Sound and Video Anthology: Program Notes

When Computer Music Journal’s Editor, Doug Keislar, invited me to create an anthology for the Journal, I decided to focus on the intersecting lines that reflect my personal, rather wide interests in music and sound. My artistic journey was most strongly influenced by three figures: Clarence Barlow, whom I met in Cologne in the early 1980s, György Ligeti, whose composition seminars I regularly attended in Hamburg in the late 1980s, and David Wessel, who became my mentor at UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) in the 1990s. These three outstanding individuals sharpened my artistic sensibilities, which encompass the creation of musical works, the development of software to facilitate artistic expression, and the foundation of theoretical frameworks for areas such as microtonality or networked music performance.Over the years I have crossed my path with like-minded people whose talents and artistic visions have deeply impressed me and whose works I would like present in this anthology. Cat Hope is an Australian composer whose radical approach to graphical and animated notation has opened the possibilities of an alternative music practice harnessed by the power of digital media and realized in her opera Speechlessness. Alexander Schubert is a German composer whose integrity and talent as artist and designer of large-scale multimedia projects such as Asterism has brought him international acclaim. Aigerim Seilova and Xiao Fu are composers from Kazakhstan and China, respectively, who have succeeded in amalgamating their own cultural roots with Western culture. They each have contributed a scene to the multimedia theater work A Space Journey included in the Anthology and premiered in 2022 at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama. It featured a choir and ensemble of instrumentalists performing in the non-octave Bohlen-Pierce scale. In the same vein, Marc Sabat is a Canadian composer living in Berlin who created a large body of compositions and theoretical work on tunings and has developed with composer Wolfgang von Schweinitz a framework for the notation of music in just intonation called The Extended Helmholtz-Ellis Just Intonation (JI) Pitch Notation. His piece Lying in the Grass, River and Clouds is concerned with tempered and just intonation tuning and uses electronic sounds to connect the two worlds. Anthony De Ritis is an American composer with whom I share my love for Chinese culture. He has dedicated a substantial amount of his work to the intercultural dialogue manifest in pieces such as Shui. Life., in which he uses a Chinese erhu accompanied by video clips and audio samples of water. Rama Gottfried is an American composer and software designer. I had the great fortune to collaborate with Rama on the Symphony in the St. Pauli Elbe Tunnel project in Hamburg, which featured 144 musicians and for which we developed a networked performance system synchronizing the performers over a large distance. His Scenes from the Plastisphere depict a musical theater of imaginary hybrid creatures digitally magnified via sound amplification and video projection. And lastly, Constantin Basica is a Romanian composer concerned with aspects of narrativity and the hybrid form of storytelling. With the exception of Sabat's instrumental composition, the chosen pieces have one thing in common: they move in a utopian space combining music, imagery, and interaction to create a formidable multimedia experience.Speechless is a 60-minute opera for four soloists, refugee choir, and bass orchestra. It is a wordless, animated notation opera intended as a personal response to the plight of refugees worldwide, drawing on the 2014 Australian Human Rights Commission report “The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention” as a starting point.The opera, directed by the composer, was co-commissioned and premiered to critical acclaim at the Perth Festival in 2019 over six sold-out nights, was awarded an AMC APRA AMCOS Art Music Award in 2020 for Best New Work (Dramatic), and received a nomination in the Helpmann Awards for music direction. The premiere was produced by Tura New Music with support from the Australia Council for the Arts and the Western Australia Department of Cultural Industries. It was hailed as the first opera relying entirely on animated notation, delivered by the Decibel ScorePlayer software co-developed by Cat Hope.On 3 May 2023, the European premiere took place, with a chamber concert version staged as part of the Ligeti Festival, celebrating György Ligeti's centenary, at the Forum of the University for Music and Drama in Hamburg, Germany.Cat Hope is a classically trained flutist, self-taught vocalist, experimental bassist, composer, and artistic director of Decibel new music ensemble. Her music is conceptually driven, using graphic scores, acoustic/electronic combinations, and digital scores. Her music has been discussed in books such as Hidden Alliances (Schimmana 2019), Sonic Writing (Magnusson 2019), Loading the Silence (Kouvaris 2013), Women of Note (Appleby 2012), and Sounding Postmodernism (Bennett 2011), as well as periodicals such as Gramophone, The Wire, Limelight, and Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Her 2017 monograph CD Ephemeral Rivers (Hat[Art]Hut) won the German Record Critics prize that year, when Gramophone magazine called her “one of Australia's most exciting and individual creative voices.” Cat is professor of music at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where she is part of the “DigiScore” European Research Council project and leader of the music notations research group. She is the co-author of the book Digital Arts – An Introduction to New Media (2014).Cat Hope's sonic practice focuses on low-frequency sound in both literal and conceptual frameworks. She explores systems for creating and reading graphic notations for music that facilitate this interest, including software development as well as new compositions, improvisations, performances, and more-traditional research outputs. Hope also researches early Australian electronic music, composers such as Giacinto Scelsi and Fausto Romitelli, digital archiving for music, art activism, and issues around gender in music.Further information: https://www.cathope.com/art-work-speechlessAsterism is a site-specific installation running for 48 hours nonstop in a black-box hall. In this setting, a piece of nature is recreated that includes a mountain, soil, a lake, and environmental aspects such as rain, heat, and wind. The installation serves as a destination for a pilgrimage, where the audience can wander towards and then engage with the setting for as long as they want. The installation provides an immersive setting including performance, light, and sound design, and sections in which the digital entity speaks to the audience. These predictions or prophecies are generated in real time and are AI-based so that the content always changes and is unpredictable. The whole performance is subdivided into modules with different performers active in different sections. When one enters the installation makes a significant difference. The performative part consists of a choir, a percussion ensemble, and dancers. It features aspects of rituals, machine-like behavior, artificial movement patterns, and virtual-like personas.The key motivation behind this work is switching between opposing worlds. A nature-like and emotionally immersive setting is created to be as persuasive as possible, only to be then dismantled and to show its underlying components. It is a process of creating reality, belief, and spirituality. That this is an act of illusion, staging, and virtual construction is the core of this happening. It switches between contrasting poles of humanity vs. technology, nature vs. science, or abstraction vs. immersion. The aim is a virtual world: a place in which is everything is possible but also everything is intrinsically constructed and thereby hollow. It provides a space dislocated from time and surroundings, like a church, a computer game, or a programming environment. In this reduction the visitor may find a calming comfort of surrender or a hollowed-out emptiness.The audience members visiting the area are handed a foldout-flyer in advance, propagating the space as a pseudoreligious site. The participants should experience the way there as part of the process, as well as the waiting in line. Upon entering the site, they first pass through an entering and resetting stage, in which they are submitted to bright light and white noise followed by complete blackness and silence. Within the area, each visitor is invited to experience the event on their own, as a personal situation, but with a sect-like context of the surrounding visitors and performers. The waiting for events to take place is part of the scenery. Visitors are even invited to sleep within the setting.The piece is realized as an AI-aided composition process in which the basis is the creation of a set of AI programs that generate sonic modules (based on stochastic pattern generation, data crawling, etc.). These modules will then be refined and curated by the composer to allow a formal dramaturgy of the evening. Roughly a third of the components will remain probabilistic in the actual presentation of the piece, which means that timing, ornaments, text, durations, and intensities are subject to constant change and evolvement.The setting is an ex nihilo constellation based on anchoring artificial digital worlds in an analog setting. The concept involves reference points, coordinates that enable an overlay between a virtual and a “real” world. Like a render context in a 3-D program, this strip of landscape is constructed and modeled like a simulated space for simulated rituals and miracles. A hyperreal space that is empty, hollow, and unreal but also subjective, personal, and comforting. In this post-digital sanctuary you can encounter a spiritual digital entity. It allows both a devoted surrender as well as a distanced skepticism—and ultimately a switching between these worlds.Born in 1979 in Bremen, Alexander Schubert studied bioinformatics in Leipzig and multimedia composition in Hamburg with Georg Hajdu and Manfred Stahnke.Schubert's work explores the intersection of acoustic and electronic music, blending genres like hardcore, free jazz, techno, and contemporary classical music. Drawing on personal experience, his compositions prioritize energy and intensity, often incorporating improvisation and pushing the boundaries between notated and improvised music. Performance plays a central role in his work, with a focus on gesture and body movement to enhance the musical experience.Since 2009, Schubert has specialized in sensor-based gestural composition, contributing to international conferences and collaborating with global institutions. His technical background as a computer scientist supports his innovative use of technology and sensors, integrating aesthetic, technical, and scientific elements into his interdisciplinary work.Schubert is a founding member of Decoder Ensemble and has curated contemporary electronic music festivals. His compositions have earned recognition with prizes and scholarships from Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM), Giga-Hertz Prize, Bourges, and the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC). His works, commissioned by institutions such as l'Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), Ensemble Resonanz, and Kulturstiftung Hamburg, have been performed over 400 times in more than 35 countries by leading ensembles like Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Decoder Ensemble. Performances include venues and festivals such as IRCAM Paris, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, ZKM Karlsruhe, and Wiener Festwochen. He is currently professor of multimedia composition at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama.More information: https://www.alexanderschubert.net/works/Asterism.phpThe piece is a multimedia, musical, and performative exploration of the topic of dark makes around of and we can only at In to of It with the of and at the same time on are only the of creation in the of construction of this piece a performance approach where the is delivered via video on for performers. approach uses a an of networked this are to by performers via a area The composition a global with Within each performers encounter notated where they elements such as and these elements remain the may these or times within the time their role as rather than of notated music. The instrumental ensemble, performing in the Bohlen-Pierce consists of two Bohlen-Pierce and The choir of each of and elements (based on a by through including and The features a and an ensemble of contributing to the multimedia nature of the approach to a of composition and the exploration of the and aspects of based in Hamburg, is a composer, and media for her compositions by a of and a Seilova studied composition at the and is currently a in artistic research at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama. a of including sensors, and she immersive and innovative musical compositions have been for their and sound intensity, the music has been and commissioned by ensembles worldwide, including the Ensemble Symphony and such as and have brought her compositions to on the global Her chamber and compositions, featured at festivals like Music Festival, Festival, and the Seilova has received scholarships from institutions such as the and the Her as a at the Music Center of the Symphony as part of the her artistic 2023, her music theater piece in with Ensemble by the as part of her from the Seilova the at the Music Festival in she serves as the of the Hamburg of the German information: piece is in four and performed by a choir, three Bohlen-Pierce and the The electronic music is generated in real time using a to the A of the work in its which project Space to of into sound through the process of composition explores the concept of Fu and from the für und Hamburg, and is the of the which a new of from jazz, and music around the world. the Xiao in the Hamburg for the concert of the the project and in the the of acoustic and electronic music, she is in gesture of and Her compositions and chamber music with have been performed at music festivals in and such as the Hamburg the Festival Music in 2014 in New Music Festival and 2017 at National in New and the International Conference on Technologies for Music and 2022 in She with ensembles and including Decibel Ensemble Ensemble Decoder and Ensemble and she has been in projects such as the sound installation at Hamburg, at Hamburg and Symphony in the St. Pauli Elbe information: work for is the piece of music to by for and It may be performed as a concert work, on its own, or place a setting of the three works in a with the The part is to that of but is on a concert rather than an acoustic computer the including a digital a free the in the Grass, River and Clouds is a sound as a into and of The of the intonation are within a of based on The space and the within a for using an of The electronic uses a to electronic that the two tuning the musicians their by including the is a free is and in a in or four the lines to remain The individual lines are in of the but may be with as intonation and the music is place in the and between sounds produced by the should to the between and allow to of as a of to these sound part will often and with the which are to to each based on and The is always to these even a by and by the percussion and by the and generated by the digital composer of Marc Sabat has been based in Berlin He makes pieces for and drawing from research the and of He his practice to music of exploration and dialogue between different of experience and cultural self-taught as a composer, Sabat studied at the University of and the in New as well as computer music at He also with and With Wolfgang von he developed the Extended Helmholtz-Ellis Pitch and is a of instrumental music and performed in Sabat's work is and in He composition and the and practice of intonation at the Berlin and is currently a research at the with and he the Space in was for Chinese and video projection. It was commissioned by of the for for a concert and international as the of of the great the which featured at the in New on the of Shui. was also at the at the in as part of the for a by to of the of the between and the has received performances, including at David of and as part of the concert event for new by the of the on erhu is a musical in performance, in and as one of a within Chinese It is the most of the of by of Shui. includes for including of of improvisation based on and use of graphic performance, Shui. is with a video of by designer The audio consists of a of and using to for her in and the An of Shui. was by at the Performance at Music on and by on Anthony De Music – In David Wessel, on as a American and whose works on and electronic Anthony De Ritis has earned international acclaim with at and the in His works and with including a de and as of American CD His third on the works for Chinese for was performed at and his innovative work incorporating sound was by the a and at the of he for and on the International of the Media and His research includes at International Center and with and Chinese Ritis earned his in composition at UC David at and from University and He also studied in and and earned an in from A of music technology program, he is a professor and music as well as a member of the Music information: the of a new is that have the is to that on will to the of but on the the may be one which supports as we Scenes from the Plastisphere a musical theater of imaginary hybrid creatures within and around with and with digital of to this piece for performers and a performance of of movement at different performers on are to performing in a The is in of but just only through from the stage, and the digitally magnified sound amplification and video through a of contrasting in the a between the The of the are and within the virtual They are artificial components of the are brought to through sonic and the The for the piece the within the but the is the in the the performers the and in an of from the Plastisphere was commissioned through the von and works aim to to the of that connect and the and that His pieces are as with that move and in and constructed from the of acoustic and electronic instrumental and and the site-specific performance to through the of and the works to the audience and of in New in Rama in where he instrumental and electronic music at an early and art focus to music performance and to New in he Ensemble collaborating with the from on to the of and performance works have been featured at Festival, and and he has created sound for the and the first composition and at the University of New and the of In he a at the where he studied composition with and in he received his in music composition and new media from the University of where he studied composition with and computer music with David Wessel, and at Rama was awarded the UC and was for the at IRCAM instrumental to audio In he was in at IRCAM and ZKM on notation and performance systems for Rama at the für und Hamburg as a and in the of multimedia composition, and from he the für von in media performance Rama was professor of contemporary computer music practice at the where he and interdisciplinary art and technology research at the for Computer Music and Technologies information: is a version of commissioned by for the and by in The to the of the premiere which included a by the composer in to the and was for sound as part of the music The video and audio was by the composer in and at Center for Computer Research in Music and Basica is a Romanian composer living in the whose work focuses on between music, and performers. His includes pieces for chamber and His works have been performed in and by and ensembles such as Ensemble Ensemble and the festivals and conferences that have featured his works are the Festival New Media Festival the International of New Music New Arts Festival the International Festival for Art and Music for Music of the 2017 and International Computer Music Conference and and the and Music Conference and He received the Award for Best from at the in earned a in composition at University the of and His Georg Manfred and his and at the Hamburg University of Music and as well as and his in composition and at the National University of Music an Constantin has and at de in and the and Music in Hamburg, as well as at the International Center for Research and in and Technologies the National of and the National University of Music in He is the of the 2022 the Prize, and the Award for in in the of music at In Constantin has with and on the development of AI for he is a at information:

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.