In June, there’s good reason to shuffle off to Buffalo: The
June in Buffalo festival. To the outside world, June in Buffalo, started by
composer Morton Feldman in 1975, is a week of contemporary music concerts
hosted by the University at Buffalo. To participating young composers, however,
it is a conference of workshops that bring them in contact with more
established composers, who serve as “resident faculty” for the week.
Afternoon
concerts present the younger composers’ music; evening concerts present music
of the resident faculty composers. (Most of the concerts are free.) Each
morning the resident faculty composers give lectures and critiques.
In 2000,
festival director David Felder “started ‘thematic programming’ as a way to
focus the festival.” This year the theme is music and computers — also known
as “computer music.”
If music
has an international language, it must be computer-eze. The festival this year
has 18 resident faculty composers flying in from Asia, Europe, and all over
North America.
Due to the
wonders of technology (e-mail), it was not hard to get the composers to spill
the beans on the latest trends in computer music. They make it clear: The three
most important words in today’s computer music are interaction, interaction,
and interaction. And what makes interaction between mind and machine more
attractive than ever is the power of today’s computers.
“Speed
is not just a matter of convenience,” says Roger Reynolds of UC San Diego “it
is the difference between guesswork — I’ll try this and hope I’m right —
and interactive work in which constant adjustments are possible as one seeks a
particular result.”
What about
interaction between machines and live musicians? “Earlier electronic musics
were based on fixing elements to an electronic tape,” says Ed Campion of UC
Berkeley, “or [more recently] subjecting a live sound to some kind of real-time
technological process.”
For
instance, in Lucent Auquarelle (Friday, June 4), by Takayuki Rai of Japan: “The live computer system samples
the sound of the harp, performs digital signal processing on it, and reproduces
the transformed harp sound in the hall in real-time,” Rai says.
Yet
“today’s computers,” Campion adds, “can [also] participate with live
instrumentalists in fantastic, new, musically rich ways.”
One example
is Not About Water (Thursday, June
3). “It is written for a quartet of three acoustic instruments and computer,”
says composer Robert Rowe of New York University. “The computer is listening to
the piano and adding its [own] part in synchrony with the human performers.”
“There is
also an implicit tension in the combination [of computer and live
instrumentalist] which I find compelling,” adds Cort Lippe of University at
Buffalo. Just because musicians and machines can play nice, doesn’t mean they
always do.
“The
electronic world (akin to the artificial) and the acoustic worlds don’t
naturally cohere,” Campion says, “and that is the underlying theme of most of
my compositions with computer and electronics. At the end of Losing Touch [Wednesday, June 2] the
fixed electronic part becomes a mechanical set of sequences that the soloist
cannot and does not care to follow.”
“The next
step,” says University of Montreal’s Robert Normandeau, “will see the
development of new interfaces that will replace the mouse and the keyboard and
will behave more like a conventional instrument.” Or, as Denmark’s Lars
Graugaard calls it, “a unique category of instruments.”
For many
composers, the computer is already the instrument of choice; working directly
with sound, composers are more self-sufficient. “The composer then is closer to
a painter or to a writer; there is no intermediate between his thoughts and the
music,” says Normandeau. “It is like making an animation film for a filmmaker.”
Computers
also allow the composer to play instrument-maker. “I now consistently develop
my own sound-processing tools as an integral part of the compositional
process,” says Ben Thigpen, who flies in from Paris. “This allows me to imagine
and implement processes that will have just the kind of animation and energy
that I need for a certain piece, rather than working within the limitations of
pre-packaged [software] programs — which are never aesthetically neutral.”
It’s not
all about technology, though. Several of the works focus on nature. In Elainie
Lilliois’s Earth Ascending (Saturday,
June 5) “themes of earth, water, fire, and nature play central roles in each of
the three texts [by three contemporary women poets],” Lilliois says. “The first
text, Earth-Body, Light-Body,
represents an ethereal journey, a realization of the unity between nature and
the self.” Aural images of sand and water create the mood.
High
culture, pop culture, and culture-clash provide other inspirations:
Normandeau’s StrinGDberg is for a
production of August Strindberg’s play Miss
Julie. The 1960s psychedelic aesthetic, Iron Butterfly, and Led Zeppelininspired Heavy/Light, a piece by Princeton’s Steven Mackey. A trip through
India, playing Bach solo cello suites, inspired With Dadaji in Paradise, by MIT’s Tod Machover.
Computer
music offers something for nearly every musical impulse. Your children’s could
be next. On Tuesday, June 1, Fisher Price will demonstrate Hyperscore, Tod Machover’s computer music software for kids. It now
comes as a handheld toy — so if you know any potential junior computer music
composers, be sure to bring them along.
June in Buffalo,
will include nine afternoon and evening concerts from Tuesday, June 1, through
Saturday, June 5, at University at Buffalo North Campus and Albright-Knox Art
Gallery. Info: www.music.buffalo.edu/juneinbuffalo,
716-645-2765 ext 1254.
This article appears in May 26 – Jun 1, 2004.
