Concert 1 – Friday, January 26, 7:30 PM – Digital Media Center Theater
Concert point of contact: Kerem Ergener – kergen1@lsu.edu
PROGRAM
1/4-Tone Circus by Gavin Sol Goodrich
Gavin Sol Goodrich, keyboard and live electronics
Music by Dylan Burchett
Dylan Burchett, objects
Decomposing by Joanna McDonald
étude no. 1: Tárrega Decomposed
étude no. 3: Mr. Miller
Remove Sharps by Will Kiel
Bass in Space by Mac Barnett
Mac Barnett, “Max.E.Mus” – interactive perfomance device
nine bells by Andrew Faulkenberry
everything happens by Taylor Stoddard
Box by Erin Demastes
Erin Demastes, handmade box
Recollect by Katy Jiaying Li
Cycle in Cycle by Tian Qin
I Miss U V-Much by Kevin Mah
Phantom of Utopia by Ka Hei Cheng
Irina Kruchinina, dancer
PROGRAM NOTES & COMPOSER BIOS
1/4-Tone Circus
An improv on top of quarter tonal scales
Gavin Goodrich is a composer and concert pianist whose works synthesize pure mathematics, Vipassana Meditation, and visual arts. Born in an Alaskan fishing community, he taught himself piano, composition, and mathematics from YouTube videos before receiving a scholarship to study at Columbia University, where he graduated with honors. His senior thesis focused on developing mathematical systems for applying 15th-century Franco-Flemish polyphony into microtonal systems. After taking a year off from academics to teach in Spain on a Fulbright Grant, he now lives in Houston and is currently pursuing his Master of Music in Composition at Rice University studying under Arthur Gottschalk.
Music
In the late 1960’s, artist Marcel Broodthaers argued that, after Duchamp, if any object could be seen as art, then all artistic works, regardless of artistic lens, could be seen as objects. Within music, a similar argument can be made. If all material objects can be experienced musically, then it follows that music itself can be experienced as a collection of material objects. The piece I have prepared today is in service of this idea, and will present a collection of twenty-four objects as music. With each object’s reveal, a short announcement will play as a reminder of the object’s current context and function. The piece will conclude once all objects have been revealed.
Dylan Burchett does a variety of sound-related things that frequently involve materials powered by electricity. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Experimental Music and Digital Media at Louisiana State University.
Decomposing
I created this work by deconstructing a recording of a string quartet of mine from 2022. My goal was to pull apart small sections of the recording that struck me as having a unique timbre, and then rearrange and recreate a new piece of music. I wanted to do this because both these works will be a part of my senior recital in February, which is inspired by the concept of an ecosystem: an interconnected system, where one element feeds into another cyclically, creating potential for new life with each iteration.
Joanna McDonald is a senior undergraduate music composition major at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. Her past works have have been mainly centered on song writing and chamber music. However, she has most recently been exploring electronic music sound scapes and is very interested in further exploring and adding electronic music to her sound pallete as a composer.
étude no. 1: Tárrega Decomposed
This musique concéte piece takes samples from Francisco Tárrega’s mazurka Adelina and reimagines it in a new way.
Even though Tárrega is no longer alive, his music still lives on. Hopefully he’s not rolling over in his grave…
étude no. 3: Mr. Miller – explicit language warning
Leaning more into the dance styles of electronic music, this piece uses samples from New Orleans legend Dr. John, and his longtime collaborator, Charlie Miller. In this way, old friends are now playing music together again.
Charlie Miller still lives and performs in New Orleans. Permission was given to sample tracks from his album Peace Horn.
Remove Sharps
Mental health is and always will be an issue. One that should be prioritized but often isn’t. If you know someone who needs help, please reach out to them — because often, they won’t.
A sample of Viktor “Freedom” Gennadyiavich’s voice was used throughout. Thank you, Viktor.
This piece uses various samples to express how it feels living with mental illness and the tragic result of mental illness being untreated. It’s uncomfortable, it’s uneasy, and you probably won’t enjoy listening to it. But, hopefully it makes its point.
Will Kiel, a guitarist and composer from California, is studying music composition at Tulane University. His love for guitar and composition started in the California Bay Area’s diverse music scene — this shaped his passion and interest in classical guitar, jazz and various forms of composition.
Bass in Space
nine bells
In this piece, I use the sound of the bell — a symbol of the passage of time — to explore the idea of stretching and contracting time.
Andrew Faulkenberry (b. 1999) is a composer of emotionally evocative works that pose questions about the human experience. His works address topics such as philosophy, communication, the natural world, and art itself. He is currently pursuing a DMA in Composition from the Shepherd School at Rice University. He has previously earned degrees from Peabody Conservatory (MM Composition), where he studied with Kevin Puts, and Rutgers University (BM Composition), where he studied with Robert Aldridge.
everything happens
This piece was created using leftover sounds and samples out of creative frustration by utilizing granular synthesis, manipulated delays, and lullaby-like chord progressions to create a dreamy soundscape.
My name is Taylor Stoddard, I’m a senior in the EMDM department at LSU, and I write music in FL Studio and Max MSP.
Box
Box is a handmade wooden box with five metal motorized mechanisms— a slinky, a piece of solder attached to a jar lid, a tube from a coat rack, a piece of foil and magnet, and a small wind chime part. Together they make metal-on-metal sounds acoustically, incorporating the resonance of the lids or tubes from each mechanism and also from the box itself. Once the switches are switched, the speaker circuit is activated which allows for an electronic connection to be made between the metal parts. This then triggers the speakers to turn on and off at the same rhythm as the mechanisms, amplifying the sound of the movements.
Erin Demastes is an experimental composer, performer, and instrument maker. She uses everyday, household objects and hacked electronics for her installations and performances and subverts their use and perception with play and experimentation. In addition to her interest in physical materials, Erin works with instruction and interaction design in her scores, performances, and installations by balancing structured composition and predetermined actions with improvisation and exploration.
Erin received an M.F.A. in Experimental Sound Practices and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts, a B.M. in jazz studies and piano performance from Loyola University New Orleans, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in experimental music and digital media at Louisiana State University. She worked as an audio technician, artist, and educator for five years in Los Angeles and as a jazz and classical pianist, composer, and arranger for ten years in the New Orleans area.
Recollect
This is a collection of my tarot card studies. I’m mesmerized by the concept of comprehending each card based on the situation and would like to create a series of visuals for it.
Jiaying (Katy) Li is a composer, pianist, and educator whose music mainly focuses on amplifying the microscopic sound of the instrument itself, and combines electronic music with her cross-cultural background to create a poetic vocabulary and multi-sensory enjoyment. Katy’s music are widely involved in solo, vocal music, percussion, chamber music, symphony, electronic music, arrangement and film scoring. In addition, her works have been commissioned and premiered by numerous performers and ensembles all over the world, including JACK Quartet, MAMMOTH trio, Austin Wulliman, Alex Sopp, Suzan Peeters, James Alexandar, and have been performed in Carnegie Hall, Norfolk Music Festival in Yale, Atlantic Music Festival, New Music on the Point Music Festival, St. John’s Concert Hall, and Royal Danish Conservatory of Music.
Cycle in Cycle
When was the last time we connected with water? When was the last time we touched the soil? Do we still remember that we were brought to life from water? This film can be about the water cycle, the water usage in rice cultivation, the unfair trading in rice production, or the personal experience with water. It provides a space to question where our food comes from, what we eat, how much we consume, and how everything links to each other. We tend to repeat our habits: cultural conditioning and near-sighted policies give us a sense of entitlement. What does the action of doing something actually mean to us?
Chinese composer and pianist, Tian Qin, graduated from Shanghai Conservatory and Manhattan School of Music and now is pursuing her Master of Music degree in composition at Rice University with the Brown Fellowship, studying with Karim Al-Zand, Shi-hui Chen, and Pierre Jalbert. Tian has composed since age ten. Her music is compelling, humorous, precise, and visual. She enjoys doing multimedia collaborations and exploring different roles she can play in her artistic language. She also serves as the staff pianist for the preparatory program in the Shepherd School of Music at Rice.
I Miss U V-Much
Hatsune Miku is a voice synthesizer developed by Yamaha, sampling the real voice of Japanese voice actress, Saki Fujita. One can input notes and lyrics for her to sing via the Vocaloid DAW. She is at once a tool, instrument, and character – with a personality and a devoted fanbase to match her stardom. In “”I Miss U V-Much,”” I use her as both a singer and instrument; she sings about a past life, long lost, and those who cannot follow her into the unknown. One can even view her as an analogy to the rise of AI, and this piece is her journey into something steadily growing beyond me. Perhaps I am afraid of following. How dare I? Perhaps it is wiser to follow…
Her vocals eventually get cut and warped into nonsense speech that can still be ambiguously recognizable as words. For example, her phrase, “I miss you,” is simply an ever so slightly warped, “I wish we…” Her imperfect pronunciation makes her undeniably a virtual entity, yet her range of programmable emotions and projection of the artist’s vision bridges the uncanny gap between instrument and human. I hoped to bring out this ambiguity through the subject matter and arrangement of the music.
This is also my first attempt at mixing for surround sound, taking advantage of the pointillistic nature of some of the synthesizers used, as well as the three layers of Hatsune Miku.
Kevin Mah is an American Born Chinese musician, starting his musical journey at age 6 when he first picked up the violin. He earned his bachelor’s degree in music composition at Loyola University New Orleans, studying with Drs. James Walsh and William Horne. After a brief foray into filmmaking and film editing, he returned to his music composition roots during the pandemic, composing in a modal soundscape for Japanese instruments, solo instruments, and chamber ensembles. In 2022, he started the graduate program in music composition at Tulane University, where he is now exploring music technology and video game music with Dr. Rick Snow, and composing in an atonal and chromatic soundscape with Dr. Edward Dulaney.
Phantom of Utopia
The piece decodes the complex strokes or elements of pictorial, ideological and semantic Chinese characters by embodied interactions, and encodes the collective bodily movements and gestures into a new representation of Calligraphic Dance.
Calligraphic Dance is proposed as a new artform that adopts somaesthetics approaches in the audio-visual dance system to enhance the consciousness of our bodily perception, promote engagement of our surrounding environment with self-expression, cultivate the spiritual connections of people to self-fashioning and appreciation and inspire users creatively explore their body contributing to generative arts. The new artform also manifest people’s sensory perception to Chinese calligraphy culture by embodied experience.
The demonstration of the system uses a Chinese poem, The Peach Blossom Spring, written by Tao Yuan-ming in 421 CE as an exploration of mythically celestial and unrealistically ideal utopia under the cruelty of social unrest and political instability in the Jin Dynasty. The dancer uses different contours of varying speed and spacing to channel traditional two-dimensional Chinese calligraphy into her original oeuvres of writing, painting and dancing in three-dimensional space.
Ka Hei Cheng is pursuing her Ph.D. in Music (Experimental Music and Digital Media) at Louisiana State University. Previously, she studied at the Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Bowling Green State University. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Cheng approaches a diversified culture and philosophy that extend her musical dimensions and nourish a similarly diverse approach to her artworks by using “brush strokes” with a sonic palette. She has composed various genres of music, including music jingles, music for animation, tailor-made event music, electroacoustic music, and acoustic compositions with or without programming. Her piece, “The Trigger Machine,” was performed at the Earth Day Art Model 2020, which was organized by IUPUI. Her works were accepted by the Exchange for Midwestern Collegiate Composers, and she has written music pieces for the Screen Music Program and the Collaborative Composition Initiative (CCI). One of her works was recorded on a CD, “CCI//Sessions, vol. 2.” In 2020, she composed a chamber orchestral piece, “Nibiru,” for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, and she was commissioned to create a commercial promotional music video for the CNA Group. Her works, “The Entangling Turner” and “COVID-19 Genomic Navigator,” were performed at NIME 2021 and 2022 (The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression) and presented at ICAD (International Community for Auditory Display). She served as the presenter and project developer of her research papers related to data sonification in NIME, ICAD, and NYCEMF. In 2022, she hosted a 40-minute presentation on Weather Reporting and Sonification at NYCEMF. Apart from data sonification, she has been involved in the development of projects related to digital fabrication, extended reality, motion tracking, and EEG sensors. She has composed pieces for laptop orchestras, and one of her compositions, “Who is the Leader?”, was commissioned by EdUHK. Recently, she collaborated with three other artists on the project “Shifting Datum,” which was displayed at the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. She also worked on a project called “Contingent Dream,” which employs a collaborative robot to create algorithmic compositions derived from audio recordings, rendering the sounds of the city in sumi-e ink. This innovative project is set to be presented at TEI2023 (17th International Conference on Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interaction). One of her previous work, Resonance: Collaborative Musicking Through Tactile Ecologies was also accepted by TEI 2024. Her recent work, “PhoeniX – Mixed Reality Performance for Dance and Viola,” was accepted by NIME 2023, and she was honored to receive third prize at the Graduate Research Conference at Louisiana State University.
