SPLICE Festival VII 2026 Concert 5 Program
featuring
SPLICE Ensemble
A concert of world premieres by SPLICE Ensemble!
Saturday March 7, 2026
7:00pm EDT
Concert Hall, Colby College
Produced by Colby College Department of Music with the Department of Performance, Theater, and Dance, Colby Arts Office
All times are Eastern Time and various events will be streamed live.
Andrew Conklin : Vanishing Point
Nick Hwang : Prospect Certainty
Scott L. Miller : The Chronicles of Kristi’s Fantastic ICE Machine
Sepehr Pirasteh : IN FLUX I HOLD ON TO YOU
Yingting Liu : P.E.R.F.E.C.T. O.R.D.E.R. O.N.L.Y.
I. F.r.a.c.t.u.r.e.
II. D.i.s.c.i.p.l.i.n.e.
III. C.o.l.l.a.p.s.e.
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Notes
Andrew Conklin : Vanishing Point
Writing in the New York Times on Jan. 18, 2026, columnist M. Gessen attempted to take stock of the country a year into the second Trump administration:
“We have become a country where people are disappeared by a paramilitary force that hunts them down in their apartments, on city streets and country roads, and even in the courts. Less than a year ago, videos of ICE arrests would go viral and social media posts about ICE sightings would send chills down our spines. Now even the most high-profile detentions have faded from view: Who has been released? Who has been deported? Who is still missing?”
This quote captures so accurately for me how these individual acts of federal violence coalesce into a slow but unmistakable erosion of political norms, and how impossible it can feel to be adequately attuned to and vigilant against these gradual shifts while attending to the inevitabilities of our everyday lives.
This piece is an expression of my experience living in the United States in 2025. The slowly evolving drone in the electronics part feels to me like an oncoming tidal wave, to which the musicians respond (or don’t respond) by playing different styles of music. They begin with classical music of childlike innocence before proceeding to a more combative form of progressive jazz/fusion, eventually landing in an open soundscape that allows them to engage most directly with the inexorable electronics.
Jessica Ackerley : Svell
Svell, the Old Norse word for “ice,” draws its sound world from field recordings I made last summer in Svalbard, captured over the course of a two-week residency aboard a tall ship. These Arctic sounds form the core of the piece’s atmosphere and texture, drawing on dripping water at the edge of the pack ice at 80 degrees north, melting ice floating in the sea, calving glaciers, and freshwater streams. The stark contrast of the natural landscape, with dark fjords surrounding expanses of white snow and ice, informs the music’s interaction between dynamic spaces of loud and quiet. This composition is part of a larger body of work I have been developing over the past two years, inspired by my Arctic residency and intended to offer audiences a glimpse into this remote part of the planet.
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Nick Hwang : Prospect Certainty
PROSPECT CERTAINTY is an interactive work for the SPLICE Ensemble (and an optional dancer) with elements of gameful performance. While this work was written specifically for the SPLICE Ensemble, I created the framework to expand for ensembles of varying sizes.
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Scott L. Miller : The Chronicles of Kristi’s Fantastic ICE Machine
I am working some things out with this piece. Musically, I’ve been concerned with one aspect of what Monty Adkins labels a “post-acousmatic practice” for a few years now—merging the aesthetic and production values of the acousmatic tradition with the agency and musical coherence of certain improvised music traditions. Several challenges present themselves repeatedly. Critical are performer experience and preparation with different improvisational styles; is there overlap with my own experiences or expectations? What do the performers uniquely bring to the final musical outcome? This is a fundamentally collaborative endeavor, but how do I balance the responsibilities and effectively communicate my desires? This last question leads to the challenge of notation. In the absence of an aural performance practice guiding improvisational choices, which traditions should I go to and which ones lend themselves to being easily integrated into my chosen graphic approach? So far I have several compositions that serve as possible answers, but there is a long way to go yet.
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Sepehr Pirasteh : IN FLUX I HOLD ON TO YOU
Like distorted images, distorted memories, wrapped tape, this piece comes from my own journey as an immigrant and artist in exile. It’s about how moving between places and being held by borders can warp your sense of the past. I wanted to capture that feeling of memories stretching and pulling like an old tape caught in a machine, where the melodies and images of home feel familiar, yet also completely different. The music takes that messy feeling of a life in flux and turns it into a landscape where everything you remember is slightly out of focus and always changing.
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Yingting Liu : P.E.R.F.E.C.T. O.R.D.E.R. O.N.L.Y.
Perfect. Order. Only. is a sonic fable about how women learn to move, breathe, speak, and fit themselves into the shapes that society draws for them. In many East Asian contexts today, perfection often wears the mask of order. It appears polite and graceful on the surface, yet underneath it quietly molds the body and softens the voice. Women are encouraged to be gentle and quiet, slim and pale, and to smile in precisely the right way, until they become bodies that are watched, consumed, managed, and adjusted.
This work asks political questions about sound.
Whose voice is allowed to be heard?
Who is told to speak softly?
Who is shaped into a standard?
Whose breathing becomes almost invisible?
The music weaves together many types of training sounds. It carries traces of the collective singing and broadcast recitation that followed the Cultural Revolution, the rhythmic pulse of 1980s aerobics culture, the energetic tone of Korean fitness media, and the slightly glitchy texture found in today’s viral electronic aesthetics. There are also subtle tones and sound images that echo the listening traditions of India and Japan, like faint memories emerging through the surface of the music. These are not direct quotations but sonic images, small cultural ghosts that reveal how sound and the body have been shaped across different times and Regions.
These seemingly unrelated sounds come together naturally in my music. This continues the listening environment I grew up with, which felt like a cultural melting pot. I did not hear a single, linear cultural sound while growing up. Instead, I heard a mixture of media, histories, and aesthetics. Propaganda voices, workout rhythms, television sound cues, noisy human chatter, popular music, and fragments of online sound culture appeared together in daily life. For me, this mixture is not a deliberate collage but a natural way of hearing the world. It has shaped the way I understand rhythm, energy, and structure.
Although the sounds come from different sources, the messages they carry are strikingly similar. Stay consistent. Follow the rules. Do not cross the line.
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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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Andrew Conklin (b. 1984) is Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at University of the Pacific, where he directs the Composition program. Andrew's music has garnered recognition from diverse voices spanning the worlds of popular and classical music, and he has appeared as a composer and performer throughout the United States and Europe. His music has received support from organizations including the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Millay Arts. His albums are released on New Focus Recordings and Bot Cave Records. A versatile musical collaborator, Conklin earned a Grammy nomination for Best Bluegrass Recording for his contributions to The Hazel and Alice Sessions (Spruce and Maple Music). His guitar and bass playing can be heard on record labels such as Six Degrees, Spruce and Maple, Plug Research, City Slang, BAG Productions or Arhoolie, and he has toured extensively in the United States and Europe as a guitarist and bassist with indie rock bands, bluegrass groups and improvising combos.
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Guitarist, composer and visual artist, Jessica Ackerley expands the lines between avant-garde jazz, contemporary classical, and ambient music, Ackerley has distinguished their musical voice across 25 releases as a bandleader with acclaim from publications like Pitchfork, BBC Radio, Wire Magazine, GRAMMY News, WholeNote, Musicworks and BandCamp, among others, making multiple critics’ year end lists.
Ackerley has toured extensively throughout North America and Europe, performing at noteworthy venues like The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Met Breuer, Vortex (U.K.), Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend (Mass MoCA), The Stone, Roulette Intermedium, Earshot Jazz Festival, Something Else! Festival, Ironworks Fest and Coastal Jazz Festival. Ackerley has composed music for Unheard-Of Ensemble, HYPERCUBE, and Clara Kim.
They have been commissioned by Bang on a Can, NYSFA, Continuum (Toronto), Adult Swim, Mutual Mentorship, and New Music USA; awarded funding from Canada Council for the Arts and Foundation for Contemporary Arts; nominated for the prestigious Academy of Arts and Letters Music Composition Award; and attended residencies at Banff Center for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Arctic Circle Residency.
Nick Hwang is a composer, sound artist, and software/game developer who holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition, Experimental Music, and Digital Media from Louisiana State University. His creative works- ranging from music compositions and interactive installations to electronic music and networked performances- have been showcased globally, including at the Edinburgh Fringe, Federal Hall in New York, Ars Electronica Festival, International Society for Electronic Art, and the International Computer Music Conference. His music has been described as “evocative” and “emotional yet cerebral.” Nick’s research focuses on computer music, networked performance, instrument creation, and audience engagement in interactive art. Nick co-founded several ventures, including Lyrai, which utilizes AI to create digital acoustic twins of architectural spaces, and Collab-Hub.io, a platform that connects creative software across the Internet. His practice encompasses interactivity, acoustic and electroacoustic composition, sound design, audio programming, networked music performance, game design, and development. Nick has led workshops on his software through organizations such as Harvestworks, Music Hackspace, WebAudioConference, and NowNetArts. For more information, visit NickHwang.com.
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Scott L. Miller
I have dabbled with electroacoustic music composition for 4 decades. My music is known by some, ignored by many, revered by a few. After studying with an eclectic mix of recovering post-serialist composers, some of them the right mentor at the right time (looking at you, Lloyd Ultan), I was rewarded with a tenure track position at St. Cloud State University in 1993. This tenure will conclude in 2027, after which the future is open. I am Past-President of SEAMUS and currently serve as Director of SEAMUS Records, a role I regard as important to our community and discipline and that I hope to continue in for years to come. www.scottlmiller.net
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Sepehr Pirasteh is a composer, conductor, and interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Shiraz, Iran. His compositions draw on Persian classical and folk traditions, as well as contemporary classical music vocabularies, to express his deep concerns about the political and social realities of the world. Through his art, Sepehr reflects on his personal journey as an immigrant and his commitment to activism. He has been commissioned and performed by American Composers Orchestra, Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Ensemble MISE-EN, Network for New Music, Arcana New Music Ensemble, ENA Chamber Opera Company, Pacific Chamber Orchestra, Argus String Quartet, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, PushBack Ensemble, and Unheard-of Ensemble. Sepehr has also received fellowships from Harvard University's Fromm Foundation (Composers Conference) and the Presser Foundation.
Sepehr pursued his Ph.D. in Music Composition at Temple University. His research interests focus on political music in Iran and the Iranian diaspora, the dynamics of hegemony in performance arts, the intersection of art and activism, and the role of music under totalitarian regimes.
Sepehr is based in Philadelphia and plays Persian Kamancheh and Tanbour. He is the co-founder and artistic director of the Shiraz Ensemble, a contemporary Iranian music ensemble.
www.sepehrpirasteh.com
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Yingting Liu is a composer whose work explores sound as a cultural melting pot, weaving together Chinese traditional culture, contemporary composition, electronics, popular culture fragments, and multimedia practices. Her music often integrates acoustic instruments, fixed media, and visual elements to create narrative-driven sonic experiences, in which sound functions not only as music but as storytelling, memory, and embodied gesture. Drawing inspiration from Taoism, folk traditions, and everyday sonic environments, Liu is particularly interested in the relationships between sound, body, space, and social structures, and in reimagining concert formats as immersive, installation-based experiences.
Liu earned her bachelor’s degree from the China Conservatory of Music and her master’s degree from the Central Conservatory of Music. She is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in Composition at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
Her works have been recognized by the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, the 2026 MMTA Composer Commission, the 2026 Hear & Now Composition Competition at Westminster University, the International Digital Music Innovation Competition (IDMIC), the HANGZHOU 2025 Electroacoustic Music Composition Competition, the RIVERS AWARDS, the SUN RIVER PRIZE (ISCM), “New Music Generation,” “Ise-Shima,” and the Luciano Berio International Composition Competition.
She has participated in major international festivals and workshops including the Mizzou International Composers Festival, RED NOTE New Music Festival, Albany Symphony Composer Workshop, Taproot New Music Festival, Splice Festival VII, Barcelona Modern International Composition Course, Darmstadt Summer Course, Time of Music (Finland), ICIT Thailand, KlexosLab, Avanti! Summer Sounds Festival, and the Asian Classical Music Initiative.
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