martes, 16 de diciembre de 2008

English texts and Bios

Here we present some of the works and the Bio of their composers

9 comentarios:

Adina Izarra dijo...

Anders Vinjar's output includes electroacoustic and instrumental
music, live-electronic works, web-art and video-works. He lives and
works at Nesodden, just outside Oslo, Norway
"One less than a perfect square" makes three attempts in four minutes
at understanding foreign sound material from the other side of the
Atlantic Ocean in a context where a small child learns himself how to
speak.

This triangulation process involves two unknowns and one known.
Recordings brought from far away places in South-America; the small
child singing the world - wanting to comprehend his environment by
putting sonic structure into it and observe any response; and the
processing and structuring of the material in a musical composition.

All 3 have the same shape.

Adina Izarra dijo...

Text for "ashore..." a contribution to the NorthSouth project by Hans Peter.

The NorthSouth project has been a unique opportunity to share personal soundrecordings, relating sounds I know and have recorded myself to recordings made by persons I have never met from faraway places I have never been. Is it possible to "reach out" and internalize sounds of foreign origines? At least as an individual, I think the answer is yes.

The project is founded on the idea that one portrays oneself and one surroundings - possibly unconsiously - through recordings. One may ask whether composers of one continent form a cultural unit? I find that though one is not necessarily representative of one native country as an culturl entity, however local, sitespecific or exotic one remains, ones cultural backage is nervertheless mirrored when trying to relate to exotic sounds of another continent.

The project has thus challenged me to go beyond the safe resort of personal material and to seek for relations in sounds, that allows the combination and incorporation of disperate material from remote companions. During actual work, I often imagined being at the locations of the recordings where I have never been. To my own positive surprise I realize that the orgines of the sounds formed an imortant part of how I treated them.

When choosing sounds I was first looking for some that could match each of my own recordings (frogchoir at night, rushes in the wind, music from the comunionshouse). I choose arctic terns (actually recorded in Iceland, but could have been at the south pacific), chilenian pifilcaflutes, brasilian churchbells and a train rocking its way to God knows where. Next I combined the pairs in likely scenes and designed how they would change in a flow with a dreamlike associative character.

I am living on an small island traditionally founded on shipping trade and farming, the men often being absent for long periods, bringing back news, goods and customs from the big world. 'Here' and 'abroad' has a lot of meaning to the islanders. The island itself is one big pile of sand, situated in the 'vadehavet' with wide, flat, empty shores with dunes and dikes, sometimes sparkled with amber, driftwoods and other valuable items, and rather big tides flushing the shore, making it always similar, always changing.

I was imaging laying in the low waters, dreaming, sounds drifting ashore from far away melting with memories of sonic experiences from this very island. Flowing between recognisable sources and strange elaborations - being here or abroad? - the dream favors neither one, but rather the changes themselves and end by a quiet waking up ...

The Composer, march 2008.

Adina Izarra dijo...

Natasha Barrett's work spans the extremes of concert composition through to sound-art. Whether writing for live performers or electroacoustic forces, the focus of this work stems from an acousmatic approach to sound and the aural images it can evoke. The spatio-musical potential of acousmatic sound features strongly in her work. Barrett currently lives in Norway and is active as a freelance composer, performer and researcher. For more information: www.natashabarrett.org

Rite-3/18
The energy in the Southern sounds was attractive. Lands I have many times wished to visit. Were the sounds exotic to my ears as if from an ancient civilization? Or were they more passionate in their expression than the sounds I would normally hear? What were the impulses that finally lead me to use these three sounds from the ‘South’: the Venezuelan 'Amolador' - a Spanish tradition where a man who sharpens knives and scissors wanders through the city playing a small flute and shouting "amolador", Colombian crowd protests and Chilean Chinos Flutes played in an authentic setting. Later I realised these were the most problematic sounds I could have chosen. The Chinos Flutes are so raucous that after only some minutes of monitoring my head would ache. In working with the crowd sounds I was in danger of loosing the energy of the crowd, while the lonely "Amolador" was in danger of getting lost. Finding place for the Northern sounds finally placed the Southern sounds in perspective. Crisp recordings of cold stones, water and wood set in a spatial, morphological and metaphorical counterpoint against the passion of the sounds from the South carving a semi-abstract musical-dramatic landscape. “Rite-3/18” was composed with support from the Norwegian “Fond for Lyd og Bilde”

Adina Izarra dijo...

Rikhardur H. Fridriksson is an Icelandic musician whose music falls into two general categories; he either makes pure electro-acoustic music, working with natural sounds and their movement in space, or he does live improvisations, playing electric guitar, processed with live electronics, appearing either alone or with the Icelandic Sound Company.
“Postcards from North and South” is a mixture of sounds that don’t really mix. We have sounds of nature from Iceland, in the form of birds, water and footsteps, and we have “non-natural”, but human voices from South America. These opposites attract, but don’t really communicate. They co-exist in a sonic space where they dance around each other, sometimes fighting for atteniton and sometimes complementing each other. In the end, they have at least had a conversation, hopefully leading to future mutual understanding. Where does that leave us? Who knows? Together? Apart? In-between? Elsewhere?

Adina Izarra dijo...

Jorge Antunes was born in 1942, in Rio de Janeiro, where he studied Violin, Composition and Conducting. He also majored in Physics at the National Faculty of Philosophy. In 1961, after constructing himself several generators, filters, modulators and other electronic equipment, Antunes founded the Chromo-Music Research Studio, and has since been recognized as the originator of electronic music in Brazil. In 1965 he began to research the correspondences between sound and color, and wrote works that he called Cromoplastofonias, for orchestras, magnetic tapes, lights, using also the senses of smell, taste and touch. From 1969 until 1973 he won scholarships to study in Buenos Aires, Utrecht and Paris. Jorge Antunes is professor of composition at the University of Brasilia and is president of the Brazilian Society for Electroacoustic Music. Antunes was a winner of the most important composition competitions in the world and his scores are published by Salabert, Breitkopf&Hartell, Suvini Zerboni, Zimmermann, Ricordi, Sistrum and Billaudot.
O COLECIONADOR DE PEDRAS DESCALÇO
(The barefooted stone collector)
electroacoustic music
duration: 4' 00"
Jorge Antunes

This piece was composed in Mars 2008 at the LIEM (Laboratorio de Informática y Electrónica Musical) in Madrid, specially for the North&South project. The basic sound materials were recorded by Jeans Hedman: "sounds of moving stones" and "sounds of Wild sea". Antunes was interested in the construction of a small piece that could alude to the caracteristics of a collector: the anxiety, the perseverance, the pertinacity, the audacity. Hearing the work we see an obstinate collector of stones. He is seeking rare stones near the beach. He walks on the stones. But he feels pains, because he is barefoot.

Adina Izarra dijo...

Jose Augusto Mannis (1958, Brazil) His repertoire covers a variety of musical genres and styles: electroacoustic, instrumental, music for video, theatre, radio art, and multi-media installations. His music is characterized by one over-riding factor: sound and musical gesture are essential concerns. As a performer of electroacoustic music, he has worked with Ensemble LíItineraire (France), Ensemble Antidogma (Turin), Grupo CÌrculo (Madrid), Duo-Di·logos (Brazil) and INA-GRM. He is the founder and former-director (1989-2005) of the Center for Documentation of Contemporary Music (CDMC) at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil, where he is a professor of composition, counterpoint and fugue. His research includes music digital library, music cataloging and the development of ideal acoustical spaces for musical research and performance.
Mosaico cruzado (2008) was composed by images and rhytms, or sound pulsations emerging when listening several soundscapes in confluences and interaction. Besides a reverb in the 1th part and a little time stretch on 2 archives to adjust rythms, there is no effects in the sounds.

Adina Izarra dijo...

CATALINA PERALTA Bogotá-Colombia (1963)
She is Associate Professor at the Department of Music of the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá where she has teached composition and electroacoustic music since 1996.
Composer of the Vienna Academy of Music. Magister Artium at the University Mozarteum-Salzburg.

Freedom in Hot & Cold

A part of the samples used, were recorded at one of the main streets of Bogotá, the Carrera 7th on Thursday the 5th of July 2007, during a very big natural manifestation of people of all kind of political thinking, as a protest against the assassination of 11 deputies from the region El Valle, that were kidnapped aprox. 9 years ago, they became hostages by the guerrilla group the Farc. People protested against the Farc, violence, kidnapping, war; they were asking for peace, for freedom.
The other samples were from the cold side of the world, ice breaking and sound of dripping and running water.

Adina Izarra dijo...

Daniel Schachter (www.schachter.netfirms.com)

Born in Buenos Aires in 1953. Composer and researcher, professor and Researcher at the Nat. University of Lanús (UNLa) where he is one of the Artistic Directors of the International Festival Sonoimágenes and at the Nat. University of Tres de Febrero, both in Argentina, and founder member of the RedASLA (Network for Latinamerican Sonic Arts). He presented his music and lectures at Conferences, Festivals and Concert Series around the world. Among these, he had two commissions from the INA.GRM for the 1996 / 2006 seasons, several participations at the Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival (USA), the Festival Synthèse (Bourges, France) and at the 2004 Sonic Arts Network Conference "Soundcircus" in Leicester (UK) thanks to the support of the British Academy. After that event, his talk was published by Organised Sound magazine (Cambridge University Press).. His music has been edited by the UNLa, Cosentino Records (Buenos Aires), the National Endowment for the Arts of Argentina and Pogus Records (New York, USA).

broad-A-broad

To work with sounds from my own environment plus a world of samples by colleagues living so far was a big challenge and a great pleasure for me.
“broad-A-broad” shows a kind of Sunday morning old wooden subway trip to the district of San Telmo where street vendors are mixed with local singers and people from different universes. Urban activity and sounds recorded at open air are central but not exclusive. From the other part of the world I looked for similar sonic situations or very contrasting but whose inclution made sense, like a child’s cry, people talking or singing, the sound of elsewhere wind, drippings, the ocean, etc. The title has to do with this kind of ambiguity among such diverse sonic theatres.

Adina Izarra dijo...

Adina Izarra
Born in 1959, in Caracas. Obtained a Dphil form de University of York, UK en 1989. At the moment she teaches at Simon Bolivar University where she directs the “Laboratorio Digital de Música”. In the year 2002 she was elected member of the Collegium of Latin American Composers “Colegio de Compositores Latinoamericanos de Música de Arte”.
http://prof.usb.ve/aizarra

10∘29´N
In spite of living in South América, Caracas is situated 10º29´N of the ecuator, and my home 66º 53´W. This work is based on Venezuelan birds: Tordos, Guacharacas, Guacamayas. There is also the very characteristic Amolador call, a very old Spanish tradition from Galicia still present in Caracas.
From the north samplers I chose also birds, and especially the sound of stones, trying to turn them into some kind of maracas.