“Composing music as a studio art” was described by composer Morton Subotnick in the early 1950’s as meaning that “the work is not the reproduction of a work originally intended for the concert hall… rather, it is intended to be experienceed by individuals or small groups of people listening in intimate surroundings” (excerpt from the “Note from the Composer” by Morton Subotnick 2017 Lincoln Center Festival).
Harvestworks has supported this concept and the many artists who have explored studio-based sound art since our beginnings in 1977 as The Public Access Synthesizer Studio. This program features works by artists in our community and highlights the some of the history and development of this art form.
NYEAF 2019: Sound Art Cube Building 10a Nolan Park Governors Island
Starting Sunday June 30th on weekends thru August 2nd 2019 except on Saturdays between 3 – 5 pm on July 13th and July 27th
Moscow Sound Art Gallery SA))_gallery exhibition opens on 16th of May and closes on 4th of August. Tuesday – Sunday from 11 am till 8 pm.
Curated by Executive Director Carol Parkinson
Compositions by Michael Lytle, Claudia Robles, Hans Tammen, Shelley Hirsch, Andrea Parkins, Matthew Ostrowski, Dan Joseph.
Michael Lytle
Title: Harvest Stream 2 (2019)
Running Time: 7 minutes
The material is drawn from the composers recordings of his own bass clarinet or electronic work or improvisations with others (with one exception this time). The extremes are quit varied. Some are so quiet, for example, you would not normally hear them less the other channels are either eliminated or very soft. Some Streams are longer and the audience is encouraged to walk around the performance space, thereby influencing the mix personally. Other audience members may just want to listen meditatively from a spot as close to the center as possible.
Bio: MICHAEL LYTLE – (aka elewhale) has been a New Music Improviser since 1968. He has performed with William Parsons, Karl Berger, George Cartwright, Garrett List, David Moss, John Zorn, Nick Didkovsky, Hans Burgener, Martin Schutz, Gerry Hemingway, Mark Dresser, Eyal Maoz, Kathleen Supove, Weasel Walter, Denman Maroney, Stephanie Griffin, Steve Swell, Ken Filiano, Mari Kimura, Evan Gallagher, Stephen Flinn, Robert Dick, Andrew Drury, JD Parran and has been involved in over 30 recordings since the 5* rated Iowa Ear Music of 1976. In solo, projects with Karl Berger and Hans Burgener, as a member of Nick Didkovsky’s band “Dr. Nerve” and a co-founder with Didkovsky & Hemingway of “Swim This” and his sonic powerhouse “Pool” he has played in festivals and venues all over the world. An early Electronic Music composer, Lytle invented the set of totally unique methods of clarinet family sonic modulation and performance, called the “most radical of his generation” by Joachim Berendt.
Hans Tammen
Running Time: 4:15
Euclidian Horns (2016) is originally written for the horns of the ships in St. John’s, Newfoundland, transforming the tugboats, trawlers, and ocean-going freighters in the harbor into an orchestra on water. The sound in the bowl-shaped harbor carries for up to 12 miles. The piece is written for a maximum of 7 ships, but as on the day of the performance only 4 ships were available, I recreated the 7 voices of the piece using a Buchla Music Easel, and mixed in a recording of the original performance in 2016.
Hans Tammen likes to set sounds in motion, and then sit back to watch the movements unfold. Using textures, timbre and dynamics as primary elements, his music is continuously shifting, with different layers floating into the foreground while others disappear. Whether richly processed guitar sounds from his hybrid interactive guitar/software instrument Endangered Guitar, traditionally notated material for his Third Eye Chamber Orchestra, or graphically notated elements for the all-electronic Dark Circuits Orchestra, his music flows like clockwork, “transforming a sequence of instrumental gestures into a wide territory of semi-hostile discontinuity; percussive, droning, intricately colorful, or simply blowing your socks off” (Touching Extremes). Wtammen.org
Matthew Ostrowski
Title: Shiver and Cleave (2017)
Running Time: 10’ 15”
This work, whose title uses two archaic English words meaning ’to split apart’ and ’to bring together’, defines a series of merging and dividing paths in space. The sound material is comprised of hundreds of short envelopes, algorithmically generated by FM synthesis. These brief sounds never move in space; each event is carefully located ‘adjacent’ to its previous event to create the illusion of movement, like footprints in the snow. Thus we perceive each path as being in a constant state of dynamic evolution as it travels.
A New York City native, Matthew Ostrowski has worked as a composer, performer and installation artist, exploring work with music, multimedia, video and theater. Using digital tools and formalist techniques to engage with quotidian materials — sonic, physical, and cultural – Ostrowski’s work explores the liminal space between the virtual and phenomenological worlds. His work, which has been seen on six continents, ranges from live electronic performance to installations incorporating video, multichannel sound, and computer-controlled objects. He is a freelance developer of interactive technology for artists, and teaches at NYU and Columbia University.
Ostrowski’s productions have been seen or performed on six continents, including the Wien Modern Festival, Transmediale and Maerz Musik in Berlin,the Kraków Audio Art Festival, Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, PS 1 and The Kitchen in New York , the Rencontres Internationales video festival in Madrid, and Yokohama’s dis_locate Festival. He has received numerous awards, including a NYFA Fellowship for Computer Arts.
Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/harvestworks/14936520691/in/album-72157646123625499/
Dan Joseph
Title: Periodicity Piece #6 (2013)
Running Time: 7 minutes
Dan Joseph’s Periodicity Piece #6 combines extensive pre-recorded musical/sonic materials, live digital processing, and, when possible, live instrumentalists, in the realization of a strictly arranged time-based score. The goal of the work is to establish multiple rates of periodicity, ranging from short musically metrical repetitions, to longer patterns of recurrence. The resulting experience of these simultaneously unfolding yet unrelated rates of periodicity, is to give the listener a rich and complex sense of passing time on multiple planes.
A New York resident since 2001, Dan’s work has been presented at Merkin Concert Hall (NYC), Diapason Gallery for Sound (NYC), Roulette (NYC), Issue Project Room (NYC) The Kitchen (NYC) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (CA), New Langton Arts (CA), Headlands Center for the Arts (CA) and other venues. He has received commissions from several ensembles and performers, including Gamelan Son of Lion, the sfSoundGroup, baritone Thomas Buckner, and clarinetist Matt Ingalls. Dan has held residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center.
As an artist who embraces the musical multiplicity of our time, Dan works simultaneously in a variety of media and contexts, including instrumental chamber music, free improvisation, and various forms of electronica and sound art. Since the late 1990s, the hammer dulcimer has been the primary vehicle for his music. As a performer he is active with his own chamber ensemble, The Dan Joseph Ensemble, as well as in various improvisational collaborations and as an occasional soloist. He has collaborated with a variety of creative artists including Miya Masaoka, Pamela Z, Loren Dempster, JD Parran, India Cooke, Andrea Williams, William Winant and Miguel Frasconi and John Ingle.
Photo: album-72157630497036298
Shelley Hirsch
Title: Please Stop Scratching That Gash (2013)
Running Time: 5’51”
Voices, text, and composition: Shelley Hirsch. Additional sounds: Simon Ho. For this piece Shelley extracted sound from his piece “Dust” and the instrumental music from a collaborative work excerpted from “A Rupture in the order of Reality”. Hirsch created “Please! Stop Scratching That Gash” as a sound installation for the 8 speaker Charlie Morrow Sound Cube in 2003.
Shelley Hirsch is an internationally acclaimed vocalist, composer, and storyteller whose compositions, staged multimedia works, improvisations, radio plays, installations, improvisations and collaborations have been produced and presented on five continents. She has appeared in and composed music for film and is the subject of two documentary portraits on Aspekte and Arte TV Programs in Germany.
Born and raised in East New York Brooklyn, Vocal Artist, Performer, Composer, Storyteller, Interdisciplinary Artist Shelley Hirsch has been pushing boundaries with her unique vocal art and performance work, drawing on her life experiences, her memory, her vivid imagination for decades.
The New York Times called her “A woman of a thousand voices… She offered an enthralling demonstration of the way songs, vocal styles and language might have evolved out of more primal musical impulses”.
Hirsch’s multimedia performances, compositions, improvisations, electronic music pieces, sound installations, collaborations and radio plays have been presented at concert halls, museums, theaters, galleries, clubs, radio, worldwide in venues including Alice Tully Hall, Roulette, Experimental Intermedia Foundation and CBGB’s in NYC; Experimenta Festival in Buenos Aires, What is Music? Festival Melbourne Australia; Beyond Innocence Festival in Kobe Japan; City of Women Festival Llubliana Slovenia; Dom Cultural Center Moscow; Akademie Der Künste Berlin; Next Festival Bratislava Slovakia; Time Festival Ghent, Belgium; Angelica Festival Bologna Italy, All Ears Festival Oslo Norway; Red House Sofia Bulgaria; Taktlos Festival Bern Switzerland; New Music America Festival Helena Montana, TBA Festival Portland Oregon, and hundreds more..
In 2018 decades of her work were acquired for the archive at The Fales Library part of NYU, for their Downtown Collection.
Other prestigious honors include The John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition 2017; The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists 2017; The Creative Capital Grant 2002; New York Foundation of the Arts in Music/Sound 2010, Multidisciplinary/ Performance 2003, Music Composition1996 and the New Forms Category 1987; Two NYSCA Grants in Vocal Music 2016 and Electronic Music in 2007; The DAAD Residency Grant in Berlin 1992 and a record six Artist in Residency Grants at Harvestworks Digital Media Center in NYC from 1985-2016.
In 2019, Hirsch was Artist in Residence at Queenslab in Queens New York.
A collection of the writing and images she produced during her Residency will be published in Summer 2019
Hirsch can be heard on over 70 recordings with several on the Tzadik, FMP, InTakt, and on Nonesuch, Sound Aspects, Tellus, Apollo, Innocent Records, Don Giovanni and many more..
Her performative compositions include “States” “My Father Piece” “For Jerry”- an homage to /virtual duet with the late Jerry Hunt, “The Passions”, The Bernard Herrmann Project.
8 channel surround sound pieces include “Stop Scratching That Gash” and “Tohuwabohu”.
She can be heard on 70 cds. Including several under her name on the Tzadik label.
QUOTE
Anne Lebaron in her essay “Surrealism in Postmodern Music” writes of Hirsch: “By violating linear narrative form, by opposing elements from our known world in disturbing ways, she plunges herself and her audience into collective reminiscenses so visceral they seem almost visual – a surreal accomplishment in itself.”
http://www.shelleyhirsch.com/shelley/
Claudia Robles
Title: Wandering in Morelia – 2019 (world premiere)
Running Time: 11:40
This octophonic acousmatic piece was composed and produced during an artist in residence at CMMAS (Mexican Center for the Music and the Soundarts in Morelia, Mexico) using sounds recorded in the city. Although the composition features the original recorded materials, there are moments however, during which the recordings are transformed via diverse DSP processes, with the purpose of inviting the audience to immerse themselves into the imaginary universe of the composer.
Claudia Robles-Angel is a new media and audiovisual artist born in Bogotá-Colombia, currently living in Cologne-Germany and active worldwide. Her work and research cover different aspects of visual and sound art, which extend from audiovisual fixed-media compositions to performances and installations interacting with biomedical signals via the usage of interfaces such as, for example, the EEG (electroencephalogram, measuring brain waves activity).
She has been artist-in-residence in several outstanding institutions, for example at ZKM (Karlsruhe), KHM (Cologne), at the ICST ZHdK in Zurich and recently at the CMMAS Morelia in Mexico.
Her work is constantly featured in not only media and sound-based festivals/conferences but also in group and solo exhibitions around the globe, for example, the ZKM Center in Karlsruhe; KIBLA Multimedia Centre in Maribor, Bauhaus Museum für Gestaltung Berlin, the International Computer Music Conferences ICMC in Copenhagen, Montréal and Utrecht; Festival Internacional de la Imagen in Manizales, ESPACIO Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires, DRHA2010 Sensual Technologies London, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival NYCEMF; SIGGRAPH Asia in Yokohama; Re-New Festival Copenhagen; New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference NIME Oslo; ISEA Istanbul, Manizales and Durban, at 55th Venice Biennale Prohelvetia – Salon Suisse, Audio Art Festival Cracow, CMMR Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research Plymouth and Marseille, at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center New York City, Museum of Contemporary Art Bogotá, MADATAC 07 Madrid, Digitale Duesseldorf, the Athens Digital Art Festival ADAF, Heroines of Sound Berlin and more recently at the Experimental Intermedia NYC
• WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
Twitter: @claudearobles
Instagram: claudearobles
Photo: INsideOUT_Yokohama_02.jpg
Andrea Parkins
Title: “Two Rooms from the Memory Palace” (Excerpt), (2014-15)
Running Time: 7 minutes
“Two Rooms from the Memory Palace” is a generative electroacoustic composition reflecting Parkins’ ongoing exploration of poetic interrelationships between site and time, and gestural trace and acoustical space. The work was developed as a cyclically-constructed/continuous duration fixed-media piece, designed for diffusion through two adjacent rooms that are not acoustically isolated from each other: enabling shifting and sometimes startling sonic juxtapositions to take place. It premiered as an 8-channel work at the 2015 New York Electronic Art Festival and later was re-imagined as a large-scale performance installation for diffusion in a single listening space: premiering at the 2016 Akousma Festival in Montreal as “Two Rooms, Variation 1, for 40 Loudspeakers and Solo Performer.”
About the artist
Andrea Parkins is a sound artist, composer, and electroacoustic musician who engages with interactive electronics as compositional/performative process. Described as a “sound-ist” of “protean talent,” by critic Steve Smith, she is known for her pioneering timberal approach on her electronically processed accordion and investigation of embodiment and chance with her self-designed virtual sound-processing instruments. Parkins’ works include multi-diffusion sound installations; electronic music pieces; electroacoustic solo and ensemble compositions; and sound for contemporary dance, film and intermedia performance. Her work has been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen, Experimental Intermedia, The Andy Warhol Museum, Kunsthalle Basel, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg; NEXT festival, Bratislava; Cyberfest, St. Petersburg; and many more. She also performs as a solo artist, and has collaborated with artists such as Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, George E. Lewis, The Necks, Ute Wasserman, choreographer Vera Mantero, and filmmaker Abigail Child, among others. Parkins’ recent works include her series of large-scale amplified drawings, developed during her 2017 fellowship at the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida, and her site-configured multi-diffusion performance/installation, Two Rooms, Variation 1, for 40 loudspeakers and Solo Performer, which premiered in 2016 at the Akousma Festival in Montreal. Parkins’ recordings are published by Important Records, Confront Recordings, Atavistic, Henceforth Records and Creative Sources. Currently, she is a fellow in Artistic Research at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo.
Web source: www.andreaparkins.com
Technique: 8 channel- plus 2 channel – electroacoustic composition for diffusion in two adjacent rooms
Andrea Parkins (Photo by Photomusix)
About Harvestworks
www.harvestworks.org
Founded in 1977 by artists, Harvestworks’ mission is to present experimental artworks created in collaboration with our Technology, Engineering, Art and Music (TEAM) Lab. The Harvestworks T.E.A.M Lab supports the creation of art works achieved through the use of new and evolving technologies and provides an environment for experimentation with project consultants, technicians, instructors and innovative practitioners in all branches of the electronic arts. We are an international digital media arts center with over 30 years of experience helping artists to get inside the electronics and to develop a hands-on, experimental and explorative approach to making art with technology. Harvestworks also produces the New York Electronic Art Festival, a summer series of concerts, workshops, and exhibitions centered on the cutting-edge work being done at the intersection of art and technology.
PRESS QUOTES
“It’s not a big organization but what they do is very useful” – Dr. Robert Moog (1934-2005)
• WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
https://www.flickr.com/photos/harvestworks/
https://www.youtube.com/user/harvestworksnyc
https://www.facebook.com/HarvestworksDigitalMediaArtsCenter/