Post-Concert Hang
Steinkeller
15 E High St, Oxford, OH 45056
https://www.steinkellercircle.com/
Concert 5 Program
SPLICE Ensemble
Brian Riordan : Climb, Sleep, Seen★
Brigid Burke : Concrete Poems★
intermission
Caroline Louise Miller : Ansible§
- Antiphony
- Gethen/Icecaps
- Uras/Walls
- Passacaglia
★world premiere
§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
Isaac Schankler : CorpusBrian Riordan : Climb, Sleep, Seen Climb, Sleep, Seen was written for SPLICE Ensemble in 2020.
This piece is a mashup of three other compositions of mine. Recorded Ruins was written to explore the use of transducers on piano strings, Never the Earth Forever was written to explore transducers on large drums, and Hive Collapse was written to explore extended techniques on brass instruments. In this piece, transducers have been placed on percussion and the piano as they will generate distorted just intonation intervals that at times will beat against the equal tempered trumpet.
The title “Climb, Sleep, Seen” is an anagram for SPLICE Ensemble.
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Brigid Burke : Concrete Poems
This work is inspired by a series of pen and ink drawings, which serve as graphic notation and traditional notation. The graphics, which are integrated into the video art work, are superimposed on pencil drawings, photographs, paintings, and electronic drawings.
Taylor Brook : Pileup
Pileup is dedicated to SPLICE Ensemble for the occasion of SPLICE Festival, 2020.
This piece is focused on the integration of a computer improvisor. After the computer improvisor has been “trained” in guided solo improvisations, analyzing the incomoning audio for a variety of features, the computer then listens and reacts to the improvising trio using the audio material from the solos. In this group section, the computer improvisor moves between a set of predetermined behaviors that define how it reacts, or does not react, to what it hears from the live musicians.
The behaviors of the computer improvisor as well as the instructions for the live improvisors are sequenced to create a gradual build up of intensity until all the sound has “piled up” to maximum saturation.
Due to the degree of improvisation involved in this piece, a performance could vary widely in duration.
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Caroline Louise Miller : Ansible
Ansible is the result of a year-long, extremely rewarding collaboration with SPLICE Ensemble. A heartfelt thanks to Sam Wells, Keith Kirchoff, and Adam Vidiksis, whose artistry, dedication and honest critique have shaped this work at every stage of our collaboration.
In memoriam: 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 potentials, 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).
The four musical movements of Ansible find resonances with these themes and with my two favorite novels of the Hainish Cycle, The Dispossessed (1974) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).
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.
Gethen / Icecaps is inspired by the ice-covered planet in The Left Hand of Darkness. It is a soundscape of creaking, melting, ice, whistling wind, glaciers, arctic fauna, and eerie voices carried by Sam’s desolate trumpet solo.
Urras / Walls draws on themes from The Dispossessed, where the protagonist constantly runs into walls and barriers of all sorts in his quest to develop the Ansible as an open-science technology. Some of these barriers prevent him from apprehending rampant economic and social inequalities that plague the capitalist society in which he is performing his research, highlighting the idea that walls both keep one side out and the other in. Toward the end of the movement, sounds from a general strike are broadcast over the radio. I used recordings of primarily women chanting, from protests all over the world, as the the oppression of women worldwide is closely linked with various economic and social injustices. During these moments, Adam Vidiksis improvises drum solos drawing on free jazz.
Passacaglia takes the form of a continuously shifting theme and variations, making small ripples and delays through time. The three instruments often work in a loose canon with each other. Delays at the scale of seconds register as near-simultaneity from an interstellar perspective. A broadcast of the general strike is briefly heard again on the radio, this time through the window of a passing car on a remote desert highway. back to program
Bios
SPLICE Ensemble is a trumpet, piano, and percussion trio focussed 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, and they were recently awarded a Chamber Music America grant for a commission of a new 25-minute work with composer Caroline Miller. 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.back to program
Isaac Schankler is a composer, accordionist, and electronic musician living in Los Angeles. Schankler’s recent album Because Patterns, released on Aerocade Music in 2019, has been lauded as "beautiful, algorithmic, organic, dystopian" (I Care If You Listen) and “remarkable listening… a new benchmark” (Sequenza21). Their music has also been described as “ingenious” (The Artificialist), “masterfully composed” (Boston Musical Intelligencer), and “the antidote to sentimentality” (LA Times).
Schankler’s recent music also includes works for Autoduplicity, Nouveau Classical Project, the Ray-Kallay Duo, Friction Quartet, gnarwhallaby, and the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet. Additionally, Schankler has written music for critically acclaimed and award-winning video games, including Ladykiller in a Bind, Analogue: A Hate Story, and Depression Quest.
Schankler is the artistic director of the concert series People Inside Electronics, and Assistant Professor of Music at Cal Poly Pomona, where they teach composition and music technology.
Brian Riordan is a composer, performer, improviser, producer, and sound artist originally from Chicago, IL. He is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow and a PhD candidate in Music Composition and Theory at University of Pittsburgh. 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, The Meridian Arts Ensemble, Kamraton, Untwelve, The H2 Quartet, Alia Musica, Wolftrap, and his compositions have been featured at STEIM, SICPP, New Music On The Point, and SPLICE. As a member of the Pittsburgh ensemble “How Things Are Made,” he produced and performed on over 54 albums for the group and have commissioned 52 compositions. back to program
Brigid Burke is an Australian clarinet soloist, composer, performance artist, visual artist, video artist and educator whose creative practice explores the use of acoustic sound, contemporary new music, technology, visual arts, video, notation and improvisation to enable cross media performances. Her work is widely presented in concerts, festivals, and radio broadcasts throughout Australia, Asia, Brazil, Europe and the USA. Currently she curates SEENSOUND a monthly Visual Music series at the LOOP Bar Melbourne - seensound.com
She has been a recipient of an Australia Council Project Music Fellowship and numerous new work commissions, Artist Residencies – USA, Australia and Singapore. Also most recently she has presented her works on the Big screen at Federation Square Melbourne, Tilde Festival, ABC Classic FM. and International Media Festival Prague, ICMC International Festivals, Generative Arts Festivals in Italy, Asian Music Festivals, Tokyo, She has a PhD in Composition from UTAS and a Master of Music in Composition from The University of Melbourne.
www.brigid.com.au
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Taylor Brook is a Canadian composer living in New York, writing and producing music for concert, film, theater and dance. Brook studied composition with Brian Cherney, Luc Brewaeys, George Lewis, Fred Lerdahl, and Georg Friedrich Haas.
Described as “gripping” and “engrossing” by the New York Times, his compositions have won numerous awards and prizes.
Brook holds a master’s degree in music composition from McGill University. He lives in New York, where he completed a DMA in music composition at Columbia University in May 2018 with Fred Lerdahl. Brook is on faculty at Columbia University as a Core Lecturer. Brook is the technical director of TAK ensemble.
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Caroline Louise Miller’s music explores affect, biomusic, labor, tactility, and digital materiality. She works freely across the realms of electroacoustic music, popular-genre crossover, sound art, chamber music, and experimental musical theater, and because of that appears at a diverse array of festivals and venues. Her most recent work is Ansible, a 32-minute meditation on communication, globalization, and open-science technology based around the science-fiction work of Ursula K. Le Guin. Ansible was commissioned by SPLICE Ensemble with a classical commissioning grant from Chamber Music America. In 2018 she won the ISB/David Walter Composition Competition for Hydra Nightingale, created with free jazz bassist Kyle Motl. Other projects include an electronics/trumpet duo with Alexandria Smith. In May 2019, the duo performed at The Stone (NYC), a historic venue curated by John Zorn. An ongoing project is a series of instrumental hip-hop/acousmatic crossover works. The first of these, Subsong, takes us on a journey through a gloomy sonic netherworld. Subsong was voted onto SEAMUS vol. 28 by audience choice. In 2020, C.L.M. will work with Ensemble Adapter (Berlin) on a new biomusic piece, studying the sound cultures of wild dogs, insects, birds, cetaceans, and rainforests.
Alongside individual projects, Caroline is passionate about organizing, curating, and producing concerts. From 2012–2017, she organized and curated annual freeform concerts at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Immersion@Birch Aquarium drew over a thousand visitors from the San Diego county community since its inaugural event, and incorporated musics as diverse as experimental chamber, gamelan, American folk, soul, free jazz, drone, and noise; as well as installation, film, and poetry. In 2019 she curated a multimedia science-fiction show called Tales from the Wasteland that brought together works which meditate on alternate realities; pasts, presents, and futures. Since 2014, she has also co-organized and co-curated, with Fernanda Navarro (and many others over the years!) a series of concerts and installations centering the perspectives and experiences of women.
Caroline's music appears across the U.S. and around the world. She holds a Ph.D. in music composition from UC San Diego, where she worked with Katharina Rosenberger, Amy Cimini, Miller Puckette, Anthony Burr, and Ricardo Dominguez.
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