Concert 4 – Saturday, January 27, 6:00 PM – Digital Media Center Theatre
Concert point of contact: Dylan Burchett – dburch6@lsu.edu & Erin Demastes – edemas3@lsu.edu
PROGRAM
Improvisation #3 by Thomas Jacob Flores, Nicholas Gomez, Jazmin Juarez, and Javier Munoz II
Return by Joel Laviolette
Generation Cycle by Joseph Brooks
Joseph Brooks, Elektron Octatrack, and Critter & Guitari Organelle
Transmutation by Benjamin Shirey
whisper by Treya Nash
Audience & cellphones
Submarine and Squid by Robert Rutherford
Breanna Loredo, Haunted box
Robert Rutherford, Enner
Rolf Rydahl, Pedals
Bobadei by Tzu-Chin Hsu
Lea Beaumert, flute, and live electronics
The Frogs Don’t Sing Red by Victor Cui
Sailing Across The Undead Seas by Thomas Jacob Flores
Ghosts by Breanna Loredo
Breanna Loredo, “little instruments”
Robert Rutherford, live electronics
Nat Cortez, Haunted box
Rx_KET by Kerem Ergener
Kerem Ergener, electronics
PROGRAM NOTES & COMPOSER BIOS
Improvisation #3
The UTRGV New Music Ensemble performs contemporary chamber works that embrace experimental performance techniques and sonic textures. Students who participate in the ensemble perform works on both electronic and acoustic instruments, with a focus on using computers, synthesizers, mobile devices, homemade electronic instruments, and expressive digital interfaces.
The ensemble serves as a vehicle for premiering compositions by students within the Music Technology or Music Composition areas. The ensemble fosters opportunities for multimedia interdisciplinary collaboration by joining forces with groups within the UTRGV community and at universities across the world.
Return
Return is a meditation. The intention is for the listener to find their own inner stillness. Through the subtle increase in acoustic complexity, the listener is led through a journey that will hopefully ‘return’ them to a more peaceful space than they began.
Joel Laviolette is a composer, educator, instrument builder and performer based in Austin, Texas. His musical experience spans genres and crosses borders, weaving in elements
from electronica to African marimba and mbira traditions. Joel is the director of the Rattletree School of Marimba and directs the groups Rattletree, Kupira Marimba, and Mafaro Marimba. His groups have been featured on Jimmy Kimmel, ACL, SXSW, PASIC, and he’s performed at well over 1000 gigs at festivals, universities, and clubs around the world. As an internationally recognized expert on Zimbabwean mbira music, Joel has been featured on NPR, and he has been published in Percussive Notes, Mbira Music: Structures and Processes and other journals. Joel has lived many years in Zimbabwe and studied with his primary teacher Newton Cheza Chozengwa for 28 years until his death in 2021.
Joel has a BA in Composition from UT Austin, where he had the honor of studying with Russell Podgorsek, Yevgeniy Sharlat, Donald Grantham, and Omar Thomas.”
Generation Cycle
Generation Cycle is a guided improvisation piece intended to investigate the interplay of stochastic textures and six cyclical rhythmic sequences of different lengths. Through the introduction of these sequences throughout the piece, listeners may find an underlying order to the sonic chaos they experience.
Joseph Brooks is a sonic and spatial artist hailing from Brooklyn, New York. Through the injection of pounding rhythms and throbbing synthesis into deep, complex textures, Brooks explores the relationship between order and disorder. Brooks studies landscape architecture at Louisiana State University.
Transmutation
Transmutation explores acoustic ecology and delves into sonic morphology. Through textural transformation, Transmutation presents an auditory landscape that hovers between the familiar and the abstract. The work is further informed by themes from artificial life and immersive systems, highlighting the complex interplay between nature and technology.
Benjamin Shirey a native Texas composer and artist, obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of North Texas under the mentorship of renowned composers like Jon Nelson, David Stout, Cindy McTee, Andrew May, and Panayiotis Kokoras. His work, from experimental opera to film scores, delves deep into acoustic phenomenology, art teleology, artificial life, and immersive systems. His film contributions, such as “Hustler of Providence” and “The Great Hanging,” have earned significant accolades. Beyond composition, he is passionate about entrepreneurship and instrument building. Now, Shirey is back at the University of North Texas, pursuing a Ph.D. in Composition, to continue exploring the ever-expanding horizons of music and art.
whisper
whisper invites you to record yourself whispering lines from the Thomas Hardy poem In a Whispering Gallery into your cell phone. These lines will be diffused into space..
Treya Nash is a composer and creative coder based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is currently completing her PhD at Louisiana State University with Mara Gibson, Jesse Allison, and Steven David Beck. She has previously studied with Paul Koonce, Mark Engebretson, and Alejandro Rutty. Treya’s areas of focus include chamber music, interactive web-based music, and electronic opera.
Submarine and Squid
Robert Rutherford is a senior Performance Studies major at TAMU. Originally a classical musician, his interests have expanded beyond Western classical styles, now exploring experimental and improvised electronic music.
Bobadei
Boba is the small tapioca balls in the bubble tea. “Dei” is the pronunciation of tea in Taiwanese dialect. This piece explores the journey of drinking bubble tea, inspired by food ASMR and subtle hints of beatbox music.
Composer Tzu-Chin Hsu draws her musical inspiration from nature, social interaction, and the culture of her home country, Taiwan. A versatile electronic, opera, and orchestra composer, Tzu-Chin has collaborated with various ensembles, including the BBC Singers, Butler Opera Center, HANATSUmiroir, Quince ensemble, Taipei Chinese Orchestra, and Taipei Symphony Orchestra, among others. She currently lives in Austin with her two cats, Mochi and Creamsicle.
The Frogs Don’t Sing Red
Inspired by the Max Ernst painting of the same title.
Composer Victor Cui finds inspiration from literatures, histories, linguistics, zoologies, and sounds in nature, and seeks to balance freedom and control, poetics and logic. Victor’s music captures his unique expression through his sensibility of motion and the physicality of sound.
Praised as “fundamentally musical” by the Olga and Paul Menn Foundation at the University of Chicago, Victor’s music has been performed in both America and Europe. Victor’s piece Poltergeist of Kayaköy for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, was premiered at the 2023 soundSCAPE Festival in Blonay Switzerland. Excerpts of Victor’s chamber opera, Shadow Stretches Long and White, based on the story of Otto Warmbier, was premiered during the Opera Etude workshop at the Peabody Institute in 2023.
Victor is pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) student at the Shepherd School of Music of Rice University. He holds a Master of Music (MM) in composition from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, and a BA/MA joint degree in Music and Humanities from University of Chicago. Victor has studied composition with Ashkan Behzadi, Augusta Read Thomas, Hans Thomalla, Courtney Bryan, Felipe Lara, and Sky Macklay, and he has taken courses in computer music with Sam Pluta and Bryan Jacobs.
Sailing Across The Undead Seas
This piece was inspired by my vision of a pirate ship in a furious storm, infested by zombie pirates attacking the ship. I intended to make a “boss music” theme in the Chiptune (or 8-bit music) style. To make this music, I utilized a DAW called Fruity Loops Studio. In terms of plug-ins, I’ve utilized “Chipsounds” to recreate the synths used in old retro games, as well as FL Studio’s built-in “FLEX” for a range of synths and sampled drums.
Thomas Jacob Flores is a 22-year-old composer from Laredo, Texas. He enjoys writing EDM music such as Chiptune and Synthwave. Thomas aspires to make music for video games while also expanding his compositional skills.
Ghosts
This piece brings the idea of little instruments into a setting with live electronics to evoke whispy, elusive spirits that cannot be seen yet are all around us.
Breanna Loredo is a Performance Studies major focusing on music and composition.
Rx_KET
“Humanity is a virus.”
FOR GENESIS – S/HE IS (STILL) HER/E
Kerem Ergener is an electronic music composer and multimedia artist. After his study at Izmir Saint Joseph French High School, he continued his undergraduate study at Bahçeşehir University’s Mechatronics Engineering Department, where he helped the establishment of BAU Stanford Robotics Research Project Laboratory. His work focused on advanced robotic applications and mobile robotics. Then, he continued his graduate education at Istanbul Technical University MIAM. He received his Master of Arts in Music/Sonic Arts in 2019. He studied electronic music and composition under Reuben de Lautour and Jeremy Woodruff. His approach to music composition was inspired by industrial groups like Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten, electronic music artists like Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto) and Mika Vainio (Pan Sonic), and composers like Morton Feldman and Julius Eastman. His artistic output mainly focuses on coding-based music making and multimedia installation with light, fog, and various found objects. He founded the label Le Horla Records, aiming to bring out unheard avant-garde and experimental sound to listeners in 2016. He has been part of many complications and released his solo work under his own name and under Le Horla. He was a lecturer at King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang’s Institute of Science, Music and Engineering in Bangkok, Thailand, between 2019-2022. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Experimental Music and Digital Media at Louisiana State University.
