Other Minds Festival 27

Subotnick: Portrait of an Electronic Music Pioneer
Screening of a new documentary about composer Morton Subotnick, and a discussion afterwards with Subotnick, with Charles Amirkhanian hosting.

Ellen Arkbro – Clouds for Three Tubas (2022), with Mattie Barbier, Mason Moy, and Luke Storm; Chords for Trumpet (2023)
Craig Taborn, piano – Improvised Set

Linda Bouchard – Murmuration, Pandemonium, Gathering; Ensemble TriOcular + (Charlotte Hug, voice and violin; François Houle, clarinet; Lori Freedman, bass and contrabass clarinet; Guillaume Barrette, technical advisor)
Morton Subotnick, electronics and Lillevan, video – As I Live & Breathe

Mary Kouyoumdjian – They Will Take My Island, Friction Quartet, Recenia Quartet
Artur Avanesov– Tezeta, Artur Avanesov, piano and Quasi Harena Maris; Artur Avanesov, piano; Recenia Quartet
Carl Stone – Kurikara, Oasobi, Tukdin, Carl Stone, laptop; Sonamu, Sarah Cahill, piano; Mian, Carl Stone, laptop, Ned Rothenberg, winds, Paul Dresher, Hurdy Grande

Neil Rolnick – Lockdown Fantasies, Geoffrey Burleson, piano and Neil Rolnick, electronics
Bora Yoon, voice, violin, electronics and Joshue Ott, video– ( (( PHONATION )) )
Eivind Buene – Chorales (OM commission) and Grid, Friction Quartet

Re:gendo is an evening-length immersive performance utilizing Gray Area’s superb audio and video capabilities. The composer Carl Stone performs live computer-based electronics with music distributed using a multichannel sound system throughout the space. The music will be accompanied by still and drone photography, and by Japanese vocalist Akaihirume.

Artur Avanesov was born in 1980 in Moscow and, from 1997 to 2002, studied piano and composition at the Yerevan State Conservatory in Armenia. Subsequently, he completed postgraduate studies in composition and musicology at the same conservatory, simultaneously taking piano master courses abroad, notably as a member of the Lucerne Festival Academy 2003-05, as well as with Ensemble Recherche in Freiburg, Germany (2007). In 2005, he was awarded a Doctor of Arts degree for his research on Zen Buddhism in 20th century music. He is currently Assistant Professor at the American University of Armenia. As both composer and performer, he has released a number of CDs with such labels as Deutsche Grammophon, Brilliant Classics, Albany Records, and Suoni e Colori.

Born in Val-d’Or, Quebec, Linda Bouchard has been active for over 40 years as a composer, orchestrator, conductor, mentor, and researcher. Bouchard is the recipient the SOCAN Jan V. Matejcek Award for New Classical Music (2023), the Composer of the Year Award from the Conseil Québécois de la Culture (1998), the Joseph S. Stauffer Award from the Canada Council for the Arts (1999), the Davidson Award (2017), and several SOCAN awards (1983, 1984, 1986).  In 1997, she moved to San Francisco, California. She has also received a multiyear grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for her project titled “Live Structures,” which she developed in partnership with Matralab at Concordia University in Montreal. In 2022-23, she is a resident researcher at CNMAT, UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies.

Eivind Buene studied at the Norwegian Academy of Music from 1992 to 1998, and the following two years he was composer in residence with the Oslo Sinfonietta. Since 2000, he has been living and working in Oslo, and he is currently professor of composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music. Buene has collaborated with a wide array of international ensembles and orchestras, with commissions from among others Ensemble intercontemporain, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Klangforum Wien, London Sinfonietta, and Berliner Philharmoniker. He has an extensive discography, including Possible Cities/Essential Landscapes, that was awarded a Norwegian Grammy.

Mary Kouyoumdjian is a composer and documentarian with projects ranging from concert works to multimedia collaborations and film scores. As a first generation Armenian-American and having come from a family directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, she uses a sonic palette that draws on her heritage, interest in music as documentary, and background in experimental composition to progressively blend the old with the new. A strong believer in freedom of speech and the arts as an amplifier of expression, her compositional work often integrates recorded testimonies with resilient individuals and field recordings of place to invite empathy by humanizing complex experiences around social and political conflict.

Lillevan is an animation, video, and media artist perhaps best known as a founding member of the visual/music group Rechenzentrum (1997-2008). Lillevan has performed and collaborated with many artists from a wide array of genres, from opera to installation, from minimal electronic experimentalism to dance and classical music. Since the mid-90s, he has mainly investigated non-narrative facets of film. This has led to completely abstract works, but also to collage explorations of film history, to interactive works for dance groups, and much more. His focus is often on the musicality of the imagery, thus defining the moving imagery as an instrument in its own right as opposed to accompanying music. Intensity and texture are more important than narrative and figure, the relationships between the image’s elements and the viewing eye, between the eye, the mind and the soul are explored.

Joshue Ott is a visualist and software designer who creates cinematic visual improvisations that are performed live and projected in large scale. Working from hand-drawn forms manipulated in real time with superDraw, a software instrument of his own design, Ott composes evolving images that reside somewhere between minimalism, psychedelia, and Cagean chance. He has performed with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall; with Son Lux at MASS MoCA; with Gina Gibney Dance at the Baryshnikov Arts Center; and frequently at venues throughout NYC, including Le Poisson Rouge and Roulette. Installation works include a large-scale audience interactive performance at the Harpa concert hall in Reykjavik, Iceland, a collaborative drawing system installed on the IAC Center’s 120-foot-long video wall, and a collaborative drawing installation at the NASA Ames Research Center.

Composer Neil Rolnick pioneered in the use of computers in musical performance, beginning in the late 1970s. Based in New York City since 2002, his music has been performed worldwide, including recent performances in Cuba, China, Mexico, and across the US and Europe. His string quartet Oceans Eat Cities was performed at COP21, the UN Global Climate Summit in Paris in December 2015. Rolnick’s music often explores combinations of digital sampling, interactive multimedia, and acoustic vocal, chamber, and orchestral works. In the 1980s and 1990s, he developed the first integrated electronic arts graduate and undergraduate programs in the US, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s iEAR Studios in Troy, New York. Though much of his work has been in areas which connect music and technology, and is therefore considered in the realm of “experimental” music, his music has always been highly melodic and accessible.

Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music and has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling” and “one of the best composers living in [the USA] today.” He has used computers in live performance since 1986. Stone was born in Los Angeles and now divides his time between Los Angeles and Japan. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the Near East. In addition to his schedule of performance, composition, and touring, he is on the faculty of the Department of Media Engineering at Chukyo University in Japan.

Morton Subotnick is an American composer of electronic music, best known for his 1967 composition Silver Apples of the Moon, the first electronic work commissioned by a record company, Nonesuch. He has worked extensively with interactive electronics and multi-media, co-founding the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Ramon Sender. Subotnick was one of the founding members of California Institute of the Arts, where he taught for many years. He is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and multi-media performance and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. Most of his music calls for a computer part, or live electronic processing; his oeuvre utilizes many of the important technological breakthroughs in the history of the genre.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Craig Taborn has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over twenty five years. He has experience composing for and performing in a wide variety of situations including jazz, new music, electronic, rock, noise, and avant garde contexts. Taborn is currently occupied creating and performing music for solo piano performance (Avenging Angel), piano trio (Craig Taborn Trio), an electronic project (Junk Magic), the Daylight Ghosts Quartet, a piano/drums/electronics duo with Dave King (Heroic Enthusiasts), and a new trio with Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith as well as piano duo collaborations with Vijay Iyer (The Transitory Poems), Kris Davis (Octopus), and Cory Smythe. He is also a member of the instrumental electronic art-pop group Golden Valley is Now and performs frequently on solo electronics.

Bora Yoon is a Korean-American composer, vocalist, and sound artist who conjures audiovisual soundscapes using digital devices, voice, and instruments from a variety of cultures and historical centuries to formulate a storytelling through music, movement, and sound. Featured on the front-page of the Wall-Street Journal, WIRE magazine, TED, and the National Endowment for the Arts podcast for her use of unusual instruments and everyday found objects as music, she evokes what George Lewis describes as “a kind of sonic memory garden” – using voice, viola, Tibetan singing bowls, vocoder, Bible pages, bike bells, turntable, walkie-talkies, chimes, water, and electronics. Yoon has presented her work at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, BAM, Visiones Sonoras (Mexico), TED Conferences, Festival of World Cultures (Poland), and MADE Festival (Sweden) and provided the live score for Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle.