Category: Concert

Phantom of the opera

In celebration of Friday the thirteenth, Franz Danksagmüller and friends will perform a live sound track for the 1925 silent film The Phantom of the Opera in the Concert Hall of the Musikhochschule Lübeck (MHL).

Stummfilmprojekt

Organ, harmonium, and soprano (all three processed through Kyma), piano, percussion, and the haunting sounds of the Gullyphone (Danksagmüller’s own invention, now complete with black light LEDs!) will all be contributing to the mysterious and dramatic live soundscape.

Friday the thirteenth of June 2014 at 8 pm in Lübeck at the MHL Großer Saal.

StummfilmprojektStummfilmprojekt

Stummfilmprojekt

Scott Miller named Fulbright Scholar

scottMillerComposer and Kyma enthusiast, Scott L. Miller, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to lecture at the Academy of Music and Theatre in Estonia during the 2014-2015 academic year. Professor Miller will lecture on approaches to electroacoustic composition, with an emphasis on real-time electronics and improvisation with Kyma.

Miller’s Every Problem is a Nail, for piano and electronics, premiers on June 7 at the New York City Electronic Music Festival (NYCEMF). The piece will be performed by pianist Keith Kirchoff (who commissioned the work), and was supported in part by the American Composers Forum 2013 McKnight Composer Fellowship Program.

Also on the NYCEMF will be the NYC premier of Miller’s Contents May Differ, performed by bass clarinetist Pat O’Keefe on June 4. O’Keefe commissioned the piece and his recording of the work is to be released on Innova later this year.  Both Every Problem is a Nail and Contents May Differ feature the Additive Synthesis Sound that Miller created especially for teaching his students.

The world premiere of Miller’s Electro-organic Ecosystem for pipe organ and Kyma is set for 26 September 2014 as part of the Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS2014) in Lübeck Germany 25-29 September.

Publikum, Komponist und Kyma

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In 1819, Diabelli provided a waltz theme and asked all the major composers of Vienna to compose a variation on the theme so he could compile all of them into a single Theme and Variations.  Beethoven indignantly refused to write a variation on such a “Schusterfleck” of a theme, and then, in irritation decided to show what you could do with such a banal and not very charming subject by composing, not one, but 33 variations with a playing time of over 50 minutes; he even demonstrated his own brand of humor in that Variation No. 22 is not a real variation but a quote from Don Giovanni (“Hab kein Ruh bei Tag und Nacht“).

Now in 2014, Viennese composer Bruno Liberda, intrigued with this idea of finding such a wealth of material within a simple source, proposes to create 31 variations on a theme provided by the audience!  All those who are present will witness the composition of a new piece.

Audience members will improvise sounds using brooms, scissors, paper, piano, wire, bell, cellophane, porcelain and other instruments which will be distilled by the composer over the course of the performance into motifs that become 31 overlapping variations.

Witness a new piece in the process of formation! Boundaries cancel… between emergence and the finished work, between a composer and an audience, between show and do.

See, hear, and experience together the process of composition!

Wo: Alte Schmiede, Schönlaterngasse 9, 1010 Wien
Wann: 30 April 2014, 19h

The Voice of Pi

Composer Franz Danksagmüller and soprano Berit Barfred Jensen will be in Copenhagen for the February 19th premiere of Danksagmüller’s new composition for voice and Kyma: sound of pi: flow my tears (for voice and continuo).

Danksagmüller will be performing the basso continuo part on a Continuum Fingerboard controlling Kyma sounds tuned to a special scale based on pi. Background textures will be granulated voices derived from the live solo voice.

It will be the first piece on Berit Barfred Jensen‘s solo voice recital at the Old Radio Hall at the Royal Danish Conservatoire in Copenhagen with the Holmes’s Baroque Ensemble and Søren Rastogi (piano). Music by Handel, Schubert, Grieg, Margarete Schweikert and Franz Danksagmüller.

Date: Wednesday 19 February 2014 
Time: at. 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Location: Conservatory Koncertsal, Julius Thomsen Gade 1
Admission: Free admission

 

 

What if the stars made music

Outdoor Culture presents Sounds of the Night Sky featuring Robert Jarvis‘ sound installation: aroundNorth, opening Thursday 20 February 2014 6.30-9.30 pm at the National Trust Stowe New Inn Farm Buckingham MK18 5EQ

This outdoor event will showcase the premier of Robert Jarvis’ new sound art installation, aroundNorth, a piece that was shortlisted for the 2010 PRS New Music Award.  A multi-speaker sound map of the stars driven by the turning of the Earth, aroundNorth uses Kyma to transform the night sky into a celestial music box rotating around Polaris, the North Star. As each star passes a virtual line in the sky, it triggers a musical note whose qualities are determined by the star’s spectrum, mass, brightness and distance from earth, creating a mesmerising sound map of the universe as viewed from our rotating planet.

Visitors will be accompanied down Bell Gate Drive on foot and into the gardens of Stowe after dark, before entering the semi-wilderness of the newly-opened Lamport Garden where the sounds of moving stars will be created like a giant celestial music box! Dress for the outdoors and bring a flashlight!  Click here for more information and tickets.

Kyma days at Future Music Oregon

 

FMO Kyma Concert

Carla Scaletti was the featured guest artist on the 23 November 2013 Future Music Oregon concert at Beall Concert Hall in Eugene Oregon where the audience performed her compositions: Autocatalysis for Kyma and Live Audience (2010) and …odd kind of sympathy for Kyma and Live Audience (2011). The concert also featured Kyma premieres by composers Colin Salisbury, Nayla Mehdi, and Churan Feng and live performances of Jeffrey Stolet’s Theatre of Spheres for Kyma and Colored Spheres and Lariat Rituals for Kyma and Gametrak.

Jeffrey Stolet

Following the Saturday concert, Scaletti conducted an all-day Kyma sound design workshop on Sunday and presented lectures on data sonification and the score for QUANTUM, a deconstruction of how Kyma was used in …odd kind of sympathy, and an advanced Kyma sound design lecture on the following Monday and Tuesday.

Kyma users from Arizona, California, New Mexico, Washington, and Oregon joined with Jeffrey Stolet’s graduate and undergraduate students in the workshops, hands-on labs, meal-time discussions, and some of the intense dark roast beverage the Pacific northwest is famous for.

 

Kyma at Musicacoustica Beijing

Three world premieres at the Musicacustica Beijing 2013 festival are utilizing Kyma for live sound generation and processing:

Magic Fingers for Leap Motion and Kyma by composer/performer Wang Chi, a composer and performer whose research and composition interests include data driven instruments and sound design. Chi is also an active translator for electronic music related books, including Kyma and the SOS Disco Club.

 

The FA Yun An man for Kyma by composer Wang Chunming, associate professor of Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, PhD candidate in digital media at the Shanghai Conservatory Of Music, and Director of the Institute of China Electronic Music.

 

And Theatre of Spheres by composer Jeffrey Stolet of the University of Oregon. Jeffrey Stolet is a professor of music and director of the Intermedia Music Technology at the University of Oregon where he has installed 5 Kyma teaching and production studios. In addition to teaching Kyma to his composition and sound design students at the University, Professor Stolet also directs the yearly Summer Academy on the UO campus where he welcomes international students and faculty for a two-week intensive course on digital audio, sound design and Kyma. Recently Stolet completed a book on Kyma, entitled Kyma and the SumOfSines Disco Club that is currently available in English and will soon be available in Chinese.

Dance of the particles

Choreographer Gilles Jobin‘s newest piece “QUANTUM” was inspired by his 2012 residency at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, where Jobin worked with physicists under the auspices of the Arts@CERN program.  For Jobin’s QUANTUM, six dancers will be illuminated by a kinetic light sculpture designed by another Arts@CERN alumnus Julius von Bismarck and sheathed in skin-tight costumes designed by Belgian fashion designer Jean-Paul Lespagnard.  Music for the production, composed by Carla Scaletti using Kyma, incorporates data from the Large Hadron Collider, including the 2012 data with evidence of the Higgs particle (thanks to physicists & inspiration partners Lily Asquith and Michael Krämer of the LHCSound  project).

Jobin-QUANTUMGilles Jobin’s QUANTUM, in rehearsal during July 2013. Photo: Gregory Batardon

The first performances will take place at the CERN CMS Experiment, directly above the detector where the Higgs Boson was discovered last year. Each evening, from 23 to 26 September 2013, audiences will be transported from Theatre Forum Meyrin to the CMS Experiment for the performance followed by a tour into the entrails of the large Hadron Collider and encounters with the artistic team and CERN physicists. For tickets, visit the Theatre Forum Meyrin site.

On the following weekend, there will be two performances a day as part of the CERN Open Days (28-29 September 2013) at the CMS experiment; CERN Open Days is one of the rare occasions when the entire CERN laboratory is open to the public.

The piece will then go on tour with electronic musician POL running the live Kyma score, beginning with 4 nights at the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale in Paris from 4-8 November 2013.

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Dancers: Catarina Barbosa, Ruth Childs, Susana Panadés Díaz, Stanislas Charré, Martin Roehrich, Denis Terrasse

Science advisers: Michael Doser, Nicolas Chanon (CERN physicists)  

Engineer: Martin Schied

Costumes assistant: Léa Capisano

Production: Cie Gilles Jobin РGen̬ve

In collaboration with: Collide@CERN, Théâtre Forum Meyrin, CERN Expérience CMS

With the support of:  Fondation d’entreprise Hermès dans le cadre de son programme New Settings, Loterie Romande, Fondation Meyrinoise du Casino, Fondation Leenaards, Fondation Ernst Göhner

La Cie Gilles Jobin is supported by the Ville de Genève, la République et Canton de Genève et Pro Helvetia Fondation suisse  pour la culture.  Gilles Jobin est artiste associé à Bonlieu Scène nationale Annecy. 
Gilles Jobin et Julius von Bismarck ont tous les deux reçu le Prix Collide@CERN 2012.  
 QUANTUM est développée à partir de la résidence d’artistes Collide@CERN Genève.  
Versuch Unter Kreisen a été développée à partir de la résidence d’artiste Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN et exposée pour la première fois au Festival Ars Electronica à Linz, Autriche, en septembre 2012.Â