Saturday, March 9, 2019, 10am-12:30pm – KCEMA Presents AT the UCM Gallery of Art and Design — Art Center — 217 East Clark
Martin Chittum — Malediction No.1: Donald J. Trump (25 min)
John Chittum — Benediction No. 1 : Jimmy Carter (20 min)
Hildegard Westerkamp — Once Upon a Time (25 min)
Barry Truax — The Garden of Sonic Delights (12 min)
Stacy Busch — excerpts from Mass (30~min)
Martin Chittum — Malediction No.1: Donald J. Trump
Malediction was composed/recorded January 31, 2019. It is an improvised performance using the Engrammatron with the purpose of producing a cybermagical curse.
John Chittum — Benediction No. 1: Jimmy Carter
Benediction is an crafted surround piece with the purpose of producing a cybermagical blessing.
Hildegard Westerkamp
Once Upon a Time (2012)
Text and composition by Hildegard Westerkamp
Narrators: Caleb and Caius Martin Ruebsaat
Girl’s Voice: Sonja Ruebsaat
One day in the Fall of 2011 I wrote a fairy tale entitled “The Girl, the Witch, and the Magic Bird”. Ultimately it is about the power of the voice, the poisonous influence of the Muzak Corporation (among others) and the magic of listening and music making. It seemed obvious that my two grandsons Caleb and Caius (10 and 7 at that time) should be the readers of this story. To my great delight they took up the challenge and surprised me with their hard work, endurance, and their lovely ways of speaking and reading. To read such a long story at their age and have it recorded by a very picky ‘Oma’ who wants to have every word and syllable annunciated as clearly as possible, is not an easy task. I was delighted by the creative energies that emerged in all of us during the process and the end result was a series of good recordings from which to choose for this piece. The girl’s voice is that of my daughter, the boys’ mother, recorded when she was a little girl. Her voice is featured in an earlier piece of mine entitled Moments of Laughter (1988) and reappears here. The recording of the loon was made by members of the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, in the early 1970s and is used here by permission. Once Upon a Time was commissioned by the Western Front in Vancouver for a wholenight event in January 2012, entitled Circle of Sleep, the concept of which was conceived by music curator DB Boyko. On the night of the premiere event, the audience reclined comfortably on floor mats with blankets and pillows listening to this bedtime story, perhaps dozing off, relaxed and calmed by the end of it, ready to hear and dream of more sounds to come throughout the night.
Barry Truax
The Garden of Sonic Delights
The Garden of Sonic Delights invites the listener to enter an imaginary soundscape (one that Murray Schafer might describe as a “soniferous garden”) richly filled with sounds that may remind us of the actual sounds of water, wind, insects and birds. Our visit will take us through the afternoon until the next morning, hopefully leaving us delighted and refreshed.
The piece was commissioned by the Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) for the 2016 BEAST FEaST, and realized in 48 channels at the Technical University, Berlin, and the composer’s private studio with spatialization created by Harmonic Functions’ TiMax2 matrix mixer, marketed by Outboard Inc (UK). Original recordings from the World Soundscape Project Tape Collection. Sound processing realized with Soundhack convolution and Chris Rolfe’s MacPod software,
The Garden of Sonic Delights was premiered at the 2016 BEAST FEaST at the University of Birmingham, UK, in 48 channels, with a 36-channel version performed during the Sonorities Festival at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), Belfast, along with an 8-channel version played at other venues.
Stacy Busch
Excerpts from Mass
Mass is a project born out of my time in Northern Iceland at the Listhus Artist Residency. My month long stay was a journey in silence, isolation, and extreme natural landscape. The word “mass” is meant to elicit feelings of reverence as well as intense breadth and depth. Originally, this even length concert of new music was designed using four spiritual pillars derived from the Bhagavad Gita. These concepts, roughly translated as: look to your calling, do it full out, let go of the fruits, and turn it over to God allows the performance to to unfold as a powerful narrative of self discovery. Mass was originally presented with choreography by Tianna Morton and video works. This presentation is fixed media and recorded excerpts from the evening length work.