Program II
Studio for Electroacoustic Music
Acedemy of Music
Polish Society for Electroacoustic Music
(PSeME)
concert Intermedium II
SARC
Sonic Arts Research Centre
Belfast - North Irland
performers:
Agnieszka Pstrokonska ? marimba
Kazimierz Pyzik ? viola da gamba
composers - sound diffusion
program:
Gordon Delap, Antonin De Bemels
Light Body Corpuscles
video & tape (5min.)
Ricardo Climent
Silent Era / La Era del Silencio
for tape (12 min.)
Henry Vega
Ssolo
for viola da gamba & tape (5 min.)
Michael Alcorn
Resonant Air
for tape (12 min.)
Katarzyna Glowicka
Dust Point Red
for harpsichord (8 min.)
Paul Wilson Without Words for marimba & computer (13 min.) Pedro Rebelo laut[omata].3 video & live electronics (8 min.) Jason Ernest Geistweidt A letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis for tape (9 min.) Christopher McClelland
video i live electronics (8 min.) (Max/MSP/Jitter)
presentation of SARC activity
Concert Hall of teh Academy of Music in Krakow
Tuesday, May 24, 2005, 19.00
First we see indefinable sparkles dancing frantically before our eyes. Then, gradually, these abstract sparks reveal themselves as glimpses of skin moving through crossed rays of light. Eventually, from a cloud of frenzied points of light, the shape of a human body emerges? "Light body corpuscles" is a piece about fragmentation of space through fragmentation of time, dissection of the body through scattering of the light. The stroboscopic alternation of different points of view creates a disrupted perception of space and time. The body we see is multi-layered, and each layer is locked in a different time-space continuum. What we see defies the rules of physics and human perception, and opens a breach in the reality as we know it...
Electroacoustic composition: Gordon Delap
Concept, photography and editing: Antonin De Bemels
Dancers: Melanie Munt and Ugo Dehaes
Lighting: Laurence Halloy
Stereoscopic display technology: Periactes
Made possible with the help of the British Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in cooperation with the Sonic Arts Research Centre and Nadine Arts Centre.
Gordon Delap is a composer and sound designer based in Belfast. He specialises in electronic music, particularly acousmatic music.
He studied electroacoustic composition at Queen's University under Michael Alcorn, and at City University, London under Simon Emmerson and Denis Smalley. He recently completed a PhD at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast.
Antonin De Bemels is a video and sound artist. Interested in experimental electronic music as well as contemporary dance and video art, his personal approach of videography is based on the representation of body movements and the dynamic relationship between sounds and images.
He has made a dozen of short videofilms and also creates soundtracks and visuals for dance and theatre pieces.
Silent Era (10:57) August 2002 The ?Animator? was a peculiar type of job created in a few silent-film cinemas in the past. This comic character used to imitate the voice of the actors and actresses in an improvised script, performing onomatopoeic noises and body language. Very often the Animator was surrounded by ingenious artefacts to produce ?sounds effects to animate the silent movies. ?Silent era? is inspired by the art of the ?Animator? and my aim is to reflect the sound world that surrounds me. Somehow I try to recover the spontaneity, imagination and improvisation of this pioneer of the cinema with sound in order to evoke a better sound world where I would like to live. The starting point are recordings from some ?sonically? interesting percussion instruments and others created by methods of synthesis in computing, imitating the previous ones.
He recently served as resident composer at the Conservatorio de las Rosas, Morelia, Mexico thanks the a Unesco-Aschberg award and also as resident composer at the JOGV orchestra in Spain. Ricardo was recently commissioned by The Instituto Valenciano de la Musica, Pedro Carneiro, C.A.R.A., Grupo Amores, JOGV, Ensamble las Rosas, Xelo Giner, Kazuhisa Ogawa, Carlos Gil and Spanish Brass Luur Metals. His music works have been widely diffused in Europe, America and Asia. "As a composer and even more as a sonic artist, one needs to perceive the environment and our soundworld in a unique way to make the music being distinctive". RC Ssolo (2002) was composed for Karin Preslmayr and is part of a cycle of pieces being written for instruments and computer. The approach to this specific medium holds the uniqueness of live performance and the beauty of transformation as its main goals. In these pieces a computer awaits for the instruments signal to reply with transformations and refractions of it. To do this, methods of analysis are used to register pitch and dynamics of the performer. When an expected pitch or dynamic is reached the computer then responds by triggering through a sequence of events, filters or processes. The other aspect of these pieces involves the exploration of controlled improvisation. In the score for Ssolo, improvised sections have been included leaving only musical triggers, which the performer will cross at will. ?Ssolo? was composed and developed at the Institute for Sonology in The Hague. Henry Vega was born in New York City, is dedicated to the creation and promotion of electro acoustic music. In a handful of years he has been involved as teacher, technician, composer and performer on productions of theatre, dance and concert music that focus solely on modern artistic trends. As a composer Vega has received commissions to work with choreographers, theatre directors and video artists while his devotion is focused on computer interactive performance. His music has received first prize from SCI, Honorable Mention from the Hungarian Radio EAR competition and was a selected finalist at the Gaudeamus Composition Contest 2004 in Amsterdam for his work 'Alibi'. Vega's works have been performed at venues in Cuba, the United States, Europe and Australia and at festivals such as SEAMUS, Sonic Residues, the Scarborough EA Festival, Primavera en la Havana, Sonorities, Aural Tick and the Florida EM Festival. In 2003 he founded 'The Electronic Hammer' with Diego Espinosa and Juan Parra, a group dedicated to performing new and recent works for percussion and computers allowing composers with limited or expert knowledge of computers to compose freely for this meta-instrument. Vega has studied composition at Florida Intl. University, at the University of North Texas with Jon Nelson and at the Institute for Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague where his mentors, Paul Berg and Joel Ryan, guided him in programming and improvisation as well as composition. During these years Vega has also had the opportunity to study composition with Franco Donatoni, Earl Brown, James Tenney and Christian Wolff.
Resonant Air (2000) for 2-channel tape This piece explores the concept of ?containers? as resonators of sound. The wooden body of a violin or any other stringed instrument, the metal or wooden tube of a woodwind or brass instrument and the shell of a percussion instrument or drum are all specially tuned ?containers? designed to amplify and enhance the timbral qualities of the sounds produced when the instruments are played. In this piece I have used very simple containers such as jam jars, metal tins, wooden boxes and other objects to act as resonators for the source sounds that are used in the piece. The resultant sounds are subjected to further transformation using a computer to act as a ?virtual resonator? (for example adding reverberation, filtering and time-stretching). This work was commissioned by 2000 Galway Arts Festival with funds provided by the Arts Council of Ireland.
Dust Point Red (2005) ca 7?30? for harpsichord and electronics for Goska Isphording.
A scientific observation inspires this piece. It has been observed, through infrared scans, that the discs of dust and rock surrounding young stars suggest that many planets apparently form in an environment more violent and chaotic than previously thought; so astronomers say. Dust like clouds of strings granulated by the computer in Red get a new, intensive colour. Points, intuitive musical gestures, occur according to Fibonacci patterns. The techniques used on the harpsichord include scraping the strings with metal drainer, touching strings at different parts with fingertips and fingernails, hitting the rim with percussive beater. The computer subjugates the harpsichord into its world. As a result, an eruption of colours and gestures is born.
...The very value of an esthetical experience lays in its power to change our feelings and ways of perceiving the environment around us. If we perceive things differently due to an esthetical experience, we think and react in another manner.
Therefore, an esthetical experience has potential means to change us. It is an act of communication and understanding between minds...
Katarzyna Glowicka 08.04.2005
Without Words My initial idea for this work was to explore the various methods for sustaining the sound of a marimba. To begin, I wanted the instrument to behave similarly to a voice delivering a continuous melodic line. This idea generated a variety of musical material, and slowly helped to define the relationship between the instrumental and electronic parts. The marimba part is extremely active throughout the piece, incorporating virtuosic flourishes, erratic and impulsive patterns and ostinatos and embroiled in these textures is an underlying melodic line. The electronic part resonates and extends this line further through morphing of marimba and voice timbres. The more dynamic sounds, wood breaking, stones and marbles inside a piano and bricks being dragged on a concrete surface, unfold with a rhetorical patter, like the rhythms found in certain words or sentences. This provides contrast and articulation to the more sustained melodic line. Paul Wilson gained his PhD in composition at the Queen's University of Belfast where he is currently employed as Lecturer in music technology. His compositions include the use of both instrumental and electroacoustic resources, and have been performed by Orkest de Volharding, Barrie Webb, Steve Halfyard, The National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and The Ulster Orchestra among others. In 2002 he received a prize from the XXIV Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo Di Musica Electroacustica for his work Spiritus and last year this work was selected for a performance at the International Computer Music Conference in Singapore. Last year, he received a commission from the Ulster Orchestra to compose a piece based on Gulliver's Travels. More recently, he was commissioned by the Millennium Court Arts Centre to produce an installation work with the Artist Barbara Freeman. In addition to this, he ahs been working on another installation piece commissioned by the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. His most recent commission, from the Composer-Pianist Simon Mawhinney, was premiered at the Sligo New music festival in Ireland. Future composition plans include collaborations with poets and artists and new works for violin and electronics and flute and electronics.
laut[omata].3 is a semi-generative work which has developed from activity in improvisatory performance with electronics and visuals. It is fabricated as fundamental digital data manipulations upon media constructed from sampling and 3D modelling. laut[omata] is a digital entity which prolongs the life of human-based interaction; it is an entity which attempts self-organisation with digital residues derived from human activity. These residues consist of behavioural structures initially defined as human-computer interaction strategies. Pedro Rebelo born in 1972 - Portugal Pedro is a composer/digital artist working in electroacoustic music, digital media and installation. His approach to music making is informed by the use of improvisation and interdisciplinary structures. He has been involved in several collaborative projects with visual artists and has created a large body of work exploring the relationships between architecture and music in creating interactive performance and installation environments. This includes a series of commissioned pieces for soloists and live-electronics which take as a basis the interpretation of specific acoustic spaces. In the duo laut with saxophonist Franziska Schroeder he investigates the extension of interfaces and control in interactive performance practices. His electroacoustic music is featured in various CD sets (Sonic Circuits IV, Discontact III, Exploratory Music from Portugal, ARiADA). Pedro conducts research in the field of digital media, interactive sound and composition. His writings reflect his approach to design and composition by articulating creative practice in a wider understanding of cultural theory. Pedro has been awarded a PhD in composition from the University of Edinburgh and is currently a lecturer and researcher at the Sonic Arts Composition at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast.
A letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis . . .
In his manifesto, The Art of Noises, Luigi Russolo incorporates a letter from his colleague, the father of The Futurist Manifesto, F. T. Marinetti. In this letter, a description of the battlefield, the poet endeavours to relate the sounds of ?the orchestra of the noises of war? via onomatopoetic text. In A letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis . . . Marinetti?s prose is presented in English translation by five individual voices. The readings have been transformed and reworked to convey the sonic milieu of the battlefield. The composition works in multiple layers with distinct fore-, mid- and background regions. This dimensionality is further heightened by the use of horizontal movement complementing the gestures of individual events. A letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis . . . progresses between external examination of events and internal reflections of the observer. Jason E. Geistweidt is a sonic artist working across the fields of theatre, film, music, dance and installation. In March, he premiered Terrestrial Variations, a large-scale work for orchestra, chorus and electronics. In February he was awarded the EMS Prize (Stockholm) for his composition A letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis . . . This past October, Geistweidt provided original music and sound design for Rachel O?Riordan?s production of Elizabeth and in May he contributed to Metropolis ?04, a collaborative effort providing a contemporary score for the classic Fritz Lang film. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Sonic Arts Research Centre working with Dr. Michael Alcorn. He holds a Masters degree from the University of Limerick (Ireland) and a B.Mus.Ed. from Southwestern University (Texas).
Real-time Audio/Visual
This piece is not in relation to frogs nor is it about Aristophanes but it is concerned with the thematic, conceptual and contextual impact of time in Finnegans Wake, and the cut-and-paste, temporally disruptive, aesthetic which followed in high modernism and early postmodernism. The video and sonic material here feature several narratives that are dislocated during live performance, using the computer. The subject matter is spliced and rejoined in a deconstructive manner similar to the non-chronological trait of Joyce and modernism.
Christopher's teachers have included Joe Cutler, Frederic Durieux, Marco Stroppa and Michael Obst and is currently under the supervision of Professor Michael Alcorn. In particular he has participated in workshops led by Diana Burrell, Brian Ferneyhough and Anthony Gilbert. Notably his music has been performed by Ian Pace, Darragh Morgen, Mary Dullea and Nancy Rufffer, and by the ensembles Apartment House, Psappha, Nosferatu, Endymion, Uroboros and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Christopher writes for both acoustic and digital mediums and as a programmer is particularly interested in developing software in the fields of interactive performance networks and computer-assisted composition.
Kazimierz Pyzik ? viola da gamba
program:
Gordon Delap, Antonin De Bemels
Light Body Corpuscles
Ricardo Climent Silent Era / La Era del Silencio
Henry Vega Ssolo
Michael Alcorn Resonant Air
Katarzyna Glowicka Dust Point Red na klawesyn (8 min.)
Paul Wilson Without Words
Pedro Rebelo laut[omata].3 video i live electronics (8 min.) Jason Ernest Geistweidt A letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis
Christopher McClelland
video i live electronics (8 min.) (Max/MSP/Jitter)
Sala Koncertowa Akademii Muzycznej w Krakowie
wtorek, 24 maja 2005 roku, godz. 19.00
Sonic Arts Research Centre
Light Body Corpuscles Kompozycja elektroakustyczna: Gordon Delap Koncepcja, fotografia, redakcja: Antonin De Bemels
Silent Era (2002)
Henry Vega
First we see indefinable sparkles dancing frantically before our eyes. Then, gradually, these abstract sparks reveal themselves as glimpses of skin moving through crossed rays of light. Eventually, from a cloud of frenzied points of light, the shape of a human body emerges? "Light body corpuscles" is a piece about fragmentation of space through fragmentation of time, dissection of the body through scattering of the light. The stroboscopic alternation of different points of view creates a disrupted perception of space and time. The body we see is multi-layered, and each layer is locked in a different time-space continuum. What we see defies the rules of physics and human perception, and opens a breach in the reality as we know it...
Electroacoustic composition: Gordon Delap
Concept, photography and editing: Antonin De Bemels
Dancers: Melanie Munt and Ugo Dehaes
Lighting: Laurence Halloy
Stereoscopic display technology: Periactes
Made possible with the help of the British Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in cooperation with the Sonic Arts Research Centre and Nadine Arts Centre.
Gordon Delap is a composer and sound designer based in Belfast. He specialises in electronic music, particularly acousmatic music.
He studied electroacoustic composition at Queen's University under Michael Alcorn, and at City University, London under Simon Emmerson and Denis Smalley. He recently completed a PhD at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast.
Antonin De Bemels is a video and sound artist. Interested in experimental electronic music as well as contemporary dance and video art, his personal approach of videography is based on the representation of body movements and the dynamic relationship between sounds and images.
He has made a dozen of short videofilms and also creates soundtracks and visuals for dance and theatre pieces.
Silent Era (10:57) August 2002 The ?Animator? was a peculiar type of job created in a few silent-film cinemas in the past. This comic character used to imitate the voice of the actors and actresses in an improvised script, performing onomatopoeic noises and body language. Very often the Animator was surrounded by ingenious artefacts to produce ?sounds effects to animate the silent movies. ?Silent era? is inspired by the art of the ?Animator? and my aim is to reflect the sound world that surrounds me. Somehow I try to recover the spontaneity, imagination and improvisation of this pioneer of the cinema with sound in order to evoke a better sound world where I would like to live. The starting point are recordings from some ?sonically? interesting percussion instruments and others created by methods of synthesis in computing, imitating the previous ones.
He recently served as resident composer at the Conservatorio de las Rosas, Morelia, Mexico thanks the a Unesco-Aschberg award and also as resident composer at the JOGV orchestra in Spain. Ricardo was recently commissioned by The Instituto Valenciano de la Musica, Pedro Carneiro, C.A.R.A., Grupo Amores, JOGV, Ensamble las Rosas, Xelo Giner, Kazuhisa Ogawa, Carlos Gil and Spanish Brass Luur Metals. His music works have been widely diffused in Europe, America and Asia. "As a composer and even more as a sonic artist, one needs to perceive the environment and our soundworld in a unique way to make the music being distinctive". RC Ssolo (2002) was composed for Karin Preslmayr and is part of a cycle of pieces being written for instruments and computer. The approach to this specific medium holds the uniqueness of live performance and the beauty of transformation as its main goals. In these pieces a computer awaits for the instruments signal to reply with transformations and refractions of it. To do this, methods of analysis are used to register pitch and dynamics of the performer. When an expected pitch or dynamic is reached the computer then responds by triggering through a sequence of events, filters or processes. The other aspect of these pieces involves the exploration of controlled improvisation. In the score for Ssolo, improvised sections have been included leaving only musical triggers, which the performer will cross at will. ?Ssolo? was composed and developed at the Institute for Sonology in The Hague. Henry Vega was born in New York City, is dedicated to the creation and promotion of electro acoustic music. In a handful of years he has been involved as teacher, technician, composer and performer on productions of theatre, dance and concert music that focus solely on modern artistic trends. As a composer Vega has received commissions to work with choreographers, theatre directors and video artists while his devotion is focused on computer interactive performance. His music has received first prize from SCI, Honorable Mention from the Hungarian Radio EAR competition and was a selected finalist at the Gaudeamus Composition Contest 2004 in Amsterdam for his work 'Alibi'. Vega's works have been performed at venues in Cuba, the United States, Europe and Australia and at festivals such as SEAMUS, Sonic Residues, the Scarborough EA Festival, Primavera en la Havana, Sonorities, Aural Tick and the Florida EM Festival. In 2003 he founded 'The Electronic Hammer' with Diego Espinosa and Juan Parra, a group dedicated to performing new and recent works for percussion and computers allowing composers with limited or expert knowledge of computers to compose freely for this meta-instrument. Vega has studied composition at Florida Intl. University, at the University of North Texas with Jon Nelson and at the Institute for Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague where his mentors, Paul Berg and Joel Ryan, guided him in programming and improvisation as well as composition. During these years Vega has also had the opportunity to study composition with Franco Donatoni, Earl Brown, James Tenney and Christian Wolff.
Resonant Air (2000) for 2-channel tape This piece explores the concept of ?containers? as resonators of sound. The wooden body of a violin or any other stringed instrument, the metal or wooden tube of a woodwind or brass instrument and the shell of a percussion instrument or drum are all specially tuned ?containers? designed to amplify and enhance the timbral qualities of the sounds produced when the instruments are played. In this piece I have used very simple containers such as jam jars, metal tins, wooden boxes and other objects to act as resonators for the source sounds that are used in the piece. The resultant sounds are subjected to further transformation using a computer to act as a ?virtual resonator? (for example adding reverberation, filtering and time-stretching). This work was commissioned by 2000 Galway Arts Festival with funds provided by the Arts Council of Ireland.
Dust Point Red (2005) ca 7?30? for harpsichord and electronics for Goska Isphording.
A scientific observation inspires this piece. It has been observed, through infrared scans, that the discs of dust and rock surrounding young stars suggest that many planets apparently form in an environment more violent and chaotic than previously thought; so astronomers say. Dust like clouds of strings granulated by the computer in Red get a new, intensive colour. Points, intuitive musical gestures, occur according to Fibonacci patterns. The techniques used on the harpsichord include scraping the strings with metal drainer, touching strings at different parts with fingertips and fingernails, hitting the rim with percussive beater. The computer subjugates the harpsichord into its world. As a result, an eruption of colours and gestures is born.
...The very value of an esthetical experience lays in its power to change our feelings and ways of perceiving the environment around us. If we perceive things differently due to an esthetical experience, we think and react in another manner.
Therefore, an esthetical experience has potential means to change us. It is an act of communication and understanding between minds...
Katarzyna Glowicka 08.04.2005
Without Words My initial idea for this work was to explore the various methods for sustaining the sound of a marimba. To begin, I wanted the instrument to behave similarly to a voice delivering a continuous melodic line. This idea generated a variety of musical material, and slowly helped to define the relationship between the instrumental and electronic parts. The marimba part is extremely active throughout the piece, incorporating virtuosic flourishes, erratic and impulsive patterns and ostinatos and embroiled in these textures is an underlying melodic line. The electronic part resonates and extends this line further through morphing of marimba and voice timbres. The more dynamic sounds, wood breaking, stones and marbles inside a piano and bricks being dragged on a concrete surface, unfold with a rhetorical patter, like the rhythms found in certain words or sentences. This provides contrast and articulation to the more sustained melodic line. Paul Wilson gained his PhD in composition at the Queen's University of Belfast where he is currently employed as Lecturer in music technology. His compositions include the use of both instrumental and electroacoustic resources, and have been performed by Orkest de Volharding, Barrie Webb, Steve Halfyard, The National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and The Ulster Orchestra among others. In 2002 he received a prize from the XXIV Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo Di Musica Electroacustica for his work Spiritus and last year this work was selected for a performance at the International Computer Music Conference in Singapore. Last year, he received a commission from the Ulster Orchestra to compose a piece based on Gulliver's Travels. More recently, he was commissioned by the Millennium Court Arts Centre to produce an installation work with the Artist Barbara Freeman. In addition to this, he ahs been working on another installation piece commissioned by the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. His most recent commission, from the Composer-Pianist Simon Mawhinney, was premiered at the Sligo New music festival in Ireland. Future composition plans include collaborations with poets and artists and new works for violin and electronics and flute and electronics.
laut[omata].3 is a semi-generative work which has developed from activity in improvisatory performance with electronics and visuals. It is fabricated as fundamental digital data manipulations upon media constructed from sampling and 3D modelling. laut[omata] is a digital entity which prolongs the life of human-based interaction; it is an entity which attempts self-organisation with digital residues derived from human activity. These residues consist of behavioural structures initially defined as human-computer interaction strategies. Pedro Rebelo born in 1972 - Portugal Pedro is a composer/digital artist working in electroacoustic music, digital media and installation. His approach to music making is informed by the use of improvisation and interdisciplinary structures. He has been involved in several collaborative projects with visual artists and has created a large body of work exploring the relationships between architecture and music in creating interactive performance and installation environments. This includes a series of commissioned pieces for soloists and live-electronics which take as a basis the interpretation of specific acoustic spaces. In the duo laut with saxophonist Franziska Schroeder he investigates the extension of interfaces and control in interactive performance practices. His electroacoustic music is featured in various CD sets (Sonic Circuits IV, Discontact III, Exploratory Music from Portugal, ARiADA). Pedro conducts research in the field of digital media, interactive sound and composition. His writings reflect his approach to design and composition by articulating creative practice in a wider understanding of cultural theory. Pedro has been awarded a PhD in composition from the University of Edinburgh and is currently a lecturer and researcher at the Sonic Arts Composition at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast.
A letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis . . .
In his manifesto, The Art of Noises, Luigi Russolo incorporates a letter from his colleague, the father of The Futurist Manifesto, F. T. Marinetti. In this letter, a description of the battlefield, the poet endeavours to relate the sounds of ?the orchestra of the noises of war? via onomatopoetic text. In A letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis . . . Marinetti?s prose is presented in English translation by five individual voices. The readings have been transformed and reworked to convey the sonic milieu of the battlefield. The composition works in multiple layers with distinct fore-, mid- and background regions. This dimensionality is further heightened by the use of horizontal movement complementing the gestures of individual events. A letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis . . . progresses between external examination of events and internal reflections of the observer. Jason E. Geistweidt is a sonic artist working across the fields of theatre, film, music, dance and installation. In March, he premiered Terrestrial Variations, a large-scale work for orchestra, chorus and electronics. In February he was awarded the EMS Prize (Stockholm) for his composition A letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis . . . This past October, Geistweidt provided original music and sound design for Rachel O?Riordan?s production of Elizabeth and in May he contributed to Metropolis ?04, a collaborative effort providing a contemporary score for the classic Fritz Lang film. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Sonic Arts Research Centre working with Dr. Michael Alcorn. He holds a Masters degree from the University of Limerick (Ireland) and a B.Mus.Ed. from Southwestern University (Texas).
Real-time Audio/Visual
This piece is not in relation to frogs nor is it about Aristophanes but it is concerned with the thematic, conceptual and contextual impact of time in Finnegans Wake, and the cut-and-paste, temporally disruptive, aesthetic which followed in high modernism and early postmodernism. The video and sonic material here feature several narratives that are dislocated during live performance, using the computer. The subject matter is spliced and rejoined in a deconstructive manner similar to the non-chronological trait of Joyce and modernism.
Christopher's teachers have included Joe Cutler, Frederic Durieux, Marco Stroppa and Michael Obst and is currently under the supervision of Professor Michael Alcorn. In particular he has participated in workshops led by Diana Burrell, Brian Ferneyhough and Anthony Gilbert. Notably his music has been performed by Ian Pace, Darragh Morgen, Mary Dullea and Nancy Rufffer, and by the ensembles Apartment House, Psappha, Nosferatu, Endymion, Uroboros and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Christopher writes for both acoustic and digital mediums and as a programmer is particularly interested in developing software in the fields of interactive performance networks and computer-assisted composition.
