SPLICE Institute 2022 Concert 5 Program
featuring
SPLICE Ensemble
Sam Wells, trumpet
Keith Kirchoff, piano
Adam Vidiksis, percussion
Friday July 1, 2022
7:30pm EDT
Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University
Livestream simulcast on SPLICE YouTube (unique link)
download program pdf (does not include notes/bios)
Elliott Lupp : []\6][]\][2][]\][][4\] (2020)
Elainie Lillios : Living Between Seconds (2022), world premiere
i. living in the dawn chorus
ii. living along the dry ground
iii. living in the frenzy
iv. living in the storm
v. living on the road
vi. living in flash-bys
vii. living in twilight
This piece was made possible by a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation
Ni Zheng : Exsanguination (2020)
Steven Ricks : Motor Culture (2021)
I. Hank’s Drive Through the Multiverse
II. Blessed Mother of Acceleration
III. Disastrous Experiment
Commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University, for SPLICE Ensemble
Notes
Elliott Lupp: []\6][]\][2][]\][][4\][]\6][]\][2][]\][][4\] is a combination of overlapping acoustic and electroacoustic material that is inspired by watching, listening to, and learning from the SPLICE Ensemble over the past few years. It is infused with material inspired by personal experiences dealing with recent and past change, anxiety, anger, stability, withdrawl, and repetition.
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Elainie Lillios: Living Between Seconds
Living Between Seconds is a work for trumpet in C, drum set, and piano with fixed media and live electronics that explores the phenomenon of temporal expansion through mindfulness and how attending to the present moment can enhance, suspend, and/or expand temporal perception.
The journey to creating Living Between Seconds began by composing a meditative fixed media soundscape composition using environmental recordings captured by Thomas Beverly in remote desert locations across the American southwest. The foundational soundscape very little processing, allowing the environment’s expansive, temporally suspended nature to remain untouched. The small detailed sounds contained within the environment – birds chirps, owl hoots, coyote howls, train hums, and others – are treated as trigger points for foreground instrumental material, influencing In so acoustic gesture, texture, and timbre. Acoustic events generated from the soundscape in turn produce live, interactive electroacoustic events programmed using Cycling 74’s Max. This real-time processing expands the trio’s acoustic sound, generating “meta instruments” that further delineate the space between sound and silence, creating an immersive environment where the ensemble and electronics articulate the meditative soundscape.
Collaborating and experimenting with the SPLICE Ensemble during the compositional process was a priceless aspect of this project, allowing each member to contribute creative ideas and techniques that make this piece a dynamic, fluid collection of evolving, expanding material. Through guided improvisation, SPLICE Ensemble “lives between the seconds” of the work, articulating gestures and textures, responding to each other, to the fixed media, and to the live electronics, simultaneously creating and living in the evolving sonic landscape.
Living Between Seconds was made possible by a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation. The piece was commissioned by the SPLICE Ensemble, and is dedicated to them with admiration and appreciation.
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Steven Ricks: Motor Culture
Motor Culture — In 2010 I was invited by my friend Ned McGowan to write a piece for his ensemble Hexnut as part of a project they initiated: WRENCH. It was inspired by the photography of Edward Burtynsky, and each composer involved wrote a piece that coordinated sound with one or more of Burtynsky’s images. At the time I was drawn to two images related to Burtynsky’s concept of “Motor Culture,” that is, all the activities of taking from the earth and production that relate to the automobile, from oil drilling to car manufacturing to freeway systems and beyond. I’ve continued to think about how the automobile influences so many aspects of my life and decided to make this piece a poetic exploration of some of those facets. The first movement, “Hank’s Drive Through the Multiverse,” takes as inspiration a children’s song by Pinto Colvig called “Honkety Hank,” a song I used to listen to from an old vinyl single my Dad had. This playful inspiration is transformed into and/or pit against a more rigorous process of color and talea that provides the underlying structure for the piece. Ultimately, I picture a sort of surreal journey that juxtaposes the playful and idealistic view of going for a ride with the more problematic features and dangers of automobile travel.
The second movement, “Blessed Mother of Acceleration,” steals a line from The Blues Brothers movie (which itself features a lot of driving and an epic car chase) to suggest the ability of cars to accelerate, but also the general “drive” or push to go faster, be better, advance in technology, etc. (cue Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”). The constant pulse, driving rhythms, and propulsive electronics are pushing things forward in a way that suggests progress, but also perhaps has the spirit of getting out of control and heading for disaster.
The final movement, “Disastrous Experiment,” is a somber reflection on the painful aspects of automobile violence, both intentional and accidental. Motor Culture was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University for SPLICE Ensemble.
-- Steve Ricks
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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, 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
Sam Wells is a musician and video artist based in Los Angeles. 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 Scarp Records, New Amsterdam/Nonesuch, New Focus Records, SEAMUS, and Ravello Recordings labels.
Sam is a Cycling ’74 Max Certified Trainer and 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. This fall, Sam will join the faculty at Temple University as an Assistant Professor of Music Technology.
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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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Elliott Lupp is a composer, improvisor, visual artist, 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 including N_SEME, CHIMEfest, Electronic Music Midwest, MOXsonic, Fulcrumpoint New Music Project, SEAMUS, and Electroacoustic Barn Dance, and by such ensembles as the Dutch/American trio Sonic Hedgehog (flute, clarinet, and electric guitar), the Atar Piano Trio, Found Sound New Music Ensemble, various members of MOCREP, The Chicago Composer's Orchestra, Fonema Consort, and Ensemble Dal Niente.
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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 participates in the networked, electroacoustic trio ESC with Chris Biggs and Scott Deal.
Elainie’s work has been recognized internationally and nationally through awards, grants, and commissions, most recently by the Johnstone Foundation, Fromm Foundation, Barlow Endowment, and Fulbright Foundation. She has been a featured guest at the Groupe de Recherche Musicales, Rien à Voir, festival l’espace du son, June in Buffalo, and elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Reviews of Elainie’s compact disc Entre Espaces (electrocd.com) praise her work for being “… elegantly assembled, and immersive enough to stand the test of deep listening” and as “…a journey not to be missed.” Other works are published by Centaur, Innova, MSR Classics, Ravello, StudioPANaroma, Musiques et recherches, La Muse en Circuit, New Adventures in Sound Art, SEAMUS, Irritable Hedgehog and Leonardo Music Journal.
Elainie serves as Director of Composition Activities for SPLICE (www.splicemusic.org) and as Professor of Creative Arts Excellence at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. elillios.com.
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Ni Zheng (b. 1997) is a chinese sound artist, electroacoustic music composer, and performer, based in USA. Her work spans fixed media, mixed media, and sound installation. She graduated from New England Conservatory where she earned her BA in composition, and is currently a PhD student in composition at UC San Diego.
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Steven Ricks (b. 1969) is described in BBC Music Magazine as a composer “unafraid to tackle big themes.” He creates work that is bold, innovative, ambitious, and diverse, and that often includes a strong narrative influence and theatrical flare. His music is performed and recorded by several leading artists and ensembles, including counter)induction (NY), New York New Music Ensemble, Canyonlands New Music Ensemble (SLC), Talujon Percussion (NY), Hexnut (Amsterdam, NE), Links Ensemble (Paris, FR), Manhattan String Quartet, Earplay (SF), NOVA Chamber Music Series (SLC), Empyrean Ensemble (SF), NY Metropolitan Opera soprano Jennifer Welch-Babidge, pianist Keith Kirchoff, guitarist Dan Lippel, flutist Carlton Vickers, and violinist Curtis Macomber.
Ricks has received commissions and awards from the Fromm Music Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, SCI, and Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, among others, and his music has been featured at multiple national and international conferences, festivals, and symposia, including ICMC, SEAMUS, NYCEMF, ISIM, KISS (Kyma International Sound Symposium), Third Practice, Festival of New American Music, and TRANSIT (Leuven, BE). Recordings of his music appear on multiple labels, including New Focus Recordings, Bridge Records, Albany Records, pfMENTUM, Vox Novus, and Comprovise Records.
Ricks received degrees in music composition from Brigham Young University (BM), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (MM), the University of Utah (PhD), and a Certificate in Advanced Musical Studies (CAMS) from King's College London. He is a professor in the BYU School of Music where he teaches music theory and composition and is the Music Composition and Theory Division Coordinator (2016 to the present). He is former Editor of the Newsletter for the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (2012-19), and was director of the BYU Electronic Music Studio for 20 years (2001-2021).
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