SPLICE Festival VI 2025 Concert 5 Program

featuring

SPLICE Ensemble

A concert of world premieres by SPLICE Ensemble!

Friday January 24, 2025
7:00pm EDT
Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University

All times are Eastern Time and various events will be streamed live.
Check the WMU School of Music Youtube channel for links.

Chloe Liuyan Liu : Suffocating Convenience
  Written for SPLICE Ensemble

Zheng Zhou : Echoes of the Transformation
  Written for SPLICE Ensemble
    I. Emergence
    II. Turbulence
    III. Reflection
    IV. Recurrence
    V. Resolution

Anthony Donofrio : Fractures/Webs
  Written for SPLICE Ensemble

Dan VanHassel : DYSTOPIA
  Commissioned by SPLICE Ensemble

    1. i do not belong here
    2. Extricate
    3. DEMONS
    4. …against the machine

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Interested in donating to SPLICE? Now you can!
All donations go directly toward scholarships for our summer Institute - and no amount is too small.

Notes

Chloe Liuyan Liu : Suffocating Convenience
My dear friend Danning Lu has dedicated her research to environmental sustainability, particularly focusing on the environmental and social harms that single-use items bring. Because of her, I have also started paying more attention to the plastics present in my daily life. While plastics make our lives more convenient and seemingly cleaner, do we ever consider where all the plastics go once we discard them after a single use? As I composed this piece, I couldn't help but think of the famous photo of a sea turtle trapped in a plastic bag. I saw this picture many years ago, and I remember feeling a deep sadness. To escape this overwhelming sadness and guilt, I forced it out of my mind, just as I did with many other stories and photos of animals falling victim to human pollution. However, Danning’s work in environmental sustainability has given me the courage to confront these harsh realities. Facing the truth is the first step toward making meaningful changes. The sea turtle was freely swimming in the ocean until it got caught in the plastic bag and suffocated. One day, we could all find ourselves in the position of that sea turtle. The convenience we tirelessly pursue is suffocating us.
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Zheng Zhou : Echoes of the Transformation
Echoes of Transformation is a sophisticated exploration of the interplay between acoustic instruments and electronics, crafting a sonic journey through contrasting musical landscapes. This five-part electroacoustic work delves into the dialectics of sound—where melody meets texture, fast meets slow, and the organic merges with the digital. Trumpet, piano, snare drum, and electronics unite to form a richly textured sound world, constantly evolving in dynamic interplay. The composition evokes a sense of fluid transformation, with each movement embodying a unique growth stage, turbulence, introspection, and resolution.

I. Emergence
The piece begins with delicate, fragmented piano motifs, gradually intertwined with electronic textures. The electronics subtly shadow the acoustic sounds, suggesting the organic growth of natural elements. The trumpet adds harmonic layers, while the snare drum punctuates with occasional rhythmic accents, creating a contemplative atmosphere that evokes the beginning of a transformation.

II. Turbulence
In contrast to the tranquil opening, this movement introduces fast, energetic rhythmic patterns between the piano and snare drum, with the trumpet cutting through the texture. Through real-time processing, electronics capture and reshape the acoustic sounds, forming swirling, unpredictable digital patterns. This section reflects the chaotic forces of change, where layers build tension and complexity, symbolizing the turbulent energy that drives transformation.

III. Reflection
The pace slows as the piece moves into a more reflective space. Soft, sustained harmonies on the piano are delicately interrupted by electronic manipulations, creating an uneasy balance between calm and disruption. The trumpet introduces a lyrical, meditative line, while the electronics transform the acoustic sounds into distant echoes using reverb and delay, suggesting a contemplative reflection on the transformative process.

IV. Recurrence
Rhythmic patterns from earlier resurface with heightened intensity, but this time, the interaction between electronics and acoustic instruments becomes even more intertwined. The snare drum drives the rhythmic momentum forward, while electronics manipulate the acoustic timbres, continually reshaping them in real time. The trumpet and piano revisit earlier motifs, representing a cyclical recurrence of transformative forces, blending the acoustic and digital worlds into an intricate dialogue.

V. Resolution
The final movement draws from earlier motifs, but now in a softened, reflective form. Electronics provide a subtle, atmospheric backdrop, with the trumpet and piano offering sustained, contemplative harmonies. The electronics, through techniques such as reverse processing and delay, blend with the acoustic instruments to create a unified, serene soundscape. The piece closes on a note of balance, suggesting that transformation, though turbulent, ultimately leads to harmony.

Throughout the piece, advanced digital processing techniques, including EQ, delay, granular synthesis, and reverb, shape the electronic landscape. These electronics transform the acoustic instruments, offering a constantly shifting perspective on the relationship between natural and artificial elements, and drawing attention to the idea that transformation is both an internal and external process—fluid, inevitable, and ever-evolving.

Performance Note: To ensure continuity and fluidity in the performance, the five sections of the piece should be played without any pauses.
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Anthony Donofrio : Fractures/Webs
In 2016, I wrote an evening-length piece that applied my observations of water droplets on a block of unfired porcelain. That piece's structure and content was based on the changes in the block up to the point of fracture.

In Fractures/Webs, the structure on content shifts to a series of interpretations and tiny meditations on the actual point of fracture in the block.
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Dan VanHassel : DYSTOPIA
DYSTOPIA (2024) for trumpet, drum set, piano, and electronics was commissioned by and dedicated to the SPLICE Ensemble and was composed mostly in the summer of 2023 and completed in early 2024. I am very grateful for their amazing support, musicianship, and friendship which have been integral in bringing this piece to life.

Following the pandemic I found it extremely difficult to write music for several years. Apart from one short piano piece completed in early 2021, DYSTOPIA is my first completed composition since early 2020. It is my longest piece to date (about 30 minutes), and perhaps also my most personal. I realize looking at it now that the work is a sort of emotional retrospective of the past few years, almost as if I needed to purge these feelings from my system in order to start composing again.

The form of the piece is inspired by Haydn’s Symphony #49 in F Minor “The Passion” which I first heard in the depths of the pandemic and at that moment struck me as the most beautiful and deeply affecting music I had ever heard. This symphony was part of Haydn’s “sturm und drang” period, known for its turbulent and dramatic emotions, and was composed in the archaic “sonata de chiesa” format. Rather than the typical fast, upbeat Allegro movement, it starts with a devastating and intense Adagio. The 2nd movement then suddenly shifts to a blistering and intense Allegro. The 3rd movement is a minuet (still in F minor) and the 4th a relentlessly driving Presto. This ordering of the movements creates a powerful emotional trajectory; beginning in a place of intense and drawn out emotion, followed by an incredible release of pent-up energy that only builds in intensity as the piece progresses.

DYSTOPIA’s 1st movement “i do not belong here” begins in a place of utter despair, with moody, sustained piano harmonies sharply contrasting with blunt and strangled air sounds and split-tones from the trumpet. The 2nd movement “Extricate” strikes a suddenly more upbeat and optimistic mood that slowly spirals into frantic madness. This movement’s attempt at sonata form is thwarted by the sudden return of material from the 1st movement, a relapse rather than a recapitulation. In place of the minuet, I thought of the 3rd movement as the “metal” movement. In the Classical era this was the place where a symphony became more streamlined and direct in its musical language, using a popular dance form that listeners at the time would have intuitively understood. For me, rock and metal music fills that role. This movement is titled “DEMONS” after the novel by Dostoevsky that I was reading while writing the piece. Although set in late 19th century Russia, this novel struck me as eerily prophetic of present day America, depicting a society slowly driven mad by destructive, nihilistic ideas. The final movement, “…against the machine,” is a fast-paced presto whose relentless pace is increasingly driven by the electronics.

A subtext throughout the piece is the sinister and growing influence of technology, represented by both live and fixed electronics. DYSTOPIA begins totally acoustically, with just the trumpet amplified; one small element of dissent from its surroundings. At the end of the 1st movement, live electronic processing is introduced, enhancing and extending the instruments. The 3rd movement features more elaborate processing and fixed electronic elements also begin to creep in. In the final movement, the musicians must play to a fixed electronic track created from a multi-genre collage of music sampled from various recordings. The musicians alternately try to fight or conform to the electronic track as it gradually takes over.
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Bios

SPLICE Ensemble is a trumpet, piano, and percussion trio focused on cultivating a canon of electroacoustic chamber music. Called a “sonic foodfight” by Jazz Weekly, SPLICE Ensemble works with composers and performers on performance practice techniques for collaboration and integrating electronics into a traditional performance space. The resident ensemble of both SPLICE Institute and SPLICE Festival, SPLICE Ensemble has been a featured ensemble at M Woods in Beijing, SEAMUS, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, SCI National, Electronic Music Midwest, and New Music Detroit’s Strange Beautiful Music 10. They have recorded on both the SEAMUS and Parma Labels.
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The music of composer/performer Anthony Donofrio questions ideas of linearity, subjectivity, and formal structure. Fascinated with how music intersects with all fields of creativity – especially literature, film, and painting – Anthony’s music is introspective, patient, fragile, and conflicted.

Their work has been featured on numerous festivals, conferences, and symposiums, including the Darmstadt Summer Courses, the Prague Quiet Music Festival, the World Saxophone Congress, SEAMUS National Conference, the Bowling Green State University New Music Festival, the Deep Listening Institute Conference, and others.

Anthony has received commissions from the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music, the Western Illinois New Music Festival, Music Teachers National Association, and from soloists and ensembles such as soprano Liz Pearse, pianists Ashlee Mack, Amy O’Dell, and Stacey Barelos, percussionist Aaron Michael Butler, harpist Ben Melsky, double bassist James Ilgenfritz, and clarinet/piano duo Duo Per Se. National and international performances include the International Contemporary Ensemble, the S.E.M. Ensemble, Longleash Piano Trio, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, and Duo Harpwerk, among others.

Specializing in concert-length works, Anthony’s catalog includes chamber pieces, works for instruments with electronics (both live and fixed media), and large ensemble works for orchestra and concert band. These works can be heard on Edition Wandelweiser Records, Sawyer Editions, Centaur Records, and August Two Editions.

As an educator, Anthony teaches composition, theory, and directs the new music ensemble at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. In addition, Anthony is also the director of the UNK New Music Series and Festival, which brings specialists in contemporary music to central Nebraska to present recitals, master classes, and lectures.

Anthony holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of Iowa; past teachers include Frank Wiley, David Gompper, Paul Schoenfield, and John Eaton. When spare time exists, Anthony enjoys book collecting, studying occultism, and cooking.
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Chloe Liuyan Liu is a composer who earned her Master of Music in Music Composition from Indiana University in May 2023, following her Bachelor of Music in Composition at Wheaton College in 2021. She achieved recognition by winning the special prize at the 4th Ise-Shima International Composition Competition, the Global Music Award, the Schultheis Composition Competition Award, and the Josephine Halvorsen Memorial Composition Prize. She also received third place in the 2024 American Prize (Vocal Chamber Division). Liu has studied composition under mentors such as Shawn Okpebeholo, Xavier Beteta, David Dzubay, Annie Gosfield, and Han Lash. She also pursued a minor in computer music under the direction of John Gibson and Chi Wang. During her time at Indiana University, she focused on interactive music with data-driven instruments for her computer music compositions. Outside of academia, she composes Chinese pop music and soundtracks for short films and games.
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The music of composer and multi-instrumentalist Dan VanHassel has been described as “energizing” (Wall Street Journal), “a refreshing direction” (I Care If You Listen), and “an imaginative and rewarding soundscape” (San Francisco Classical Voice). His works create a uniquely evocative sound world drawing from a background in rock and heavy metal, Indonesian gamelan, free improvisation, and classical music.

VanHassel’s compositions have been featured at top national and international contemporary music festivals, including the MATA Festival, Gaudeamus Music Week, International Computer Music Conference, Bowling Green New Music Festival, UnCaged Toy Piano Festival, Shanghai Conservatory Electronic Music Week, and the Bang on a Can Summer Festival. His music is played regularly all over the world by ensembles and performers such as the Talea Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, pianist Jihye Chang, Verdant Vibes, Keuris Saxophone Quartet, Transient Canvas, pianist Gloria Cheng, Symphony Number One, Red Fish Blue Fish, Empyrean Ensemble, Hotel Elefant, the Boston Percussion Group, Ensemble Pamplemousse, and the UC Santa Cruz Wind Ensemble. Recordings of his works are featured on albums by the Now Hear Ensemble and Ignition Duo, as well as releases on the New Focus, Soundset, and Thinking OutLoud labels.

VanHassel was awarded a Live Arts Boston grant from the Boston Foundation, as well as commissions from Chamber Music America, the Barlow Endowment, and the Johnstone Fund for New Music. As an electric guitarist, VanHassel has performed with leading contemporary ensembles including the Callithumpian Consort, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Eco Ensemble, and Kadence Arts. He was a founding member and artistic director of contemporary chamber ensemble Wild Rumpus in San Francisco until 2016, and is the founder and executive director of the Boston-based Hinge Quartet.

VanHassel received degrees in composition from the University of California, Berkeley, New England Conservatory, and Carnegie Mellon University. He has taught composition and electronic music at: MIT, Brandeis University, UC Berkeley, Clark University, and Connecticut College and is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
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Dr. Zheng Zhou (b. 1992) is a composer, songwriter, and Di-zi (Chinese bamboo flute) player whose music has been performed globally, including in the United States, Europe, and China, etc. He has worked with ensembles from different regions, such as Utah Philharmonia, DuselForty58, PHACE, NOVA, Fear No Music, etc. Dr. Zhou’s music is multicultural, employing various elements of different genres. He also absorbs compositional ideas from vivid images of the world around him. Dr. Zhou has been working on the composition and research of “visual-musical combination” and “electroacoustic music with cultural diversity.” His works have been published by Universal Edition, UCLA Music Library, China Scientific & Cultural Audio-video Publishing Co., Ltd, and Central China Normal University Publishing Company. Dr. Zhou was selected as winner of The American Prize in Composition, 2023, in the professional orchestra division, for his piece Loess for Orchestra and Live Multimedia. His string quartet, Glen Echo (2020), was published on the official site of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), in which he was interviewed by UMFA and the “@theU” Newsletter at the University of Utah. He also participated in an interdisciplinary collaboration regarding climate change at the University of Utah, “Artivism for Earth,” in which he composed a sextet piece, Reflection (2021). Dr. Zhou holds a degree in musicology from China University of Mining and Technology (B.A.) and music composition from California State University, Northridge (M.M.). In 2022, Dr. Zhou received his Ph.D. in music composition from the University of Utah, where he also served as an instructor of record in musicianship/theory areas and the president of the University Composers Collective. Currently, Dr. Zhou is an Assistant Professor of Music Composition at the School of Music at Central China Normal University.
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SPLICE Festival VI 2025 Workshop 2

Saturday January 25, 2025
4:00-4:55 EDT
    AND
5:00-5:55 EDT
Dalton Computer Lab, Western Michigan University

Dmitri Volkov

Getting Started with Pivotuner

Pivotuner is a plugin which tunes MIDI data in pure intonation in real time. Besides enabling beautiful purely-tuned chords on keyboards, this also enables many other cool things such as microtonal modulation, and unusual chord sonorities! This workshop goes over the fundamentals of how to use Pivotuner, and some of the more advanced features, and practical techniques for achieving different musical results! Topics include: setting up Pivotuner with MPE or MTS-ESP protocols, general Pivotuner concepts, Pivotuner tuning modes, key determiners, pitch/key locking, bendback.

Bio

Dmitri Volkov primarily operates within the realms of music and computer science. Musically, Dmitri is an award-winning composer and producer who seeks to use bleeding-edge experimental techniques in convincing ways; he is also an accomplished multi-instrumentalist. With computer science, Dmitri is comfortable with both the theoretical and the practical, having published academic papers as well as mobile apps and websites. He actively seeks out ways to combine the two disciplines, by publishing work on quantum computer music and developing audio plugins such as Pivotuner (which enables adaptive pure intonation and microtonal modulation for virtual instruments). Dmitri also wants you to know that he does not usually write in the third person.

SPLICE Festival VI 2025 Lectures 2

Saturday January 25, 2025
1:50-3:00pm EDT
Dalton Lecture Hall D1110, Western Michigan University

Jeremy Muller
Music for Instruments + Mobile Phones

This lecture-performance, which includes a performance of Blackwater: The Little Prince, explores how multimedia participation via the mobile phone can transform the concert experience. With this work, the devices “perform” in real-time using open, interoperable, and ubiquitous technology. We will discuss the limitations of indeterminate network latency and how this can be embraced as a musical aesthetic for spatialized performances.

Program notes for Blackwater: The Little Prince
Blackwater is about the infamous private mercenary army founded by Erik Prince, its war crimes, and how "endless wars" is a murderous business model in the 21st century. In this piece, the solo instruments are the two snare drums while the electronic part lives in the audience's phones and is an extension of the snare drums' sound using only filtered or downsampled noise. Audience members are encouraged to participate in the piece by using their mobile device as part of the musical texture. Turn your volume up, turn off vibrate and autolock, and please visit the website below on your mobile device to join:
https://blackwater.jeremymuller.com

Christopher Cresswell
Revisiting Plunderphonics 40 Years Later

It has been 40 years since John Oswald gave his (in)famous lecture, "Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative" at the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto in 1985. The questions raised in this lecture seem even more prescient in our current internet age where the contemporary reincarnations of plunderphonics, notably memes, sampling, and animated gifs, among many others, are not the domain of subversive artists like Oswald, but rather the lingua franca of our culture both on and off the internet.

Bios

Jeremy Muller (jeremymuller.com) is active as a percussionist, composer, and multimedia artist. He’s been described as “highly creative” by Take Effect and has performed as a featured soloist at many venues throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia including International Computer Music Conference, The Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), Transplanted Roots (Australia), MoxSonic, NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, ZeroSpace, Southwest Electroacoustic Festival, Jacksonville Electroacoustic Music Festival, IEEE VIS conference, the Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, and PASIC. He has given world premieres of works by many composers including Matthew Burtner, Alexandre Lunsqui, Cristyn Magnus, & an evening-length tour de force solo work by Stuart Saunders Smith. Jeremy released his debut solo percussion album on Albany records which includes several recording premieres, and his music can also be heard on Arcomusical’s third album “Emigre & Exile.” He is currently a Professor of Music at Georgia Institute of Technology.
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A composer/sound artist, singer/songwriter, educator, and radio host, Chris Cresswell is a curious musician whose work betrays his affection for sonic wanderlust. His music has been praised for its “textural variety” (Gramophone) that “… blur the boundaries between industrial and organic, soothing and suspenseful, and introspective and anxious” (International Clarinet Association), creating “a truly immersive, dreamlike atmosphere” (PopMatters).

After learning how to play a few basic chords in his 8th grade music class, Cresswell bought his first guitar in the summer of 2001. He almost immediately began writing songs and shortly thereafter started recording them. Two decades later, this interdependence of exploring the idiomatic possibilities of an instrument, and using the recording studio as a creative sandbox, is a hallmark of his work. Whether pushing into the extremes of harsh noise, ambient stillness, or somewhere in between, Cresswell’s music retains an emotional core rooted in his experience as a singer/songwriter.

Cresswell currently works as a teaching artist and as an adjunct lecturer at Onondaga Community College. He is the host of A Curious Ear on WCNY-FM, which explores the unlikely connections between disparate musical worlds. When not doing musical things, he can be found running the streets and trails of Central New York, watching St. Louis Cardinals baseball or Syracuse basketball, and spending time with his wife Amber and their adorable kitty, Eloise.
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SPLICE Festival VI 2025 Concert 4 Program

Saturday January 25, 2025
10:30am EDT
Multimedia Room, Western Michigan University

All times are Eastern Time and various events will be streamed live.
Check the WMU School of Music Youtube channel for links.

Pamela Z. (arr. Mayrose/Whiting) : Four Movements for Cello and Delays
  Drew Whiting, baritone saxophone
    I. Three Loops
    II. Gradual Quartet
    III. Quickly
    IV. Grains

Marcin Pączkowski : Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed
  Marcin Pączkowski, electronics

Anthony Marasco : Migration Script
  Anthony Marasco, electronics

Stephanie Vasko : Michigan: Flow State
  Stephanie Vasko, live interactive electronics, software synthesis, field recordings, video synthesis

Zeynep Özcan : Customs and Borders
  Zeynep Özcan, electronics

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Interested in donating to SPLICE? Now you can!
All donations go directly toward scholarships for our summer Institute - and no amount is too small.

Notes

Pamela Z. (arr. Mayrose/Whiting) : Four Movements for Cello and Delays
This work was commissioned by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s for their “Second Helpings” series at the DIA Center Chelsea in New York. It was composed for cello and electronics (three long delay lines and granular synthesis executed in MAX MSP Software on a Mac). In its premiere it was performed by principal cellist, Myron Lutzke with Pamela Z on electronics. It has subsequently been played by cellist Mimi Yu at the Juilliard School’s annual “Focus!” Festival, and a violin transcription of it has been recorded and performed at Center for New Music and Technology (CNMAT) in Berkeley by violinist Lina Bahn. —PZ.

With permission of the composer, Drew Whiting adapted the cello part for baritone saxophone, and John Mayrose provided MAX programming to execute the electronics. This saxophone and electronics version was premiered in 2023 at the North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Conference at the University of Southern Mississippi.
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Marcin Pączkowski : Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed
The title of the piece comes from a nursery rhyme referenced in George Orwell’s book “1984”. Throughout the book the main character struggles to remember the poem’s ending, which is revealed to him at the key moment, right before he is captured: “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head”.

This thread in the whole story resonated with me, as it touches on the volatility of one’s memory, with the backdrop of large-scale manipulation of recorded knowledge performed by the totalitarian regime in the book. While Orwell mostly deals with the memory that exists within humans and memory that’s written down, today we deal with omnipresence of recorded media of multiple sorts, particularly sounds, images, and videos. As we produce larger and larger amount of such records, not only through traditional books, audio records and movies, but also in social media, blogs, podcasts etc., I find it fascinating how we navigate this oversaturated space and how it is being transformed by both large-scale phenomena as well as targeted actions. In my piece I am seeking to explore these transformations by employing a machine learning model that embeds the memory of the piece. While being performed, the piece re-composes itself, as the model is being re-trained to embed new “memories” of the performance gestures.

This work is supported by the Department of Digital Arts and Experimental Media at the University of Washington, as well as eScience Institute with support from the Washington Research Foundation.

The piece is realized in 3rd order Ambisonics spatial sound format and employs custom motion sensors developed by the composer.
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Anthony Marasco : Migration Script
Migration Script centers on the unrelenting forces of nature that push creatures to live their lives as molded through centuries-old patterns without question. Using Mark Wheeler's 'Overwintering' script and Zach Scholl’s 'granchild' script for the Monome Norns, the performer reacts to and shapes the slowly evolving harmonic content generated in real-time from bird migration patterns captured across Europe. Building new polyphonic and rhythmic overlays from bird song field recordings and the aforementioned sonified data, the performer uses granular engines and digital sample reduction processing to impart their fleeting influence on an unrelenting force. This piece also uses the 'CH-Norns' package developed by the composer, allowing wireless collaborative data sharing between multiple Monome Norns instruments, mobile devices, and computers. During the performance, one Norns transmits audio-reactive control data to the other two computers, allowing the sonic properties of the music it synthesizes to adjust properties such as the grain density, bit reduction amount, and modulation depth of the signal processing machines in real time. In this manner, the musician gains an improvisation partner out of one of their own instruments, another source of stochastic drive they must attempt to sculpt and decide how to react to in each performance.
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Stephanie Vasko : Michigan: Flow State
Michigan: Flow State is a 10-minute audiovisual love letter to the lakes, rivers, and waterfalls of Michigan. This performance will combine 1. field recorded and manipulated audio performed with software and Midi controllers with 2. projected live coding video synthesis and 3. live sound creation. Field recordings and video/photography from on, in, and Michigan locations will be supplemented with sounds created by modular virtual synthesis, hydropowered instruments, and by live manipulation of water sources and hydrophones. Sounds and images will flow from one to another, with triggers between the two, highlighting the interconnected of our senses and of our lives with our water sources. back to program

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Zeynep Özcan : Customs and Borders
Customs and Borders is a transducer-based interactive live performance that challenges the audience’s perception on social identities through playful engagement and critical reflection. Utilizing objects symbolic of immigration, such as passports, stamps, and single-hole punches, the performance highlights the tangible artifacts of border crossing. As the performer takes on the role of a customs and border protection officer, the performance intentionally blurs the lines between authority and absurdity, inviting the audience to question the power structures at play in such contexts.

Become part of the performance!

This performance is interactive, and I invite volunteers to participate. Please pick up a passport near the stage and approach the performer with it. The performer will then decide whether to grant you entry with a stamp or deny it.
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Bios

Anthony T. Marasco is a composer, sound artist, and instrument designer who takes influence from the aesthetics of today’s Digimodernist culture. His music and installations showcase emerging technologies to highlight their creative flexibility, combining interactive sensor systems and cyber-hacked circuit-bent hardware with modular synthesizers and tabletop sound computers. An internationally recognized artist, Marasco’s works have been featured at the SEAMUS conference, the Networked Music Festival, MoxSonic, NIME, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, NYCEMF, Mise-En Festival, Montreal Contemporary Music Lab, and more. Anthony’s research centers on developing collaborative and networked performance tools for electroacoustic music performance. He is a co-developer of Collab-Hub, a framework that lets remote, physically distanced performers share control of virtual and tangible instruments across the internet. Marasco is an Assistant Professor of Composition and Technology at Michigan State University’s College of Music.
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Dr. Zeynep Özcan is an experimental and electronic music composer, sound artist and performer. She explores biologically inspired musical creativity, interactive and immersive environments, and generative systems. Her works have been performed and presented throughout the world in concerts, exhibitions, and conferences, such as AES, ICAD, ICMC, ISEA, NIME, NYCEMF, WAC and ZKM. She is an Assistant Professor and a faculty director of Girls in Music and Technology (GiMaT), Summer Institute at the Department of Performing Arts Technology at the University of Michigan, School of Music, Theatre & Dance. She specializes in the implementation of software systems for music-making, audio programming, sonification, sensors and microcontrollers, novel interfaces for musical expression, and large-scale interactive installations. Her research interests are exploring bio-inspired creativity, artistic sonification, playfulness and failure in performance, and sonic cyberfeminisms. She is passionate about community building and creating multicultural and collaborative learning experiences for students through technology-driven creativity.
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Marcin Pączkowski [`marr-cheen pawnch-`koavz-kee] is a composer, conductor, digital artist, and performer, working with both traditional and electronic media. As a composer, he is focused on developing new ways of creating and performing computer music, and his pieces involving real-time gestural control using accelerometers have been performed in the United States, Poland, Canada, and South Korea.

As the Music Director of Evergreen Community Orchestra, he presents concerts of diverse repertoire to local communities. He is also involved in performing new music and has led premieres of numerous works in Poland and in the United States. He received grants and commissions from the Seattle Symphony, eScience Institute, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and from Polish Institute of Music and Dance. He received his Ph.D. in Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. He also holds Masters' degrees from the Academy of Music in Kraków, Poland, and from the University of Washington.
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Dr. Stephanie E. Vasko (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with sound, electronics, sculpture, software, video, performance, coding, and photography. A tinkerer and experimentalist at heart, her work uses combinations of vintage and current technologies, instruments, and techniques to warp perceptions, play with the distinction between natural and built spaces, and explore embodied experiences. She performs online and in-person, most recently, as part of Sound Scene 2024 at the Hirshhorn Museum, and has participated in solo and collaborative residencies. Dr. Vasko is the co-founder of the bimonthly Ambient Annotations experimental music series in Lansing, MI. You can find out more about her at http://www.stephanievasko.com or on Instagram at @stephanievaskostudio.
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Saxophonist Drew Whiting has established himself as a champion of new and experimental music, specializing in performing works of the 20th and 21st centuries in solo, chamber, and electroacoustic settings. Drew is described as having “superb musicianship” (The Saxophonist), “remarkable versatility” (Computer Music Journal), and is a “superb advocate of the music he champions” (Fanfare Magazine).

Drew received his Bachelors and Masters of Music degrees from the Michigan State University College of Music and the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Drew is a proud Yamaha Performing Artist and Vandoren Artist-Clinician, performing exclusively on Yamaha saxophones and Vandoren woodwind products.
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Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist making works for voice, electronics, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), MoMA (NY), the Venice Biennale, and Dakar Biennale. She has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles (including Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird). Her awards include the Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MIT McDermott Award, the Guggenheim, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
www.pamelaz.com

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SPLICE Festival VI 2025 Concert 3 Program

Friday January 24, 2025
7:00pm EDT
Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University

All times are Eastern Time and various events will be streamed live.
Check the WMU School of Music Youtube channel for links.

Pedram Diba : For it is Our First Universe
  Zaira Castillo, piano + lights

Carolyn Borcherding : Life is
  Henning Schroeder, saxophones

Chris Biggs : Artifacts of Leisure
  Henning Schroeder, saxophones
  Yu-Lien Thé, piano

Arya Nair : Vara Da: Missed Stop
  Olivia Cirisan, vibraphone

Duo Cataclysma : Improvisation
  Jeff Kaiser, trumpet + laptop/electronics
  Seth Andrew Davis, electric guitar + laptop/electronics

Per Bloland : Los murmullos
  Keith Kirchoff, piano

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Interested in donating to SPLICE? Now you can!
All donations go directly toward scholarships for our summer Institute - and no amount is too small.

Notes

Pedram Diba : For it is Our First Universe
The conceptual framework of For it is Our First Universe is taken from Gaston Bachelard's book, Poetics of Space. In this book, Bachelard talks about the intimacy one develops toward the space of their childhood home, and how that intimate relationship becomes a fundamental part of that person. The title of the work was constructed by putting two quotes from Bachelard’s book together. In general, the concept of home could be applied to things beyond the house itself. For example, it could be applied to home town, home country, the language one grows up with, the cuisine of one's culture, etc.

In this work, I use phonographies of the bazaar in Kerman, Iran to make the electronics and form the instrumental part. I chose to record the sounds of this bazaar because of its national significance as well as personal meaning. As one of the largest and oldest bazaars in Iran, it has cultural significance and has become a destination. Additionally, its sounds have a strong sense of intimacy for me since the distinctive accent of the Farsi spoken in Kerman resonates with me personally. In this piece I tried to capture the essence of this intimacy through the bazaar’s sounds and spaces.
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Carolyn Borcherding : Life is
2018 was a particularly tumultuous time in my life. As I struggled to make sense of the challenges I was facing, I frequently found myself meditating on the meaning of life. I decided that meaning was built from small, day-to-day occurrences –greeting a friend, hearing the rattle of leaves in the trees, going on a short walk– rather than large events, such as traveling or having a piece premiered. Grand events were, I decided, assembled by a series of smaller events that were by no means any less important.

Life is represents this concept. The piece is built on an ascending major seventh motive, representing a small moment in life. This motive transforms and grows as it attempts to find resolution, winding its way through growing tension and conflict built from distortions of the motive itself. Thus, reiterations and developments of this single motive knit together an experience far larger than itself. Only in the final moments of its iteration does this motive find its perfect resolution.
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Arya Nair : Vara Da: Missed Stop
Paragon of vortex,
I swirl into abyss
For the sake of composure,
I'm smiling
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Duo Cataclysma : Improvisation
For SPLICE Fest, Duo Cataclysma will be showcasing both Kaiser and Davis’ and their respective robot improvisers, KaiGen and Cybersyn. Both systems reflect the creative outlook and values of their creators. This hybrid quartet is intended to reflect the post-humanist possibilities of what it can mean for human and robot agents to interact in creative practice, specifically improvised music.
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Per Bloland : Los murmullos
Los murmullos, for piano and electronics, is based on a highly influential novel from the 1950s: Pedro Páramo, by the Mexican author Juan Rulfo. The electronics for this piece were generated using a physical model of the Electro-Magnetically Prepared Piano – a device consisting of a rack of twelve electromagnets that can be installed on the frame of any grand piano. The EMPP is somewhat like an EBow in that the electromagnets cause the strings to vibrate. However, because the electromagnets receive audio signals from a computer, there is a much higher degree sonic variability. The physical model of this device, called the Induction Connection, was developed during an Artistic Research Residency at IRCAM in Paris. The Induction Connection is currently built into IRCAM’s software Modalys.

The novel Pedro Páramo is the surreal tale of a man’s return to the town in which his parents lived, long after that town has fallen into decay. Comala is now populated more heavily by the dead than the living, and exists in a blurred twilight realm in which such distinctions are meaningless. The descriptions of the environment are exceptionally vivid, often invoking the four elements to transition between the past and the present, and between the living and the dead. The original title of the novel was Los murmullos, a reflection of the murmuring and whispering of the dead heard at various points throughout. Contrary to the gentle implications of the word, it is the intensity of these murmurs that overwhelms and suffocates the protagonist just over half way through the narrative.

Los murmullos is dedicated to Keith Kirchoff.
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Bios

Christopher Biggs is a composer, electronics performer, and multimedia artist whose “original and unique musical language” blends dense, contrapuntal textures with direct, visceral expression. His music presents a “masterful combination between acoustic instruments and electronics” (Avant Scena), and has been described as “heartbreakingly beautiful” (Classical Music Review), and a “sonic foodfight” (Jazz Weekly). His recent projects focus on integrating live instrumental performance with interactive audiovisual media.
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Per Bloland is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music whose works have been praised by the New York Times as “lush, caustic,” and “irresistible.” His compositions range from solo pieces to works for large orchestra, and incorporate video, dance, and custom-built electronics. His opera, Pedr Solis, was premiered by Guerilla Opera in 2015. He has also received commissions from Unheard-of//Ensemble, loadbang, Keith Kirchoff, Wild Rumpus, the Ecce Ensemble, the Callithumpian Consort, Stanford’s CCRMA, SEAMUS/ASCAP, and Patti Cudd. His music can be heard on the TauKay (Italy), Capstone, Spektral, and SEAMUS labels, and through the MIT Press. A portrait CD of his work, performed by Ecce Ensemble, is available on Tzadik.

Bloland is the co-creator of the Electromagnetically-Prepared Piano. In 2013 he completed a five-month Musical Research Residency at IRCAM in Paris, and is currently in a second multi-segment residency there. He is an Associate Professor of Composition and Technology, and coordinator of the Composition area at Miami University, Ohio. He is also a founding board member of the SPLICE Institute. He received his D.M.A. in composition from Stanford University and his M.M. from the University of Texas.

Scores may be purchased at www.babelscores.com/perbloland
For more information visit: www.perbloland.com
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Carolyn Borcherding is a composer and sound artist predominantly interested in building sounding and visual worlds within which performing bodies and audio gestures can exist together in fluid relationships. Her body of work ranges from pieces for solo instrument to multimedia ensembles consisting of video, electronically produced sound, and acoustic instruments. In her multimedia works, she considers each medium an essential performing body in which the media interact with, relate to, and inform one another. In fixed media works, she experiments particularly with the creation and destruction of the listeners’ sense of space. Her art has increasingly explored topics on the human experience, data in the natural sciences, and literary narratives.

Carolyn received her master’s degree in music composition at Western Michigan University and her doctorate at the University of Illinois. She is currently Assistant Professor in Composition at Baldwin Wallace University.
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Zaira Castillo is a passionate pianist with a profound commitment to contemporary music and collaboration with living composers. Over recent years, she has commissioned and premiered numerous solo and chamber piano works, showcasing her passion for pushing musical boundaries. As an active performer, she has premiered and performed works at several venues in the Chicago area including, Constellation Chicago, the Epiphany Center for the Arts, Northwestern University, Roosevelt University, Experimental Sound Studios, and Clara Chicago.

Her programming style reflects thoughtful curation, seamlessly blending traditional repertoire with contemporary works. This approach has earned her recognition through multiple grants, affirming her impact on the musical landscape.

Based in Chicago, Zaira balances her career as a freelance pianist and private instructor with her role as a founding member and pianist for Duo Riso.
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Olivia Cirisan is a percussionist, singer/songwriter, composer and producer based in Southeast Michigan. Olivia’s range of work is diverse, as she involves herself in many creative projects and musical interests. Her work is often collaborative, cross-genre and experimental, and frequently makes use of technology and multimedia. Olivia is a percussionist and founding member of mixed sextet FLYDLPHN, percussion / multimedia duo VIRID, and percussion trio Brain Pocket. A collaborator at heart, she has premiered many works by living composers, and she has also worked on notable projects such as John Luther Adams’ GRAMMY-nominated recording of “Sila: The Breath of the World,” the premiere of Michael Gordon’s “Field of Vision,” and “A New Age for New Age, Vol. 5.” As a composer, songwriter and producer, Olivia combines her percussion training, her love of electronic production and her songwriting experience to make music that swims amongst both popular and unconventional idioms, most recently exemplified by her 35-minute record, MIDDLES.

Currently, Olivia is pursuing her M.M. in percussion performance at the University of Michigan, where she is also the Assistant Director of the University of Michigan Gamelan. She is a 2024 Graduate Fellow in the Center for World Performance Studies as well. back to program

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Duo Cataclysma is the electro-acoustic duo of Jeff Kaiser (trumpet, flugelhorn, and laptop/electronics) and Seth Andrew Davis (electric guitar, laptop/electronics). The group focuses on improvisation and interactive electronics with live signal processing and virtual/artificial/robot agents. The group is heavily influenced by American free jazz, European free Improvisation, and Electro-Acoustic free improvisation traditions.
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Pedram Diba (b. 1993) is an Iranian-American composer of acoustic, acousmatic, and mixed music currently residing in Paris. Diba's music features intricate, ever-evolving soundscapes that consistently reveal interconnected relationships among various sound elements and components, offering a distinctive and intellectually engaging listening experience.

His compositions have been showcased in festivals and conferences such as SEAMUS, IRCAM Forum, CIRMMT-ACTOR Symposium, Festival Temporel, NOVA Contemporary Music Meeting, and New Music Gathering, among others.

Since 2019, Diba has been a member of the Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) Project. Through ACTOR, he has participated in and initiated various research-creation projects such as the CORE Ensemble Project, Musicians Auditory Perception (MAP), and Space As Timbre (SAT), which have led to peer-reviewed publications as a direct outcome of these projects.

Diba completed his B.M. in composition at the University of Oregon where he received the prize of Outstanding Undergraduate Scholar in Composition. Later, he received the MAX Stern Fellowship in Music to attend McGill University, where he completed his M.M. in composition under the supervision of Philippe Leroux. Currently, Diba is pursuing his Ph.D. in composition and music technology at Northwestern University with Alex Mincek, Hans Thomalla, and Jay Alan Yim. He is also one of the selected composers participating in the Cursus de composition et d'informatique musicale at IRCAM for 2023-2024.
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Described as a “virtuosic tour de force” whose playing is “energetic, precise, (and) sensitive,” pianist and composer Keith Kirchoff has performed throughout North America, Europe, and the Pacific Southwest. A strong advocate for living composers, Kirchoff is committed to fostering new audiences for contemporary music and giving a voice to emerging composers, and to that end has commissioned several dozen compositions and premiered hundreds of new works. He is the co-founder and President of SPLICE Music: one of the United States’ largest programs dedicated to the performance, creation, and development of music for performers and electronics. Kirchoff is active as both a soloist and chamber musician, and is a member of both Hinge Quartet and SPLICE Ensemble. Kirchoff has won awards from the Steinway Society, MetLife Meet the Composer, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chamber Music America, and was named the 2011 Distinguished Scholar by the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association. He has recorded on the New World, Kairos, New Focus, Tantara, Ravello, Thinking outLOUD, Zerx, and SEAMUS labels.

You can follow Kirchoff on Instagram @8e8keys and learn more at his website: keithkirchoff.com
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Arya Nair
Sophomore in Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Composer/Singer/Pianist.

Emerging from Dubai, U.A.E, she has traveled the world; growing her expertise and striving to bridge sociocultural barriers with music. Her compositions have earned her a scholarship at the Conservatory, where she continues to grow under the guidance of composers including Bahar Royaee, Victoria Cheah, Marti Epstein, and Mischa Salkind-Pearl.
Additionally, she is enriched by her experience as a certified Trinity College London grade 8 Piano performer, and is acclaimed as the 2022 London Young Musicians Silver Award winner.

Arya works as a Stage Manager in Boston Conservatory. She is currently Boston-based, where she enjoys exploring bakeries and taking walks by the stream.
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German saxophonist Henning Schröder has concertized at major venues throughout Europe, Asia and North America, both as a soloist and in groups as diverse as the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Max Raabe & Das Palast Orchester. Dr. Schröder holds the baritone saxophone chair in the Capitol Quartet. Together with his longtime duo partner, pianist Yu-Lien The, Dr. Schröder explores both the standard and contemporary repertoire of his instrument. He frequently collaborates with composers and has performed world premieres of solo or chamber compositions by Frederic Rzewski, Anna Clyne, Carter Pann, and Branford Marsalis, to name just a few.

A Yamaha Performing Artist, he has been featured in performances, lectures, clinics and as a composer at international conferences and festivals in Europe and North America, including the Midwest Clinic, SEAMUS, World Saxophone Congresses, Biennial Conferences of the North American Saxophone Alliance as well as the Schleswig Holstein Musikfestival. Dr. Schröder holds degrees in saxophone performance and saxophone pedagogy from the University of Arts Berlin, Western Michigan University and the University of Illinois. He studied with Debra Richtmeyer, Johannes Ernst, Trent Kynaston and Chip McNeill. Dr. Schröder teaches at Western Michigan University and he spends his summers in North Carolina as a member of the Brevard Summer Music Festival Artist Faculty.
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Yu-Lien Thé has performed throughout the U.S., Europe, and Southeast-Asia, including appearances as a soloist with the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, the Kammerorchester Hannover, and the Baroque Orchestra L'Arco. Other notable performances include a two-piano recital with Lori Sims of Messiaen’s “Visions de l’Amen” in 2008 and a lecture-recital of “The Other Diabelli-Variations” in 2012, both at the Gilmore International Keyboard Piano in Kalamazoo. A prizewinner of the 12th International Piano Competition Viotti-Valsesia (Italy) and the Deutsche Musikwettbewerb, she was admitted to the National Concert Podium for Young Artists (Germany), which led to several concert tours with violinist Tomo Keller. Dr. The is a champion of contemporary composers and has been involved in a number of commissions and world premieres. She frequently collaborates with saxophonists Joe Lulloff and Henning Schröder as well as composers Dorothy Chang, Keith Murphy, and Carter Pann. During her tenure with the new music ensemble Opus21, she worked with composers Anna Clyne, David Lang, and Frederic Rzewski, which culminated in premiere performances at Symphony Space (New York) as well as Zankel Hall at Carnegie in 2007 and 2008, respectively.

Born in the Netherlands, Yu-Lien Thé received most of her musical training in Germany, where she obtained degrees in both piano and recorder performance and pedagogy from the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover. She has earned an Artist Diploma from the Hochschule für Musik Detmold, a Master of Music from Western Michigan University, as well as a D.M.A. in piano performance from Michigan State University. Her principal piano teachers were Arie Vardi, Anatol Ugorski, Deborah Moriarty, and Lori Sims.

Yu-Lien Thé is Associate Professor of Keyboard Studies at Western Michigan University and has previously served on the faculties at Bowling Green State University, Valparaiso University, and Kalamazoo College.
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SPLICE Festival VI 2025 Workshop 1

Friday January 24, 2025
4:30-5:30pm EDT
Dalton Lecture Hall D1110, Western Michigan University

NOTE: Rachel Devorah Rome's workshop has been cancelled and will be replaced with the following workshop.

Please note new start time: 4:30.

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Per Bloland

Computer Assisted Orchestration with Orchidea/MaxOrch

Orchidea is collection of Max objects designed for computer-assisted orchestration. Users select a set of instruments and a target audio file, and Orchidea attempts to match the spectral chacteristics of the target file with the designated instruments. The result is a sample-based audio file and a notated score.

These objects are incredibly powerful and feature-rich, but the learning curve is a bit steep. MaxOrch provides an interface to make the features easier to access and offer detailed explanations about their implementation.

This workshop includes an overview of the Orchidea ecosystem and a tutorial on the use of MaxOrch.

To install MaxOrch, please visit the MaxOrch page. It is recommended that you install the standalone - it's just easier to do!

Bio

Per Bloland is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music whose works have been praised by the New York Times as “lush, caustic,” and “irresistible.” His compositions range from intimate solo pieces to works for large orchestra, and incorporate video, dance, and custom-built electronics. He has received awards and recognition from organizations including IRCAM, ICMA, SEAMUS/ASCAP, the Ohio Arts Council, Digital Art Awards of Tokyo, ISCM, the Martirano Competition, and SCI/ASCAP. His first opera, Pedr Solis, commissioned and premiered by Guerilla Opera in 2015, received rave reviews from the Boston Globe and the Boston Classical Review. He has received commissions from Unheard-of//Ensemble, loadbang, Keith Kirchoff, Wild Rumpus, the Ecce Ensemble, Ensemble Pi, the Callithumpian Consort, Stanford’s CCRMA, SEAMUS/ASCAP, the Kenners, Michael Straus and Patti Cudd. His music can be heard on the TauKay (Italy), Capstone, Spektral, and SEAMUS labels, and through the MIT Press. A portrait CD of his work, performed by Ecce Ensemble, is available on Tzadik.

Bloland is the co-creator of the Electromagnetically-Prepared Piano, about which he has given numerous lecture/demonstrations and published a paper. In 2013 he completed a five-month Musical Research Residency at IRCAM in Paris, and is currently in the midst of a second multi-segment residency there. He is an Associate Professor of Composition and Technology, and coordinator of the Composition and Music Technology areas at Miami University, Ohio. He is also a founding composition faculty member at the SPLICE Institute, and recently established the Composition program at the Montecito International Music Festival. He received his D.M.A. in composition from Stanford University and his M.M. from the University of Texas at Austin.

Scores may be purchased at www.babelscores.com/perbloland For more information visit: www.perbloland.com

SPLICE Festival VI 2025 Lectures 1

Friday January 24, 2025
2:00-3:00pm EDT
Dalton Lecture Hall D1110, Western Michigan University

Stephanie Vasko
Putting the Wave in Waveform: Incorporating the Power and Sound of Water in Electronic Music

While field recordings of water are often incorporated into electronic music compositions, there are a multitude of ways to use water to create movement, sound, and visual interest in performances. This talk will cover techniques including field recording (above/on/underwater), hydropowering equipment, and incorporating water in various states into live performances. This talk will also feature a live demonstration of combining tape loops and ice.

Duo Cataclysma
Enter Agency: Interagency and Intra-action

In this presentation Duo Cataclysma (Jeff Kaiser and Seth Andrew Davis) introduce the technological, theoretical and historical underpinnings of their creative practice. Moving through ideas of technological and human relationships, the agency of technology and the environment, and they will also discuss and demo the various softwares they have authored and will be performing with that grew out of these ideas. For more information: https://jeffkaiser.com/duocat

Bios

Dr. Stephanie E. Vasko (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with sound, electronics, sculpture, software, video, performance, coding, and photography. A tinkerer and experimentalist at heart, her work uses combinations of vintage and current technologies, instruments, and techniques to warp perceptions, play with the distinction between natural and built spaces, and explore embodied experiences. She performs online and in-person, most recently, as part of Sound Scene 2024 at the Hirshhorn Museum, and has participated in solo and collaborative residencies. Dr. Vasko is the co-founder of the bimonthly Ambient Annotations experimental music series in Lansing, MI. You can find out more about her at http://www.stephanievasko.com or on Instagram at @stephanievaskostudio.
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Duo Cataclysma is the electro-acoustic duo of Jeff Kaiser (trumpet, flugelhorn, and laptop/electronics) and Seth Andrew Davis (electric guitar, laptop/electronics). The group focuses on improvisation and interactive electronics with live signal processing and virtual/artificial/robot agents. The group is heavily influenced by American free jazz, European free Improvisation, and Electro-Acoustic free improvisation traditions. back to program

SPLICE Festival VI 2025 Concert 2 Program

Friday January 24, 2025
10:30am EDT
Multimedia Room, Western Michigan University

All times are Eastern Time and various events will be streamed live.
Check the WMU School of Music Youtube channel for links.

Liann J. Kang : Images
  Jack Thorpe, sax

Isaac Smith : Extension
  Robin Meiksins, flute

Sivan Cohen Elias : RESET
  Will Yager, bass

Christopher Cresswell : Sometimes I Get a Feeling
  RE:Duo, viola + sax

Caroline Flynn : Fish Song
  Caroline Flynn, voice

Lisa Coons : Chimera’s Garden
  Robin Meiksins, flute

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Interested in donating to SPLICE? Now you can!
All donations go directly toward scholarships for our summer Institute - and no amount is too small.

Notes

Liann J. Kang : Images
Images was conceived as a “sonic cycle,” a cycle of pieces for varied instrumentation and media which seek to musically convey intangible, abstract ideas such as philosophies, concepts, or thoughts, as a series of sonic images. Images is an ongoing project. The first two pieces of the cycle, Blue Air and Traces, were written for Jack Thorpe who commissioned the pieces under the auspices of the 2022 Presser Graduate Music Award. The live electronics for both were developed in SuperCollider by Victor Zheng.

I. Blue Air. The flickering image of bursting air
Intertwined with sounds around us
Sounds that bring out memories
Voices that call out to us
Nostalgia about a place that we have never been to

II. Traces
Drifting in unmeasured time
Grasping for direction amid remnants and wisps
Textures across a static continuum
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Isaac Smith : Extension
This piece is an exploration of the relationship of live performers to generative AI. A neural network was trained on a large dataset of recordings made by Robin from her YouTube channel. That trained model is then loaded into the nn~ object in Max/MSP, which analyzes incoming audio and resynthesizes that audio using samples from the dataset. When it is working optimally, Robin and AI are almost exact copies of one other, but as the piece progresses the algorithm's capabilities reach their limit, failing and distorting. In the end, however, the dichotomy of artist and machine becomes blurred, and the performer finds themselves imitating the AI in a cyclic conversation with no clear start or end.
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Sivan Cohen Elias : RESET
RESET for prepared double bass and live electronics is designed as a pattern that keeps restarting itself in a way that preserves its core elements while ever morphing into new shapes, through its presence in space and time. It works akin to a body that is reflected through a looking glass, which then warps and shreds, so the reflection keeps changing while the original content remains intact. The core sound imagery combines representations of nostalgic harmonic sound with a seemingly “paper tearing” sound, and a quasi-bird sound.

The electronics part consists of a sequential automated presets, mainly utilizing real time signal processing, recording and processing the double bass performance in real-time, and fixed media containing pre-made processed pre-recorded materials of the double bass, while also living some room for electronics improvisation.

RESET was written for and is dedicated to Will Yager.
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Christopher Cresswell : Sometimes I Get a Feeling
"Sometimes I get the feeling that I won’t be on this planet for very long I really like it here, I’m quite attached to it, I hope I’m wrong”

Pop songs that I hated as a kid. Concert banter from my favorite band. An episode of TRL. Television commercials. Ephemera. Refuse. Individually these moments are a way of passing the time. Collectively they reflect back the life we lived.
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Caroline Flynn : Fish Song
Originally written for The Cube, a 134.2-channel immersive concert space at Virginia Tech, Fish Song blends techniques of electroacoustic music with stylistic practices associated with pop. Its text deals with themes of toxic codependency and the loss of one’s sense of self that results from uneven power dynamics. The presentation of this text is obfuscated and fleeting as a reflection of its speaker’s identity.
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Lisa Coons : Chimera’s Garden
Chimera’s Garden was born of a desire to tell a story within an aural-visual world: a world shared by performer and audience. The multimedia serves as both the “score” the performer reads/responds to, and the context in which the performance exists (a temporally evolving “scene”). The narrative is of a woman deeply connected to the natural world, a protagonist never at home with others. As she is always at odds with the outside world, the woman loses herself in the cultivation of her garden. She is eventually subsumed by her remote sanctuary, undergoing an irreversible metamorphosis and finding her own peculiar peace.

This is a recent work in a series I call “Narrative Environment Works;” works that are story-based for multimedia and performers. The original physical score combined watercolor, ink, and found objects to convey the connections between the protagonist and the natural world. That document, including my original text and vocal performance, was then translated to video and fixed media. Chimera’s Garden is a structured improvisation work, using the aforementioned multimedia as a score/framework for the performance; and it is always a collaboration with the performer, relying deeply on how that individual tells the story.
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Bios

Lisa Renée Coons makes creative sound projects with others. Her preferred labels oscillate from sound artist to composer, from mentor and teacher to dreamer and maker. Although her artistic work spans disciplines, media, and vocabularies, almost all are collaborative, integrating aural and visual elements in some capacity, and are grounded in themes of environmentalism, identity, and the performing body. Lisa’s rich experiences collaborating include those with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Spectral Quartet, Mark DeChiazza, The American Composers Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente, the NODES Project, Dither Electric Guitar Quartet, Shanna Pranaitis, Iktus Percussion Quartet, Illinois Modern Ensemble, the New England Guitar Quartet, Hannah Addario-Berry, Collect/Project, and the California E.A.R. Unit. She has been fortunate to develop her work in fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Hartt School, and the Other Minds Festival. Lisa is currently an Associate Professor of Music at Western Michigan University. lisarcoons.com
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A composer/sound artist, singer/songwriter, educator, and radio host, Chris Cresswell is a curious musician whose work betrays his affection for sonic wanderlust. His music has been praised for its “textural variety” (Gramophone) that “… blur the boundaries between industrial and organic, soothing and suspenseful, and introspective and anxious” (International Clarinet Association), creating “a truly immersive, dreamlike atmosphere” (PopMatters).

After learning how to play a few basic chords in his 8th grade music class, Cresswell bought his first guitar in the summer of 2001. He almost immediately began writing songs and shortly thereafter started recording them. Two decades later, this interdependence of exploring the idiomatic possibilities of an instrument, and using the recording studio as a creative sandbox, is a hallmark of his work. Whether pushing into the extremes of harsh noise, ambient stillness, or somewhere in between, Cresswell’s music retains an emotional core rooted in his experience as a singer/songwriter.

Cresswell currently works as a teaching artist and as an adjunct lecturer at Onondaga Community College. He is the host of A Curious Ear on WCNY-FM, which explores the unlikely connections between disparate musical worlds. When not doing musical things, he can be found running the streets and trails of Central New York, watching St. Louis Cardinals baseball or Syracuse basketball, and spending time with his wife Amber and their adorable kitty, Eloise.
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Sivan Cohen Elias, a 2024 ACF McKnight Composer Fellow, is an electroacoustic composer and improviser. Her work spans the United States, Europe, and Asia, where she has received various prestigious international awards, including Fromm Foundation, and Akademie Schloss Solitude. Her pieces have been performed by ensembles such as Klangforum Wien, Jack Quartet, Talea, Distractfold, soundinitiative, among many others in festivals including Wien Modern, Impuls, Bang on a Can, TimeSpan, Klangspuren, to name a few. She received PhD from Harvard University. Main former composition instructors include Chaya Czernowin, and Steven K. Takasugi. She was a visiting professor at the University of Iowa between 2018-2021, taught electronic music performance at NYU in 2021-2022, and since Fall 2022 she has been the Assistant Professor of Composition and Music Technology at the University of Minnesota, School of Music.
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Caroline Flynn is a composer, songwriter, and performer currently living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her work, while covering a variety of genres and styles, typically has an emphasis on voice and text, glitch, and feelings of uncanny valley that result from the combination of natural and artificial aural elements. Having earned both a B.A. in creative technologies in music and a B.S. in psychology from Virginia Tech, Caroline integrates this academic background to create music that is concerned with human perception, assumptions, reactions, and emotions. Caroline is currently pursuing a Master of Music in Composition, as well as teaching in the Composition and Multimedia Arts Technology departments, at Western Michigan University.
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Born in Seoul, South Korea, Liann J. Kang (formerly Jung Hyun Lee) is a composer residing in the US. In her work, she seeks to direct the audience’s perception of sound and space altered by crafted sonic illusions. Inspired by her own synesthesia, her compositions stimulate not only hearing, but all the senses collectively to each awaken uniquely in response to the temporal art of music.

Kang was recently named as first prize winner of the 2024 Sweetwater/SEAMUS Commission Competition and winner of the twenty-third annual 21st Century Piano Commission Competition at the University of Illinois. Her works have featured internationally at events and conferences including SEAMUS, EMM, NYCEMF, ICMC 2024, Napoleon Electronic Media Festival, CHIMEFest at University of Chicago, Chosun Daily National Debut Concert in Seoul, South Korea, Sound Spaces in Malmö, Sweden, and the highSCORE Festival in Pavia, Italy.

She is the recipient of 2024 Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship and previously had masterclasses led by Kaija Saariaho and John Harbison. Currently, Kang is a doctoral candidate in composition-theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also earned her Master of Music. She earned a Bachelor of Music in composition with honors from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.
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Robin Meiksins is a freelance contemporary flutist focused on collaboration with living composers. Chicago-based, she uses the Internet and online media to support and create collaboration. In 2017, Robin completed her first year-long collaborative project, 365 Days of Flute. Each day featured a different work; each video was recorded and posted the same day. In 2018, Robin completed the 52 Weeks of Flute Project. Each week features different living composer to workshop a submitted work, culminating in a performance on YouTube. Robin has premiered over 100 works and has performed at SPLICE Institute and Festival, the SEAMUS national conference, Oh My Ears New Music Festival. In 2018, she was a guest artist at University of Illinois for their first annual ’24-Hour Compose-a-thon.’ Robin holds a masters degree from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music where she studied with Kate Lukas and Thomas Robertello. She also holds a Bachelors of Music with Honors from University of Toronto where she studied with Leslie Newman.
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RE:duo (“Reply Duo”) engages audiences with innovative programming that blurs the lines between artistic disciplines. Consisting of saxophonist, Wilson Poffenberger, and violist, Elsie Bae Han, the duo formed following an interdisciplinary collaboration exploring the intersection between sound and movement. RE:duo has since expanded its repertory to include works that feature performative elements such as theater, improvisation, movement, and speech. With a principal objective of elevating and connecting with other artists, both duo members founded and hold executive positions with New Music Mosaic, a new music collective dedicated to promoting a more equitable musical community through the performance, creation, and dissemination of new music by artists of diverse backgrounds and identities. Through New Music Mosaic, RE:duo curates a series of concerts across the U.S. as a part of their open call for scores initiative.

Recognized nationally and internationally, RE:duo has performed at conferences and institutions such as the Composers Conference, the International Saxophone Symposium, the Cortona Sessions for New Music, North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Conference, Avaloch Farms Music Institute, Valdosta State University, Georgia State University, the University of North Texas, and the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
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Isaac Smith was born in 1991. He earned his Bachelors in Music Theory and Composition at CSU, Sacramento in 2013. In 2011, he studied electronic music at the Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen, Germany. In 2019, he earned a Masters of Music in Composition from the University of Oregon, where he headed the Oregon Composers Forum. Isaac is currently studying for his Doctorate of Music in Composition at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he is the Special Projects Manager for the Office of Entrepreneurship and Career Development. He is a member of the Center for Electronic and Computer Music at IU and has completed a doctoral minor in Electronic Music. He is the winner of the Morris and Sheila Hass Award in Computer Music for his piece for flute and live electronics, “Extension,” and was a finalist for the Fermilab Composer-in-Residence position for his orbital panning work “Formation,” which was performed at the SEAMUS National Conference in 2023. His research interests include data sonification of the gravitational waves produced by merging black holes, and using neural networks to augment live electronic performance. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife Pafoua and several well-loved house plants.
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Atlanta-based saxophonist Jack Thorpe currently serves as Artist Affiliate of saxophone at Georgia State University. As a soloist and chamber musician, Thorpe has performed throughout the United States, Japan, and Spain and is a frequent masterclass clinician at colleges and universities. He has performed with ensembles including the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Bent Frequency, and New Music Mosaic. As an educator who is passionate about community engagement, Thorpe coordinates Atlanta Saxophone Day, an annual event that attracts middle school through collegiate students from across the southeastern US. With funding from the Theodore Presser Foundation, Thorpe recently commissioned six solo and electroacoustic works for saxophone, which were recorded and released as his debut album, Illusory Dreams in 2023. He has performed as a concerto soloist at institutions including Berry College, the University of Illinois, Stephen F. Austin State University, and Georgia State University.
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Dr. Will Yager is a double bassist committed to experimental music, improvisation, and collaborating with other artists in the creation of new solo and chamber repertoire for the double bass. He is a founding member of both LIGAMENT, a chamber duo with soprano Anika Kildegaard, and the improvising trio Wombat with Justin Comer and Carlos Cotallo Solares. Performance highlights include appearances at Bang on a Can’s Long Play 2024, Big Ears Festival, High Zero Festival, Omaha Under the Radar, University of Iowa Center for New Music, Experimental Sound Studios’ Quarantine Concerts, 2021 International Society of Bassists Convention, Nief-Norf Summer Festival, New Music on the Point, Cortona Sessions for New Music, and the Bang on a Can Loud Weekend. In addition to his varied performing activities, Yager currently teaches double bass at the University of Northern Iowa and spends his summers on faculty at the North Carolina Governor’s School West.
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SPLICE Festival VI 2025 Concert 1 Program

Thursday January 23, 2025
7:00pm EDT
Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University

All times are Eastern Time and various events will be streamed live.
Check the WMU School of Music Youtube channel for links.

Sarai Juarez Osorio : Techno Cumbia
  Sarai Juarez Osorio, voice

Zouning Liao : His Dreams, i. Iron Horses
  Alexey Logunov, piano

Yao Hsiao : Consort Yu
  Yao Hsiao, voice and live electronics

Philippe Macnab-Séguin : GENERIC MUSIC 1: Trad
  Avital Mazor, violin

Mickie Wadsworth : Mirror, Mirror,
  Mickie Wadsworth, voice

Ed Martin : Aria
  Drew Whiting, baritone saxophone

Michael Beil : Key Jack
  Ancel Neeley, percussion

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All donations go directly toward scholarships for our summer Institute - and no amount is too small.

Notes

Sarai Juarez Osorio : Techno Cumbia
This collection of songs builds on the foundation of techno cumbia while incorporating innovative sounds through technology. The lyrics delve into themes of courage, hope, and the exploration of the unknown, all in Spanish, my native language. As the daughter of hardworking Mexican immigrants, I have always felt a sense of foreignness. Writing these songs allowed me to confront unresolved personal dilemmas and reflect on my experiences.
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Zouning Liao : His Dreams, i. Iron Horses
Composed for solo piano and fixed media, His Dreams, i. Iron Horses draws inspiration from Alexey Logunov's surreal dream. The piece depicts the dreamscape he documented in his journal. In short, it recounts a journey aboard a train traversing from a desert landscape to a beach. Along the way, surreal events unfold, such as the transformation of the train into a horse and a snake escaping from its enclosure at a beachside serpent museum, preparing to attack humans.

The solo piano passages in this composition embody the escalating momentum and mechanical characteristics of the locomotive, using repetitive clusters spanning both the highest and lowest registers, along with persistent rhythms reminiscent of train wheels running across the tracks. The electronic elements use field recordings, including samples of trains captured in Bloomington, Indiana, and Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as synthesized sounds processed in Ableton Live.
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Yao Hsiao : Consort Yu
In the piece Consort Yu, I was inspired by the traditional Chinese Peking Opera “The Hegemon-King Bids His Lady Farewell,” which is about the fight between two kings, Xiang Yu and Liu Bang. In the opera, Xiang Yu is surrounded by Liu Bang's forces and on the verge of total defeat. Realizing the dire situation that has befallen them, Xiang Yu’s wife, Consort Yu, begs to die alongside her husband, but he strongly refuses her wish. Afterwards, as he is distracted, Yu commits suicide with Xiang Yu's own sword.     I tried to create connections between traditional Peking opera and contemporary electronic music. First, I used timbres and rhythms similar to those used by“The Hegemon-King Bids His Lady Farewell.” Also, the musical use of unstable pulses, such as tempo rubato and voice glissando in Peking opera, can relate to the color of contemporary music. Second, I used traditional Peking opera singing style throughout the vocal part. I also used some similar lines from the Peking opera but changed some notes to add different harmonic colors. In the electronics, I sometimes imitated the rhythms the Peking opera, and at other times made different granulated layers of various singing styles in Peking opera. Moreover, I used Leap Motion to better control the gestures of Peking opera in a live performance setting.     Text:   My lord is now sleeping quietly. I can go out of the tent for a walk to let go of my sorrow.   看⼤王和衣睡穩，我出帳外且散愁情。     Oh, hold on! Why is there the singing of the state of Chu in the enemy's village? What is the reason for this? Oh, my lord, my lord! I'm afraid that my lord is on the verge of total defeat!   哎呀且住！  怎麼敵⼈寨內竟有楚國歌聲，這是甚麼緣故？ 哎呀⼤王啊⼤王！ 只恐⼤勢去矣！    Oh, my lord, my lord! So be it! I would like to use the sword of my lord to kill myself, so as not to become your burden!   ⼤王啊！⼤王啊！也罷！願以⼤王腰間寶劍，⾃刎君前，免得掛念妾⾝哪！ 

Han soldiers have captured my territory, Besieged on all sides singing. The king's spirit is exhausted, How can I survive!   漢兵已略地，四⾯楚歌聲。    君王意⽓盡，妾妃何聊⽣
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Philippe Macnab-Séguin : GENERIC MUSIC 1: Trad
Trad is first of a series of pieces called GENERIC MUSIC. The term ‘generic’ here refers to two things: firstly, that each piece in the series takes as its point of departure the examination of genre and their re-contextualization; and secondly, the use of generated materials, often using various AI tools.

In this case, the genre taken as a point of departure is Traditional/folk Québecois music (usually referred to as ‘Trad’), and the set of associations it has for me personally. The basic material taken as a point of departure was transcriptions of the incredible Trad fiddle player “Ti” Jean Carignan playing “Bagpipes on Violin” and “Reel Kébec.”
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Mickie Wadsworth : Mirror, Mirror,
When you look in the mirror, what stares back at you?
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Ed Martin : Aria
Aria (2021) presents a lyrical melody that gradually unfolds over the course of the piece, beginning in quiet solitude and building to an impassioned plea. The melody is played exclusively with multiphonics, which both provide its unique tonality and form a physical barrier that the saxophonist must sing through and transcend. Aria was commissioned by saxophonist Drew Whiting, who provided many of the sounds heard in the electronics and offered invaluable feedback throughout the composition process.
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Michael Beil : Key Jack
It has become a trademark of Michael Beil (°1963) to thoroughly dismantle the traditional image of the musician and his instrument. In Key Jack, the grand piano has even disappeared from the stage altogether. Deprived of his beloved instrument, the pianist has exchanged his black suit for a more casual outfit. Once a solist, he is now assisted by 2 questionable Doppelgänger. Yet, Key Jack is still a highly virtuosic solo piano piece. In front of the camera the pianist faces a mind-bending playback-challenge. Beil thereby skillfully recombines movement, image and sound, thus confusing even the most alert spectators. The result is a fascinating performance, that almost makes you forget the piano isn’t actually there.
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Bios

Michael Beil studied piano and music theory at the Hochschule für Musik Stuttgart and afterwards composition with Manuel Hidalgo. In 1996 he taught music theory and composition at the music conservatories in Kreuzberg and Neukölln in Berlin as director of the precollege department and the department of contemporary music. At this time Michael Beil also directed the Klangwerkstatt – a contemporary music festival in Berlin and founded in 2000 together with Stephan Winkler the team Skart to present concerts based on interdisciplinary concepts. In 2007 he became the professor for electronic music at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne and director of the studio for electronic music.

As composer Michael Beil has colaborated with numerous ensembles and soloists. His music has been commissioned by festivals for contemporary music including Ultraschall in Berlin, ECLAT in Stuttgart or Wien Modern and has been featured in portrait or concert broadcasts on radio stations such as Deutschlandradio, RBB, SDR and many others. Furthermore he has received scholarships for Künstlerhaus Wiepersdorf, cité des arts in Paris and the Heinrich-Gartentor-Scholarship for video art in Thun, Switzerland. In addition he participated in the Nachwuchsforum für junge Komponisten of the Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (GNM) in collaboration with the Ensemble Modern.
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Performer, composer, and producer Scott Deal explores new pathways of musical computer interactivity, networked systems, and media. Hailed as “a riveting performer” who “exhibits phenomenal virtuosity”, Deal has performed and recorded throughout the world, and can be heard on the Albany, Centaur, Cold Blue, SCI, and Neuma record labels. His recordings have been described as “soaring, shimmering explorations of resplendent mood and incredible scale”….”sublimely performed”. Deal has built his work at the nexus of music performance and emerging artistic technologies. His work has received funding from organizations that include Meet the Composer, New Frontiers, Indiana Arts Council, Clowes Foundation, Indiana University Arts and Humanities Institute, and the University of Alaska. Deal is a Professor and Director of the Donald Tavel Arts and Technology Research Center at Indiana University Indianapolis, and is an Indiana University Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellow.
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Yao Hsiao is a performer-composer, singer, voice artist, pianist, violinist, poet, and actor from Taiwan. They received their Master of Music degree in Composition from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where they studied with David Dzubay, Aaron Travers, Chi Wang, and John Gibson. Hsiao is currently pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy in Data-driven Music Performance and Composition at the University of Oregon, where they study with Jeffrey Stolet.

They have been inspired by literature ranging from Western poems to ancient Chinese poetry and Japanese haikus. Additionally, they were drawn to traditional Chinese culture. Chant of Languor and Dreamy Chant are inspired by Chinese poems, and Consort Yu for voice and live electronics is another piece of theirs combining Peking opera gestures and singing techniques, which they performed themselves. They were invited to perform this piece at conferences such as NIME 2024, SEAMUS 2024, EMM 2024, MOXsonic 2024, NYCEMF 2024, ICMC 2024, and SPLICE Festival VI. The piece was also selected as one of the finalists in the 2024 Sweetwater/SEAMUS Student Commission Competition. They also participated in Click Fest 2024, performing their piece Daiyu for voice, iPad, and live electronics.
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Described as a “virtuosic tour de force” whose playing is “energetic, precise, (and) sensitive,” pianist and composer Keith Kirchoff has performed throughout North America, Europe, and the Pacific Southwest. A strong advocate for living composers, Kirchoff is committed to fostering new audiences for contemporary music and giving a voice to emerging composers, and to that end has commissioned several dozen compositions and premiered hundreds of new works. He is the co-founder and President of SPLICE Music: one of the United States’ largest programs dedicated to the performance, creation, and development of music for performers and electronics. Kirchoff is active as both a soloist and chamber musician, and is a member of both Hinge Quartet and SPLICE Ensemble. Kirchoff has won awards from the Steinway Society, MetLife Meet the Composer, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chamber Music America, and was named the 2011 Distinguished Scholar by the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association. He has recorded on the New World, Kairos, New Focus, Tantara, Ravello, Thinking outLOUD, Zerx, and SEAMUS labels.

You can follow Kirchoff on Instagram @8e8keys and learn more at his website: keithkirchoff.com
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Born in Guangdong, China, Zouning is a composer, electronic music improviser, and sound artist whose work draws inspiration from nature and noise. She is passionate about DIY electronics and enjoys field recording in the woods.

Her music has been showcased across North America, Europe, and Asia. In 2024, her work has been featured in festivals such as The Espacios Sonoros in Argentina, NoiseFloor in Portugal, Klexoslab Workshop in Spain, MISE-EN Festival, Splice Festival & Institute, Cube Fest, IRCAM Forum Workshop, SEAMUS/Sweetwater at Charlottesville, Performing Media Festival as well as Electronic Music Midwest. In previous years, she was honored to be featured in festivals such as Musicacoustica Hangzhou Electronic Music Festival, CampGround, Turn Up, and New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. Zouning was named a finalist in the ASCAP/ SEAMUS Student Composer Commission Competition in 2021.

Zouning is a first year PhD student at Northwestern University. She recently completed her master’s degree with double majors in electronic music composition and music theory at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. She also served as an Associate Instructor of Music Theory and taught written and aural theory at undergraduate level.
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Alexey Logunov was born in Leningrad, Russia. He graduated in 2014 from Saint-Petersburg State Conservatory of Rymsky-Korsakov, where he studied composition with Vladimir Tsitovich and Gennady Banshchikov and was later assistant to Sergei Slonimsky. Logunov studied piano performance at Saint Petersburg Conservatory, mentored by Ekaterina Murina from 2016 to 2018. In 2020, he earned a Master of Music degree in Composition from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he studied with P. Q. Phan, Eugene O’Brien, and Tansy Davies. Logunov is now a doctoral student and associate instructor of composition at the Jacobs School.
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Philippe Macnab-Séguin is a composer of instrumental, electroacoustic and mixed music whose work aims to create a new musical language at the crossroads of popular musics (especially electronic music, jazz and metal) and contemporary classical music. His music is rhythmically driven, complex, and reflects his eclectic musical background as an electric guitarist in metal and jazz, his study Nancarrow’s music, his lessons in konnakol (south Indian vocal percussion) with Ghatam Karthick, his experience in Barbershop singing and arranging, and his study of Hyperglitch music and production with the producer Woulg. He and producer Nicolas Gaumond form the prog-pop duo Greetings From The Hole. His in-depth study of Aural Sonology, the frequent presentations and workshops he gives on the subject, and his contact with Lasse Thoresen helps ground his artistic research in clear perceptual principles. He has received over 20 scholarships and awards for his work, including the Prix d’Europe, a BMI award, four SOCAN young composer awards, a JTTP award, and funding from the SSHRC and FRQSC. He received his D.Mus in composition from McGill University under the supervision of Jean Lesage, and has received mentorship from Denys Bouliane, Lasse Thoresen, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, Matthew Shlomowitz, Philippe Leroux, Du Yun and Steve Takasugi, among others.
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Ed Martin (b. 1976) is an award-winning composer whose music has been performed world-wide by ensembles such as the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra, the Hinge Quartet, Ear Play, the Empyrean Ensemble, the Symchromy Ensemble, Musical Amoeba, and duoARtia. His album “Journeys,” featuring pianist Jeri-Mae G. Astolfi, is available from Ravello Records, and other works are recorded on the Mark, innova, Centaur, Emeritus, New Focus, and SEAMUS labels. His music has received awards from the Percussive Arts Society, the Craig and Janet Swan Prize for orchestra music, the Electro-Acoustic Miniatures International Contest, ASCAP, and SEAMUS. He is Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh where teaches composition and music theory. Visit www.edmartincomposer.com.
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Avital Mazor, originally from Israel, has been an active violinist in NYC since 2016. He has performed worldwide as both a soloist and chamber musician. Avital has participated in music festivals including Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival, Green Mountain and many others. He has been the recipient of the America-Israel Foundation scholarships as well as a laureate of the Rosen Schaffel and Gritz competitions. Avital is an alumnus of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, University of North Carolina School of the Arts as well as Mannes School of Music. He is currently pursuing his Doctorate at Stony Brook University. He resides in Brooklyn where he devotes much of his time to recording solo and chamber music as well as maintaining a private studio. Apart from playing the violin, Avital enjoys woodworking and studying languages.
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Ancel ‘Fitz’ Neeley (b. 2000) is a composer, percussionist, educator, and videographer from the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti MI area who writes a variety of solo, chamber, electronic, and multimedia works. His music often takes inspiration from cinematography, screenwriting, and the dialogue between technology and natural elements. Fitz is a frequent collaborator as both composer and performer as has been apart of numerous projects such as Clara Warnaar's "A New Age for New Age Vol. 5", Shodekeh Talifeiro’s “Vodalitites”, John Luther Adams’ Grammy Nominated recording of "Sila", and the premiere of Michael Gordon’s work for percussion ensemble “Field of Vision”. As a percussionist, Fitz performs with his percussion and multimedia duo VIRID, percussion trio Brain Pocket, and mixed sextet FLYDLPHN, all of which are geared towards the creation of new works by composers looking to explore new techniques in writing for percussion, chamber winds, and electronics. As a part of VIRID, Fitz is also a co-producer of the concert series VIRID and Friends through Oz’s Music Store in Ann Arbor. VIRID and Friends hosts 5-7 guests bi-annually for intimate showcases of contemporary classical and electronic music.
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Sarai Juarez Osorio
Sarai is a Mexican-American singer born in CA, United States. Sarai has performed since age 5 and spent most of her childhood recording and producing music in service of her local church. She earned a degree in music ministry at Canzion Institute in 2021 graduating as the youngest student of her class. She has directed several shows and concerts in high school at Sonoma Academy and became the founder of the first-ever Spanish show in the school’s history. She has received countless recognition and numerous awards, some include becoming a recent first prize winner of American Protege’s International Vocal Competition as well as first prize winner of the We Sing Pop! competition. This led her to perform at Carnegie Hall. She became a Questbridge Scholar after matching with Oberlin College and Conservatory with a full scholarship where she is currently pursuing both a BM/BA. She currently majors in Technology in Music and Related Arts at Oberlin Conservatory and Economics (with a business concentration) at Oberlin college.
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Mickie Wadsworth is a composer and conductor based in Upstate New York. Much of their work focuses on the human experience, and the complexity of our emotions. Their discography primarily consists of vocal, electro-acoustic, fixed media, and large ensemble pieces. As a musician, they are dedicated to creating a welcoming community that celebrates new music from diverse voices. Outside of being a musician, they spend much of their time hiking in the adirondacks, working at Bitchin’ Donuts, or hanging out with their cat Norma. Mickie is happy to answer both compositional or coffee/donut related questions. They received their M.M. in Composition and their M.M. in Conducting (Wind Track) from Ohio University, and their B.M. in Music Composition from SUNY Fredonia.
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Saxophonist Drew Whiting has established himself as a champion of new and experimental music, specializing in performing works of the 20th and 21st centuries in solo, chamber, and electroacoustic settings. Drew is described as having “superb musicianship” (The Saxophonist), “remarkable versatility” (Computer Music Journal), and is a “superb advocate of the music he champions” (Fanfare Magazine).

Drew received his Bachelors and Masters of Music degrees from the Michigan State University College of Music and the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Drew is a proud Yamaha Performing Artist and Vandoren Artist-Clinician, performing exclusively on Yamaha saxophones and Vandoren woodwind products.
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SPLICE Institute 2024 Concert 3 Program

featuring

SPLICE Faculty and Guests

Wednesday June 26, 2024
7:30pm EDT
Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University
Livestream simulcast on SPLICE YouTube (unique link)

Joo Won Park : Singaporean Crosswalk
  Electronic Ensemble

Kyong Mee Choi : Slight Uncertainty is Very Attractive
  Robin Meiksins, flute

Gabriel Bolaños : los minisculos
  Dana Jessen, bassoon

Becky Brown : Etude
  Becky Brown, mixer

Joo Won Park : Large Intestine
  Joo Won Park, no input mixer

Kyong Mee Choi : too bright to see
  Drew Whiting, saxophone

Sam Pluta and Dana Jessen : Improv
  Dana Jessen, bassoon
  Sam Pluta, electronics

## Notes

Joo Won Park: Singaporean Crosswalk
Singaporean Crosswalk was inspired by my trip to Singapore in 2010. The sound of the traffic light in the city was quite different from that of the United States and Korea. It was fun, effective, and musically intriguing. During the day, this sound was a theme song for the people in a metropolis. During the night, it became part of the flora and fauna surrounding the city.
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Kyong Mee Choi : Slight Uncertainty is Very Attractive
The attractiveness of somewhat unfocused images in photography served as the inspiration for this piece. The flute and electronics are blended in such a way that it is not always clear which is sounding. Pitch bend, airy sounds, whistle tones, and other extended techniques enhance this “fuzzy” effect.
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Gabriel Bolaños : los minisculos
Los Minúsculos​ is an homage to the over 300 victims who have been killed by the Nicaraguan government since April 2018, and to all my fellow Nicaraguans who have suffered under Daniel Ortega’s regime. The first lady and vice president disparagingly calls protesters "minúsculos grupos alentadores del odio” (miniscule groups inciting hatred). As a reaction, hundreds of thousands of self-proclaimed minúsculos have repeatedly taken to the streets in protest, demanding justice for the victims of oppression. This piece, for bassoon and electronics, was written in close collaboration with Dana Jessen and performed at SPLICE institute. It is an examination of collective movement and growth, a study on how multiple small things can converge, grow and develop into a larger, cohesive, even uncontrollable whole. Many thanks to Dana for the brilliant performance and a fruitful collaboration, and to SPLICE institute.
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Becky Brown: Etude
As per the title, this piece is meant to be performed by its engineer, and to a lesser degree by anyone else who may happen to be in the space concurrently. Maintain attention on everything you can: the room, its walls, the speakers, the cables, the stage, your neighbors, your body, the air. You may find this difficult, as many parts of "everything" will attempt to become forgettable.
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Joo Won Park: Large Intestine
In no-input mixing, a performer controls an audio mixer by creating and manipulating a feedback loop without an external sound source. With proper patching and some practice, a no-input mixer becomes a powerful and expressive electronic instrument. Large Intestine uses the said instrument to narrate the following story: I am a taco on a journey in a man’s digestive system, and this is what I heard inside the bowel.
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Kyong Mee Choi : too bright to see
too bright to see is based on theme of Gustav Mahler's "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" whose poem was written by Friedrich Rückert.

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world's tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song.
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Bios

Gabriel José Bolaños (b. 1984 Bogotá, Colombia) is a Nicaraguan-American composer of solo, chamber, orchestral and electroacoustic music. He frequently collaborates closely with performers, and enjoys writing music that explores unusual structures and timbres. He is interested in computer-assisted-composition, auditory perception, linguistics, and modular synthesizers. He enjoys listening to music by Saariaho, Romitelli, Grisey, Gubaidulina, Harvey, León, Os Mutantes, Ciani, Wishart, Simon Diaz, Yupanqui and Sabicas.

Recent projects include a grant from the AZ Commission on the Arts to deveop computer-assisted-composition tools for the creation and realization of polytemporal music, a residency at CIRM with a commission for ensemble C. Barré for festival MANCA in Nice, France, a collection of audiovisual vignettes titled The Grand Transparents, a collaboration with Bassoonist Dana Jessen for solo bassoon and electronics called Los Minúsculos, and Charity and Love, an album with jazz pianist Frank Carlberg inspired by the music and voice of Mary Lou Williams.

Bolaños received a BA in Music from Columbia University and a PhD in Music Theory and Composition from UC Davis. His principal composition teachers include Mika Pelo, Pablo Ortiz, Laurie San Martin, Fabien Lévy and Sebastian Currier, and he studied orchestration with Tristan Murail. He also attended the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau (France), SICPP (Boston), Atlantic Music Festival (Maine), New Music on the Point (Vermont), Festival Mixtur (Barcelona) and SPLICE Institute (Michigan).

Bolaños is Assistant Professor of Music Composition at Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, where he teaches courses in composition, music technology, analysis, and acoustics. Bolaños serves as the coordinator of the ASU electronic music studios, and is co-director of annual the PRISMS contemporary music festival. Before coming to ASU, he was visiting lecturer at Bates College for the 2018-2019 academic year and taught courses in music theory and music technology. As a 2016-17 Fulbright Visiting Scholar in Nicaragua, he was composer-in-residence and visiting conductor for the UPOLI Conservatory Orchestra, and visiting professor at the UPOLI Conservatory of Music. He was co-founder and artistic director of Proyecto Eco, Nicaragua’s first new-music ensemble. He has also helped organize artistic and cultural exchanges between US and Nicaraguan musicians. Beyond his work as a teacher and composer of concert music, he has also written music for film, theater and dance, and has experience performing as a flamenco dance accompanist.
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Becky Brown is a composer, harpist, artist, and web designer, interested in producing intensely personal works across the multimedia spectrum. She focuses on narrative, emotional exposure, and catharsis, with a vested interest in using technology and the voice to deeply connect with an audience, wherever they are. She is currently pursuing graduate studies in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia, and is an audio engineer at NPR.
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Kyong Mee Choi, composer, organist, painter, poet, and visual artist, received several prestigious awards and grants including John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Robert Helps Prize, Aaron Copland Award, John Donald Robb Musical Trust Fund Commission, Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, First prize of ASCAP/SEAMUS Award, Second prize at VI Concurso Internacional de Música Eletroacústica de São Paulo among others. Her music was published at Ablaze, CIMESP (São Paulo, Brazil), SCI, EMS, ERM media, SEAMUS, and Détonants Voyages (Studio Forum, France). She is the Program Director of Music Composition, Music and Computing at Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University in Chicago where she teaches composition and electro-acoustic music. Samples of her works are available at http://www.kyongmeechoi.com.
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Hailed as a “bassoon virtuoso” (Chicago Reader) and 2023 Cleveland Arts Prize winner, Dana Jessen tirelessly seeks to expand the boundaries of her instrument through original compositions, improvisations, and collaborative work with innovative artists. Over the past decade, she has presented dozens of world premiere performances throughout North America and Europe while maintaining equal footing in the creative music community as an improviser. Her solo performances are almost entirely grounded in electroacoustic composition that highlight her distinct musical language. As a chamber musician, Dana is the co-founder of the contemporary reed quintet Splinter Reeds, and has performed with Alarm Will Sound, Amsterdam’s DOEK Collective, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Tri-Centric Ensemble, among many others. A dedicated educator, Dana teaches at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and has presented masterclasses and workshops to a range of students from across the globe. More at: www.danajessen.com
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Robin Meiksins is a flutist and improviser focused on collaboration with living composers and music performance through the internet. Chicago-based, she uses online media to support and create collaboration, as well as more traditional means of performance. Robin’s biggest creative platform is YouTube. On her channel she is most known for her long term collaborative projects, the first being 365 Days of Flute in 2016-2017. Robin has since completed 5 more long term Youtube projects. Most recently, Robin completed two projects highlighting improvisation and Chicago beer and breweries. Robin has premiered over 200 works written by living composers. In September 2022, she premiered two works for woodwind trio for Arc Project’s “Three Winds” project. She has performed at the SEAMUS national conference, EMM, SPLICE Institute and Festival, and Oh My Ears festival, among others.

Robin holds a masters degree from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music where she studied with Kate Lukas and Thomas Robertello. Robin received a Bachelors of Music with Distinction from University of Toronto, having studied with Leslie Newman.
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Joo Won Park (joowonpark.net) makes music with electronics, toys, and other sources that he can record or synthesize. He is the recipient of the Knight Arts Challenge Detroit (2019) and the Kresge Arts Fellowship (2020). His music and writings are available on ICMC DVD, Spectrum Press, MIT Press, PARMA, Visceral Media, MCSD, SEAMUS, and No Remixes labels. He currently teaches Music Technology at Wayne State University.
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Sam Pluta is a Baltimore-based composer, laptop improviser, electronics performer, and sound artist. Though his work has a wide breadth, his central focus is on using the laptop as a performance instrument capable of sharing the stage with groups ranging from new music ensembles to world-class improvisers. By creating unique interactions of electronics, instruments, and sonic spaces, Pluta's vibrant musical universe fuses the traditionally separate sound worlds of acoustic instruments and electronics, creating sonic spaces which envelop the audience and resulting in a music focused on visceral interaction of instrumental performers with reactive computerized sound worlds.

As a composer of instrumental music, Sam has written works for Wet Ink Ensemble, the New York Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, the Warsaw Autumn Festival, Yarn/Wire, Timetable Percussion, Mivos Quartet, Spektral Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Mantra Percussion, TAK, Rage Thormbones, and Prism Saxophone Quartet. His compositions range from solo instrumental works to pieces for ensemble with electronics to compositions for large ensemble and orchestra. In addition to acoustic and electro-acoustic works, Pluta has written extensive solo electronic repertoire ranging from multi-channel acousmatic compositions to solo laptop works with video to laptop ensemble compositions for up to 15 players.

Sam is the Technical Director for the Wet Ink Ensemble, a group for whom he is a member composer as well as principal electronics performer. As a performer of chamber music with Wet Ink and other groups, in addition to his own works, Sam has performed and premiered works by Peter Ablinger, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Katharina Rosenberger, George Lewis, Ben Hackbarth, Alvin Lucier, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Alex Mincek, Kate Soper, and Eric Wubbels among others.

As an improviser, Sam has collaborated with some of the finest creative musicians in the world, including Peter Evans, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Craig Taborn, Ingrid Laubrock, Anne La Berge, and George Lewis. Sam is a member of multiple improvisation-based ensembles, the jazz influenced Peter Evans Ensemble, the free improvisation-based Rocket Science (with Evan Parker, Craig Taborn and Peter Evans), the analog synth and laptop duo exclusiveOr (with Jeff Snyder), and his longstanding duo with Peter Evans. Sam has also performed with the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. With these various groups he has toured Europe and America and performed at major festivals and venues, such as the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, the Moers and Donaueshingen Festivals in Germany, Bimhuis in Amsterdam, and The Vortex in London.

Dr Pluta studied composition and electronic music at Columbia University, where he received his DMA in 2012. He received Masters degrees from the University of Birmingham in the UK and the University of Texas at Austin, and completed his undergraduate work at Santa Clara University. His principal teachers include George Lewis, Brad Garton, Tristan Murail, Fabien Levy, Scott Wilson, Jonty Harrison, Russell Pinkston, Lynn Shurtleff, and Bruce Pennycook.

Sam is Associate Professor of Computer Music and Music Engineering Technology at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where he directs the Peabody Computer Music Studios. From 2011-15 he directed the Electronic Music Studio at Manhattan School of Music and from 2015-2020 he directed the CHIME Studio at the University of Chicago. For 16 years he taught composition, musicianship, electronic music, and an assortment of specialty courses at the Walden School, where he also served as Director of Electronic Music and Academic Dean. He now teaches at the Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat, a summer program for adult sonic artists.
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Saxophonist Drew Whiting has established himself as a champion of new and experimental music, specializing in performing works of the 20th and 21st centuries in solo, chamber, and electroacoustic settings. Drew is described as having “superb musicianship” (The Saxophonist), “remarkable versatility” (Computer Music Journal), and is a “superb advocate of the music he champions” (Fanfare Magazine).

Drew currently serves as Associate Professor of Saxophone at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. He received his Bachelors and Masters of Music degrees from the Michigan State University College of Music and the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Drew is a proud Yamaha Performing Artist and Vandoren Artist-Clinician, performing exclusively on Yamaha saxophones and Vandoren woodwind products.
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SPLICE Institute 2024 Concert 2 Program

featuring

SPLICE Faculty and Guests

Tuesday June 25, 2024
7:30pm EDT
Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University
Livestream simulcast on SPLICE YouTube (unique link)

Kyong Mee Choi : Du §
  Keith Kirchoff, piano

Elainie Lillios : Immeasurable Distance
  Scott Deal, percussion

Sam Pluta : points against fields
  Dana Jessen, bassoon

Christopher Biggs : We All Fall In
  Scott Deal, percussion

Per Bloland : Los murmullos §
  Keith Kirchoff, piano

§ Commissioned by Keith Kirchoff

Notes

Kyong Mee Choi : Du
Du (you) is written for the composer's husband, celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary. The electronic part of the piece involves water sounds that are associated with the composer's name and the plainsong that she wrote for her husband. The piece attempts to reflect the balance between lighthearted nature and the depth of connection, which the couple appreciates throughout their life together. "Du" also has a special meaning to the composer in that Du is the word that her parents who were German literature scholars used to call each other.
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Elainie Lillios : Immeasurable Distance
Immeasurable Distance was composed in memory of my percussion colleague Roger Schupp. Roger asked me to write a piece for him but passed away before the piece could be brought to fruition. My sincere appreciation and thanks to Scott Deal, who agreed to join me to imagine and complete the journey of this piece. While Immeasurable Distance was initially composed as a tribute to Roger, I think it has become a piece about the immeasurable distance that can exist between any of us.
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Sam Pluta : points against fields
Points Against Fields (tombeau de Bernard Parmegiani) is a collaboration in the truest sense of the word, and is based on improvisations with Dana Jessen. The electronics part is comprised mostly of components created in our improvisations. The bassoon part embraces Dana's skills as both a performer of notated works and as an improviser. Points Against Fields is dedicated to Bernard Parmegiani, one of the great composers of the twentieth century, who died at the end of 2013. The end of the piece is a direct quote of the end of Parmegiani's 1974 masterwork de natura sonorum.
- Sam Pluta
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Christopher Biggs : We All Fall In
we will all fall in was written for and is dedicated to Scott Deal. The work draws on imagery from Jeff Lemire and Scott Snyder’s graphic novel “A.D. After Death.” A scene in the graphic novel paints a picture of a family playing on a frozen lake and the juxtaposition between the family’s experience of joy and freezing water below the ice. “...part of you refuses to ignore what’s beneath, to ignore the fact that at some point...the ice will give way to the cold, black water below it. And, one by one, your friends, your family, and you, will all fall in.”

For me, this scene evoked the feeling that I often have right now: all the joy and beauty created by humans is at risk because of climate stability. That feeling and dread for humanity’s future colors all the creative, beautiful, and empathetic acts I witness. Without rapid and dramatic action we will all fall in.
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Per Bloland: Los murmullos
Los murmullos is based on a highly influential yet little known (at least in the US) novel from the 1950s: Pedro Páramo, by the Mexican author Juan Rulfo. It is the surreal tale of a man’s return to the town in which his parents lived, long after that town has fallen into decay. Comala is now more heavily populated by the dead than the living, and exists in a blurred twilight realm in which such distinctions are meaningless. The descriptions of the environment are exceptionally vivid, often invoking the four elements to transition between the past and the present, and between the living and the dead. Sound is particularly important to the narrative. The original title of the novel was in fact Los murmullos, a reflection of the murmuring and whispering of the dead heard at various points throughout. Contrary to the gentle implications of the word, it is the intensity of these murmurs that overwhelms and suffocates the protagonist just over half way through the narrative.

My composition, for piano and electronics, shifts between four recurring material types, each inspired by one of the above-mentioned elements as described in the book. The electronics for this piece were generated using a physical model of the Electro-Magnetically Prepared Piano – a device consisting of a rack of twelve electromagnets that can be installed on the frame of any grand piano. The EMPP is somewhat like an EBow in that the electromagnets cause the strings to vibrate. However, because the electromagnets receive audio signals from a computer, there is a much higher degree sonic variability. The physical model of this device, called the Induction Connection, was developed during an Artistic Research Residency at IRCAM in Paris. The Induction Connection is currently built into IRCAM’s software Modalys.

The short version of this piece, Los murmullitos, has been around for a while, and performed many times by Keith Kirchoff, for whom it was written. I’m thrilled to finally get the full version out there, and even more so to hear Keith work his magic on it. I believe this confirms that he is indeed an alien. At the outset he’d asked for something with a bit of noise – hopefully this does the trick.

Los murmullos is dedicated to Keith Kirchoff (obviously).
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Bios

Christopher Biggs is a composer, electronic music performer, and multimedia artist residing in Kalamazoo, MI, where he is Associate Professor of Music Composition and Technology at Western Michigan University. Biggs’ recent projects focus on developing and performing a live electronic music system for both in-person and networked performances. Biggs is the Director of SPLICE Institute.
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Per Bloland is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music whose works have been praised by the New York Times as “lush, caustic,” and “irresistible.” His compositions range from solo pieces to works for large orchestra, and incorporate video, dance, and custom-built electronics. His opera, Pedr Solis, was premiered by Guerilla Opera in 2015. He has also received commissions from Unheard-of//Ensemble, loadbang, Keith Kirchoff, Wild Rumpus, the Ecce Ensemble, the Callithumpian Consort, Stanford’s CCRMA, SEAMUS/ASCAP, and Patti Cudd. His music can be heard on the TauKay (Italy), Capstone, Spektral, and SEAMUS labels, and through the MIT Press. A portrait CD of his work, performed by Ecce Ensemble, is available on Tzadik.

Bloland is the co-creator of the Electromagnetically-Prepared Piano. In 2013 he completed a five-month Musical Research Residency at IRCAM in Paris, and is currently in a second multi-segment residency there. He is an Associate Professor of Composition and Technology, and coordinator of the Composition area at Miami University, Ohio. He is also a founding board member of the SPLICE Institute. He received his D.M.A. in composition from Stanford University and his M.M. from the University of Texas.

Scores may be purchased at www.babelscores.com/perbloland
For more information visit: www.perbloland.com
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Scott Deal has performed throughout the world premiering solo, chamber and mixed media works, and can be heard on the Albany, Centaur, Cold Blue, SCI, and Neuma record labels. His recordings have been described as “soaring, shimmering explorations of resplendent mood and incredible scale”….”sublimely performed”. His recent recording of John Luther Adams’ Four Thousand Holes, for piano, percussion, and electronics was listed in New Yorker Magazine’s 2011 Top Ten Classical Picks.

Described as a “riveting performer” who plays with “phenomenal virtuosity”, Deal has built his work at the nexus of music performance and emerging artistic technologies. He is the founder of the Telematic Collective, an Internet performance group comprised of artists and computer specialists, and was the founder for the computer-acoustic trio Big Robot (2008-2018). In 2011, Deal and composer Matthew Burtner won the coveted Internet2 IDEA Award for their co-creation of Auksalaq, a telematic opera called “an important realization of meaningful opera for today’s world”. In 2020 he launched Earth Day Art Model Festival, a transmedia event highlighting telematic and media-enriched musical performances from around the world. Earth Day Art Model has reached audiences in over 100 countries.

Deal has received funding from organizations that include Meet the Composer, Lilly Foundation New Frontiers, Indiana Arts Council, Clowes Foundation, IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute, ConocoPhillips, and the University of Alaska. In 2023 he was named an Indiana University President’s Arts and Humanities Fellow. He resides in Indianapolis, Indiana where he is a Professor of Music and Director of the Donald Louis Tavel Arts and Technology Research Center at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Deal was a Professor of Music at the University of Alaska Fairbanks from 1995 to 2007, where he founded the percussion and technology programs and served as Principal Percussionist of the Fairbanks Symphony and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra. He served on the faculty of the New England Conservatory Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (Sick Puppy) from 2006 to 2022.

Early in his career he was the Timpanist/Principal Percussionist of the Miami Symphony, and taught at the New World School of the Arts, where in 1994 he was voted Teacher of the Year. As a student he was winner in the Music Teacher’s National Association Collegiate Artist Competition, the Cincinnati College-Conservatory Concerto Competition, and was a finalist in the Percussive Arts Society International Marimba Competition and the McMahon Competition. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree from the University of Miami, a Master of Music degree from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cameron University. Deal is a Yamaha and Black Swamp Percussion Artist.
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Kyong Mee Choi, composer, organist, painter, poet, and visual artist, received several prestigious awards and grants including John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Robert Helps Prize, Aaron Copland Award, John Donald Robb Musical Trust Fund Commission, Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, First prize of ASCAP/SEAMUS Award, Second prize at VI Concurso Internacional de Música Eletroacústica de São Paulo among others. Her music was published at Ablaze, CIMESP (São Paulo, Brazil), SCI, EMS, ERM media, SEAMUS, and Détonants Voyages (Studio Forum, France). She is the Program Director of Music Composition, Music and Computing at Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University in Chicago where she teaches composition and electro-acoustic music. Samples of her works are available at http://www.kyongmeechoi.com.
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Hailed as a “bassoon virtuoso” (Chicago Reader) and 2023 Cleveland Arts Prize winner, Dana Jessen tirelessly seeks to expand the boundaries of her instrument through original compositions, improvisations, and collaborative work with innovative artists. Over the past decade, she has presented dozens of world premiere performances throughout North America and Europe while maintaining equal footing in the creative music community as an improviser. Her solo performances are almost entirely grounded in electroacoustic composition that highlight her distinct musical language. As a chamber musician, Dana is the co-founder of the contemporary reed quintet Splinter Reeds, and has performed with Alarm Will Sound, Amsterdam’s DOEK Collective, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Tri-Centric Ensemble, among many others. A dedicated educator, Dana teaches at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and has presented masterclasses and workshops to a range of students from across the globe. More at: www.danajessen.com
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Described as a “virtuosic tour de force” whose playing is “energetic, precise, (and) sensitive,” pianist and composer Keith Kirchoff has performed throughout North America, Europe, and the Pacific Southwest. A strong advocate for living composers, Kirchoff is committed to fostering new audiences for contemporary music and giving a voice to emerging composers, and to that end has commissioned several dozen compositions and premiered hundreds of new works. He is the co-founder and President of SPLICE Music: one of the United States’ largest programs dedicated to the performance, creation, and development of music for performers and electronics. Kirchoff is active as both a soloist and chamber musician, and is a member of both Hinge Quartet and SPLICE Ensemble. Kirchoff has won awards from the Steinway Society, MetLife Meet the Composer, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chamber Music America, and was named the 2011 Distinguished Scholar by the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association. He has recorded on the New World, Kairos, New Focus, Tantara, Ravello, Thinking outLOUD, Zerx, and SEAMUS labels.

You can follow Kirchoff on Instagram @8e8keys and learn more at his website: keithkirchoff.com
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Acclaimed as one of the “contemporary masters of the medium” by MIT Press’s Computer Music Journal, Elainie Lillios creates works that reflect her fascination with listening, sound, space, time, immersion, and anecdote. Her compositions include stereo, multi-channel, and Ambisonic fixed media works, instrument(s) with live electronics, collaborative experimental audio/visual animations, and installations. She also performs live electronics with ESC Trio collaborators Chris Biggs and Scott Deal and with Origami Sound Society collaborator Mark Nagy.

Elainie’s work has been recognized internationally and nationally through awards, grants, and commissions, including a 2020 Johnston Foundation commission, 2018 Fromm Foundation Commission, 2016 Barlow Endowment Commission, a 2013 Fulbright Scholar Award and many others. Her music is regularly performed at conferences, festivals, and concerts throughout the United States and abroad by amazing virtuoso performers who give their time and talent bringing her music to life in vibrant, engaging ways. Elainie’s work can be accessed on compact disc through many publishers including Emprientes DIGITALes (electrocd.com), as well as on SoundCloud, and YouTube.

Elainie serves as Director of Composition Activities for SPLICE and as Professor of Creative Arts Excellence at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

elillios.com
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Sam Pluta is a Baltimore-based composer, laptop improviser, electronics performer, and sound artist. Though his work has a wide breadth, his central focus is on using the laptop as a performance instrument capable of sharing the stage with groups ranging from new music ensembles to world-class improvisers. By creating unique interactions of electronics, instruments, and sonic spaces, Pluta's vibrant musical universe fuses the traditionally separate sound worlds of acoustic instruments and electronics, creating sonic spaces which envelop the audience and resulting in a music focused on visceral interaction of instrumental performers with reactive computerized sound worlds.

As a composer of instrumental music, Sam has written works for Wet Ink Ensemble, the New York Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, the Warsaw Autumn Festival, Yarn/Wire, Timetable Percussion, Mivos Quartet, Spektral Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Mantra Percussion, TAK, Rage Thormbones, and Prism Saxophone Quartet. His compositions range from solo instrumental works to pieces for ensemble with electronics to compositions for large ensemble and orchestra. In addition to acoustic and electro-acoustic works, Pluta has written extensive solo electronic repertoire ranging from multi-channel acousmatic compositions to solo laptop works with video to laptop ensemble compositions for up to 15 players.

Sam is the Technical Director for the Wet Ink Ensemble, a group for whom he is a member composer as well as principal electronics performer. As a performer of chamber music with Wet Ink and other groups, in addition to his own works, Sam has performed and premiered works by Peter Ablinger, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Katharina Rosenberger, George Lewis, Ben Hackbarth, Alvin Lucier, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Alex Mincek, Kate Soper, and Eric Wubbels among others.

As an improviser, Sam has collaborated with some of the finest creative musicians in the world, including Peter Evans, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Craig Taborn, Ingrid Laubrock, Anne La Berge, and George Lewis. Sam is a member of multiple improvisation-based ensembles, the jazz influenced Peter Evans Ensemble, the free improvisation-based Rocket Science (with Evan Parker, Craig Taborn and Peter Evans), the analog synth and laptop duo exclusiveOr (with Jeff Snyder), and his longstanding duo with Peter Evans. Sam has also performed with the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. With these various groups he has toured Europe and America and performed at major festivals and venues, such as the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, the Moers and Donaueshingen Festivals in Germany, Bimhuis in Amsterdam, and The Vortex in London.

Dr Pluta studied composition and electronic music at Columbia University, where he received his DMA in 2012. He received Masters degrees from the University of Birmingham in the UK and the University of Texas at Austin, and completed his undergraduate work at Santa Clara University. His principal teachers include George Lewis, Brad Garton, Tristan Murail, Fabien Levy, Scott Wilson, Jonty Harrison, Russell Pinkston, Lynn Shurtleff, and Bruce Pennycook.

Sam is Associate Professor of Computer Music and Music Engineering Technology at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where he directs the Peabody Computer Music Studios. From 2011-15 he directed the Electronic Music Studio at Manhattan School of Music and from 2015-2020 he directed the CHIME Studio at the University of Chicago. For 16 years he taught composition, musicianship, electronic music, and an assortment of specialty courses at the Walden School, where he also served as Director of Electronic Music and Academic Dean. He now teaches at the Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat, a summer program for adult sonic artists.
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SPLICE Institute 2024 Concert 1 Program

featuring

SPLICE Ensemble + Guests

  Sam Wells, trumpet
  Keith Kirchoff, piano
  Adam Vidiksis, percussion
  with Jennifer Beattie, voice

Monday June 24, 2024
7:30pm EDT
Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University
Livestream simulcast on SPLICE YouTube (unique link)

Dan VanHassel : Camouflage (2011)

Scott L. Miller : Katabasis III (2018)

Caroline Miller : Antiphony (2019, rev. 2022) §‡

Christopher Biggs : Decoherence (2014)

    intermission

Paula Matthusen : Performing Artifacts (2020)
  with Jennifer Beattie, voice

§ Commissioned by Keith Kirchoff

‡ This commission has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Notes

Dan VanHassel : Camouflage
Camouflage is a work for piano with interactive live electronics. All of the electronics are built from sounds sampled in real-time from the piano. In the first section of the work, the computer responds to the sharp attacks of the piano with colorful rhythmic patterns built from the very sound that triggered the pattern. In this way the music has a regular pulsing rhythm, without resorting to continuous sequenced patterns. The electronics act as an extension of the instrument, creating a hybrid entity in which both elements are necessary for the music to make sense. As the piece progresses, the underlying harmonic progression gradually becomes more prominent, enhanced by sustaining electronics, creating blurry impressionistic washes of color. As the piano moves increasingly towards an ecstatic outburst of romanticism the electronics respond by becoming increasingly noisy and aggressive.
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Scott L. Miller : Katabasis III
In my electroacoustic music, I am fond of manipulating recordings using granular synthesis in a way not originally intended. The original concept of granular synthesis involves "clouds" of sound "grains," each grain only milliseconds in duration. I use grains of tens of seconds in duration, reading through samples of acoustic instruments performing melodic lines. Multiple streams of grains overlap and can be thought of as windows slowly moving along a melodic line, the musical material in each window looping back on itself, gradually progressing along the melodic path. The speed and size and direction of each window is different, producing a unique kind of polyphony based on a single melodic line. These studies work out a purely instrumental realization of this synthesis approach, without computer processing.
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Caroline Miller : Antiphony
Antiphony is a revision of the first movement of Ansible which was composed for the SPLICE Ensemble and is dedicated to the memory of Ursula K. Le Guin.

Ursula K. Le Guin coined the term “Ansible” in her 1966 science fiction novel Rocannon’s world. The Ansible is a device that enables instantaneous interstellar communication, alleviating the significant time lag between the transmission and receipt of messages that could previously only travel at the speed of light. In Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, a loosely connected group of sci-fi novels that take part within the same universe, the Ansible is sometimes present and sometimes absent – for a variety of reasons, economic, political, or because it hasn’t been invented yet. In circumstances where the Ansible is absent, communication between entities is often frustrated or inflected by vast distances of time and space, causing interstellar political troubles as messages received 50 or 100 years later lose their relevance. The Ansible, an open-source, open-science communications device invented by an Anarchist physicist, is conceived by Le Guin as having utopian potentials, enabling a peaceful interstellar coalition called the Ekumen. In spite of its Utopian potential, its presence produces conflict as well, a rich metaphor for globalization. Struggles are waged for control of the Ansible technology itself, by entities who wish to capitalize on exclusive rights to its use. The rapid exchange of information across galaxies also interacts in unpredictable ways with different societies, in the very worst circumstances causing a technocracy (see The Telling).

Antiphony is a meditation on pre-ansible communication, as messages from almost a century ago (conveyed by classical music recordings from the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s) finally are received in a not-so-distant future. Keith responds by playing extrapolations on these old tunes on a decaying piano. These old recordings, first heard in Antiphony, are carried throughout the other three movements; snippets placed in a variety of contexts – borne on the wind from a distant house maybe, or heard broadcast over the radio. The theme of embedding the same information in a multitude of spatial and temporal contexts carries throughout the rest of the piece.
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Christopher Biggs : Decoherence
Decoherence is dedicated to Samuel Wells and was commissioned by a consortium consisting of Samuel Wells, Aaron Hodgson, Scott Thornburg, and the UMKC Trumpet Studio. The work abstractly reflects on a phenomenon in quantum physics and a possible explanation for the phenomenon.

Decoherence is a phenomenon whereby particles that have probable locations always take on a specific location when observed by a human. This is represented through the presentations of hundreds of possible ways to a play a single pitch on the trumpet followed by the performer’s decision to play the pitch in a specific manner. Also, when the performer is making a decision about what to play, he or she becomes part of the video. One possible explanation for how probable locations collapse into a specific location is that all probable locations come to exist in their own parallel universe upon observation. As the work progresses the trumpet player has less and less freedom as the specific universe he or she inhabits is increasingly defined by past decisions.
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Paula Matthusen : Performing Artifacts
The woven together fragments presented here represent a small selection of an extended project which is the outgrowth of over a decade long period of research and conversation with Mammoth Cave, its history, and the many people connected to it. This specific set of compositions marks the return of the SPLICE Ensemble (Keith Kirchoff, Adam Vidiksis, Sam Wells) and Jennifer Beattie to Mammoth Cave following a recording session originally completed in 2019. Hopefully this will be followed by yet other opportunities to interact with the cave and its numerous complexities.

We have conducted this creative research through the gracious support of Mammoth Cave National Park, and owe special gratitude to Rick Toomey, Brice Leech, Janet Bass Smith, and Jerry Bransford, whose hands, conversations, and research (if not literally their voices) make appearances in this collection. The collection will continue to be updated and revised. This serves as an initial gathering of materials and ideas that will be revised as they become enacted and engaged with.

Many thanks to Wesleyan University and their GiSOS Distinctive Project Grant, which provided invaluable support for this creative research.
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Bios

SPLICE Ensemble is a trumpet, piano, and percussion trio focused on cultivating a canon of electroacoustic chamber music. Called a “sonic foodfight” by Jazz Weekly, SPLICE Ensemble works with composers and performers on performance practice techniques for collaboration and integrating electronics into a traditional performance space. The resident ensemble of both SPLICE Institute and SPLICE Festival, SPLICE Ensemble has been a featured ensemble at M Woods in Beijing, SEAMUS, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, SCI National, Electronic Music Midwest, and New Music Detroit’s Strange Beautiful Music 10. They have recorded on both the SEAMUS and Parma Labels.
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Sam Wells is a musician and artist based in Philadelphia, whose work often invokes a heightened sense of the entanglements of space, air, breath, and body. Manifesting as music composition, performance, and improvisation, as well as multimedia performance and installation, his work is experientially substantial. It is rooted in the humanity of breath and highlights our interrelations with the cosmic, terrestrial, social, and internal spaces that surround us.

Sam is a trumpeter and improviser who has performed around the world and is a member of SPLICE Ensemble, Aeroidio, and the Miller/Vidiksis/Wells trio. He has also performed with Contemporaneous, Metropolis Ensemble, Nate Wooley, TILT Brass, the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, and the Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra. Sam has recorded on the Scarp Records, New Amsterdam/Nonesuch, New Focus Records, SEAMUS, and Ravello Recordings labels.

As a composer, Sam creates acoustic, electroacoustic, and electronic works, often incorporating multimedia elements. His works have been performed throughout the United States and internationally. He is a recipient of a 2016 Jerome Fund for New Music award, and his work “stringstrung” is the winner of the 2016 Miami International Guitar Festival Composition Competition. As an avid collaborator, Sam has written for theater and dance productions, as well as for many notable performers of contemporary music such as HOCKET, SPLICE Ensemble, Maya Bennardo, Dana Jessen, Vicki Ray, Lin Faulk, Kenken Gorder, and Will Yager.

Technology is a deep through line of Sam’s practice, and he is active as a music technologist. Sam is a Cycling ’74 Max Certified Trainer and organizes the Max Meetup Philadelphia event series. He runs Scarp Records, a record label dedicated to highlighting the experimental and improvisational practices of performer/composers.

Sam currently serves as the Member At Large for the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), as well as a board member for SPLICE Music, the parent organization of SPLICE Institute, Festival, and Ensemble, dedicated to the performance, creation, and development of music for performers and electronics.

Sam holds degrees in both performance and composition from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, graduate degrees in Trumpet Performance and Computer Music Composition from Indiana University, and a doctoral degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Sam is an Assistant Professor of Music Technology at Temple University.
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Pianist and composer Keith Kirchoff has performed throughout North America, Europe, and the Pacific Southwest. A strong advocate for modern music, Kirchoff is committed to fostering new audiences for contemporary music and giving a voice to emerging composers, and to that end has premiered over 100 new works and commissioned over two dozen compositions. Specializing on works which combine interactive electro-acoustics with solo piano, Kirchoff's Electroacoustic Piano Tour has been presented in ten countries, and has spawned three solo albums. Kirchoff is the co-founder and a director of SPLICE and the founder and Artistic Director of Original Gravity Inc. Kirchoff has won awards from the Steinway Society, MetLife Meet the Composer, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and was named the 2011 Distinguished Scholar by the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association. He has recorded on the New World, Kairos, New Focus, Tantara, Ravello, Thinking outLOUD, Zerx, and SEAMUS labels.

You can follow Kirchoff on Twitter @keithkirchoff and learn more at his website: keithkirchoff.com.
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Adam Vidiksis is a drummer and composer based in Philadelphia who explores social structures, science, and the intersection of humankind with the machines we build. His music examines technological systems as artifacts of human culture, acutely revealed in the slippery area where these spaces meet and overlap—a place of friction, growth, and decay. Vidiksis is a sought-after champion of new works for percussion and electronics, performing as a featured artist in venues around the world. Vidiksis’s music has won numerous awards and grants, including recognition from the Society of Composers, Incorporated, the American Composers Forum, New Music USA, National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, and ASCAP. His works are available through HoneyRock Publishing, EMPiRE, New Focus, PARMA, and SEAMUS Records. Vidiksis recently served as composer in residence for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia and was selected by the NEA and Japan-US Friendship Commission, serving as Director of Arts Technology for a performance of a new work during the 2020 Olympics in Japan. Vidiksis is Assistant Professor of music technology at Temple University and President of SPLICE Music. He performs in SPLICE Ensemble and the Transonic Orchestra, conducts Ensemble N_JP, and directs the Boyer College Electroacoustic Ensemble Project (BEEP). [www.vidiksis.com]
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The music of composer and multi-instrumentalist Dan VanHassel has been described as “energizing” (Wall Street Journal), “a refreshing direction” (I Care If You Listen), and “an imaginative and rewarding soundscape” (San Francisco Classical Voice). His works create a uniquely evocative sound world drawing from a background in rock and heavy metal, Indonesian gamelan, free improvisation, and classical music.

VanHassel’s compositions have been featured at top national and international contemporary music festivals, including the MATA Festival, Gaudeamus Music Week, International Computer Music Conference, Bowling Green New Music Festival, UnCaged Toy Piano Festival, Shanghai Conservatory Electronic Music Week, and the Bang on a Can Summer Festival. His music is played regularly all over the world by ensembles and performers such as the Talea Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, pianist Jihye Chang, Verdant Vibes, Keuris Saxophone Quartet, Transient Canvas, pianist Gloria Cheng, Symphony Number One, Red Fish Blue Fish, Empyrean Ensemble, Hotel Elefant, the Boston Percussion Group, Ensemble Pamplemousse, and the UC Santa Cruz Wind Ensemble. Recordings of his works are featured on albums by the Now Hear Ensemble and Ignition Duo, as well as releases on the New Focus, Soundset, and Thinking OutLoud labels.

VanHassel was awarded a Live Arts Boston grant from the Boston Foundation, as well as commissions from Chamber Music America, the Barlow Endowment, and the Johnstone Fund for New Music. As an electric guitarist, VanHassel has performed with leading contemporary ensembles including the Callithumpian Consort, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Eco Ensemble, and Kadence Arts. He was a founding member and artistic director of contemporary chamber ensemble Wild Rumpus in San Francisco until 2016, and is the founder and executive director of the Boston-based Hinge Quartet.

VanHassel received degrees in composition from the University of California, Berkeley, New England Conservatory, and Carnegie Mellon University. He has taught composition and electronic music at: MIT, Brandeis University, UC Berkeley, Clark University, and Connecticut College and is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
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Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. In addition to composing for a variety of different ensembles, she also collaborates with choreographers and theater companies. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered. Recent areas of creative inquiry include extensive field recording, which has led to compositions and sound projects in aqueducts, caves, and sites of historic infrastructure.

Her music has been performed by Dither, Mantra Percussion, the Bang On A Can All-Stars, Brooklyn Rider, Metropolis Ensemble, Loadbang, New York New Music Ensemble, Splinter Reeds, the Scharoun Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), orchest de ereprijs, The Glass Farm Ensemble, the Estonian National Ballet, GAHLMM, James Moore, Terri Hron, Dana Jessen, Kathryn Woodard, Todd Reynolds, Kathleen Supové, Margaret Lancaster, Anna Svensdotter, Nina De Heney, and Jody Redhage. Her work has been performed at numerous venues and festivals in America and Europe, including the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, the Caramoor Festival, the MusicNOW Series of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Ecstatic Music Festival, Other Minds, the MATA Festival, Merkin Concert Hall, the Aspen Music Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music at MassMoCA, the Gaudeamus New Music Week, SEAMUS, International Computer Music Conference and Dither’s Invisible Dog Extravaganza.

Matthusen performs frequently on live-electronics as well, and has been a featured composer and performer at Experimental Intermedia Festival (NYC), 9 Evenings +50 at Fridman Gallery (NYC), SPLICE Festival (Kalamazoo), BEASt FEaST (Birmingham, UK), Ultrasons (Montreal), and Salon Bruit (Berlin). She also performs frequently with Object Collection, and is involved in interdisciplinary collaborations such as the project between systems and grounds with visual artist Olivia Valentine for live-textile generation and live-electronics, and Kite Choir with artist Firat Erdim.

Awards include the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Grant, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Awards, First Prize in the Young Composers’ Meeting Composition Competition, the MacCracken and Langley Ryan Fellowship, a Van Lier Fellowship at Roulette Intermedium, the “New Genre Prize” from the IAWM Search for New Music, and the 2014 Elliott Carter Rome Prize. Matthusen has also held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Hambidge, ACRE, create@iEar at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, STEIM, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, VCCA, CMMAS, Konstepidemin, Copland House, Composers NOW Residency at Pocantico, the Hambidge Center, and Loghaven. Matthusen completed her Ph.D. at New York University – GSAS and has taught at Columbia University, the TU-Berlin as the Edgard Varèse Guest Professor (through DAAD), the Slee Visiting Professor at University at Buffalo, and Florida International University.

Matthusen is currently Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, where she teaches experimental music, composition, and music technology, and founded the Toneburst Laptop and Electronic Arts Ensemble.
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Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Beattie, called a “smashing success” (San Francisco Examiner) and praised for her “warmth” (New York Times) and “exuberant voice and personality” (Opera News), revels in performing everything from traditional to brand-new classical repertoire, as well as engaging in ongoing collaborations with performance, visual, jazz, folk, and theater artists. Her projects this season include singing the role of Anna in the world premiere of Lembit Beecher’s opera Sophia’s Forest, written for chamber orchestra and electronically-controlled sound sculptures; championing art song written by women & performing with drag queen Cookie DiOrio on her series “The Art of the Heel”; and developing the co-created historical-discovery/ storytelling/electronic, classical and Slovakian-folk-music-based tale of The Black Queen with composer Juraj Kojs, pianist Adam Marks, and collaborators from four countries, which premieres in Miami in the Fall of 2018.

Jennifer has been a featured soloist with organizations including The National Opera Orchestra at the Kennedy Center; The Philadelphia Orchestra; Opera Philadelphia; the Columbus Symphony Orchestra; Symphony in C; Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia; the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Brooklyn Art Song Society; the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago; Malibu’s Stotsenberg Recital Series w/ John Musto at the piano; the National Arts Club NYC; Argento Chamber Ensemble at the Park Avenue Armory; JACK Quartet; Aizuri Quartet; Argus Quartet; Lake George Music Festival; and as vocalist-in-residence at the New Music on the Point Festival. Jennifer is a member of two chamber music duos: Albatross, with pianist Adam Marks (artists-in-residence with the Yale college composers); and So Much Hot Air, with oboe/ English horn player Zachary Pulse. She also serves as co-director of Artists at Albatross Reach, a retreat for the development of weird, wonderful new work and artistic collaborations in northern California.
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Scott L. Miller is an American composer best known for his electroacoustic chamber music and ecosystemic performance pieces. His music is characterized by collaborative approaches to composition and the use of electronics, exploring performer/computer improvisation and re-imagining ancient compositional processes through the lens of 21st century technology. Inspired by the inner-workings of sound and the microscopic in the natural and mechanical worlds, his music is the product of hands-on experimentation and collaboration with musicians and performers from across the spectrum of styles. His recent work experiments with VR applications in live concerts, first realized in his composition Raba, created for Tallinn-based Ensemble U:.

Miller’s ecosystemic works model the behavior of objects from the natural world in electronic sound, creating interactive sonic ecosystems. Ecosystemic pieces are the result of autonomous sounds competing with each other for sonic space. Individual sounds tend to find a balance, which can be upset by changes to the sonic landscape, such as the introduction of new sounds. Because of this, sonic ecosystems are intimately tied to the space they are presented in. With or without humans, repeat performances produce unique results each time—sometimes subtle, sometimes drastic—while maintaining a recognizable identity. Recordings of his music are available on New Focus Recordings, Innova, Ein Klang, and other labels; many of these recordings feature his long-time collaborators, the new music ensemble Zeitgeist (whose albums he also produces). His music is published by the American Composers Edition, Tetractys, and Jeanné. His most recent albums include COINCIDENT (FCR337), Havona (#SR002), Lab Rat (ekr 070).

Miller is a Professor of Music at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, where he teaches composition, electroacoustic music and theory. He is Past-President (2014—18) of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the U.S. (SEAMUS) and presently Director of SEAMUS Records. He holds degrees from The University of Minnesota, The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill and the State University of New York at Oneonta, and studied composition at the Czech-American Summer Music Institute and the Centre de Création Musicale Iannis Xenakis.

Miller has been named a McKnight Composer Fellow three times (2001, 2013, 2018), a Fulbright Scholar (2014—15), and his work has been recognized by numerous state, national, and international arts organizations. He has been the featured artist at several festivals, including the Chicago Electro-Acoustic Music Festival, the Lipa Festival, and the Estonian Academy of Music’s Autumn Festival, Sügisfest.
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Caroline Louise Miller (they/them) is a US composer based in Portland, Oregon. Their work broadly explores affect, ecology, labor politics, tactility, and digital materiality, often addressing contemporary issues within dreamlike musical spaces that thread field recordings, shimmering textures, and romantic melodic lines through harsh noise and clattering dissonances. They have most recently received grants, fellowships, and commissions through Alarm Will Sound, SPLICE Ensemble with funding from Chamber Music America, Guerilla Opera, Transient Canvas, and Ensemble Adapter. In 2018 they won the ISB/David Walter Composition Competition for Hydra Nightingale, created with improvisor and bassist Kyle Motl. Recent projects include Superlunary, a collection of acousmatic soundscapes for improvisation, with George Colligan; and Here-There, a multimedia installation with Alarm Will Sound and digital media artist Stefani Byrd that explores layered histories of labor at abandoned and active California railroad sites. C.L.M.'s music appears across the U.S. and internationally. Caroline is Assistant Professor of Music in Sonic Arts at Portland State University, and holds a Ph.D in Music from UC San Diego.
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Christopher Biggs is a composer, electronic music performer, and multimedia artist residing in Kalamazoo, MI, where he is Associate Professor of Music Composition and Technology at Western Michigan University. Biggs’ recent projects focus on developing and performing a live electronic music system for both in-person and networked performances. Biggs is the Director of SPLICE Institute.
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SPLICE Festival V 2023 Concert 5 Program

featuring

SPLICE Ensemble

Saturday November 4, 2023
7:00pm EDT
David Friend Recital Hall, Berklee College of Music
921 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02115

Livestream available at https://vimeo.com/showcase/dfrh

Peter Van Zandt Lane : Anabranch

Derek Hurst : Fissure

Shahrzad Talebi : Eternal Embrace of the Sea

Ted Moore : nand

Bella Rose Kelly and Ziaire Trinidad Sherman : Yield

Zouning (Anne) Liao : Rupturing Signals

Brian Sears : bare.

Notes

Peter Van Zandt Lane : Anabranch

                          I believe
in the violence of not knowing.

I've seen a river lose its course
& join itself again,
                   watched it court
a stream & coax the stream
into its current,

                       & I have seen
rivers, not unlike
                 you, that failed to find
their way back.

- Andrew Zawacki, excerpt from “Anabranch: Credo" (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2004)

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Brian Sears : bare.
bare. is an exploration of restraint, simplicity, and vulnerability, which is presented in various ways. A simple chord progression reoccurs throughout the piece, first as a deconstructed and sparse piano texture, and later as fully stated straight forward chords, and outlined melodies in the trumpet. As the texture and energy of the piece increases, the overarching themes of the piece persist with repeating and hypnotic rhythmic textures, simple tonal melodies, and sustained tones that are transformed and given life by the live electronics, adding interest and complexity to simple beauty. Within the piece, each instrument has a moment to stand on its own, giving each performer a chance to show their own vulnerability through exposed improvisations.

The final moments of the piece brings the instruments together for a pop/dance music inspired celebration of the simple elements presented throughout the earlier sections, showing the versatility and beauty of simple ideas.
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Shahrzad Talebi : Eternal Embrace of the Sea
Eternal Embrace of the Sea is written for the Splice ensemble, inspired by the poem “Quietness” by Rumi. The poem centers around spiritual awakening and rebirth, representing the act of killing one's ego and breaking free from the prison of thought. The music is expressing this idea by creating an eerie, soft yet intense atmosphere that is periodically disrupted by sudden loud attacks. As the piece progresses, these sudden attacks occur more frequently, eventually becoming the defining texture and character of the music.

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You’re covered with a thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
The speechless full moon
comes out now.

“Quietness” by Rumi
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Ted Moore : nand
Electrons oscillating high and low, edgy square waves that turn on and off different tones, noise, oscillating with silence, in turn turning off and on themselves. A complex system creating simple sounds (repeating phrases consisting of square waves, filtered noise, and silence), each gesture has microvariations, just enough entropy to keep me listening for the next squealy tone.
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Zouning (Anne) Liao : Rupturing Signals
TThe inspiration for this composition project is to explore the electromagnetic signals that surround us but are not audible in everyday life. Humans emit electromagnetic radiation when making decisions or engaging in activities like driving or choosing what to wear. These brainwave activities alter the electromagnetic field (EMF) signals. I find it fascinating that these physical EMF signals can be transformed and amplified into audio signals, allowing us to hear the sonic differences between devices like laptops and iPhones.

To prepare for this project, I used electromagnetic sensors to detect various gadgets that emit EMF. These sensors convert the magnetic signals into audio signals. I am fascinated by the diverse musical qualities present in these recordings. Some have strong rhythmic grooves, while others have distinct and persistent frequency content. However, these signals are fragile and unstable, depending on the position of the sensors. Even a slight movement of the sensor can significantly weaken the audio signal or completely change the sound. Sometimes, moving the sensors closer to the source can trigger a dangerously loud boom, followed by a signal break.

In Rupturing Signals, the ensemble and electronics collaborate to recreate different rhythmic and frequency patterns of the EMF. This composition aims to highlight the unstable, ever-changing, and instantly breaking characteristics of the recorded audio signals.
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Bella Rose Kelly and Ziaire Trinidad Sherman : Yield
Yield was written about a character's relationship with a singular moment. They relive and rewrite what happened trying to justify their actions. This ultimately leads to them being stuck in a feedback loop, unable to break out. Through microtonal interactions and contrasting electronics, reality begins to tear leaving the character where they started. By the end, there is no time for them to stop or start down a new path; All they can do is yield.
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Bios

SPLICE Ensemble is a trumpet, piano, and percussion trio focused on cultivating a canon of electroacoustic chamber music. Called a “sonic foodfight” by Jazz Weekly, SPLICE Ensemble works with composers and performers on performance practice techniques for collaboration and integrating electronics into a traditional performance space. The resident ensemble of both SPLICE Institute and SPLICE Festival, SPLICE Ensemble has been a featured ensemble at M Woods in Beijing, SEAMUS, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, SCI National, Electronic Music Midwest, and New Music Detroit’s Strange Beautiful Music 10. They have recorded on both the SEAMUS and Parma Labels.
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Derek Hurst is a composer writing acoustic and electroacoustic concert music. His work exhibits a balance between visceral solemnity and muscular jocularity, mixed with timbral subtlety. Both his acoustic and electronic works have been performed throughout the U.S. and abroad by ensembles such as: Boston Modern Orchestra Project, String Noise, Left Coast Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Interensemble, Brave New Works, Ecce Ensemble; and prominent soloists: Ian Pace, Winston Choi, Geoffrey Burleson, Ashleigh Gordon, Sarah Brady et al, with works featured on concert events of: League-ISCM, SEAMUS, ICMC, Boston Cyberarts and the ComputerArts Festival. Mr. Hurst and his creative work have received several awards, honors and distinctions including: Fromm Foundation Commission, Jebediah Foundation Commission, MCC Artist’s Fellowship, the Wayne Peterson Prize, The Copland House Residency et al. As a new music advocate, he also has directed numerous concerts of new music and was Cohost for SEAMUS’ 2019 National Conference, which was held on the Berklee / BoCo campus.

Derek is Professor of Composition at Berklee and teaches courses in composition, electronic music, theory, counterpoint & contemporary music. Mr. Hurst earned his PhD in Composition / Theory from Brandeis University. Major teachers include David Rakowski, Eric Chasalow, Martin Boykan, Yehudi Wyner and John Melby. His dissertation on Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto (op. 42) is published by Verlag, D.M.
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Peter Van Zandt Lane is an American composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music, whose unique musical style draws from his eclectic musical background in genres ranging from classical, Renaissance music, avant-garde electronic music, EDM, folk, and progressive rock. When awarded the Charles Ives Fellowship in composition, the American Academy of Arts and Letters noted “at every turn, his propulsive, incisive work is beautifully and confidently made. . . Lane’s music is as inviting as it is sophisticated.” He is currently Associate Professor of Composition and Director of the Roger and Center for New Music at the University of Georgia.
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Brian Sears’s music is based on his attraction to timbre, space, and texture, and is heavily influenced by the art of electroacoustic performance practice, and its ability to shift our perception of reality through the use of technology. His compositions use memory, constructive reality, and intimate sonic expressions to invoke deep emotional connections. Brian holds a Ph.D in Music Composition and Theory from Brandeis University, where he studied with Eric Chasalow, Yu-Hui Chang, and David Rakowski. Brian is continually inspired and influenced by his interactions and collaborations with performers and sound artists, as well as past teachers and mentors like Elainie Lillios, Mikel Kuehn, Pablo Furman, and Brian Belet.

Brian is currently serving as the Assistant Director of Operations for the Writing and Music Technology Division at Berklee College of Music, where he creates new curricular programs to encourage student creation and collaboration. He is the winner of the 2018 ASCAP/SEAMUS Commission Competition, and his music has been performed nationally at festivals and conferences like ICMC, SEAMUS, NYCEMF, SCI, New Music Gathering, Electronic Music Midwest, N_SEME, SPLICE Festival, and others, as well as by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Collage New Music, SPLICE ensemble, the Toledo Symphony Orchestra and the San José Chamber Orchestra. He has also been a participant artist at various residencies including the Manifeste Academy at IRCAM, Atlantic Center of the Arts, the SPLICE Summer Institute, and the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice at New England Conservatory.
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Shahrzad Talebi is a composer from Tehran, Iran. Her music is inspired by a broad range of human experiences, from personal to political and poems. It is characterized by dense textures and a spontaneous rhythmic style. The microtonal structures, styles of ornamentation, and the timbral scope of Iranian traditional and folk music have been influential to her approach. Her work has been selected for Electronic Music Midwest, the Klingler ElectroAcoustic Residency Competition (Writing a piece for Unheard-of//Ensemble), the Toledo Symphony Orchestra reading session, BGSU MicroOpera, Fifteen Minutes-of-Fame (Drew Hosler), the electroacoustic music competition “Reza Korourian Awards”. Shahrzad earned her bachelor's degree from the Tehran University of Art and her master's degree at Bowling Green State University, where she studied with Dr. Mikel Kuehn, Dr. Elainie Lillios, and Dr. Christopher Dietz. She will be attending the University of North Texas to pursue her PhD in composition this fall.
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Ted Moore (he / him) is a composer, improviser, and intermedia artist whose work fuses sonic, visual, physical, and acoustic elements, often incorporating technology to create immersive, multidimensional experiences.

Ted’s music has been presented by leading cultural institutions such as MassMoCA, South by Southwest, The Walker Art Center, and National Sawdust and presented by ensembles such as Talea Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, the [Switch~ Ensemble], and the JACK Quartet.

Ranging from concert stages to dirty basements, Ted is a frequent improviser on electronics and has appeared with dozens of instrumental collaborators across Europe and North America. Described as “frankly unsafe” by icareifyoulisten.com, performances on his custom, large-scale software instrument for live sound processing and synthesis, enables an improvisational voice rooted in free jazz, noise music, and musique concrète.
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Born in Guangdong, China, Zouning’s music draws inspiration from her fascination with nature and technology, blended with a constant curiosity about the playing capacity of instruments. She endeavors to incorporate unexpected and everyday sounds into her music.

Her music has been performed in the United States, France, China, and England. In 2023, her work was featured in the Musicacoustica Hangzhou Electronic Music Festival, Electronic Music Midwest, CampGround23, Turn Up 2023, SPLICE Festival, and Everyday is Spatial 2023. She was honored to also be featured in New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (2022), SEAMUS national conference in (2021, 2022), National Student Electronic Music Event (2021), and the Society of Composers Inc. (2021). Zouning was named a finalist in the ASCAP/ SEAMUS Student Composer Commission Competition in 2021.

Zouning is currently pursuing a master’s degree with double majors in electronic music composition and music theory at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. She also serves as an Associate Instructor of Music Theory and teaches written and aural theory at undergraduate level. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the same institution where she studies with David Dzubay, John Gibson, and Chi Wang among other notable mentors. In summer 2023, Zouning earned a certification from the CIEE Paris Contemporary Music Creation and Critique Program, ManiFeste & I’Académie at IRCAM- Centre Pompidou in Paris, France.
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Bella Rose Kelly is a student at Berklee College of Music where she is majoring in Composition and minoring in Screen Scoring. She has earned the Berklee World Tour scholarship as well as the Taco Bell Live Mas scholarship in composition. Bella has operated most notably in the Neither/Nor ensemble directed by Dr. Richard Carrick as a composer, performer, and orchestra manager. She has premiered two pieces with the group since 2021. Her goal is to make classical music more accessible through writing and imaginative concert experiences. She is inspired by the music of Jessie Montgomery and Claude Debussy.
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Ziaire Trinidad Sherman is a Black American saxophonist, composer, and visual artist based in Cincinnati and Boston. He is known for blending his musical talents with storytelling and admiration for life. Ziaire's captivating saxophone performances, combined with cutting-edge technology and a deep appreciation for the history of sound, create visually stunning experiences. He has showcased his work through audiovisual pieces, touring, and art installations, with exhibitions and performances at MIT, Harvard, Documenta, and Fabrica Research Center. Ziaire Trinidad Sherman remains committed to exploring fresh and innovative ways to express his artistry.
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SPLICE Festival V 2023 Workshop 2

Saturday November 4, 2023
2:00pm EDT
Multi-Purpose Room, Berklee College of Music
132 Ipswich St, Boston, MA 02215

Erin Landers, Sophie Delphis, and Brian Ellis

Movement and Music: Working with Choreography and Motion Capture Technology

Brooklyn Motion Capture Dance Ensemble is dedicated to the art of sonification of movement. This workshop will be an exploration of our group's artistic practice, and will share best practices we've learned regarding collaborations among composers, choreographers, and creative coders. In our time together, we will discuss theoretical groundings, play with some AI-powered instruments, and perform a piece together as a group.

NOTE: To the extent that you are comfortable and able, this workshop will ask you to move with us. Comfortable clothing conducive to movement is encouraged but not required.

Bios

Erin Landers, Movement Director of Brooklyn Motion Capture Dance Ensemble, (she/her) is a Brooklyn based choreographer, teacher, and performer. She is a founding member of ECHOensemble, an improvising group of musicians and dancers, a dancer with dNaga Dance Company, an internationally-touring, intergenerational dance company directed by Claudine Naganuma, and was a co-founder of A-Y/dancers, a Hudson-Valley based repertory company. Erin is influenced by her upbringing in a musical household and study of a variety of dance forms including modern, contemporary, ballet, Zimbabwean (Shona), Irish (step), and Balkan folk dance, as well as mime. Erin recently produced her second evening-length performance, entitled of body of body of, a piece of horizontal movement theater. She has presented work at Palace of Fine Arts (San Francisco), the Trust Performing Arts Center (Lancaster, PA), Alchemical Studios (New York City), ChaShaMa (New York City), and the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY).

Franco-American mezzo-soprano Sophie Delphis’ operatic roles include: Félicie/Adélaïde (La Belle et la Bête, Glass), Cherubino (Le nozze di Figaro), Giunone (La Calisto), Carmen and Mercédès (Carmen), Flora (La Traviata), Rosina (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Cenerentola and Tisbe (La Cenerentola), Concepción (L’heure espagnole), Hansel, (Hansel and Gretel) and Elle (La voix humaine). An avid recitalist, Sophie regularly produces programs for musical and cultural organizations in the United States and China. Recent and upcoming works include: Ravel's Chansons madécasses and Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, Bolcom's Cabaret Songs, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten and Messiaen's Harawi. Along with classical repertoire, she enjoys collaborating with composers, improvisers and theater artists on new works. She is a soloist on the Grammy Award-nominated Naxos recording of Milhaud’s Oresteia trilogy. She currently resides in New York City, where she is pursuing a doctoral degree in voice performance at the Graduate Center CUNY.

Brian Ellis is a creative coder, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. His artistic practice centers around using code to democratize creative expression. He founded the Brooklyn Motion Capture Dance Ensemble to explore this via the medium of dance, and to expand the possibilities of movement-based musical interfaces. Brian additionally maintains many performance practices. He incorporates classical guitar, mountain dulcimer, live electronics, and no-input-mixing into his solo practice, and is an active ensemble member in Echo Ensemble and SANS; duo.

SPLICE Festival V 2023 Workshop 3

Saturday November 4, 2023
4:00pm EDT
Multi-Purpose Room, Berklee College of Music
132 Ipswich St, Boston, MA 02215

Heather Stebbins

Getting Started with Eurorack (Without Going Bankrupt)

Introduction to working with modular synthesis using [free] VCV rack. Participants will learn the basics of modular synthesis and signal flow in the digital environment. By the end of the workshop they will generate their own musical content using VCV

Bio

Heather Stebbins is a composer, technologist, synthesist, and educator based in Washington, DC, where she is Assistant Professor of Electronic and Computer Music at George Washington University. She works with sounds created by instruments, found objects, nature, and voltage to generate musical experiences ranging from notated works for chamber ensembles to improvised performances on modular synthesizers. Really wonderful people and ensembles have performed her music in a lot of neat places, and she is grateful for that. Her recent album, At the End of the Sky (Superpang, 2023), is available on Bandcamp and streaming platforms. Other recordings are available on New Focus Recordings, Not Art Records, SEAMUS, and Coviello labels.

SPLICE Festival V 2023 Concert 4 Program

Saturday November 4, 2023
11:00am EDT
David Friend Recital Hall, Berklee College of Music
921 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02115

Will Yager : Krats/Strak: Spectral DJ & Double Bass
  Will Yager, bass
  Jean-François Charles, light show DJ

Marcea McGuire : Body
  Marcea McGuire, voice

Nina Shekhar : Honk if You Love Me
  Amy Advocat, clarinet

Leah Reid : Jouer
  Kyle Hutchins, soprano saxophone

Elliott Lupp : a warp along the length of the face
  Will Yager, bass

Wenxin Li : Wu
  Wenxin Li, live electronics

Badie Khaleghian : Before I Became Aware Of This Moving Of Life
  Wilson Poffenberger, saxophone

Note: Caroline Miller was formerly scheduled to have a piece on this concert, but was unfortunately unable to attend.

Notes

Will Yager : Krats/Strak: Spectral DJ & Double Bass
Spectral DJ is Jean-François Charles's personal electronic music improvisation tool; it is a unique software musical instrument optimized for live performance with a DJ controller. It features a versatile scratch delay and a powerful live graphic sound processing environment. Collaborative creation lies at the core of the Spectral DJ Duo. By design, the Spectral DJ instrument restores the art of listening as the most important of musical skills. When combined with Will Yager’s double bass, the possibilities include not only live synthesis and processing, but also counterpoint between the instruments and combining to form a fused sonic entity.
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Marcea McGuire : Body
Body explores the effects of generational trauma. Black women have been subjected to alarming rates of sexual violence for generations. The cycle of silent suffering has only just begun to change with the #MeToo movement. This piece illustrates the impact of sexual assault on one’s self image and interactions within their community.
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Nina Shekhar : Honk if You Love Me
In any large city, the sound of car horns riddles every street. But whenever I visit a city in India, the level of this traffic-filled soundscape is taken to an extreme, with a constant barrage of wild, animated, and exuberant car horns and songs like “Happy Birthday” which play every time a car is put into reverse. These unique horns almost sound too melodic and friendly to be recognized as traffic noises elsewhere, and hence they are used differently when driving – rather than honking out of anger, they are used to communicate to other drivers and make each car’s presence known, almost as a form of self-expression. In many ways, these drivers are reclaiming technology and using it to communicate – the most human and individual act possible. In essence, this piece Honk If You Love Me is a meta-version of this phenomenon, using electronics to disintegrate these traffic sounds and recontextualize them into something deeply personal and human.
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Leah Reid : Jouer
Jouer is an immersive composition for amplified soprano saxophone and electronics that explores sounds associated with “play”—sports, balls bouncing or being hit, playground and amusement park sounds, sounds of various children’s toys, balloons, video games, swimming pool games, trampolines, casinos, racetrack sounds, and much more. The electronics lead the listener through various soundscapes associated with the theme, while the saxophone part interacts with the evolving timbres and unifies the various sound worlds.

The composition was written as part of Reid’s Guggenheim Fellowship for Kyle Hutchins and the Cube at Virginia Tech.
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Elliott Lupp : a warp along the length of the face
This piece was written for and in collaboration with double bassist and friend Will Yager over a two year period. The work uses a series of cue like notational ‘guides’ (provided in real time via laptop) to instruct the performer through a series of physical, semi-improvisatory performative instructions. These moments rely heavily on the performer’s ability to listen, watch, and move between each moment with well-timed procession and musicality, while also allowing the performer a good amount of agency to explore sonic/performative possibilities from cell to cell. The electronics, both live and fixed, are all synthesized from sounds of wood (a majority of which came from Will’s own double bass). The title comes from the idea that if a plank of wood is said to be 'bowed’, it is said to have a warp along the length of its face.
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Wenxin Li : Wu
Wu is a live electronics piece working with motion detection in Max/MSP. It tracks the performer’s body movements with a camera and translates those movements to control commands for playing and mixing pre-recorded sounds. Wu (舞) in Chinese means dance. Normally dance comes after music. However, in this piece, dance creates the music.
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Badie Khaleghian : Before I Became Aware Of This Moving Of Life
Before I Became Aware Of This Moving Of Life is a work that celebrates the spontaneity and power of improvisation, brought to life by the incredible talent of saxophonist Wilson Poffenberger. This piece was conceived during a close collaboration between Wilson and myself, and it had its world premiere at the Splice Institute 2022 in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

The initial creative spark for the piece came when Wilson mentioned his passion for improvisation during brainstorming sessions with me. This mutual love for organic sonic processes provided the perfect foundation for a work that explores the limits of expression and freedom within a structured environment.

The piece itself is divided into several sections, each offering a unique space for Wilson to showcase his virtuosity and emotional depth. Each section presents a different sonic landscape, built upon a foundation of my guidelines and Wilson's creative input. The result is an ever-evolving dialogue between the saxophonist and the music as they together traverse the ephemeral landscapes that unfold before them.
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Bios

Will Yager is a double bassist committed to experimental music, improvisation, and collaborating with other artists in the creation of new solo and chamber repertoire for the double bass. He is a founding member of both LIGAMENT, a duo with soprano Anika Kildegaard, and the trio Wombat with Justin Comer and Carlos Cotallo Solares. Performance highlights include appearances at the High Zero Festival, Omaha Under the Radar, University of Iowa Center for New Music, Experimental Sound Studios’ Quarantine Concerts, 2021 International Society of Bassists Convention, Nief-Norf Summer Festival, New Music on the Point, Cortona Sessions for New Music, and the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival. He is based in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Jean-François Charles is a composer, clarinetist, and live electronics designer. After obtaining a MSc in Electrical Engineering at the National Institute for Applied Sciences in Lyon, he studied in Strasbourg with the Italian composer Ivan Fedele. As a clarinetist, he worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen for the world première and recording of Rechter Augenbrauentanz. He earned his Ph.D. in music/composition at Harvard, where he studied with Hans Tutschku, Chaya Czernowin, Julian Anderson, Helmut Lachenmann, Gunther Schuller, and others. His article “A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing using Max/MSP and Jitter” published in the Computer Music Journal has helped many electronic musicians integrate spectral sound processing into live performances, compositions, or their own software creations. After serving as deputy director at the Brest Conservatory (Bretagne, France), he joined in 2016 the School of Music at the University of Iowa as assistant professor in composition and digital arts.
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Marcea McGuire is a composer who shares her lived experience through music. Her work — which has been described as “stunning,” “graceful,” “powerful,” and “chilling” — was commissioned by the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, Lillith Vocal Ensemble and Horizon Ensemble.

McGuire aims to express the unique struggles her community faces; and celebrate her culture and history.

She has a B.F.A. from Ball State University in Music Composition with focus in Sonic Arts Technology. She has a M.M. in Composition from Boston Conservatory at Berklee. McGuire has studied with Keith Kothman, Derek Johnson, Michael Pounds, Mary Kouyoumdjian, and Young Lee.
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Nina Shekhar is a composer and multimedia artist who explores the intersection of identity, vulnerability, love, and laughter to create bold and intensely personal works.

Described as “tart and compelling” (New York Times), “vivid” (Washington Post), and an “orchestral supernova” (LA Times), her music has been commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic, LA Philharmonic, Nashville Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, Sarasota Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, Albany Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, New World Symphony, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Eighth Blackbird, International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, New York Youth Symphony, Alarm Will Sound, The Crossing, and Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Her work has been featured by Carnegie Hall, Hollywood Bowl, Kennedy Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Library of Congress, and National Gallery of Art.

Current projects include commissions for the New York Philharmonic, Grand Rapids Symphony, and Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA). Shekhar is the recipient of the 2021 Rudolf Nissim Prize and the 2018 ASCAP Foundation Leonard Bernstein Award, funded by the Bernstein family.

Aside from composing, Shekhar is a versatile performing artist as a flutist, pianist, and saxophonist. She has been featured by the National Flute Association, and she has performed in the Detroit International Jazz Festival.

Shekhar is currently a PhD candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. She is the 2021-2023 Composer-in-Residence for Young Concert Artists. She is a first-generation Indian American and a native of Detroit, Michigan.
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Sought out for her “dazzling” (Boston Globe) performances with “extreme control and beauty” (The Clarinet Journal), Amy Advocat, clarinetist, is an avid performer of new music having performed with Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Alarm Will Sound, Sound Icon, Guerilla Opera, Firebird Ensemble, Callithumpian Consort, Collage New Music, and Dinosaur Annex. Recent appearances include performances at Beethovenfest Bonn, Vienna Summer Music Festival, Monadnock Music, New Hampshire Music Festival, and the White Mountain Music Festival.

Amy is a founding member of the bass clarinet and marimba duo, Transient Canvas, with whom she has commissioned and premiered hundreds of new works and released three albums to critical acclaim. Transient Canvas regularly tours across the United States and Europe, including featured performances at New Music Gathering (San Francisco/Boston), SoundNOW Festival (Atlanta), Alba Music Festival (Italy), Music on the Edge (Pittsburgh), Outpost Concert Series (Los Angeles), and more. Their debut album, Sift, was released in August 2017 on New Focus Recordings to rave reviews. KLANG New Music called it "one of the more refreshing things I've heard in recent years." Their second album, Wired, was named a top local album of 2018 by The Boston Globe with I Care If You Listen raving “Transient Canvas is a tour de force and this record is a must-add to any new music lover’s library.”

Amy Advocat is a proud endorsing artist with Conn-Selmer and Henri Selmer Paris Clarinets.
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Leah Reid (www.leahreid.com) is a composer, sound artist, researcher, and educator, whose works range from opera, chamber, and vocal music, to acousmatic, electroacoustic works, and interactive sound installations.

Winner of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, Reid has also won the American Prize in Composition, the KLANG! International Electroacoustic Composition Competition, Musicworks’ Electronic Music Contest, Sound of the Year’s Composed with Sound Award, IAWM’s Pauline Oliveros Award, and prizes in the Iannis Xenakis International Electronic Music Competition and International Destellos Competition.

Her compositions have been presented at festivals, conferences, and major venues throughout the world, including Aveiro_Síntese, BEAST FEaST, Espacios Sonoros, EviMus, ICMC, IRCAM’s ManiFeste, MA/IN Festival, NYCEMF, OUA-EMF, Série de Música de Câmara, the Tilde New Music Festival, and WOCMAT, among many others.

Reid received her D.M.A. and M.A. from Stanford University and her B.Mus from McGill University. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia.
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Hailed as “epic” (Jazz Times), "formidable" (The Saxophone Symposium), and "gripping" (Star Tribune), Kyle Hutchins (http://www.jefferykylehutchins.com) is an internationally acclaimed saxophonist. He has performed across five continents, recorded over two dozen albums, premiered hundreds of new works, has authored a book and edited multiple anthologies of music for the saxophone. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Minnesota. Kyle has served on the faculty of Virginia Tech since 2016 where he is Assistant Professor of Practice. He is a Yamaha, Légère Reed, and E. Rousseau Mouthpiece Performing Artist.
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Elliott Lupp is a composer, improvisor, visual artist, educator, and sound designer whose work often invokes images of the distorted, chaotic, visceral, and absurd. This aesthetic approach as it relates to both acoustic and electroacoustic composition has led to a body of work that, at the root of its construction, focuses on the manipulation of noise, extreme gesture, shifting timbre, and performer/computer improvisation/interaction as core elements.

Elliott has received a number of awards and honors for his work, including a 2019 SEAMUS/ASCAP Commission, the 2019 Franklin G. Fisk Composition Award for Chamber Music, and Departmental and All-University awards in Graduate Research and Creative Scholarship. His music has been performed at a variety of electroacoustic festivals/conferences including NUNC!, SPLICE Institute, N_SEME, CHIMEfest, Electronic Music Midwest, MOXsonic, SEAMUS, and Electroacoustic Barn Dance.

Elliott currently teaches courses in music composition and music technology at Northwestern University.
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Wenxin Li is a native of Chongqing, China, and is currently teaching composition and electronic music at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Li’s music has been featured in a variety of festivals, including Aspen Music Festival, Composers Conference, SCI National Conference, RED NOTE New Music Festival, FSU New Music Festival, National Student Electronic Music Event, Midwest Graduate Music Consortium, and Midwest Composers Symposium. Her music has also been performed by the JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, H2 Quartet and Accroche Note. Li received her bachelor’s degree from Sichuan Conservatory of Music, master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is pursuing her PhD degree in composition at the University of Iowa under David Gompper.

https://soundcloud.com/wenxin-li
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Badie Khaleghian is a dynamic composer and multimedia artist whose passion for collaborative and innovative storytelling projects ignites imaginations, conversations, and transformative experiences. With a keen interest in exploring the intersection of art, cultures, science, and technology, he creates performances that challenge boundaries and break new ground. His works have been featured at renowned festivals worldwide, including the Atemporanea Festival in Buenos Aires, the Korea Electro-Acoustic Music Society’s Annual Conference in Seoul, and the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS). Khaleghian’s compositions have been performed by a range of ensembles, from the Crossing Borders and Hub New Music to the Talea Ensemble, Transient Canvas, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

Currently pursuing a doctorate in composition at Rice University, Khaleghian is deeply committed to research, teaching, and composing. He draws inspiration from his diverse cultural background and a strong desire to connect people through the power of art. Whether collaborating with other artists or working solo, Khaleghian’s work is characterized by its bold experimentation, technical sophistication, and emotional depth. With his finger on the pulse of the latest artistic trends and technologies, Khaleghian is poised to make an indelible mark on the world of contemporary music and multimedia art.
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Described as an “Admirably skilled player” (The News-Gazette), Boston based saxophonist WILSON POFFENBERGER is quickly establishing himself as a soloist, educator, chamber musician and improviser. Currently, Mr. Poffenberger is pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in saxophone performance and literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where he recently received ABD status.

As a soloist, Mr. Poffenberger has performed with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Illinois Modern Ensemble, Illinois Wind Symphony, Dana Symphony Orchestra, Youngstown State University Percussion Ensemble, and Hagerstown Municipal Band. He has presented recitals at the National Student Electronic Music Event, XVIII World Saxophone Congress in Zagreb, Croatia, EMS60 Conference, Splice New Music Festival, International Navy Band Saxophone Symposium, North American Saxophone Alliance Biannual Conference, Duquesne Saxophone Day, the Fondation des Etats-Unis and the Fondation Bierman-Lapotre.

Recent accomplishments include first prize at the 2020 UI Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition, first prize at the 2020 American Prize Chamber Music Competition, first prize at the 2020 North American Saxophone Alliance Quartet Competition, first prize at the 2019 Mostly Modern Festival Concerto Competition, first prize at the 2019 Krannert Debut Artist Competition, grand prize at the 2017 Enkor International Woodwind and Brass Competition, winner of the 2016-2017 Harriet Hale Woolley award, first prize at the 2014 Dana Young Artist competition, semi-finalist in the 2014 International Saxophone Symposium and Competition, and semi-finalist in the 2018 and 2014 North American Saxophone Alliance Collegiate Solo Competition.
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SPLICE Festival V 2023 Concert 3 Program

Friday November 3, 2023
7:00pm EDT
David Friend Recital Hall, Berklee College of Music
921 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02115

Anonymous (arranged by Rakel Saranga) : Durme Durme
  Rakel Saranga, Cristina Aramayo, Michal Nissimoff, and Viktoria Stachova -
      voice, electronics, Oud, and frame drum

Dana Jessen and Ted Moore : (un) Wired: Improvisation with DJII
  Dana Jessen, bassoon
  Ted Moore, electronics

Luciano Berio : Altra Voce
  SydeBoob Duo:
      Anna Elder, voice
      Sara Steranka, flute
  Brian Riordan, live electronics

Stacy Busch : She Breathes Fire
  newEar Contemporary Chamber Ensemble:
    Stacy Busch, voice
    Zsolt Eder, violin
    Boris Vayner, viola
    Sascha Groschang, cello

        intermission

Zouning (Anne) Liao : hypothetical particles
  Zouning (Anne) Liao, light.void~

Brian Ellis and Erin Landers : We Grow Together
  Erin Landers, dancer
  Sophie Delphis, dancer
  Brian Ellis, dance

Notes

Anonymous (arranged by Rakel Saranga) : Durme Durme
Durme Durme is a traditional Sephardic Jewish lullaby, sung primarily throughout regions in Turkey. The objective of this project was to take monophonic, melody based middle eastern music, and introduce it to the world of granular synthesis and processing; connecting old melodies with an electronic sound, playing with the dynamics of old and new. The idea is to have percussion and singers live, whilst recordings of the voice are being synthesized within Ableton Lives Granular II, creating a mass of auditive textures that will eventually turn into what electronic musicians like to call, “wall of sound”.
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Dana Jessen and Ted Moore : (un) Wired: Improvisation with DJII
Dana Jessen's (un) Wired is a solo electroacoustic and improvisatory work that incorporates sonic environments and live processing through DJII. DJII is a software designed by Ted Moore and Dana Jessen to be used by an improvising performer as live electronics accompaniment and interaction. Their collaborative process began in 2021 with open discussions about what a performance with DJII would sound like to an audience and feel like to a performer, and how one might develop an ongoing performance practice with the software. This performance will showcase the interface in conversation with Jessen's unique improvisatory language.
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Luciano Berio : Altra Voce
In one episode, namely Il Campo (The Field), from my azione musicale Cronaca del Luogo, there is a virtual love duet. Two voices and several instruments 'fall in love' and follow one another in a constantly renewing relationship. As we all know, in true polyphony each voice contributes to the whole yet retains its own identity, if not complete autonomy. In Altra voce I have liberated one voice (mezzo-soprano) and one instrument (alto flute) from the whole and developed their respective autonomies and harmonic premises by, among other means, using live electronics.
- Luciano Berio
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Stacy Busch : She Breathes Fire
The piece explores the fantasy world of Shey- a land and history of my own imagination. The world is currently divided by the ruling Kingdom of Men who have oppressed and silenced women for centuries. Now, the women have gathered their strength with an all powerful weapon and march to defeat the Kingdom of Men. However, they find that power and fear causes corruption even with the best of intentions.

I think of this piece as a prologue that recounts the history of Shey as it introduces us to the world and it's major players. It is an epic that expresses the deepest human struggles while also commenting on the similarities and differences with our world today.

This is the first piece in a large series of works to be written from the world of Shey.
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Zouning (Anne) Liao : hypothetical particles
Hypothetical particles in physicals are particles that have not yet been proven to exist by observation. However, these phenomena are necessary for consistency within a given physical theory. In this piece, I explore the phenomenon through the interaction between light and sound particles. Amplitudes of the lights trigger changes in music, which reveal connections between the natural and synthetic sound worlds.

The light instrument is a handmade digital photo controller consisting of 16 light-dependent resistors. This is a replication of light.void~, designed by recent IU alumnus Felipe Tovar-Henao based on Leafcutter John’s light thing.

This piece is dedicated to Felipe Tovar- Henao, who is a good friend, an important mentor, and a crucial source of inspiration that motivated me to pursue music composition.
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Brian Ellis and Erin Landers: We Grow Together
We Grow Together is a community-based ritual performance. Grounded fully in the idea that every person can be expressive through movement and music, we aim to create a playful space where the audience is invited to collaborate with us in creating our sonic and spatial environment.
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Bios

Rakel Saranga is a Boston based vocalist, arranger, composer. She is born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. Her music draws inspiration from the multiple countries/regions that she has lived in, such as the Middle East, Eastern Europe, US and Turkey. She maintains a unique sound that’s an amalgamation of multiple musical genres/worlds. She creates a unique playful sound writing haunting melodies using tensions and unexpected chords. Her main goal is to deliver heartfelt music that takes people on a journey.
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Cristina Aramayo is a 22 year old guitarist, producer and sound designer who uses her cross cultural background to fuse as many genres as possible. She was born in the UK and spent her formative years there, developing an early interest in British rock bands who are still an influence on her today. When she was 8, she moved to Mexico City where the rest of her family is from, which is when she began to discover a joy for all types of genres ranging from EDM, to hip hop, to reggaetón, amongst others. She largely attributes her current interest in music to the cultural richness of CDMX. In 2021, she moved to Boston to start her music career in Berklee, and is currently an EPD student with a burning passion for granular synthesis and sound design.
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Hailed as a “bassoon virtuoso” (Chicago Reader), Dana Jessen tirelessly seeks to expand the boundaries of her instrument through original compositions, improvisations, and collaborative work with innovative artists. Over the past decade, she has presented dozens of world premiere performances throughout North America and Europe while maintaining equal footing in the creative music community as an improviser. Her solo performances are almost entirely grounded in electroacoustic composition that highlight her distinct musical language. As a chamber musician, Dana is the co-founder of the contemporary reed quintet Splinter Reeds, and has performed with Alarm Will Sound, Amsterdam’s DOEK Collective, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Tri-Centric Ensemble, among many others. A dedicated educator, Dana teaches at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and has presented masterclasses and workshops to a range of students from across the globe. More at: www.danajessen.com
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Ted Moore (he / him) is a composer, improviser, intermedia artist, and educator. He holds a PhD in Music Composition from the University of Chicago and recently served as a Research Fellow in Creative Coding at the University of Huddersfield (AY 2021-22), investigating the creative affordances of machine learning and data science algorithms as part of the FluCoMa project.​ His work focuses on fusing the sonic, visual, physical, and acoustic aspects of performance and sound, often through the integration of technology. Ted’s work has been described as “frankly unsafe” (icareifyoulisten.com), an impressive achievement both artistically and technically” (VitaMN), and “epic” (Pioneer Press). Ted’s work has been presented by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Jack Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, Yarn/Wire, Splinter Reeds, Quince Vocal Ensemble, HOCKET, Imani Winds, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Line Upon Line, The Dream Songs Project, AVIDduo, and has been performed around the world including at South by Southwest (Austin, TX), National Sawdust (NYC), The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), STEIM (Amsterdam), Whatever Works nykymusiikkifestivaali (Finland), Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (Germany), City University (London), Hochschule für Musik (Freiburg), Center for New Music (San Francisco), ESS (Chicago), World Saxophone Congress (Croatia), New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, CubeFest (Blacksburg, VA), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), Omaha Under the Radar (Nebraska), Electric Spring (UK), Pittsburgh Festival of New Music, Electroacoustic Barn Dance, Root Signals Electronic Music Festival (Georgia), SEAMUS, Punk Ass Classical (Minneapolis), MOXsonic (MO), New Horizons Music Festival (MO), and the SPLICE Festival (Bowling Green, OH).
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SydeBoob Duo is a female-fronted experimental music collective located in Brooklyn, NY and composed of soprano vocalist Anna Elder and flutist Sarah Steranka. We are dedicated to pushing the boundaries of contemporary performance, amplifying the voices of female artists, and using alternative performance mediums to invite listeners into a more unique and challenging listening space. We are creators, improvisers, and performers of contemporary sounds actively commissioning and performing contemporary classical music for soprano voice, flute(s), and electronics.
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Brian Riordan is a composer, performer, improviser, producer, and sound artist originally from Chicago, IL. He completed his PhD in Music Composition and Theory at University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches a class he designed called “Programming Environments in Music: An Introduction to Max/MSP”. His research interests are in temporal discontinuity, delay-based performance, real-time digital signal processing, and laptop performance aesthetics. As an avid collaborator, he has performed in numerous ensembles ranging from rock, jazz, classical, and experimental throughout North American, Europe, and Asia. His compositions have been performed by The JACK Quartet, The Callithumpian Consort, Wet Ink Ensemble, andPlay, The Meridian Arts Ensemble, Kamraton, Untwelve, The H2 Quartet, Alia Musica, Wolftrap, and his compositions have been featured at STEIM, SEAMUS, SICPP, New Music On The Point, SPLICE, and The Walden Creative Musicians Retreat. As a member of the Pittsburgh ensemble “How Things Are Made,” he produced and performed on over 70 recordings for the group and have commissioned 52 compositions.
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Stacy Busch is a composer/performer who utilizes her voice with electronics to build unique sound worlds. Her work is a meeting point between art pop, avant-classical and singer-songwriter. Stacy's work has been performed nationally and internationally. It has been performed by ensembles including: loadbang, Bent Frequency, Beo String Quartet and newEar Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Performances at international residencies include Listhus Artist Residency in Iceland and ArtHouse Holland in The Netherlands. Stacy is a 2022 OneBeat Virtual Fellow for Global Music Leaders (a program of Bang on a Can) and she received the 2020 Charlotte Street Foundation Generative Performing Artist Award. Stacy has received grants from ArtsKC, ArtSounds, Charlotte Street Foundation and the UMKC Women's Council. Stacy received her MM in composition from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and her BM in composition from Western Michigan University.
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Hungarian violinist Zsolt Eder has established himself as a versatile and engaging performer and teacher. Zsolt has performed extensively in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Highlights include performing in the first Canadian Ring Cycle (Wagner) with the Canadian Opera Company, at the Beijing Modern Music Festival in China, IMS Prussia Cove in England, and at the International Classical and Folk Music Festival in Kyrgyzstan. He has performed as a soloist with the Cleveland Institute of Music Symphony Orchestra, the Topeka Symphony, the City of Asuncion Symphony Orchestra (OSCA) in Paraguay, the Parlando Chamber Orchestra (Hungary), the Via Salzburg Chamber Orchestra (Toronto, Canada) and the Midwest Chamber Ensemble (Kansas City). He has appeared live on Hungarian National Radio and ABC Australia.
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Originally from Novosibirsk, Russia, Boris Vayner has been enjoying a diverse career in music as a violist, educator and conductor. As a member of the Grammy nominated St. Petersburg String Quartet since 2005, he has been intensively touring throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia. The highlights of his career include performances at Lincoln Center, Library of Congress, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Manchester Bridgewater Hall, Dublin National Concert Hall, London King’s Place, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Great Hall, and appearances at such festivals as Schleswig-Holstein (Germany), MIMO (Brazil), Buxton (England), Fishguard (Wales), Music Mountain, Newport, Rockport, and Mainly Mozart in San Diego, among others. Boris Vayner has collaborated with such internationally renowned artists as Leon Fleisher, Michael Tree, Peter Donohoe, David Shifrin, Misha Dichter, and Stephanie Chase. He has also been a member of the St. Petersburg Piano Quartet that debuted in New York in May 2014.
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Sascha Groschang, cellist, has performed extensively across the United States and Asia. She has appeared at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall numerous times, and gave her solo debut recital at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in 2009. She has been a soloist and lecturer at the Thailand International Composition Festival, performed for the King of Malaysia with the Kuala Lumpur International Festival Orchestra, and traveled all across China on two tours with the Mantovani Pops Orchestra. She has shared the stage with artists such as Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, The Eagles, Vince Gill, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Michael Bublé, Peter Gabriel, Josh Groban, Sarah Mclachlan, Idina Menzel, Amy Grant and her recording credits include NBC, Atlantic, and Rhino Records.
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Born in Guangdong, China, Zouning’s music draws inspiration from her fascination with nature and technology, blended with a constant curiosity about the playing capacity of instruments. She endeavors to incorporate unexpected and everyday sounds into her music.

Her music has been performed in the United States, France, China, and England. In 2023, her work was featured in the Musicacoustica Hangzhou Electronic Music Festival, Electronic Music Midwest, CampGround23, Turn Up 2023, SPLICE Festival, and Everyday is Spatial 2023. She was honored to also be featured in New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (2022), SEAMUS national conference in (2021, 2022), National Student Electronic Music Event (2021), and the Society of Composers Inc. (2021). Zouning was named a finalist in the ASCAP/ SEAMUS Student Composer Commission Competition in 2021.

Zouning is currently pursuing a master’s degree with double majors in electronic music composition and music theory at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. She also serves as an Associate Instructor of Music Theory and teaches written and aural theory at undergraduate level. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the same institution where she studies with David Dzubay, John Gibson, and Chi Wang among other notable mentors. In summer 2023, Zouning earned a certification from the CIEE Paris Contemporary Music Creation and Critique Program, ManiFeste & I’Académie at IRCAM- Centre Pompidou in Paris, France.
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Brian Ellis is a creative coder, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. His artistic practice centers around using code to democratize creative expression. He founded the Brooklyn Motion Capture Dance Ensemble to explore this via the medium of dance, and to expand the possibilities of movement-based musical interfaces. Brian additionally maintains many performance practices. He incorporates classical guitar, mountain dulcimer, live electronics, and no-input-mixing into his solo practice, and is an active ensemble member in Echo Ensemble and SANS; duo.
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Erin Landers, Movement Director of Brooklyn Motion Capture Dance Ensemble, (she/her) is a Brooklyn based choreographer, teacher, and performer. She is a founding member of ECHOensemble, an improvising group of musicians and dancers, a dancer with dNaga Dance Company, an internationally-touring, intergenerational dance company directed by Claudine Naganuma, and was a co-founder of A-Y/dancers, a Hudson-Valley based repertory company. Erin is influenced by her upbringing in a musical household and study of a variety of dance forms including modern, contemporary, ballet, Zimbabwean (Shona), Irish (step), and Balkan folk dance, as well as mime. Erin recently produced her second evening-length performance, entitled of body of body of, a piece of horizontal movement theater. She has presented work at Palace of Fine Arts (San Francisco), the Trust Performing Arts Center (Lancaster, PA), Alchemical Studios (New York City), ChaShaMa (New York City), and the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY).
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Franco-American mezzo-soprano Sophie Delphis’ operatic roles include: Félicie/Adélaïde (La Belle et la Bête, Glass), Cherubino (Le nozze di Figaro), Giunone (La Calisto), Carmen and Mercédès (Carmen), Flora (La Traviata), Rosina (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Cenerentola and Tisbe (La Cenerentola), Concepción (L’heure espagnole), Hansel, (Hansel and Gretel) and Elle (La voix humaine). An avid recitalist, Sophie regularly produces programs for musical and cultural organizations in the United States and China. Recent and upcoming works include: Ravel's Chansons madécasses and Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, Bolcom's Cabaret Songs, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten and Messiaen's Harawi. Along with classical repertoire, she enjoys collaborating with composers, improvisers and theater artists on new works. She is a soloist on the Grammy Award-nominated Naxos recording of Milhaud’s Oresteia trilogy. She currently resides in New York City, where she is pursuing a doctoral degree in voice performance at the Graduate Center CUNY. back to program

SPLICE Festival V 2023 Workshop 1

Friday November 3, 2023
4:00pm EDT
Loft, Berklee College of Music
921 Boylston Street, 3rd floor, Boston, MA 02115

Nilou Nourbakhsh

Novel Interfaces of Expression

A one-hour laptop ensemble workshop that can work with 4 participants or more, up to 40. This workshop includes an introduction to building a simple max patch that we will then use to improvise within a structured improvisation. This workshop also includes a rehearsal of two pieces from the laptop ensemble repertoire: Sonorous Noise by Oliver Hickman and Callings by Spencer Topel

Bio

Described as “stark” by WNPR and “darkly lyrical” by the New York Times, a winner of the Second International Hildegard commission award, a 2019 recipient of Opera America’s Discovery Grant, and winner of 2022 Beth Morrison Projects Next Generation competition, Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s music has been performed at numerous festivals and venues including Carnegie Hall, Mostly Mozart at Lincoln Center, and Direct Current Festival at the Kennedy Center. A founding member and co-director of Iranian Female Composers Association, Nourbakhsh is a strong advocate of music education and equal opportunities. She is currently the co-artistic director of Peabody Conservatory Laptop Orchestra and teaches composition at Longy School of Music of Bard college. Niloufar holds a doctoral degree from Stony Brook University and regularly performs with her Ensemble Decipher.

SPLICE Festival V 2023 Lectures

Friday November 3, 2023
2:00pm EDT
Loft, Berklee College of Music
921 Boylston Street, 3rd floor, Boston, MA 02115

Jocelyn Ho, Margaret Schedel and Bryan Jacobs
Women's Labor: Rheostat Rotary Rack

A feminist-activist project, Women’s Labor repurposes domestic tools to become new musical instruments using embedded technologies, featured in interactive installations, commissioned compositions, and performances. Rheostat Rotary Rack, the second instrument in Women’s Labor that won the 2021 IAWM Ruth Anderson Prize, is based on a mid-20th century umbrella-style rotary dryer, performed by hanging clothing on its strings, rotating it by hand and by wind using potentiometers and rotary encoder. The design of the gestural-sound mappings using potentiometers, rotary encoder, and a six-sided speaker box augment the affordances of the rotary rack dryer and revalues housework as participatory performance, where the public is invited to hang clothes. The lecture presentation will discuss the intersection between the technical, design, feminist-activist aspects and performance capabilities of the instrument, including a demonstration of the Rack.

Ted Moore and Dana Jessen
DJII: Modular Instrument Design for Expressive Improvisation Accompaniment

The DJII presentation (presented by DJII coder Ted Moore) outlines the process of collaborating with bassoonist Dana Jessen to create DJII, a software designed to be used by an improvising performer as live electronics accompaniment. The collaborative process began with open discussions about what a performance with DJII would sound like to an audience and feel like to a performer, and how one might develop an ongoing performance practice with the software. These goals guided the design which uses modular signal processing, matrix routing, software-wide state-saving, and time-based parameter transitions between states. This presentation will include an explication of the technical design of the software, but will focus on the performance-practiced-based design choices.

Nolan Hildebrand
NIMB+: Acoustic Instruments as Controllers for No-Input Mixing Board

This lecture recital will consist of a presentation on the use of external acoustic instruments as controllers for no-input mixing board (NIMB). No-input mixing is a technique where one routes a mixer's inputs back into its own outputs to create feedback loops. When a signal from an acoustic instrument's microphone is routed into a no-input mixer, the performer’s amplitude and gestures can control the behavior of the feedback loops. Manipulating the dials and faders of the no-input mixer results in an exciting interaction that creates unpredictable and noisy sounds. The author has dubbed this live electroacoustic set up the NIMB+. The sound output from the NIMB+ setup then has the ability to bridge the gap between acoustic and electronic instruments in live performance.

Caroline Miller
Designing ‘songwriting’ as an inclusive, student-led course

A presentation on my approach to creating an inclusive, student-led environment in my songwriting class, extrapolatable to many kinds of creative/projects oriented courses. In designing the course I drew upon queer theory and texts by Bell Hooks, including Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom.

Bios

Jocelyn Ho’s artistic practice involves exploring the relationship between sound, bodily gesture, and culture, as well as rethinking the classical music genre through multimedia technologies, inter-disciplinarity, and audience interactivity. She directs inter-disciplinary, collaborative performance projects, including the sold-out music-art-tech concert project Synaesthesia Playground in which she performed works created by fifteen composers, visual artists, technologists, and fashion designers in an interactive, multimedia piano recital. Her latest project Women’s Labor has won the IAWM Ruth Anderson Prize, Hellman Fellowship, Harvestwork residency, and UCLA Hugo Davise Fund for Contemporary Music, and has been featured at Governors Island, New Music Gathering, Design Museum of Chicago, ISEA, NIME, Alliance of Women in Media Arts and Technology Conference, CCRMA at Stanford, and UCLA Art|Sci Gallery. Ho is a Steinway Artist and an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at UCLA.
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With an interdisciplinary career blending classical training in cello and composition, sound/audio data research, and innovative computational arts education, Margaret Anne Schedel transcends the boundaries of disparate fields to produce integrated work at the nexus of computation and the arts. She has a diverse creative output with works spanning the interactive multimedia opera The King Listens, virtual reality experiences, sound art, video game scores, and compositions for a wide variety of classical instruments or custom controllers with interactive audio and video processing. She is internationally recognized for the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media and won the 2019 Pamela Z Innovation Award. Her solo CD, Signal through the Flames, will be released by Parma Records in2020. She holds a certificate in Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and has studied composition with Mara Helmuth, Cort Lippe and McGregor Boyle and Geoffrey Wright and improvisation with George Lewis and Mark Applebaum. Schedel is a joint author of Cambridge University Press's Electronic Music and recently edited an issue of Organised Sound on using electroacoustic terminology to describe pre-electric sound. Her work has been supported by the Presser Foundation, Centro Mexicano para laMúsica y les Artes Sonoras, and Meet the Composer. She has been commissioned by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, Ictus, reACT, Yarn|Wire and the Unheard-of//Ensemble. Her research focuses on gesture in music, the sustainability of technology in art, and sonification of data; she co-authored a paper published in Frontiers of Neuroscience on using familiar music to sonify the gaits of people with Parkinson's Disease. She serves as a regional editor for Organised Sound and is an editor for the open access journal Cogent Arts and Humanities. From 2009-2014 she helped run Devotion, a gallery in New York City focused on the intersection of art, science, new media, and design. As an Associate Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, she taught SUNY’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for Coursera, and formerly served as the director of the Consortium for Digital Arts Culture and Technology. Schedel currently serves as the co-director of computer music and leads the Making Sense of Data Workgroup at the Institute of Advanced Computational Science. She also teaches composition for new media at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. In her spare time, she curates exhibitions focusing on the intersection of art, science, new media, and sound while running www.arts.codes, a platform and artist collective celebrating art with computational underpinnings.
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Composer, performer, and sound artist, Bryan Jacobs’ work focuses on interactions between live performers, mechanical instruments, and computers. His pieces are often theatrical in nature, pitting blabber-mouthed fanciful showoffs against timid reluctants. The sounds are playfully organized and many times mimic patterns found in human dialogue. Hand-build electromechanical instruments controlled by microcontrollers bridge acoustic and electroacoutic sound worlds. These instruments live dual lives as time-based concert works and non-time-based gallery works.

His music has been performed by ensembles such as the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Wet Ink, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, and defunensemble. His music has been featured at many music festivals in Europe and the US. He is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow. He has performed his own compositions for guitar and electronics at the Stone (NYC), Miller Theater (NYC), and the Wulf (LA). In addition to his artistic endeavors, Jacobs is a member of the performer/composer collective, Ensemble Pamplemousse.
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Ted Moore (he / him) is a composer, improviser, and intermedia artist whose work fuses sonic, visual, physical, and acoustic elements, often incorporating technology to create immersive, multidimensional experiences.

Ted’s music has been presented by leading cultural institutions such as MassMoCA, South by Southwest, The Walker Art Center, and National Sawdust and presented by ensembles such as Talea Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, the [Switch~ Ensemble], and the JACK Quartet.

Ranging from concert stages to dirty basements, Ted is a frequent improviser on electronics and has appeared with dozens of instrumental collaborators across Europe and North America. Described as “frankly unsafe” by icareifyoulisten.com, performances on his custom, large-scale software instrument for live sound processing and synthesis, enables an improvisational voice rooted in free jazz, noise music, and musique concrète.
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Hailed as a “bassoon virtuoso” (Chicago Reader), Dana Jessen tirelessly seeks to expand the boundaries of her instrument through original compositions, improvisations, and collaborative work with innovative artists. Over the past decade, she has presented dozens of world premiere performances throughout North America and Europe while maintaining equal footing in the creative music community as an improviser. Her solo performances are almost entirely grounded in electroacoustic composition that highlight her distinct musical language. As a chamber musician, Dana is the co-founder of the contemporary reed quintet Splinter Reeds, and has performed with Alarm Will Sound, Amsterdam’s DOEK Collective, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Tri-Centric Ensemble, among many others. A dedicated educator, Dana teaches at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and has presented masterclasses and workshops to a range of students from across the globe. More at: www.danajessen.com
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Nolan Hildebrand is a composer, improviser, researcher, and noise artist based in Toronto, Canada. Nolan’s musical practices and aesthetics are centered around noise and maximalism, stemming from a background in drumkit, metal music, and noise music. Through noise, Nolan explores conceptual and physical extremities to create intense and engaging music. His compositional output spans classical ensembles, electroacoustic music, and improvised music. Nolan also performs, records, and releases music under his experimental solo noise project, BLACK GALAXIE.

Nolan has had opportunities to work with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, ECM+ Ensemble, XelmYa Ensemble, TORQ Percussion, Jonny Axelsson, Nick Photinos and has attended masterclasses with Donnacha Dennehy, Ana Sokolovic, and Luca Cori. He has presented his music and research at the Anestis Logothetis Centenary Symposium (Athens, Greece), the CeReNeM Composers’ Colloquia (Huddersfield, UK), and the Korean Electro Acoustic Music Society’s Annual Conference (Seoul, Korea).

He is currently pursuing a DMA at the University of Toronto.
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Caroline Louise Miller is a US composer based in Portland, Oregon. Their work broadly explores affect, ecology, labor politics, tactility, and digital materiality, often addressing contemporary issues within dreamlike musical spaces that thread field recordings, shimmering textures, and romantic melodic lines through harsh noise and clattering dissonance. She has received grants, fellowships, and commissions through Sonic Matter OpenLAB, Alarm Will Sound, SPLICE Ensemble & Chamber Music America, Guerilla Opera, Transient Canvas, and Ensemble Adapter. In 2018 she won the ISB/David Walter Composition Competition for Hydra Nightingale, created with improvisor and bassist Kyle Motl. Other projects include whistle-session hijacker, a collection of acousmatic/instrumental hip-hop crossover tracks. C.L.M.'s music appears across the U.S. and internationally. Caroline is Assistant Professor of Music in Sonic Arts at Portland State University, and holds a Ph.D in Music from UC San Diego.
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SPLICE Festival V 2023 Concert 2 Program

Friday November 3, 2023
11:00am EDT
David Friend Recital Hall, Berklee College of Music
921 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02115

Mofan (Amber) Dai : immersed imprint
  Mofan (Amber) Dai, horn

Heather Stebbins : Form 6
  Heather Stebbins, electronics

Michael Flynn : Squint Skyward and Listen—
  Justin Paul Ortez, piano
  Michael Flynn, electronics

Tao Li : Tres Aurorae
  Zhi-Yuan Bruce Luo, clarinet

Eric Chasalow : The Wings That Bear The Night Away
  Julia Glenn, violin

Ciyadh Wells : Detras Nuvo Canción
  Ciyadh Wells, guitar

Dan VanHassel : Aftershock
  Angela Kim, piano

Notes

Mofan (Amber) Dai : immersed imprint
immersed imprint is a piece exploring the fine line between the sounds of horn and voice with elements of improvisation and randomness.
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Heather Stebbins : Form 6
My musical output in the last decade or so consists largely of notated music for instruments and electronics. That process involves a great deal of planning, revisions, and introspection. The music on my recent albums is a complete shift from this process- very little planning went into developing the tracks. Instead, the process was more about following my musical intuition. I began exploring semi and fully modular synthesis in 2021. I approached learning new techniques and gear methodically; about 4 or 5 times a week, after my children went to bed, I would start up my gear and try to make something. I always recorded these sessions, and while most nights the result wasn't anything worth keeping I would occasionally stumble upon a patch that generated musical results that I could work with. As weeks went on the ratio of frustration:usable material shifted and I felt more in control of the gear and how I wanted to use it musically.

Though I'm primarily a composer, my background is as a performer, and working with synthesis in this way has been like finding this liminal space between composition and performance that I really connect with. I also thrive in the immediacy of the sonic experience: unlike with notated music, being able to hear and react to my output in real time helps drive my process forward. I also palpably feel the impermanence of working with synthesis; the patch I generate will likely not be able to be recreated in the exact way, so I have to experience it deeply in the moment. I've always felt like when I compose, I am discovering rather than creating. This sentiment is even stronger when I am working with my synthesizers.
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Michael Flynn : Squint Skyward and Listen—
Squint Skyward and Listen— is a work for solo piano and electronics, written for—and dedicated to—my good friend Justin Ortez. The piece draws its harmonic material from two songs: “Emily” by Joanna Newsom and “A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell. Justin is arguably the biggest fan in the world of both of these artists—I doubt he would dispute this—so it felt fitting to draw from their music when writing a piece for him.

Newsom’s lyrics in “Emily” inspired the structure of the work, with each section of the score being marked with a different lyrical excerpt. Imagery of staring up at the sky—either a bright blue expanse with a blazing sun or a vast night sky full of stars—appears throughout the song, and served as inspiration for the rising musical gestures that occur throughout Squint Skyward. At multiple points in the piece, the performer strums chords on the strings inside the piano, meant to evoke the chords Joni Mitchell strums on a mountain dulcimer at the beginning of “A Case of You.”

Electronically, the sound world of the piece is quite similar to much of my recent electronic work, featuring glittering bells, sparkling synths, and the occasional thumping bass line. By marrying my personal electronic sensibility to piano writing evocative of Justin’s favorite artists, Squint Skyward and Listen— is a musical tribute to one of the most significant friendships of my life.
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Tao Li : Tres Aurorae
This piece draws inspiration from the sculpture Bust by Nevine Mahmoud. The surrounding auroras created by light diffused through the many complex surfaces of Bust immediately drew my attention and lead to the title of this piece Tres Aurorae. The human subject of the work and the abstract light effects create a strong contrast of real and surreal. These abstract auroras, represented by electronic textures “surrounding” the acoustic clarinet, symbolize the feminine power and its inclusivity and strength. In this way, Tres Aurorae adopts this concept of contrast between live acoustic sounds from solo clarinet and processed electronic sounds also derived from clarinet.
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Eric Chasalow : The Wings That Bear The Night Away
The Wings That Bear the Night Away is the latest in my long series of works for instrument and fixed media. Each piece seeks some new way of expanding upon the live instrument(s) to modulate its sound and the sense of space. At times, the media adds metamusical meaning by layering modulated text. This latest piece, for violin and fixed media, uses string quartet recordings, which have been processed using granular synthesis, to explore the boundaries between our perception of rearticulated and jittery string harmonies and those that we perceive as modulated and extended. Our sense of the changing pace of the harmonic rhythm is part of what drives the narrative of the piece.
- Eric Chasalow
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Ciyadh Wells : Detras Nuvo Canción
Drawing on the songs from the Nueva Canción movement from the 1950s and 1960s, Detras Nuvo Canción takes inspiration from the movement’s most famous activists to create a modern protest music using live electronics and video projections.
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Dan VanHassel : Aftershock
Aftershock was commissioned by pianist Angela Kim as part of her multimedia program “Chaos Magick” and was premiered in January 2020. The video was created by Michael Boswell and Peter John Kearney. The music was inspired in part from re-reading Charles Rosen’s "The Classical Style," one of my all-time favorite books about music. This piece is an attempt to imagine a version of sonata form based on timbre rather than pitch. The electronics are a fixed track made up of short samples taken from various recordings ranging from Lachenmann to Rage Against the Machine, along with piano samples that extend the piano with fast rhythmic loops. Ideally the electronics and piano should merge together into one hybrid-organism with the pianist at the center, in control of everything.
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Bios

Mofan (Amber) Dai (b. 2000) is a composer, horn player and recorder enthusiast based in Boston, Massachusetts. They were exposed to a wide variety of musical genres throughout their career, with contemporary wind ensemble music being the most profound influence to their style. After earning their degree in music composition from St. Olaf College, they continued by pursuing masters degree in composition at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. Throughout the years, Amber worked with teachers such as Dr. Timothy Mahr, Mary Ellen Childs, Dr. Eun Young Lee and Mischa Salkind-Pearl. As a composer performer, Amber’s writing balances practicality while pushing boundaries of conventional techniques throughout the creative process of each piece, and each of these processes influences how they perform as well. They view art holistically and take inspiration from visuals of nature, celestial bodies and landscapes. By painting scenes with music, they discuss difficult topics that resonate with others, but also uplift positive emotions that build bonds and communities.
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Heather Stebbins is a composer, technologist, synthesist, and educator based in Washington, DC, where she is Assistant Professor of Electronic and Computer Music at George Washington University. She works with sounds created by instruments, found objects, nature, and voltage to generate musical experiences ranging from notated works for chamber ensembles to improvised performances on modular synthesizers. Really wonderful people and ensembles have performed her music in a lot of neat places, and she is grateful for that. Her recent album, At the End of the Sky (Superpang, 2023), is available on Bandcamp and streaming platforms. Other recordings are available on New Focus Recordings, Not Art Records, SEAMUS, and Coviello labels.
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Michael Flynn is a composer of acoustic and electronic music whose works present familiar musical ideas in inventive sonic and structural contexts. To this end, his music juxtaposes timbral exploration and metric complexity with pop-music-inflected harmony and beat-driven groove. Drawn towards bright, sparkling timbres, Michael strives to create works that feature vividly colored, dreamlike sound worlds. Michael’s music has been featured at events such as the SPLICE Institute and Festival, the CHIME Festival, SICPP, NSEME, the Northwestern University New Music Conference, Electronic Music Midwest, NYCEMF, and the SEAMUS National Conference. He has written for performers and ensembles including the Chicago Composer's Orchestra, Sonic Hedgehog, the Found Sound New Music Ensemble, the Vital Organ Project, the PRISM Saxophone Quartet, HINGE, and SpacePants, among others. Michael is a recent graduate of the DMA program in composition at the University of Georgia, where he studied under Dr. Peter Van Zandt Lane.
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Justin Paul Ortez is a pianist, composer, and songwriter based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, whose work across disciplines centers emotional intimacy, sonic experimentation, and the integration of poetics and language. Most frequently a performer of contemporary music, he has given dozens of premieres and performances of solo and chamber music in the United States and Canada. He has been praised for thoughtful and detailed performances of avant grade repertoire, his careful handling of dynamic extremes, and his sense of poise and comfort when performing on the inside of the piano. He has conducted the bulk of his studies at Western Michigan University, where he obtained both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in performance; his piano studies were completed under Lori Sims, alongside composition studies with Dr. Lisa Renée Coons. He has also held fellowships at a number of summer festivals such as SICPP at the New England Conservatory, the Cortona Sessions for New Music, soundSCAPE Composition & Performance Exchange in Italy, SPLICE Institute, and the Toronto Creative Music Labs.
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Award winning composer Tao Li was born and raised in Beijing, China and currently based in Eugene, Oregon working on her second Doctoral degree in Intermedia Music Technology at the University of Oregon. The philosophy, literature, and spirituality of the ancient East play a formative role in the aesthetic of Tao’s work. Her music consists of vivid soundscapes, colorful timbres, and interdisciplinary elements that often lead her audiences on a multi-dimensional journey full of imagination. As an Asian female musician, Tao is devoted to promoting gender equity and cultural diversity through her music as well as through collaboration with other artists. Tao’s music has been performed at concerts and music festivals throughout the world including China, Japan, Korea, Australia, Ireland, Ukraine, Brazil, and the U.S.A. Her primary interests include acoustic and electroacoustic composition, performance practices, and analysis of compositional techniques, aesthetics, and intercultural dialogues. For more information, please go to taolimusic.com.
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Born and raised in Taiwan, 30-year-old clarinetist, Zhi-Yuan is an educator, soloist, and orchestral musician. Mr. Luo is a multiple award-winning clarinetist. He was the winner of the 2014 Tunghai University Concerto Competition, the 2017 Soochow University Concerto Competition, and runner-up of the 6th Magic Clarinet Quartet Competition in Taiwan, where world renowned French Clarinetist Michel Arrignon spotted and hand-picked Zhi-Yuan to play as a soloist at the solo recital. In 2020, he won the 1st prize of the 1st World Clarinet E-Competition in Italy and was awarded the 12th Stars of Tiding in Taiwan. In 2021, Mr. Luo was not only awarded Honorable Mention in the Peter Tannenwald Competition organized by the Philharmonic Society of Arlington, but also won the 4th place in the Thailand International Clarinet Competition and the 3rd place in the 15th LISMA International Music Competition. As a soloist, he has performed with the Tunghai University Wind Ensemble, the Soochow University Symphony Orchestra, and the Conroe Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Luo has performed as a Guest Clarinet with the National Taiwan Orchestra, Kaohsiung Symphony Orchestra, Evergreen Symphony Orchestra, Eugene Symphony Orchestra, Eugene Opera, Eugene Concert Choir, Rogue Valley Symphony and Oregon Mozart Players among others. Mr. Luo is a Nymph Performing Artist exclusively playing Nymph products. For more information about Zhi-Yuan Luo, please visit his Instagram (@bruce_ channel).
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Eric Chasalow is a composer, sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, teacher, and advisor to non-profits. An album of ten new genre-bending songs, Ghosts of Our Former Selves was released in the fall of 2020. Current projects incorporate oral histories and environmental sound to comment on a number of global themes, including the cultural effects of climate change and species extinction.

He is Irving G. Fine Professor of Music at Brandeis University, and Director of BEAMS, the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio. A product of the famed Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, he holds the D.M.A. from Columbia University where his principal teacher was Mario Davidovsky and where he studied flute with Harvey Sollberger. Among his honors are awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Koussevitzky Music Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Fromm Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Eric Chasalow collection is in the Library of Congress.
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Boston native Julia Glenn has been hailed as "remarkable," "gripping," and "a brilliant soloist" by the New York Times and performs internationally on modern and baroque violins. She recently joined the Lydian Quartet after teaching for three years at the Tianjin Juilliard School, where she served as violin faculty and was a member of the Tianjin Juilliard Ensemble.

Ms. Glenn has appeared on stages including Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall, Sanders Theatre, Jordan Hall, the Beijing Recital Hall, Beijing's National Centre for the Performing Arts, and Shanghai Concert Hall. She has recently performed with the Shanghai Camerata, New York New Music Ensemble, ACRONYM, Cantata Profana, members of the Juilliard String Quartet, and Soloists of New England. In January of 2016 she gave the world premiere of Milton Babbitt’s violin concerto to critical acclaim; her article on the work was published in 2022 in Contemporary Music Review.
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Dr. Ciyadh Wells is a multi-talented musician who not only considers herself an artist, but also an activist and scholar. With a passion for promoting diversity and inclusivity in the arts, she firmly believes that access to such experiences is crucial for a healthy society.

Ciyadh strives to leverage the power of music, both classic and contemporary, to ignite transformative change and foster a sense of community. In addition to her many talents, Ciyadh is also an avid language learning enthusiast, always seeking to expand her linguistic horizons.
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The music of composer and multi-instrumentalist Dan VanHassel has been described as “energizing” (Wall Street Journal) and “an imaginative and rewarding soundscape” (SF Classical Voice). His compositions have been presented at top national and international contemporary music festivals, including the MATA Festival, Gaudeamus Music Week, International Computer Music Conference, Bowling Green New Music Festival, Shanghai Conservatory Electronic Music Week, and the Bang on a Can Summer Festival. And by ensembles such as the Talea Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Verdant Vibes, and Transient Canvas. His work has received grants from Chamber Music America, the Barlow Endowment, the Boston Foundation, and New Music USA. Dan is the artistic director and electric guitarist of Hinge, and was a founding member of San Francisco’s Wild Rumpus (now Ninth Planet). Dan has degrees from UC Berkeley, New England Conservatory, and Carnegie Mellon University and is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
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Praised by international press as “a pianist who meets the highest standard of technique,” Angela Kim is a pianist who shows her versatility through colorful imagination, and intense musical expression. As a sought-after pedagogue, Ms. Kim was inducted into the Steinway & Sons Teacher Hall of Fame in Spring 2023. Ms. Kim has performed throughout the United States, South America, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Korea. Earning academic honors, Ms. Kim completed Bachelor, Masters, and Graduate Diploma at the New England Conservatory of Music. She has finished her Doctorate of Piano Performance, and Literature, at the Eastman School of Music. Upon graduation, she held a teaching position at New England Conservatory of Music as a Professor of Theory. Currently Ms. Kim is an Associate Professor of Piano, and Director of Keyboard Area at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. In 2022-2023, Ms. Kim has served as a Visiting Professor of Piano at the Eastman School of Music.
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SPLICE Festival V 2023 Concert 1 Program

Thursday November 2, 2023
7:00pm EDT
David Friend Recital Hall, Berklee College of Music
921 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02115

Evan Williams : The Last Trumpet
  Sam Wells, trumpet

Diego Peralta-Gonzales : little flower (harawi)
  Diego Peralta-Gonzales, live electronics

Molly Monahan : Bloom
  Waveform Collective, bass, marimba, crotales, and cymbals

Gabriele Vanoni : Job’s Journey
  Sam Wells, trumpet

José Martinez : Do I Regret?
  Noa Even, saxophone

NpHz : /Equations of Coltrane
  SYO (Scott Oshiro), flute
  OCH (Omar Costa Hamido), saxophone

Notes

Evan Williams: The Last Trumpet
Between 2013 and 2018, several witnesses around the world reported hearing the sound of discordant “trumpets” blaring in the sky. There are video recordings of this from rural villages in Europe to major cities in North America. As of this date, there is no widely accepted explanation for the phenomenon.

Many were quick to draw the obvious connection to Christian apocalyptic writings. Several instances of the end of the world heralded by the sound of the trumpet are found in the Bible, other religious texts, and music.

The Last Trumpet for solo trumpet and interactive electronics is inspired by this unexplained phenomenon. It employs musical references to apocalyptic trumpet calls from works such as Verdi’s Requiem, Britten’s War Requiem, and Handel’s Messiah.

The Last Trumpet was commissioned by a consortium of trumpet players led by Adam Gaines, Isaac Mayhew, and Sam Wells.
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Diego Peralta-Gonzales : little flower (harawi)
little flower is about acceptance and melancholy. When there is nothing else to do but to fall into the void. And then you realize you feel in peace, like you have not felt in a long time. The piece starts with tenuos and ambient sounds that evolve throughout the piece into a dense wall of noise. This process is contrasted by other elements such as melodic samples - inspired by the traditional Peruvian folk genre called "Harawi" - and piano chords that guide the piece to its inevitable end.
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Molly Monahan: Bloom
Bloom is meant to capture the mysterious beauty of an algal bloom, swirling colors, and textures that provoke a mixture of awe and disgust. From a distance, they look almost like a nebula, or a palette of watercolor paints spilled together. Up close, however, one notices the clumps of algae, seaweed, sediment, and creatures, alive and dead.

As the blooms flow between dense ecosystems of algae and clear waters, “Bloom” operates on patterns that arise, disappear, and morph unmetered and flowing freely. The clear chords of the marimba and frequent dissonances of the bass mimic the visceral, curious beauty of an algal bloom.
-Molly Monahan, 2022
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Gabriele Vanoni: Job’s Journey
I always found the “Book of Job” one of the most fascinating books of the Bible, because more than others, does resonate with our modern world. The story of a honest man, tested by the Devil through so many dramatic trials, including the loss of all his possessions and the death of his sons, brings forth one of the big questions we all have, whatever is our background: why does evil exist, and why is it so often that the ones to suffer are good people? My piece is a fairly short piece for trumpet and live electronics that explores the journey of a man that, like us, struggle with the challenges life puts ahead of him, and feels the loneliness, the anger, but also the hope and the determination that often come in those trying circumstances. This is the first of a series of multimedia pieces on the Book of Job, aimed at exploring more sides of this fascinating story.
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José Martinez: Do I Regret?
This piece pursues the impossibility of undoing what is already done, of traveling back in time and revisiting that moment that changed the path. The score involves improvisation and written music and achieves this utopia thanks to the help of technology. The performer is asked to create on the spot and these spontaneous creations are recorded, and later used to accompany themselves. Thus, every performance has a renewed sense and reflects the performer’s emotion at that specific moment. At the very end of the piece, the performer revisits these creations and has the power to modify, stretch, and mix their final creation, fulfilling the utopia of changing the past.
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NpHz: /Equations of Coltrane
Program: Fluidity (2023) Composed by SYO (Scott Oshiro) & OCH (Omar Costa Hamido)

/Equations of Coltrane (2023) Composed by SYO (Scott Oshiro) & OCH (Omar Costa Hamido)

Performers: SYO (Scott Oshiro) - Flute & Electronics OCH (Omar Costa Hamido) - Saxophone & Electronics

Quantum Systems Featured: Lineage - Real time quantum improvisation systems, similar to that of George Lewis’ Voyager. This will be performed in a trio setting with Scott Oshiro on Flute and OCH on Saxophone. Quantum Synthesizer - a quantum computing based synthesizer. The QAC Toolkit - live coding quantum circuits with the new package for Max/MSP.
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Bios

Drawing from inspirations as diverse as Medieval chant to contemporary pop, the music of composer and conductor Evan Williams (b. 1988) explores the thin lines between beauty and disquieting, joy and sorrow, and simple and complex, while often tackling important social and political issues. Originally from the Chicagoland area, Williams currently resides in Boston, MA, where he is Assistant Professor of Composition at the Berklee College of Music. Williams’ catalogue contains a broad range of work, from vocal and operatic offerings to instrumental works, along with electronic music. He has been commissioned by ensembles including the Cincinnati and Toledo Symphony Orchestras, with further performances by members of the Detroit, Seattle, and National Symphonies.

Williams holds degrees from the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, Bowling Green State University, and Lawrence University.
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Diego Peralta-Gonzales (b.2000) is a Peruvian composer and pianist. Born in Lima, he began his piano studies at the age of 12 at the Universidad Católica del Perú. At the age of 18 he began his composition studies at the National Conservatory of Music of Peru, in which he would study with Alvaro Zuniga and Antonio Gervasoni. Since 2021 he is studying composition at The Boston Conservatory at Berklee, receiving classes from Timothy McCormack, Victoria Cheah and Mischa Salkind-Pearl. He has participated in important new music festivals in the United States such as the Divergent Studio at Longy School of Music and the Summer Institute of Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP). His collaborations include works for Splinter Reeds, pianist Yundi Xu and the Divergent Quartet. In addition, Diego has been part of different organizations that promote new Peruvian contemporary classical music such as “Comunidad Peruana de Musica Nueva” (CPMN).
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Molly Monahan is a San Francisco-based composer. Her acoustic, electronic, and multi-media works have earned her numerous accolades and performances at renowned venues and festivals worldwide. She has been recognized with awards and recognitions such as the Ti;ME competition, NextNotes competition, YoungArts, the Christopher Newport University Young Composer's competition, and the Webster University Young Composer's competition. Molly has also participated in various music festivals and residencies, including the Hot Air Festival in San Francisco and the Estalagem da Ponta do Sol Residency for Contemporary Music and Electronics in Madeira, Portugal. Her work has been featured in collaborations with the ClimateMusic Project and the Latvian National Ballet.
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The Waveform Collective strives to create and expand the library of music for percussion and double bass. This initiative serves to nurture and grow an accessible community centered around interdisciplinary collaborations with artists of diverse backgrounds and identities.

The Waveform Collective is comprised of Maxwell Winningham; double bass, and Quincy Doenges; percussion.
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Gabriele Vanoni is an Italian composer, currently living in the Boston area. Born in Milan, he started his musical studies at the Conservatory of Milan, and continued his education with a Ph.D. in Music Composition at Harvard University, under the guidance of Julian Anderson, Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku, as well as a two-year program at Ircam (Cursus 1-2). His music has been performed in several prestigious venues and festivals, such as Carnegie Hall (Weill Hall), Biennale di Venezia, ManiFeste, Moscow Conservatory, Royaumont Voix Nouvelles, June in Buffalo, IRCAM, BIT Teatergarasjen in Bergen, Festival Meridien in Bucharest and Accademia Chigiana di Siena, among many others. His music was performed by groups and solisists like Ensemble Intercontemporain, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Talea Ensemble, Mario Caroli, Diotima Quartet, Les Cris de Paris, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and many more. He is currently Assistant Chair of the Composition Department at Berklee College of Music. Recent and upcoming commissions include a multimedia opera, Ellis, written for Guerilla Opera, a new piece for trombonist Barrie Webb and a recording project with flutist Orlando Cela. He lives with his wife and children in Stoneham.
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José Martinez
José’s music incorporates a wide range of influences from Colombian folk tunes to contemporary composition techniques while borrowing from Latin music, heavy metal, and audio sampling techniques. His works range from solo pieces with electronics to orchestral works, passing through chamber ensembles, electroacoustic pieces, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Among others, his music has been performed by groups such as Alarm Will Sound, Wild Up, and Grammy award-winning quartet Third Coast Percussion. An alumnus of percussion and composition at the National University of Colombia, he studied composition at the University of Missouri and UT Austin. José was a visiting professor at East Carolina University and the New College of Florida. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Music at Colby College.

His music has also been presented by Spanish ensemble Taller Sonoro, LA-based Piano duo Hockett Duo, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s from New York City, Grupo de Cámara de Bogotá, and Austin-based percussion ensemble Line Upon Line, among others. Other collaborators also include Sarasota Contemporary Dance, Teatro del Valle (Colombia), and visual artist Yulia Lanina. He has participated in institutes and festivals such as the Banff Ensemble Evolution program, DeGaetano, Splice, SEAMUS, Missouri International Composer Festival, Line Upon Line Winter Composer Festival, ClarinetFest, and VIPA.

José is a recipient of the 2008 National Composition Prize for Young Composers, the 2011 “Ciudad de Bogotá” Composition Award, and the 2013 National Cultural Prize. In the US, he received the 2013 Sinquefield Composition Prize and the 2019 Rain Water Grant for Innovation.
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Based in Philadelphia, Noa Even is a versatile saxophonist dedicated to the creation of new music through close collaboration with composers, improvisation, and most recently, composition. Ongoing projects include atomic, a multimedia solo program exploring themes of human connection; an interview series called Talking Free Music; her duos, Ogni Suono and Patchwork; and The Saxophone Repository, a list of resources and music for saxophonists that focuses on living, historically excluded composers, musicians, and authors. Noa recently joined New Thread Quartet in New York City. In 2017, she co-founded Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project (CUSP), a non-profit organization that champions new and experimental music. Noa is Lecturer and Head of Woodwinds at Rowan University in New Jersey, a Conn-Selmer Artist-Clinician, a Vandoren Artist, and Treasurer of the North American Saxophone Alliance. You can follow her on Instagram @noaeven.music. For more information, visit www.noaevenmusic.com.
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Scott Oshiro
Scott is a Bay Area-based flautist and music technology researcher. As an African and Okinawan American, Scott’s creative and academic work incorporates influences from his heritage and combines them with Jazz, Hip Hop, and Electronic music. He is a 5th year Ph.D. Candidate at the Center for Computer Research in Music & Acoustics at Stanford University, where he researches the intersection between quantum computing, music, and culture. Scott is an Asian Improv aRts fellow, developing quantum computer music improvisation systems for an album featuring BIPOC artists from California, showcasing the connection between music and science.

https://linktr.ee/scottoshiro
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Omar Costa Hamido
OCH is a performer, composer, and technologist, working primarily in multimedia and improvisation. His current research is on quantum computing and music composition, telematics, and multimedia. He is passionate about emerging technology, cinema, teaching, and performing new works. He earned his PhD in Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology at University of California, Irvine with his research project Adventures in Quantumland (quantumland.art). He also earned his MA in Music Theory and Composition at ESMAE-IPP Portugal with his research on the relations between music and painting. In recent years, his work has been recognized with grants and awards from MSCA, Fulbright, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Medici, Beall Center for Art+Technology, and IBM. Currently, he is a Marie-Curie Fellow at CEIS20, University of Coimbra. https://omarcostahamido.com/
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Sam Wells is a musician and video artist based in Philadelphia.

Sam has performed throughout North America and Europe, as well as in China. He is a recipient of a 2016 Jerome Fund for New Music award, and his work, stringstrung, is the winner of the 2016 Miami International Guitar Festival Composition Competition. He has performed electroacoustic works for trumpet and presented his own music at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, Chosen Vale International Trumpet Seminar, Electronic Music Midwest, Electroacoustic Barn Dance, NYCEMF, N_SEME, and SEAMUS festivals. Sam and his music have also been featured by the Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance (KcEMA) and Fulcrum Point Discoveries. He has also been a guest artist/composer at universities throughout North America.

Sam is a member of SPLICE Ensemble. Sam has performed with Contemporaneous, Metropolis Ensemble, TILT Brass, the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, and the Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra. Sam has recorded on the SEAMUS and Ravello Recordings labels.

Sam holds degrees in both performance and composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, graduate degrees in Trumpet Performance and Computer Music Composition at Indiana University, and a doctoral degree at the California Institute of the Arts. He is an Assistant Professor of Music Technology at Temple University.
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SPLICE Festival V 2023 Presentation

Thursday November 2, 2023
1:00pm EDT
Room 1A, Berklee College of Music
1140 Boylston St,. First Floor Boston, MA 02115

Joo Won Park - The Music of Joo Won Park

Bio

Joo Won Park (joowonpark.net) makes music with electronics, toys, and other sources that he can record or synthesize. He is the recipient of Knight Arts Challenge Detroit (2019) and the Kresge Arts Fellowship (2020). His music and writings are available on ICMC DVD, Spectrum Press, MIT Press, PARMA, Visceral Media, MCSD, SEAMUS, and No Remixes labels. He currently teaches Music Technology at Wayne State University.