- Treya Nash • Whisper • for audience with cellphones • 5
- David Aguila and Natalia Merlano Gómez • Caldera • trumpet, voice, and electronics • stereo • 5
- Jeremy Muller • Radio Swan • maracas and electronics • 10
- Brad Decker • Out of the Ground, Into the Sky • for B flat Clarinet and Computer • 8
- Elisabeth Stimpert and Doug Nottingham • Double Music 2024 by Barry Moon and alejandro t. acierto • 7
- Maxwell Miller • Antithesis (this is the part where I scream) • Guitar, Voice, and Electronics • 8
- Nolan Hildebrand • generative open graphic score #1 • 6
- Total: 49 mins
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Whisper
for audience with cellphones
Treya Nash
Whisper is a concert piece which uses a web app designed for collaborative performance between audience cell phones and a performer who controls sound diffusion. The piece is inspired by whispering galleries, spaces in which sound waves travel around curved surfaces, so that whispers produced in one area can be heard in another. The piece focuses on the intimate sound world of whispers, exploring the potential of the audience as a sound making body. The piece uses the poem In a Whispering Gallery by Thomas Hardy.
Treya Nash is a composer and creative coder based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is currently completing her PhD at Louisiana State University. Treya grew up in Devon, England, but has since lived in various places. Treya works with new and experimental music ensembles, visual artists, choreographers, filmmakers, and more. Treya is fascinated by audience participation in the concert hall. She creates pieces for audience with cell phones, and sometimes gives the audience physical objects to play with. Her greatest joys include creating and facilitating live music, and listening to frogs.
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Caldera
trumpet, voice, and electronics
David Aguila and Natalia Merlano Gómez
Natalia Merlano Gomez is an experimental music performer and creator who explores extended vocal techniques, graphical notation, improvisation, text, visuals, and electronic sounds. Her research examines the performative aspects of voice and text beyond traditional singing and interdisciplinary vocal performance from a decolonial perspective.
David Aguila is a performer and composer, who’s multifaceted practice focuses on the intersection of trumpet, electronics and music production; working in the fields of contemporary, experimental, electro-acoustic and improvised music. His research is focused on parametric, gestural notation, performance, sound projection practices, and alternative approaches to trumpet pedagogy.
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Radio Swan
maracas and electronics
Jeremy Muller
I am proposing a performance of a new work I wrote for maracas and electronics entitled, “Radio Swan.” The piece gets its name from the pirate radio station in which the CIA used to broadcast propaganda into Cuba in order to foment revolt against Fidel Castro in the early 1960s. In this work I am exploring some of the previous century’s communication technology as an aesthetic for the electronics and live audio interaction. Some of the musical material is taken from the radio broadcasts translated into Morse code. The electronic part is specifically designed to be low fidelity, efficient, and full of digital audio artifacts and glitches. This is both an aesthetic choice as well as a practical choice in that I purposefully want the live electronics to run on a Raspberry Pi.
Additionally, this piece is meant to showcase a small setup (something that is rare for percussionists) with an ease in travel, demonstrating a virtuosity in seemingly simple objects. “Radio Swan” can also be a companion piece to Javier Alvarez’s “Temazcal” in that both works are for maracas and electronics. My inspiration from “Temazcal” has been to compose an interactive work where the computer manipulates live audio input through the Raspberry Pi.
Jeremy Muller (jeremymuller.com) is active as a percussionist, composer, and multimedia artist. He’s been described as “highly creative” by Take Effect and has performed as a featured soloist at many venues throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia including International Computer Music Conference, The Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), Transplanted Roots (Australia), MoxSonic, NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, ZeroSpace (University of Virginia), Northern Illinois University, Southwest Electroacoustic Festival, Jacksonville Electroacoustic Music Festival, Web Audio Conference, ATMI conference, IEEE VIS conference, Art on the Atlanta BeltLine, UNC Pembroke, Balance-Unbalance International Conference, the Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, and PASIC. He has given world premieres of works by many composers including Matthew Burtner, Alexandre Lunsqui, Cristyn Magnus, an evening-length tour de force solo work by Stuart Saunders Smith, and has worked with Yarn/Wire Ensemble and Annea Lockwood. Jeremy’s music has been performed by Arcomusical, Heartland Marimba Quartet, Arizona Contemporary Music Ensemble, Crossing 32nd Street, Manuel Rangel, clarinetist Robert Spring, Sam Houston State University, Georgia State University, and many others. Jeremy released his debut solo percussion album on Albany records which includes several world premieres, and his music can also be heard on Arcomusical’s third album “Emigre & Exile.” Some of his research & publications can be found through Bachovich Music Publications & Percussive Notes. Jeremy is currently a Professor of Music at Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Out of the Ground, Into the Sky
for B flat Clarinet and Computer
Brad Decker
“Out of the Ground, Into the Sky” was originally composed in 2010 for solo English horn, and is dedicated to my father who passed away suddenly that year. The piece was premiered in 2011 and enjoyed numerous performances. I recently rediscovered this piece, and felt that if this piece was truly a tribute to my father, I should re-write it for Bb Clarinet and computer, as I grew up playing soprano clarinet, and played through my college years.
Rewriting it for Bb Clarinet was rewarding. I feel it is a good work for either instrument, but the soprano clarinet provides more opportunities for contrasts. The clarinet has an amazing range and capacity for dynamics, and I enjoyed working through the four voices of the instrument. It also provides amazing spectral properties and an array of unique timbres for the sake of live computer processing.
This piece is yet unfinished but has a mostly complete score. The computer processing portion is not yet ready but is almost there. I plan to utilize fixed media layers in conjunction with live processing moments. It most closely will resemble my work for viola and computer, titled What on Earth (2023), in the way it uses live processing and open phrases, with cues. It will feature arcing lines of live processed clarino range, contrasting with rumbling chaleumeau range layers, granular key clicks, and shadowy melodic echoes.
I am working with the amazing Eric Mandat, Professor of Clarinet at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, to produce this work. He has graciously agreed to perform it, if selected, at MOXsonic 2025 for its reimagined premiere.
Brad Decker is a composer, educator, and performer of contemporary concert music, whose works often incorporate electronic, electroacoustic, or interactive media. His recent works explore the interaction of acoustic instruments and electronics to create immersive composite textures. His instrumental works combine virtuosic flourishes, polyrhythmic interplay, and extended techniques. Electronic elements include adventures in analog synthesis, interactive computer processing and sampling, multichannel diffusion, and fixed-media accompaniments. Multimedia projects range from traditional film soundtracks to live-performed improvisations with video. As a double bassist, he regularly performs his own compositions and improvisations that incorporate computer interactivity. His teachers include Peter Hestermann, Kenneth Jacobs, Erik Lund, Heinrich Taube, Steven Taylor, and Scott Wyatt. He has attended masterclasses and lessons with composers Agostino DiScipio, Stefano Gervasoni, Lee Hyla, and Tristan Murail. He is currently Assistant Professor of Composition and Music Technology at Eastern Illinois University. His music is distributed through his website www.braddecker.org.
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Double Music (probably…name may change)
improvised music for clarinets, percussions, and computers
Elisabeth Stimpert
In Double Music (2024), composers alejando t. acierto (Wayne State University) and Barry Moon (pincushioned) reflect on the 20th century American Experimental model of Double Music (1941) by John Cage and Lou Harrison through the lens of 21st century aesthetics and technology. They will manifest these practices in the creation of a new framework for collaborative composition, computer interactivity, real-time composition and transmedia performance. This new work, performed by Elisabeth Stimpert (Alarm Will Sound, University of Central Missouri) and Douglas Nottingham (pincushioned, Crossing 32nd Street, Glendale Community College) will be premiered in 2025.
Elisabeth Stimpert is a founding member of the critically-acclaimed new-music ensemble Alarm Will Sound. She performs on stages across the United States and internationally and works regularly with living composers from a wide range of musical traditions. Dr. Stimpert serves as Associate Professor of Music at the University of Central Missouri where she directs the UCM Clarinet Studio, teaches aural skills, chamber music, and co-directs the annual Missouri Experimental Sonic Arts Festival.
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Controlized
Flute, Violin, Suling (Bamboo Flute), Electronic, Lighting Installation
Kurnia Eka Fajar
Controlized by duoreboot
This is our first year of constructing duo project to do performance art involving several field of arts and it concerned to do something new and create a new presentation form in our perspective and experience. Our performance contained strong music, lots of lightning flash, exploring body movement and audience interactive.
This work concept is an implementation of human restraint in a work entitled “Controlized”.
As humans, we always want to feel free, but there is something that controls us to prevent us from crossing boundaries. Humans are social beings, bound to one another, so their freedom as humans must also consider the freedom of others. Humans cannot create freedom without simultaneously doing the same for the freedom of others.
We create this work to spread message that, as social beings living in this world, we need to control ourselves and increase awareness among others in order to create a peaceful life. Additionally, we aim to break down boundaries in the field of art by exploring sound from traditional instruments/music and combining it with electronic sounds. Furthermore, we create lighting installations integrated with the sounds we produce to support our performance and body movement.
Alexander Schubert is an inspirational person of creating our work concept, he gives us expansion thinking of making arts and gives another way to express sense of arts united with digitalization and of course we always bring up traditional system/design/discipline just like our background as a traditional musicians.
Kurnia Eka Fajar (b. 1995) studied music at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (UPI) Bandung. He recently participated in a tour with contemporary gamelan ensemble Kyai Fatahillah Ensemble to The Netherlands and Germany where he performed works by several composers such as Dieter Mack, Roderik de Man and Iwan Gunawan as a traditional musician. Also, he hascomposed for several theatre works with Stage of Wawan Sofwan, including ‘How the Nightingale so Innocently Loved’ by Sandra Fiona Long and ‘Besok atau Tidak Sama Sekali’ by Wawan Sofwan and ‘Surat-Suratnya’ which performed at La Mama, Melbourne in December 2023 and recently toured in Europe. He has recently starting teaching gamelan to students of different ages, which expanding his horizons in another direction. Currently, he has formed a duo project with Hilmi, called Duo Reboot that focuses on sound, body movement and light design.
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Antithesis (this is the part where I scream)
Guitar, Voice, and Electronics
Maxwell Miller
Antithesis (this is the part where I scream) is the embodiment of the frustration I
sometimes feel dealing with a split sense of self. It explores feelings of inevitability and anger, with me grappling with the electronic sounds and fighting to retain voice as a performer amidst a thick and sometimes overwhelming texture. This piece is quite open in its structure, asking the performer to create gestures of increasing intensity until it reaches its point of climax, a full scream, until releasing that energy back into silence.
Maxwell Miller’s art blends elements of performance art, video art, and experimental music to create chaotic listening spaces. He is often involved with performances of his works, either taking to the stage as an electronics operator or as a performer. He has presented works at Electronic Music Midwest, Performing Media Festival, and the SPLICE Institute, and was the recipient of the 2023 Franklin G. Fisk Composition Award. He is currently the Program Coordinator for the SPLICE Institute, a weeklong summer program which takes place in Kalamazoo, MI.
He currently studies as a doctoral student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received a Master’s of Music Composition from Western Michigan University, and a Bachelor’s of Music Composition from Central Washington University. His composition instructors include Eli Fieldsteel, Lisa Coons, Christopher Biggs, Jiyoun Chung, and Martin Kennedy.
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generative open graphic score #1
Nolan Hildebrand
generative open graphic score #1 is a work that uses the software program Touchdesigner to design and build generative processes that create an open graphic score/notation. In performance the digital score produces a plethora of graphic symbols—from simple ink blot-esque dots and abstract globular shapes to complex webs of broken grid patterns interacting with sharp and angular geometric shapes.
The electroacoustic aspects of this work utilize mixer feedback. Mixer feedback is created when the outputs of the mixer are routed back into its inputs to create a (feedback) loop. Manipulating the mixer’s, faders, dials, and buttons creates unpredictable electronic sounds ranging from simple and harmonious to chaotic and noisy. The setup for generative open graphic score #1 consists of an instrumentalist patched into a mixer with feedback loops being played by another performer. In this novel electroacoustic setup, the sounds, and timbres of the two instruments can clash and contrast or synthesize and melt together.
In performance, the instrument patched into the mixer transmutes into a noise-laden super-instrument that in turn can mutate the behaviour of the electronic sounds together with the mixer performer. I have dubbed this live electroacoustic system/process as “Instrumentalist and Mixer Feedback Transmutation”.
Nolan Hildebrand is a composer and noise artist based in Toronto, Canada. Nolan’s music explores conceptual and physical extremities to create intense and engaging music. His compositions span classical ensembles and electroacoustic music, and performance in an experimental solo noise project dubbed BLACK GALAXIE.
Nolan’s music has been performed at major festivals around the world including Darmstädter Ferienkurse, International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), Forum Wallis, and Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend. He has had opportunities to work with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, ECM+ Ensemble, XelmYa Ensemble, Jonny Axelsson, Nick Photinos and has attended masterclasses with Stefan Prins, Ana Sokolovic, and Malin Bång. He has presented his music and research at ICMC 2023 (CN), SPLICE Festival 2023 (US), the Anestis Logothetis Centenary Symposium 2021 (GR), the CeReNeM Composers’ Colloquia (UK), and the 2022 Korean Electro Acoustic Music Society’s Annual Conference (KOR).
Nolan completed his BMus in composition with Dr. Gordon Fitzell and Örjan Sandred at the University of Manitoba and an MMus in composition under the supervision of Dr. Eliot Britton at the University of Toronto. He is currently pursuing a DMA at the University of Toronto with a focus on graphic notation and electroacoustic music under the guidance of Dr. Kotoka Suzuki.