Electronic Music Studio - Concert I

Sunday, December 13, 2020 at 7:30pm, Stark Opera Studio

Imaginary Soundscapes

Sivan Cohen Elias, EMS director

Stephan Carlson, teaching assistant

Program

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Pastel

Angelica Emrich

Séance on the Blacktop

Maxwell Denney
        Séance on the Blacktop looks to create a listening environment of vulnerability, openness, and soft focus, as well as explore the beauty and resonances found in audio feedback. The core of the piece is a tempo canon, with the three melodic voices moving through the same material at different rates.

Desert of Life

Colin Cline

Soliloquy

Stephan Carlson
        Soliloquy is a setting of text from the book of Job and focuses on the content of the soliloquy found in chapter three.

Eternal Pilgrim

Maxwell Denney

Mylar - Two Electronic Miniatures, for fixed media and video

Stephan Carlson
        The work examines the disorientating effect of endlessly competing interpretations that are so prevalent, more than ever, in physical and virtual societal discourse, constantly entangling, merging with and separating from one another. The video creates an ever-changing face-like feature that both mirror and distort suggestions of an underlying order. This video-electronics piece is one layer within a large-scale interactive work in progress.

Soundscape

Jessica Dzielinski

Hyperdistanced

Ramin Roshandel

Choreography: Stephanie Miracle in collaboration with the dancers

Costume Designer: Margaret Wenk-Kuchlbauer

Film: Stephanie Miracle and Auden Lincoln-Vogel, co-directors

Cinematography: Auden Lincoln-Vogel

Dancers

Leigh Durian, Ianka Hou, Jessie Madden

Katherine Shamdin, Kate Vincek, Ellen Welch

Dolly Grip: Stephanie Miracle
        In this season of separation, sanitation, and safety protocols, Hyperdistanced was born: a dance film containing collective questions and playful investigations into the meaning of proximity and connection during this time.

Boxed Up and Stored Away

Brendon P. Van Dorn

Brick by Brick

Trinton Prater

Instrumentation: String ensemble and fixed media

Strings: The Center for New Music Ensemble
        Brick by Brick uses types and levels of density to imitate the process of a wall being built up, standing, and falling down. The strings interface with their instrument in a cyclical motion, moving up and down the bridge of the instrument, sometimes spending more or less time playing on a given spot. The fixed media supports the sounds created by this movement, increasing the saturation of particular timbres that are typically more difficult to hear.

Sublimation

Stephan Carlson
        Program Note: A work in progress.

Tranquility

Will Yager & Jean-François Charles

Double Bass: Will Yager

Live Electronics: Jean-François Charles
        Tranquility is a sonic exploration of the sound of the double bass. The performers- composers created this piece in 2020, working in different spaces and times. Upon hearing it, some listeners found it “cool,” “fly,” or “serene,” which helped settle on the title. All electronic sounds are generated live from the sound of the double bass.
       
Sivan Cohen Elias’s work is cross-disciplinary, using the body, everyday objects, installations, technological interventions, and musical instruments to all constantly contribute to and disrupt, one another’s domains. In her work, she looks to materials that appear in “in-between” places; places where contradictory impulses — musical performance, play, task, absurdity, tension, humor — operate simultaneously. Described by the New York Times as “deconstructing the instruments themselves,” Cohen Elias’s work involves performers frequently appearing in dual roles as producers of sound, agents of choreography, and puppeteers of objects. Cohen Elias has been the recipient of numerous international awards, residencies, and commissions, including the Music Theatre Composition Staatstheater Darmstadt Prize (2016), Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship (2012–13) and the Impuls International Composition Competition (2009). Cohen Elias’s works have been commissioned, broadcast and performed by ensembles and performers (including herself) in and around the United States, Europe, Russia, and Israel. Collaborators include Staatstheater Darmstadt, Klangforum Wien, MusikFabrik, Mosaik, Dal Niente, and JACK Quartet, among many others, and festival appearances include Darmstadt Fereinkurse, Bludenz, Wien Modern, Witten, Warsaw Autumn, and Bang on a Can. She received her doctoral degree from Harvard University, where she studied with composer Chaya Czernowin. Since 2018, Cohen Elias has been a visiting assistant professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches applied composition and music technology, as well as serving as the director of the electronic music studios.