Symposium of Contemporary Music, September 2018

Illinois Wesleyan University School of Music PR E SE N T S

:

David Vayo, Director

LXIV

Photo Credit: rubra (courtesy of Ars Electronica)

Featured Guest

Pamela Z

September 21-22, 2018

Symposium of Contemporary Music September 21, 2018 7:30 pm

Westbrook Auditorium

Pamela Z in Performance Quatre Couches (2015) Flare Stains (2010) Typewriter / Declaratives (1995/2005) Syrinx (2003) Badagada (1988) Breathing (from Carbon Song Cycle, 2013) Unknown Person (from Baggage Allowance, 2010) Sixteen Actions (2013) Pool (2015) Other Rooms (2018) Scared Song (1986) Meredith Monk (arr: Pamela Z) Following the program, the audience is invited to a reception in the Presser Hall reception room, courtesy of Sigma Alpha Iota Special thanks to Victoria Folse, Acting Director of the School of Music Mario Pelusi, Professor of Composition and Theory Elisabeth Beaird, Circuit Network agency Jane Schurter Smolen, Administrative Specialist, School of Music Sigma Alpha Iota Music Fraternity for Women Michael Limacher, Thorpe Digital Center Ed Risinger, Technical Coordinator, School of Music School of Music Stage Crew, Sound Crew and Recording Crew This program is presented as part of the IWU New Music Series.

To receive email notifications of future New Music Series events, contact David Vayo, Series director: dvayo@iwu.edu.

September 22, 2018 10:30 am

Westbrook Auditorium

The Extended Performer Presentation by Pamela Z

A Word from the Symposium Director The first extended performers may have been those Greek actors, in the fifth century B.C., who wore masks that included a cone aligned with their mouths, thereby amplifying their voices so that the folks in the cheap seats could still follow the play. Similarly, in the early twentieth century, many vocalists sang through megaphones in order to project over the throbbing bustle of a dance band; not long thereafter, electricity, which made microphones possible, finally allowed audiences to see the face of a volume-enhanced performer.

But increased volume was only the beginning of how electric and electronic technology transformed the sounds of live performers. In the 1960’s, Gordon Mumma designed custom circuits to radically alter a signal arriving from a microphone, transforming such instruments as the French horn (which Mumma played) and the Argentinean bandoneón of tango fame into darkly grinding electric beasts. As a college-age musician in the 1970’s, I was impressed with the work of three vocalists, composer/ soprano Joan La Barbara and jazz singers Flora Purim and Urszula Dudziak, who added electronic echos and other effects to their amplified voices (when I saw Purim perform she alternated between a single instrument or voice, one with and one without effects). More and more, a single instrument or voice could catalyze a dream-world of complex and enveloping sound.

The advent of digital control over sound made possible new levels of sophistication and subtlety for the extended performer. MIT’s brilliant composer/technologist Todd Machover spent much of the 1980’s developing what he called hyperinstruments, such as a cello (played by Yo-Yo Ma) tricked out with motion sensors and a variety of other controls, generating digital signals that gave commands to musical software. More recently, Michal Waisvisz’s The Hands and Laetitia Sonami’s Lady’s Glove have allowed a performer to initiate and control a universe of electronic sounds and processing via subtle movements of their fingers and hand, like a cybernetic version of classical Indian and Balinese dance techniques.

Pamela Z is a contemporary manifestation of this tradition, a composer/performer who conjures rich multifaceted sonic- and visualtextures in real time using customized gestural controllers. One might consider her a twenty-first-century version of Mozart performing and conducting his piano concertos at the same time. And like Mozart’s, her art is deeply human and rewards our close attention.

–David Vayo

About the Performer Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine extended vocal techniques, bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. In addition to her solo work, she has been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theatre, film, and chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, the Bang on a Can All Stars, Eighth Blackbird, Ethel, and San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.

She also has a growing body of inter-media gallery works including multi-channel sound and video installations.

Her interdisciplinary performance works have been presented globally at venues including The Kitchen (NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), REDCAT (LA), MCA (Chicago), and Trafo (Budapest), and her installations have been presented at such exhibition spaces as the Whitney (NY), the Diözesanmuseum (Cologne), Dak’Art (Sénégal), and the Krannert (IL). She has collaborated with a wide range of artists including Joan La Barbara, Joan Jeanrenaud, Vijay Iyer, Brenda Way (ODC Dance), Miya Masaoka, Jeanne Finley + John Muse, Shinichi Iova Koga (Inkboat), and Luciano Chessa. She has participated in several New Music Theatre events (including John Cage festivals), and has performed with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.

Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center (New York), Interlink (Japan), Other Minds (San Francisco), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy, and Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival (Wuppertal, Germany). Her numerous awards include a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, an Ars Electronica honorable mention, and the NEA Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder. www.pamelaz.com

About the Program Quatre Couches is a sonic trifle, tiramisu, or mille-feuille –

juxtaposing four contrasting layers and manually toying with them – mixing them and moving them around on the plate until they all melt away. Flare Stains is a sonic poem on the residue left by emergency

flares. Typewriter uses voice, processing, and typewriter samples

(triggered with a gesture controller). Syrinx is named for the avian vocal organ. In this little extract from my longer 2004 sound work, a birdsong is pitch-shifted and consequently stretched until its individual notes are slow enough and low enough to be accurately produced by a human voice. In Badagada, one of my early digital delay pieces, the syllables

“ba-da-ga-da-ga-da-ga-da-ga” are layered in multiple delay lines to form a harmonic, rhythmic accompaniment to a melody sung in English.

Breathing is a solo version of a movement from a 2013 multi-media

chamber work called Carbon Song Cycle. Unknown Person is an excerpt

from Baggage Allowance, an intermedia work that scans and inventories the belongings (and memories) we all cart around. Sixteen Actions is a

work involving live video capture and gesture controlled audio and video samples. Pool is a short episode from Memory Trace, a full evening solo performance work exploring various aspects of memory. Other Rooms

is constructed from samples of the speaking voice of Paul David Young taken from an interview I recorded as part of the process of making my performance work, Memory Trace.

In 2009, I was commissioned by Meredith Monk’s House Foundation for the Arts and Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid) to create a track to be included on “Monk Mix”, a double CD of various composers doing remixes and reinterpretations of Meredith’s music. I chose to make an arrangement of Scared Song. I used samples of my

voice in place of Meredith’s organ and piano parts, and then sang the melodic material over that. I did make a small sample of the piano from her record as a nod to the “remix culture” out of which the project was born. Other than the one piano sample, the source of all the sound is my

own voice. When I was asked to perform my track at the 2012 CD release event in New York, I was startled because I had built the piece entirely in the studio with no thoughts of performing it live. But – with much programming, finagling, and practicing – I managed to work out the live version, which you will hear tonight.

Symposium of Contemporary Music Guest Composers • Performers • Scholars 1952-2018 1952: Earl George, Grant Fletcher, Burrill Phillips 1953: Anthony Donato, Homer Keller 1954: Normand Lockwood, Robert Palmer 1955: Wallingford Riegger, Peter Mennin 1956: Hunter Johnson, Ulysses Kay 1957: Ernst Krenek, William Bergsma 1958: Aaron Copland 1959: Paul Pisk, George Rochberg 1960: Roy Harris 1962: Robert Erickson, George Rochberg, Glenn Glasow 1963: Robert Wykes, Alabama String Quartet 1964: Robert Wykes, E. J. Ulrich, Salvatore Martirano, Herbert Brün, Ben Johnston 1966: Louis Coyner, Edwin Harkins, Philip Winsor, Edwin London 1967: Frederick Tillis, George Crumb 1968: Iain Hamilton 1969: The Loop Group, DePaul University 1970: Halim El-Dabh, Olly Wilson 1971: Edward J. Miller 1972: Stravinsky Memorial Concert 1973: Courtney Cox, Phil Wilson 1974: Scott Huston 1975: David Ward-Steinman 1976: Donald Erb 1977: Lou Harrison, Ezra Sims 1978: M. William Karlins 1979: Leonard B. Meyer 1981: Walter S. Hartley 1982: David Ward-Steinman 1983: George Crumb Concert 1984: Robert Bankert, Abram M. Plum, R. Bedford Watkins 1985: Michael Schelle 1986: Jean Eichelberger Ivey 1987: Jan Bach

1988: John Beall 1989: Hale Smith 1990: Karel Husa 1991: Alice Parker 1993: (Spring) Alexander Aslamazov 1993: (Fall) Leslie Bassett, John Crawford (Society of Composers, Inc. Region 5 Conference) 1995: David Diamond 1996: Morton Gould Memorial Concert 1997: Joseph Schwantner 1998: Arvo Pärt 1999: John Corigliano 2000: Libby Larsen 2001: William Bolcom, Joan Morris 2002: Present Music 2003: Mario Lavista, Carmen Helena Téllez 2004: Louis Andriessen, James Quandt, Monica Germino,Cristina Zavalloni 2005: Vince Mendoza 2006: New York New Music Ensemble 2007: Stephen Paulus 2008: (Spring) Roderik de Man,

Annelie de Man (Amsterdam) 2008: (Fall) John Sharpley,

Orchid Ensemble 2009: ONIX (Mexico City) 2011: Yang Xiaozhong, Song Mingzhu, Zhou Tianli (Sichuan Conservatory of Music) 2012: (Spring) Shulamit Ran 2012: (Fall) Chinary Ung, Susan Ung, Adam Greene, Stacey Fraser, Jocelyn Chang 2014: John Daversa 2015: Fifth House Ensemble 2016: (Spring): Kyle Gann 2016: (Fall): Eve Beglarian 2017: Judith Shatin 2018: Pamela Z