SPLICE Festival VI 2025 Concert 2 Program
Friday January 24, 2025
10:30am EDT
Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University
Liann J. Kang : Images
Jack Thorpe, sax
Isaac Smith : Extension
Robin Meiksins, flute
Zouning Liao : His Dreams, i. Iron Horses
Alexey Logunov, piano
Christopher Cresswell : Sometimes I Get a Feeling
RE:Duo, viola + sax
Lisa Coons : Chimera’s Garden
Robin Meiksins, flute
Notes
Caroline Flynn : TBD
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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