin, 2009-14. He has also composed and performed electronic music and indeterminate works by John Cage and others.
Lauren Hayes Lauren Hayes is a Scottish musician and sound artist who builds and performs with hybrid analogue/digital instruments. She is a “positively ferocious improvisor” (Cycling ‘74), her music refusing to sit nicely between free improv, experimental pop, techno, and noise. Over the last decade she has developed and honed a deliberately challenging and unpredictable performance system that explores the relationships between bodies, sound, environments, and technology. Her work has been presented internationally (e.g. Moogfest, Ableton’s LOOP, hcmf//, NIME, ICMC, MOCO, etc.) and published in major journals including Contemporary Music Review, Computer Music Journal, Organised Sound. She is a member of the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop, directorat-large of the International Computer Music Association, and is currently Assistant Professor of Sound Studies at Arizona State University where she leads Practice and Research in Enactive Sonic Art (pariesa.com).
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CONCERT 3 Saturday, February 29, 2020 / 7:30-9:00pm Logan Center for the Arts Performance Penthouse
CATHY VAN ECK empty chairs Cathy van Eck, electronics OLIVER HICKMAN
Sonorous Noise
Laptop Orchestra Jason Charney Lauren Sarah Hayes Oliver Hickman Brett Masteller Viola Yip Marcel Zaes
BARRY MOON & DOUG NOTTINGHAM Castaway I. Snare drum + computer Barry Moon & Doug Nottingham, snare drum II. Bass drum + computer Barry Moon & Doug Nottingham, bass drum ALEJANDRO T. ACIERTO
Our proximities are tethered with time
Alejandro Acierto, single-channel feedback system
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BIOS Cathy van Eck Cathy van Eck’s bio on page 8.
Oliver Hickman Oliver Hickman is a recent graduate of the Master of Music in Theory and Composition at NYU Steinhardt and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. His works have been performed throughout the United States and Europe by ensembles such as Dal Niente, the JACK Quartet, Chicago Composers Orchestra, Mocrep, the RighteousGIRLS, and the NYU Contemporary Music Ensemble. When he’s not composing, Oliver works in web development and plays guitar in a Pauline Oliveros-inspired ensemble, Consensus.
Barry Moon Barry Moon combines various forms of art and technology to create works that encourage meaningful interactions between humans and computers. This includes music compositions, interactive installations, and digital art. Works for instrumental performance and computer have been performed at the International Computer Music Conference in 1998, 2004, 2006, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2018. Other venues where this body of his work has received international attention has been at the Australasian Computer Music Conference in Melbourne and Perth, the Sonic Circuits festival in Toronto, the InterCollege Computer Music festival in Tokyo, the MIX.01 in Aarhus, Festival in Denmark and Sweden, the MAXIS Festival in Leeds UK, Digital Arts and Culture Conference in Doncaster
UK, the real-time/non real time festival, ´ ˛skie Dni Muzyki Basel, Switzerland, and Sla Współczesnej in Katowice Poland. Barry is Associate Professor in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance program at Arizona State University.
Douglas Nottingham Dr. Douglas Nottingham has been active throughout the U.S. as a percussionist, multi-media performance artist/ technologist, composer, music educator, recording artist and producer. As a performer, he is experienced in many diverse genres, running a wide gamut ranging from symphony orchestras to world-beat jazz groups, contemporary chamber music ensembles to drums corps and original heavy metal bands to ethnomusicological ensembles. As an electro-acoustic musician and composer, he performs and composes with pincushioned, his collaboration with Dr. Barry Moon. Since 2007 the group has been seeking to reexamine multimedia by artfully combining emerging and anachronistic technologies to create improvised performances of nonlinear sound and visuals. pincushioned frequently appears in festival, gallery and concert settings, often incorporating site-specific elements and trans-media arts collaborations. They recently embarked on a comprehensive national featuring over 40 performances, masterclass presentations, guest lecture/ demonstrations and collaborative performances at host institutions and venues.
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BIOS Dr. Nottingham lectures at Glendale Community College, where he has developed a comprehensive curriculum and facility for the study of synthesis, electronic/computer music and sound design.
Alejandro T. Acierto Alejandro T. Acierto is an artist and musician whose work is largely informed by the breath, the voice, and the processes that enable them. He has exhibited artworks at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Issue Project Room, MCA Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, and Roman Susan and presented performance works at Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival, the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, the KANEKO, Center for Performance Research, and Center for New Music and Technology. Recent projects were shown at the 2019 Havana Biennial in Matanzas and Boundary Gallery in Chicago. Noted for his “insatiable” performance by the New York Times, Acierto has performed written and improvised music extensively throughout the US and abroad as a soloist and chamber musician. He is also a clarinetist and founding member of the Chicago-based new music collective Ensemble Dal Niente.
of Music, an MFA in New Media Arts from University Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and was an inaugural Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University. He is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Digital Art and New Media at Vanderbilt University. Additional artist bios can be found throughout the program book.
Acierto has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, VCCA, Banff Centre, High Concept Laboratories, LATITUDE, Chicago Artists’ Coalition and was an FT/FN/FG Consortium Fellow and a Center Program Artist at the Hyde Park Art Center. A 3Arts Awardee, he received his undergraduate degree from DePaul University, an MM from Manhattan School
19 | Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition
CHICAGO CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY COMPOSITION The Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago is a dynamic, collaborative, and interdisciplinary environment for the creation, performance and study of new music and for the advancement of the careers of emerging and established composers, performers, and scholars. Distinguished by its formation within an uncompromising, relentlessly searching, and ceaselessly innovative scholarly environment that celebrates excellence and presents new possibilities for intellectual dialogue, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition is comprised of ten integrated entities: an annual concert series with the resident Grossman Ensemble, CHIME (Chicago Integrated Media Experimental Studio), visiting ensembles, distinguished guest composers, performances, recordings, research, graduate student-led projects, workshops, and postdoctoral research positions. FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR Augusta Read Thomas ADVISORY BOARD Seth Brodsky Anthony Cheung Jennifer Iverson Amy Iwano Travis Jackson Sam Pluta Barbara Schubert
STAFF Daniel Meyers, Marketing Coordinator Will Myers, Operations Assistant Maria Savannah, Operations Coordinator Claire Snarski, Graphic Designer Margo Strebig, Director of Communications CHIMEFEST 2020 TEAM Ted Moore, Director Darlene Castro, Assistant Director Maria Kaoutzani, Assistant Director
The Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition relies on the financial support of its patrons and friends to present world-class contemporary music programs. You, and other supporters like you, are at the core of the CCCC. Please consider sharing your love of contemporary music by making a contribution.
cccc.uchicago.edu SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SUPPORTERS MAJOR SUPPORTERS Carolyn (Kay) Bucksbaum Gay K. Stanek Sanford J. Grossman Charitable Trust
2018-19 CONTRIBUTORS John Bierbusse (in-kind) Ingrid Gould, AB'86, AM'88, and Robert Hsiung James F. Melchert, MFA'57 Debra Karen Moskovits, PhD'85 in honor of Jack W. Fuller Benjamin Stanigar, AB'94
2019-20 CONTRIBUTORS Robert Anstee, AB'93 John Balfe Nancy Herring Donald L. Kass, SB'67 Daryl Koehn, AB'77, AM'83, PhD'91, and Julian Brown, AB'77, AM'78 Deborah Sellers