the philadelphia music project professional development program
New Frontiers in Singing and Electronic Music with Bobby McFerrin, Lucy Shelton, Tanya Tagaq, George Lewis, Morton Subotnick, and Hans Tutschku
registration deadline: friday, january 21, 2011
friday, january 28, 2011 Settlement Music School, Presser Hall 416 Queen Street Philadelphia, PA 19147
To register for one or both panels, please call PMP at 267.350.4960 or e-mail Elizabeth Sayre at esayre@pcah.us Registration is required. This event is offered free of charge.
9:45 to 10 am: sign-in 10 am to 12 pm: panel i Bobby McFerrin Lucy Shelton Tanya Tagaq 12 to 1 pm: buffet luncheon 1 to 3 pm: panel ii George Lewis Morton Subotnick Hans Tutschku
5
6
Both panels will be moderated by new music advocate, author, and veteran WNYC radio host John Schaefer. Panelist and moderator biographies on reverse
This event is produced by the Philadelphia Music Project, a program of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
panel 1 Singing is such a simple thing—until it isn’t. From thousand-year-old world traditions to the latest avant-garde search for extended techniques, a small group of adventurous singers has always pushed the boundaries of listeners’ expectations. Today, the vanguard is expanding performance practice: incorporating techniques from other cultures; using the latest interactive technology; or taking a holistic approach to the voice as part of the larger instrument of the body, or as part of a larger dramatic/ narrative art. Master improviser and 10-time Grammy Award winner Bobby McFerrin is recognized for his extraordinary vocal range and technique, his work as a classical conductor, as well as his innumerable cross-genre collaborations with the likes of Yo-Yo Ma, Chick Corea, and the Vienna Philharmonic. Winner of two Walter W. Naumburg Awards, soprano Lucy Shelton is an esteemed exponent of new classical music who has premiered over 100 works by composers including Carter, Davidovsky, Del Tredici, and Grisey. Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq has collaborated with internationally known pop and classical performers from Björk to the Kronos Quartet, introducing audiences around the world to traditional Inuit music in new settings. panel 2 The composer Philip Glass once pointed out that musicians are surprisingly high up in the food chain when it comes to technology—the military or NASA is first, then musicians, then everyone else. A quarter century before proto-geeks moved the first personal computers into their parents’ basements, composers had access to computing power that would later send astronauts to the moon. The early adopters of interactive electronic and software-based music might not recognize the extraordinary array of options at the modern composer’s disposal…except that some of those early adopters are still in the forefront today. Our panelists’ work spans most of the history of electronic music, and includes initial landmark compositions as well as the current state of the art. A MacArthur Fellow and early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), George Lewis is a composer, trombonist, and scholar on the faculty of Columbia University. His works have been featured on more than 130 recordings. Guggenheim fellow Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic/electro-acoustic music and multimedia performance, including interactive computer music systems, and has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, Meet the Composer, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hans Tutschku is professor of composition and director of the electroacoustic studios at Harvard University and has won many international composition prizes, including Bourges, CIMESP Saõ Paulo, and Prix Ars Electronica.
Moderator
Panel 2
John Schaefer is Executive Producer of Music Programming at WNYC, and hosts WNYC’s innovative music/talk show Soundcheck, which features live performances and interviews with a variety of guests. Schaefer has also hosted and produced WNYC’s radio series New Sounds since 1982 (“The #1 radio show for the Global Village” —Billboard) and the New Sounds Live concert series since 1986. Schaefer has written extensively about music, including the book New Sounds: A Listener’s Guide to New Music (Harper & Row, NY, 1987; Virgin Books, London, 1990); the Cambridge Companion to Singing: World Music (Cambridge University Press, U.K., 2000); and the TV program Bravo Profile: Bobby McFerrin (Bravo Television, 2003).
George E. Lewis serves as the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. A member of the AACM since 1971, Lewis’s work as composer, improvisor, performer, and interpreter explores electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated and improvisative forms, and is documented on more than 130 recordings. His oral history is archived in Yale University’s collection of “Major Figures in American Music,” and his published articles on music, experimental video, visual art, and cultural studies have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes. His widely acclaimed book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) is a recipient of the American Book Award (2009), the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award (2009), and an Award for Excellence in Recorded Sound Research from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (2009).
Panel 1 Listening to Bobby McFerrin sing may be hazardous to your preconceptions. Side effects may include unparalleled joy, a new perspective on creativity, rejection of the predictable, and a sudden, irreversible urge to lead a more spontaneous existence. 10-time Grammy Award winner Bobby McFerrin is known internationally for his hit song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” His legendary solo performances and collaborations with great artists including Herbie Hancock, Yo-Yo Ma, Chick Corea, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and The Vienna Philharmonic have toured the world, from Russia to Brazil to Japan to Abu Dhabi. His latest projects include Bobble, an improvisational opera that tells the tale of the tribe of Babel, and a tribute to Frederic Chopin arranged for big band by Gil Goldstein. The New York Times has credited him with sparking the current revival of a cappella music. Newsweek said, “There is something almost superhuman about the range and technique of Bobby McFerrin. He sounds, by turns, like a blackbird, a Martian, an operatic soprano, a small child and a bebop trumpet.” VOCAbuLarieS, Bobby McFerrin’s first new release in eight years, was recently nominated for a Grammy Award as Best Classical Crossover Album. The complex architecture and rich textures created by composer/ arranger/producer Roger Treece, a member of Bobby’s improvising vocal ensemble Voicestra, harnesses Bobby’s wildly joyful creativity and searching music curiosity within a new framework. “Music for me,” says Bobby, “is like a spiritual journey down into the depths of my soul. And I like to think we’re all on a journey into our souls. What’s down there? That’s why I do what I do.” Soprano Lucy Shelton is the recipient of two Walter W. Naumburg Awards—as both a chamber musician and a solo recitalist. An esteemed exponent of 20th- and 21st-century repertory, she has premiered over 100 works. Notable among these are song cycles by Elliott Carter, Oliver Knussen, Louis Karchin, and James Yannatos; chamber works by Carter, Joseph Schwantner, Mario Davidovsky, Stephen Albert, Lewis Spratlan, Charles Wuorinen, Gabriela Lena Frank, Bruce Adolphe, Alexander Goehr, Poul Ruders, Anne Le Baron, and Thomas Flaherty; orchestral works by Knussen, Albert, Schwantner, David Del Tredici, Gerard Grisey, Ezra Laderman, Sally Beamish, Virko Baley, and Ned Rorem; and an opera by Robert Zuidam. An avid chamber musician, Shelton has been a guest artist with ensembles such as the Emerson, Brentano, Guarnieri string quartets, the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, Da Capo Chamber Players, Boston Musica Viva, Da Camera of Houston, eighth blackbird, the Ensemble Moderne, Klangform Wien, Schoenberg-Asko, and Ensemble Intercontemporain. She has participated in numerous festivals including those of Aspen, Santa Fe, Ojai, Tanglewood, Chamber Music Northwest, BBC Proms, Aldeburgh, Caen, Kuhmo, Togo, and Salzburg. Shelton has appeared with major orchestras worldwide including Amsterdam, Boston, Chicago, Cologne, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Minnesota, Munich, New York, Paris, St. Louis, Stockholm, Sydney, and Tokyo under leading conductors such as Marin Alsop, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Reinbert De Leeuw, Charles Dutoit, Alan Gilbert, Oliver Knussen, Kent Nagano, Simon Rattle, Helmuth Rilling, Mstislav Rostropovich, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin and Robert Spano. She joined the resident artist faculty of the Tanglewood Music Center in 1996. In the fall of 2007 she was appointed to the Manhattan School of Music’s Contemporary Performance Faculty. She is also a member of the Symphony Space All Stars. Shelton’s recent CD releases feature works by Alberto Ginastera, Anne Le Baron, Virko Baley, Louis Karchin, Chinary Ung and Charles Wuorinen. Her extensive discography is on the Deutsche Grammophon, Koch International, Naxos, Nonesuch, NMC, Bridge, Albany, and Innova labels. So much has happened to Tanya Tagaq since the release of her debut CD Sinaa (‘edge’ in Inuktitut) in 2005. The Nunavut-born singer has not just attracted the attention of some of the world’s most groundbreaking artists; they have invited her to participate on their own musical projects. In 2005, a monumental collaborative project came to fruition when the Kronos Quartet invited Tanya to participate on a project aptly titled Nunavut, which has been performed across North America and Europe, from the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver, BC, to New York’s Carnegie Hall. Acclaim and respect has followed Tagaq on her solo ventures as well: both Sinaa and the 2008 release Auk / Blood were nominated for Juno Awards, for Best Aboriginal Recording and Best Instrumental Recording. Both recordings won in several categories at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, including Best Female Artist. Tanya’s most recent project is the stunning video Tungijuq, a collaboration with Jesse Zubot and Montreal film-makers Felix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphael, which premiered at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and was screened at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and multimedia performance and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. Most of his music calls for a computer part, or live electronic processing; his oeuvre utilizes many of the important technological breakthroughs in the history of the genre. In the 60s, Subotnick taught at Mills College and was music director of the Actors Workshop. It was also during this period that Subotnick worked with Buchla on what may have been the first analog synthesizer (now at the Smithsonian Museum). While working as an artist in residence at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Subotnick helped develop and became artistic director of the Electric Circus and the Electric Ear. In 1969, Subotnick helped to carve out a new path of music education, and, along with a team of fellow artists, created the now famous California Institute of the Arts. Subotnick became the head of the composition program where he created a new media program that introduced interactive technology and multimedia into the curriculum. Subotnick has also written for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, theater and multimedia productions. His “staged tone poem” The Double Life of Amphibians, a collaboration with director Lee Breuer and visual artist Irving Petlin, utilizing live interaction between singers, instrumentalists and computer, was premiered at the 1984 Olympics Arts Festival in Los Angeles. The concert version of Jacob’s Room, a mono drama commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and singer Joan La Barbara, received its premiere in San Francisco in 1985. The larger version of Jacob’s Room will be premiered in 2010 at the Bregenz Festival in Austria. Subotnick’s recent works—among them The Key to Songs, Hungers, In Two Worlds, And the Butterflies Begin to Sing, and A Desert Flowers—utilize computerized sound generation, specially designed software Interactor and “intelligent” computer controls which allow the performers to interact with the computer technology. He tours extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe as a lecturer and composer/performer. Subotnick has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Rockefeller Grants, two Meet the Composer grants, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Composer Award, the ASCAP John Cage Award, and the ACO Lifetime Achievement Award. Born 1966 in Weimar, Hans Tutschku has been a member of the Ensemble for Intuitive Music Weimar since 1982. He studied composition of electronic music at the College of Music Dresde and, since 1989, has participated in several of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s concert cycles to learn the art of the sound direction. In 1991–92, Tutschku further studied sonology and electroacoustic composition at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague (Holland). Subsequently, he studied for a year at IRCAM in Paris. He taught as a guest professor of electroacoustic composition in Weimar, and in 1996, participated in composition workshops with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough. From 1997 to 2001, Tutschku taught electroacoustic composition at IRCAM and, from 2001 to 2004, at the conservatory of Montbéliard. In May 2003, he completed a doctorate (Ph.D.) with Professor Dr. Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham. During the spring term of 2003 he was the “Edgar Varèse Gast Professor” at the TU Berlin. Since September 2004, Tutschku has been working as a composition professor and the director of the electroacoustic Studios at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA). He is the winner of many international composition awards including Bourges, CIMESP Saõ Paulo, Hanns Eisler Price, Prix Ars Electronica, Prix Noroit, and Prix Musica Nova. In 2005, Tutschku received the culture prize of the city of Weimar.