SPLICE Institute 2024 Participant Concert 1 Program
Friday June 28, 2024
7:30m EDT
Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University
Livestream simulcast on SPLICE YouTube (unique link)
Gian Torrano Jacobs : So Far (2024)
June Cummings, percussion
Victor Cabezas : Umbral Moments (2024)
Victor Cabezas, voice
Zouning Anne Liao : His Dream, I. Iron Horses) (2024)
Alexey Logunov, piano
Megan Denslinger : Splash (2024)
Amanda Forest, clarinet
Weilu Ge : Candy Crusher (2024)
RE:duo:
Wilson Poffenberger, saxophone
Elsie Han, viola
Jack Hamill : Fuse in/to Spring (2024)
June Cummings, percussion
Alexey Logunov : Tocsin (2024)
Alexey Logunov, piano
Notes
Gian Torrano Jacobs : So Far
So Far is an exploration of four main soundscapes for vibraphone and electronics, utilizing live processing and generative audio.
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Victor Cabezas : Umbral Moments
Inspired by totality during a solar eclipse, this piece explores the fleeting otherworldly experience under the Moon’s shadow.
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Anne Liao : His Dream, 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 vividly 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 frequently 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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Megan Denslinger : Splash
Splash is my latest piece written for clarinet, live electronics, and fixed media. It was a spontaneous composition revolving around capturing the sounds of nature through the use of MIDI instruments, audio effects, and a clarinet. The clarinet solo captures the beauty of water as it splashed through the rivers, lakes, and oceans. The live electronics capture the ripples that are created when a stone is skipped into the water and the fixed media captures the motion of the water.
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Weilu Ge : Candy Crusher
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Jack Hamill : Fuse in/to Spring This is a collaborative project between Jack Hamill and June Cummings. It involves a custom instrument made out of springs, brackets, contact microphones, and a motor.
Here we have set out to explore a basic and elemental tension inherent to the relationship of being a human and being a machine: what does it mean to live out a technology not as if it is yours, but as if it is part of you? How do you live the experience of an object, like a motor, with it's fundamentally non-human (a)rhythmic persistence, in your breath, feeling, and being?
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Alexey Logunov : Tocsin
Before the invention of sirens, bells were the primary means of alerting people to impending threats. In many countries, this anxious, repetitive bell ringing acquired special names and became a symbol of impending disasters. With the emergence of nuclear weapons, the term "Tocsin" was adopted by the British Royal Observer Corps as a codeword prefix during Soviet nuclear trials observation in the Cold War.
Tocsin for piano, live video and electronics (2024) reflects on the current global political climate, the eruption of conflicts in different parts of the world, and the alarming rise of hatred and violence that humanity faces today.
The piece includes fragments of President John F. Kennedy’s radio and television address to the nation regarding the former Soviet Union’s military presence in Cuba in 1962. I am also grateful to Amy Hamburg for her help with recording the sounds of the IU Metz Carillon, which are incorporated into the electronics part of the piece.
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Bios
Victor Cabezas is a contemporary composer, hornist, pianist, and singer based in Bowling Green, Ohio. His music has been described as “incredibly inventive” with “vivid soundscapes”. His acoustic and electronic works have been selected for performance at Bowling Green State University, SPLICE Institute, and the International Horn Society Symposium. In addition to his compositional endeavors, he is an experienced performer of both his own works and the works of others. He has performed with both the Toledo Symphony Orchestra and Toledo Symphony Youth Orchestras and is a winner of the 2020 Concerto Competition at Northern Kentucky University. He holds a B.M. in Music Composition from Northern Kentucky University and an M.M. in Music Composition from Bowling Green State University. His primary teachers in composition include Elainie Lillios, Christopher Dietz, Mikel Kuehn, and Brant Karrick. His primary instructors in performance include Andrew Pelletier, and Richard Van Dyke.
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Energetic and sincere, June Cummings (she/they) is a percussionist, improviser, and educator based in Long Island, NY. As a performer, she brings the immediacy and materiality of her percussive sound to her repertoire of contemporary works and her collaborations and premieres of electroacoustic works. As an educator she leads the undergraduate percussion studio at Stony Brook University which strives to promote student collaboration through experimental music practices and improvisation. She is currently studying for her Master’s degree from Stony Brook University with Eduardo Leandro and received her bachelor degree from James Madison University studying with Casey Cangelosi.
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Megan Denslinger graduated from Radford University in Radford, VA in April 2021 and 2019 with a M.A. in Music with a concentration in Music Composition and B.S. in Music Spring 2019. She studied composition with Dr. Bruce Mahin and clarinet with Professor David Perry. Her compositions have been recorded since 2014. Her pieces, “A Day at Sea,” “Dance Suite for Two Clarinets,” and “Quartet No. 4” are described as "video game-like” and “scenic.” When composing a new piece, aesthetics towards the Baroque and classical eras are influenced employing modern musical techniques. Megan writes music for stop-motion animations using Logic Pro, Max for Live, and MIDI. Megan composes for large ensembles, chambers, and solo works utilizing acoustic and electronics. Megan blends electronics, MIDI, and recorded audio with acoustic instruments by using everyday sounds to create harmonious soundscapes unique to her environment. As a clarinetist and saxophonist, in 2024, Megan joined the Falls Church Community Band and in 2022, joined the Charles Washington Symphony Orchestra. 2015-21, she played in the Radford University wind bands, jazz bands, and pit orchestra. 2018-21, she built and lead chamber ensembles for new music performance. 2017-20, she played with Winds of the Blue Ridge in Roanoke. Her master’s thesis, “A Comparative Study on the Thematic and Motivic Development of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, First Movement, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s Symphony No. 3, First Movement,” provides an overview on development of themes and motives within a sonata and how compositional devices advance development of musical ideas.
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Amanda Forest is a Canadian clarinetist residing in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Beginning her clarinet journey at the age of 12 in her 7-12 high school band program, she eventually attained both a Bachelor's in Music Education from Brandon University, and a Master's in Clarinet Performance from Western University. Recently, Amanda was featured in the International Clarinet Association's Virtual ClarinetFest 2021 as a performing artist. She has also been involved with zFestival, the Toronto Creative Music Lab, and appeared as an alumni guest artist at the Brandon University Clarinet Festival in 2019.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amanda has been exploring audio recording and composing through improvisation. Many of the recordings from these processes are included on her Bandcamp. Among the collection, her EP Bloodstone was noticed by local music review website Bad Gardening Advice, where it was described as "extremely rare" and "extraterrestrial".
Other interests Amanda has include Theatre, Storytelling, Animals and Video Games. Occasionally she will arrange covers of some of her favorite video game tunes and upload them on her youtube channel for anyone to listen.
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Weilu Ge is a composer and media artist. She works with various media forms, from concert music, installation, performance to video and innovative technology. Her recent practice and experiments center around theatrical expressions of sonic, visual and spatial media, taking composition and space as critical means to examine relationships between power, system, body, and technology in a social-cultural context. Weilu’s works have been presented at festivals and conferences internationally.
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Jack Hamill (b. 1999) is a multimedia artist primarily focused on sound. His creative practice ranges across a variety of art forms, spanning electro-acoustic music, noise, experimental film, digital visual art, and more. He has worked with a broad variety of aesthetic media, including computer-generated scores, Disklaviers, DIY electronics, an ultrasound fetal doppler, video projections, and acoustic ensembles. His recent work tends to focus on disparate modes of expressive intensity: seriousness and irreverence, deliberation and intuition, jibberish nonsense and vigorous manifestos. He is pursuing a PhD in Music Composition and Technology at Northwestern University, where he currently studies with Jay Alan Yim.
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Boston-based violist/composer/improvisor Elsie Bae Han seeks out new paths for human connection through music-making. With a focus on new chamber music, Elsie hopes to present accessible concerts and musical resources to the general public as well as to the music world. She graduated with a M.M. in Contemporary Classical Music Performance under the tutelage of Lila Brown at the Boston Conservatory, and received her undergraduate degrees at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying under Elizabeth Freivogel and Kerrith Livengood. Always searching for new and interesting sounds, she prioritizes working with emerging composers. Elsie is the violist in the saxophone/viola duo, RE:duo (pronounced “Reply”) and works as a freelance violist and composer in the Greater Boston Area. She has attended festivals such as New Music on the Point, the Castleman Quartet Program, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and the Cortona Sessions for New Music as an ensemble fellow with RE:duo.
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Gian Torrano Jacobs is a composer and performer from New Jersey, USA. Their interests lie in the synthesis of contemporary and early musics, natural and synthetic sounds, electronics, acoustics, and visual media. Cross-pollination is at the heart of their process.
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Born in Guangdong, China, Zouning’s music draws inspiration from her fascination with nature and technology, blended with a constant curiosity about the playing capacity of instruments. She endeavors to incorporate unexpected and everyday sounds into her music.
Her music has been performed in the United States, France, China, and England. In 2024, her work will be featured at the NoiseFloor in Portugal, MISE-EN Festival, Splice 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, SPLICE Festival V and New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. Zouning was named a finalist in the ASCAP/ SEAMUS Student Composer Commission Competition in 2021.
Zouning 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. She will start pursuing her PhD in Composition and Music Technology at Northwestern University in Fall 2024.
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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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Described as an “Admirably skilled player” (The News-Gazette), South Georgia based saxophonist WILSON POFFENBERGER is currently Lecturer of Saxophone at Valdosta State University where he teaches in the woodwind and jazz area. Wilson has performed as a soloist with the Mostly Modern Orchestra, Sinfonia da Camera, and Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Presented at conferences and festivals such as the Boston New Music Initiative, Cortona Sessions, World Saxophone Congress, and the Fondation des Etats-Unis. And won prizes at the Fischoff Competition, Krannert Debut Artist Competition, and the Harriet Hale Woolley award. A strong advocate for new music, Wilson has premiered and commissioned over 30 new works by composers such as Matthew Aucoin, Annika Socolofsky, Badie Khaleghian, and more. He is a founder of the new music ensemble, RE:duo, who has been in residence at institutions and festivals such as the Cortona Sessions, Composers Conference, Boston Conservatory, and University of North Texas.
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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. Both duo members founded and hold executive positions with New Music Mosaic, a new music collective dedicated to the dissemination of resources to artists. Through New Music Mosaic, RE:duo curates a series of concerts across the U.S. as a part of their biennial open call for scores initiative. Recognized nationally and internationally, RE:duo has performed at conferences and institutions such as the International Saxophone Symposium and the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. Fellowships and residencies that the ensemble have held include the Cortona Sessions for New Music, Avaloch Farms Music Institute, and the Composer's Conference.
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