En Vivo: Line Upon Line Program 7 Feb 25

PROGRAM

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT SAN ANTONIO COLLEGE OF LIBERAL AND FINE ARTS SCHOOL OF MUSIC

SONIC OPERATOR by Miles Jefferson Friday

WHAT WAS TRUEST ABOUT US by Andrew Wright Smith

SONIC INFLATABLES by Miles Jefferson Friday

RAGE/REMIT by Andrew Wright Smith

Formed in 2009 Matthew Teodori, Jordan Walsh) exists to champion living composers and pursue the musically unfamiliar.

The Austin-based trio has premiered well over 100 new works for percussion and has worked with composers University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Texas at Austin, Kunstuniversität Graz, University of Huddersfield, University of Liverpool, City University of London and Monash University (Melbourne).

Internationally, the group has performed at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (Australia), Open Circuit Festival (Liverpool), Novalis Festival (Osijek), in Basel (Hochschule für Musik), Berlin (Unerhörte Musik), Cologne (Loft Köln), Freiburg (Hochschule für Musik), Graz (Open Music), Koper (Koper Biennale) and London (City, University of London), and has taught at the Conservatoriums in Melbourne and Sydney, London (Guildhall School of Music & Drama), Manchester (Royal Northern College of Music) and Tours (Le pôle Aliénor).

Line Upon Line Trio

Formed in 2009 at The University of Texas at Austin, line upon line (Cullen Faulk, Matthew Teodori, Jordan Walsh) exists to champion living composers and pursue the musically unfamiliar. The Austin-based trio has premiered well over 100 new works for percussion and has worked with composers in residencies at Harvard University, Stanford University, Cal Poly, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Texas at Austin, Kunstuniversität Graz, University of Huddersfield, University of Liverpool, City University of London and Monash University (Melbourne).

Nationally, line upon line has performed and taught in twenty-five different states, at two Percussive Arts Society International Conventions, the Festival of New American Music (Sacramento) and The Myrna Loy Center (Helena, MT).

Internationally, the group has performed at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (Australia), Open Circuit Festival (Liverpool), Novalis Festival (Osijek), in Basel (Hochschule für Musik), Berlin (Unerhörte Musik), Cologne (Loft Köln), Freiburg (Hochschule für Musik), Graz (Open Music), Koper (Koper Biennale) and London (City, University of London), and has taught at the Conservatoriums in Melbourne and Sydney, London (Guildhall School of Music & Drama), Manchester (Royal Northern College of Music) and Tours (Le pôle Aliénor).

In Texas, the group has performed at two Fusebox Festivals, the Menil Collection (Houston), Victoria Bach Festival and the International Festival-Institute at Round Top.

Nationally, line upon line has performed and taught in twenty-five different states, at two Percussive Arts Society International Conventions, the Festival of New American Music (Sacramento) and The Myrna Loy Center (Helena, MT).

In Texas, the group has performed at two Fusebox Festivals, the Menil Collection (Houston), Victoria Bach Festival and the International Festival-Institute at Round Top.

Andrew Wright Smith:

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT SAN ANTONIO COLLEGE OF LIBERAL AND FINE ARTS SCHOOL OF MUSIC

BIOS:

An educator, composer, electronic musician, and vocalist from Atlanta, GA, J. Andrew Smith (b. 1992) is zealous about the intersections between acousmatic sound, live performers, and improvisation. His works often delve into personal narratives and how they can inform and enrich abstract mediums. Musical characteristics such as timbre, gesture, space, and form are often dictated by a delicate interlacing of autobiography with poetry and fiction in J. Andrew’s music. He embraces the convergence of complex structures with elements of improvisation to give performers agency without losing coherence or cogency in his music. As a vocalist, he maintains a passion for visceral, guttural, strange, and electrifying sounds.

J. Andrew’s works have been performed at numerous SEAMUS conferences, the SPLICE Institute and Festival, Third Practice Electroacoustic Music Festival, New Music on the Point, Electric LaTex, PASIC, and the Southeastern Composers’ Symposium. He has participated in readings with Michael Lewanski, the Spektral Quartet, the Semiosis Quartet, and the Toledo Symphony Orchestra. In 2022, he was selected as one of the four finalists in the ASCAP/ SEAMUS Student Commission Competition for his piece Arbitrary/Peremptory for voice and interactive electronics.

His dissertation Utterances; Approaching a New Acousmatic Praxis examines the philosophical roots of acousmatic music and attempts to modernize Pierre Schaeffer’s conceptions of sound and emphasize the significance of the ways that sound is used by composers as the crux of a modern acousmatic praxis.

A graduate of the University of North Texas’s PhD program in Music Composition. J. Andrew’s teachers have included Jon Nelson, Joseph Klein, Panayiotis Kokoras, Andrew May, Elainie Lillios, Mikel Kuehn, Christopher Dietz, Fred Cohen, and Matthew McCabe. Additionally, he has worked with artists and performers such as Jordan Walsh, Colin Stokes, Diana Rojas, Sean Lopez, Lisa Kaplan, Matthew Duvall, and Conner Simmons.

Currently Assistant Professor of Practice in Music Technology at the University of Texas San Antonio, J. Andrew has taught electronic music and composition classes at Bowling Green State University, Owens Community College, and the University of North Texas.

Miles Jefferson Friday:

Miles Jefferson Friday is a composer and educator who aims to construct communities where sound can serve as a site for critical inquiry to be realized. Within this guiding principle, Miles’s creative output acts as a form of project-based research, where he utilizes music technologies and engages with theoretical scholarship as a means of exploring personal subjectivities of auditory reception, re-thinking instruments and/as objects, and proposing ways in which sound-based practice can operate more dynamically and equitably. Miles’s works have been performed across the United States and internationally by ensembles such as the AIR Contemporary Music Collective (China), Ensemble Dal Niente (USA), Ensemble InterContemporain (France), Ensemble Suono Giallo (Italy), the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble (Russia), the Tacet(i) Ensemble (Thailand), the Tönkunstler Orchestra

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT SAN ANTONIO COLLEGE OF LIBERAL AND FINE ARTS SCHOOL OF MUSIC (Austria), the Wet Ink Ensemble (USA), and Yarn/Wire (USA). Additionally, Miles has exhibited acousmatic works and multi- media installations at festivals such as the SinusTon Festival (Germany), the International Computer Music Conference (Ireland & Shenzhen), the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium (Thailand), and the SEAMUS Conference (USA). Miles holds a BM in music composition from Indiana University (2016), an MA in music composition from the Eastman School of Music (2018), an MFA in music composition from Cornell University (2021), and a DMA from Cornell University (2023). Miles is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Music at the University of Texas at San Antonio.