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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