Anne La Berge’s solo concert Utter features richly moving interactive works that weave together performer, audience and digital technology. From her new collaborative work Utter to the Byzantine-inspired oneiricon from Yannis Kyriakides, La Berge combines virtuosity, innovation and raw emotion in a way rarely seen on today’s stages.
Sam Pluta
Delay/Line (2016) 12′
for flute and electronics
Hugo Morales
Modes of Assisted Ventilation (2014) 8′
for intubated flute and electronics
David Dramm
Telemachus (2014) 9′
for flute and soundtrack
with text by David Dramm
Anne La Berge
Utter (2016) 25′
for flute and electronics, narration and interactive tablets
Yannis Kyriakides
oneiricon (2014) 12′
for musicians and tablets
Description of works:
Anne La Berge in collaboration with Isabelle Vigier, Marcel Wiercks
Utter
for flute and electronics and iPads
Utter maps out the emotional and linguistic complexities of mother/child communication. The artistic team of Anne La Berge, Isabelle Vigier and Marcel Wierckx have made a tour-de-force of sound, images and text, including a unique interactive tool specifically for the piece. The intimate, innovative setting features flutist Anne La Berge together with 6 iPads that create a two-way guiding system where performer and media discover each other, exploring Utter’s rich sonic and visual fabric.
http://isabellevigier.com
http://www.lownorth.nl
David Dramm
Telemachus
for flute and soundtrack
Telemachus was originally composed for the dance production My Private Odyssey in collaboration with Club Guy & Roni and Stadstheater Mainz. Homer’s Odyssey provided a loose backdrop for an intensely personal look at the differences between “coming home” and “going home.” Telemachus’ search for his father is played out in a multilayer texture of flute chorus and authentic ship communications reworked into Homer’s narrative. Emerging from a rich, electronic texture of sea signals, we hear a lone boy calling F(oxtrot), A(lpha), T(ango), H(otel), E(cho), R(omeo).
TelemachusRecording
Yannis Kyriakides
oneirocriticon
version for soloist and laptop
oneiricon is a interactive score based on an early Byzantine dream interpretation book (book of Daniel).
The score itself has two modes – one in which the player scrolls through the actual book – word for word – and one in which words are randomly picked from the text and morphed with the next random word. The letters of the words are assigned to notes, based on frequency charts and the player can navigate and manipulate the speeds and sounds created by the score.
The work explores some territory of video-score explored in earlier works such as karaoke etudes and the way Laptops can be used as instrument, screens and notational tools at the same time. There are also some cryptographic elements in the way projected text is used to create semantic relationships to what we are hearing.
As well as the score having the function of communicating musical data to the musicians (and language data to the audience) – the program produces sound which adds to the musical soundscape and influences the musical decisions being made by the musicians.
The piece was developed on the Processing platform. The original version as written for MAZE and as been performed at the Angelica Festival in Bologna and the Amsterdam Orgelpark.
oneirocriticon description
Hugo Morales
Modes of Assisted Ventilation
for intubated flute and electronics
“…an opening must be attempted in the trunk of the trachea, into which a tube of reed or cone should be put; you will then blow into this, so that the lung may rise again…and the heart becomes strong…”
Vesalius 1555
SplendorPerformanceVideo
Sam Pluta
Delay/Line
for flute and electronics
Delay/Line is a focused study on the effect of simple delays on a gradual glissando from the low to the high range of the flute. Simple in nature, but virtuosic to perform, Delay/Line is a testament to Anne LaBerge’s virtuosity as an electro-acoustic performer and improviser. Delay/Line was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University.
Bios:
Anne La Berge’s career as flutist/improviser/composer stretches across international and stylistic boundaries.
Her performances bring together the elements on which her international reputation is based: a ferocious and far-reaching virtuosity, a penchant for improvising delicately spun microtonal textures and melodies, and her wholly unique array of powerfully percussive flute effects, all combined with electronic processing. Many of her compositions involve her own participation, though she has produced works intended solely for other performers, usually involving guided improvisation and text. In addition to creating her own work she regularly performs in other artists’ projects in a range of settings from modern chamber music to improvised electronic music.
Anne La Berge performs regularly with Robert van Heumen in their duo Shackle. At the heart of their duo is a self-designed, digital cueing system that operates as a sometimes-visible third member. She is a member of MAZE, an electroacoustic ensemble dedicated to performing experimental musical forms. She is an active artist in Splendor Amsterdam, a collective of 50 musicians, composers and stage artists who have transformed an old bathhouse in the center of Amsterdam into a cultural mecca.
She can be heard on the Largo, Artifact, Etcetera, Hat Art, Frog Peak, Einstein, X-OR, Unsounds, Canal Street, Rambo, esc.rec., Intackt and Data labels which include recordings as a soloist and with Ensemble Modern, United Noise Toys, Fonville/La Berge duo, Rasp/Hasp, Bievre/La Berge duo, Apricot My Lady, Big Zoom, the Corkestra, La Berge and Williamson duo and MAZE.
Her music is published by Frog Peak Music (US) and by Donemus (NL). She is the co-director, with her husband David Dramm, of the Volssp Foundation that supports innovative projects for composed and improvised music.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_La_Berge
http://www.volsap.nl/
http://www.shackle.eu
http://www.maze.nu
http://splendoramsterdam.com
David Dramm (b.1961) was born in Illinois, growing up in San Diego, California. The international press has dubbed him an ‘American iconoclast.’ As a composer, singer, guitarist and lyricist Dramm “moves effortlessly between the worlds of classical music, improvisation, rock music, theater and dance.”
His composition studies began with Robert Erickson and, later, at Yale University with Louis Andriessen and Earle Brown.
His music has been performed regularly throughout Europe and elsewhere including Warsaw Autumn, Holland Festival, EXPO in Biel, and the Finnish ‘Time of Music’ Festival. Major commissions have included works for Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Rotterdam Philharmonic, ASKO/Schoenberg, Radio Chamber Philharmonic, Netherlands Wind Ensemble, Albany Symphony, Frances-Marie Uitti, Anne La Berge, Monica Germino, Club Guy & Roni, Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel and Scapino Ballet.
Dramm’s daringly unconventional pop arrangements for artists such as John Cale, Low, Ellen ten Damme and Junkie XL have been widely broadcast and recorded.
Recordings of his music are available on Wergo, BVHaast, New World, Vanguard Classics, Challenge, ATTACCA, Einstein, Composer’s Voice and X-OR. Dramm’s music is published by MCN/Donemus and voLsap Music.
David Dramm is a co-founder of Splendor Amsterdam.
http://www.daviddramm.com
http://splendoramsterdam.com
Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969 and in 1975 emigrated with his family to Britain. After travelling for a year with his violin in the near east, learning traditional music, he returned to England to study musicology at York University, later being drawn by the music of Louis Andriessen to move to The Netherlands, with whom he studied under at the Hague Conservatory.
As a composer and sound artist he strives to create new forms and hybrids of media, synthesizing disparate sound sources and exploring spatial and temporal experience. He has focused in the majority of his work on ways of combining traditional performance practices with digital media.
He has written over ninety compositions, of which recent large scale works include: memoryscape (35′) for video and ensemble (musikFabrik, WDR) ; satellites (50′) for ensemble and electronics (Seattle Chamber Players); disco debris (interactieve installatie, Amiens Maison de la Culture). an ocean of rain (80′) opened the Aldeburgh Music Festival in 2008. Two sound installations will be shown at the Dutch pavillion of the Venice Bienalle 2011.
He has been featured composer at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2007 and will be in November Music Festival 2011. He has released about 10 CDs of his music of which the most recent is “Antichamber”, a double CD collection of electroacoustic chamber music, which won a French Qwartz electronic music award.
In September 2000 he won the Gaudeamus composition prize for his composition a conSPIracy cantata – regarded by The Wire magazine as “a modern classic in the making”. The CD “Wordless” recieved an honorary mention in the Prix Ars Electronica 2006. Together with Andy Moor and Isabelle Vigier he founded and runs the CD label for innovative new electronic music, Unsounds. He teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague.
Hugo Morales is a composer and sound artist based in The Netherlands.
His work focuses on the development of alternative instruments for sound generation. Whether extensions of traditional instruments or instrumental implementations of rudimentary objects; technique, notation, physical modification and various uses of technology are usually elements defining his music composition and performance.
After concluding his studies at the Center of Research and Musical Studies (CIEM) in Mexico City, he moves to The Netherlands to continue his postgraduate studies with the support of “The Netherlands Organization for International Cooperation in Higher Education” (Nuffic), NL, “Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes” (FONCA),MX, “Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds” and “Fonds Podiumkunsten” (NL). He holds a master’s degree in Music Composition from the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, a master’s degree in Sonology (with “Distinction”) from the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, and a PhD degree from the Centre of Contemporary Music Practice (CCMP) Brunel University, London.
Sam Pluta is a New York City-based composer, laptop improviser, electronics performer, and sound artist. Though his work has a wide breadth, his central focus is on the laptop as a performance instrument capable of sharing the stage with groups ranging from new music ensembles to world-class instrumental improvisers. By creating unique interactions of electronics, instruments, and sonic spaces, Pluta’s vibrant musical universe fuses the traditionally separate sound worlds of acoustic instruments and electronics, creating sonic spaces which envelop the audience and resulting in a music focused on visceral interaction of instrumental performers with reactive computerized sound worlds.
As a composer of instrumental music, Sam has written works for Wet Ink Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Timetable Percussion, Mivos Quartet, RIOT Trio, Ensemble Dal Niente, Jessie Marino, Mantra Percussion, TAK, Dave Eggar, and Prism Saxophone Quartet. As an improviser, Sam has collaborated with some of the finest creative musicians in the world, including Peter Evans, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Craig Taborn, Jim Black, Anne La Berge, and George Lewis. Sam is the Technical Director for the Wet Ink Ensemble, a group for whom he is a member composer as well as principal electronics performer. He studied composition and electronic music at Columbia University, where he received his DMA in 2012. He received Masters degrees from the University of Birmingham in the UK and the University of Texas at Austin, and completed his undergraduate work at Santa Clara University. A dedicated pedagogue, Sam teaches Composing with Sound and Technology and Improvisation at Bennington College. From 2011-15 he directed the Electronic Music Studio at Manhattan School of Music, and has taught Music Humanities and The History of Sound Art at Columbia University. For the past 15 years he has taught composition, musicianship, electronic music, and an assortment of specialty courses at the Walden School, where he also serves as Director of Electronic Music and Academic Dean.