Saturday – March 16, 2024 – Concert 5 – 4pm – Hart Recital Hall

  • Mark Phillips—Dream Dance—7:20 (s)
  • Timothy Crist—colored fields of reception—9:00 (4)
  • Konstantinos Karathanasis—Hekate—11:50 (s)
  • Travis Garrison-Dorian RPS-10:00
  • Mark Snyder—can’t—5:25 (8)

Mark Phillips—Dream Dance—7:20 (s)

Dreamy vocoders give way to an algorithmic synth groove, but only partially … and not for long.

Mark Phillips (Ohio University Distinguished Professor Emeritus) won the 1988 Barlow International Competition for Orchestral Music, leading to collaborations with conductor Leonard Slatkin. His Violin Power appears on the SEAMUS 2015 conference CD. The World Saxophone Congress commissioned and premiered his What If for 101 saxophones. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Wigmore Hall, the Festival Internacional de Música de Bogotá, the Blossom Music Festival, and numerous other festivals and conferences around the world. Commissioned for a Memphis premiere, his Dreams Interrupted has received performances across the country. He has received orchestra performances by groups such as the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the NHK Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra — and has been recorded by Richard Stoltzman and the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, the Lark Quartet, and several solo artists. More information is available at www.coolvillemusic.com.

Timothy Crist—colored fields of reception—9:00 (4)

colored fields of reception began with the use of light to trigger, control, and process audio. Light is passed as stimuli to electronic neural networks which respond in more or less dramatic ways passing a signal onwards to other neural circuits or directly on to program control destinations. Certain light-driven gestures are recorded and reflected throughout the performance. The light sources in the work are black and white images and video which originate on the computer, live from the computer’s webcam, or modules in the modular system that contain light dependent resistors (LDRs). One source of light is a black and white film created by photographer Melissa Gryffin. These sources are gated by light sources and are periodically allowed to pass into the circuitry. This work mostly uses LDR and neural networking modules designed by the modular company nonlinearcircuits.

Timothy Crist is a Professor of Music at Arkansas State University where he teaches composition, electronic music, theory, and classical guitar. He is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts 2003 Individual Artist Fellowship for Music Composition. He has composed over 300 musical works for various media including solo, chamber, orchestral, band, and electronic media. Crist received a D.M.A. from the University of Georgia, Athens. Crist’s music is performed throughout the United States and has been featured on National Public Radio, SEAMUS conferences, Southeastern Composers League, the Electronic Music Midwest Festival, the Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, the Society of Composers, Inc. conferences, New York City Electronic Music Festival, and at the Missouri Experimental Sonic Arts Festival. 

In recent years, he has turned to modular synthesis where his music has been subjected to duress through indeterminate procedures, Chua attractors, generative processes, mysterious algorithms, and a number of chaotic modulators. His recent research involves embracing STEM education and revising music classroom instruction to focus heavily on new methods of music composition including modern hardware and software tools.

Konstantinos Karathanasis—Hekate—11:50 (s)
Ricardo Coelho de Souza, Bendir

Hekate is a Greek goddess associated with crossroads, gates, liminal places in space and time. The moon, fire, herbs and poisonous plants, magic, witchcraft, angels and ghosts are her dominion. She rules over earth, sea and sky, and accompanies the souls of the deceased to Hades, holding torches in her hands. In late antiquity she is known as Savior who embodies the Cosmic Soul.

The piece is written for Bendir, a special type of frame drum with snares, finger cymbal, and ankle bells. The sound of the Bendir creates powerful images associated with shamanism, mysticism, rituals, ecstasy, healing, and femininity.

The composition showcases nocturnal and other field recordings captured by the composer in Greece. The computer tracks the attack and the dynamics of the instruments and reacts by using various live processing techniques, which include multiple delays, phase vocoding, live sampling, frequency shifting, and harmonization among others.

Hekate is dedicated to Patti Cudd.

Konstantinos Karathanasis as an electroacoustic composer draws inspiration from modern poetry, artistic cinema, abstract painting, mysticism, Greek mythology, and the writings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. His compositions have been performed at numerous festivals and received awards in international competitions, including Musica Nova, SIME, SEAMUS/ASCAP, Música Viva and Bourges. Recordings of his music are released by SEAMUS, ICMA, Musica Nova, Innova, Equilibrium and HELMCA. Konstantinos holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University at Buffalo. A Stavros Niarchos Foundation Fellow for Spring 2020, he is Professor of Composition & Music Technology at the University of Oklahoma. More info at: http://karathanasis.org

Ricardo Coelho de Souza is actively engaged in performing, composing, conducting, and teaching. Recently, he co-organized the 100th-year celebrations of the Semana de Arte Moderna at the University of Oklahoma, when he also premiered Jorge Antune’s “Confinement II.” His own composition, “Oferendas 5,” was selected to be performed in NYC by the North/South Consonance Ensemble. As a performer, he has been featured at the NYCEMF in New York City, the Oklahoma Electric Festival in Tulsa, the Puerto Rican Soundscapes Conference in NYC, the International Computer Music Conference in Texas, the Southwest Electronic Music Festival in Arizona, and the Toronto Electro-Acoustic Symposium. Ricardo teaches World Music and co-directs the New Music Ensemble, Avant-GardeN, at OU.

Travis Garrison-Dorian RPS-7:00 (tbd)

Dorian RPS is an electronically mediated sonic journey through environments real and imagined.  Unaltered sounds from the real world meld with their digitally manipulated counterparts, creating a dialogue between the real and the hyperreal.  This dialogue is mirrored in the piano, with live performance informing the actions of a digital improvisational partner.

Dr. Travis Garrison is a composer, audio engineer, and performer of electroacoustic music, and serves as Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Music Technology at The University of Central Missouri. He was previously on the faculty of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and worked as an audio engineer and taught courses at East Carolina University and Bennington College. A common thread throughout his work as a composer and performer is a blurring of the boundaries between things organic and things electronic. His work as a recording/editing/mixing/mastering engineer and producer is represented on a number of commercially available recordings in the areas of classical and experimental music, and he has worked in live sound reinforcement in venues across the country. Current research interests include computer-based improvisational systems and the aesthetics, history, and theory of electroacoustic music.  Dr. Garrison holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition with a cognate in Historical Musicology from the University of Florida, an M.A. in Electroacoustic Music from Dartmouth College, and a B.A. in Computer Music and Composition from the University of California, San Diego.

Mark Snyder—can’t—5:25 (8)
Chris Scanlon, trumpet

Mark Snyder is a Musician, Video Artist, Writer, Engineer, Producer & Teacher living in Illinois. Mark’s multimedia compositions have been described as “expansive, expressive, and extremely human. As a producer, writer, engineer, and performer, his discography includes world, electroacoustic, pop, rock, classical, and country records. A quarterfinalist for the Grammy Music Educator of the Year Award, Mark has guided his students to success in music, including a Morton Gould Young Composer Award winner, a capstone paper published in the journal Metamorphis, and three students taking second place at the Nashville AES Mix Competition. Mark earned the DMA from the University of Memphis, MM from Ohio University and a BA from Mary Washington College. He currently is an Instructor at Northern Illinois University. marksnyder.org

Chris Scanlon is an International Trumpet Artist and Educator who has performed in Europe, Asia, Canada, Mexico, the Middle East and across the United States. He currently resides outside Chicago where he is Assistant Professor of Trumpet at Northern Illinois University and trumpet with the award-winning chamber group, Axiom Brass. chrisscanlonmusic.com

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