Month: March 2023

DETAILS:

This IDEAS performance features UC San Diego Professor Emeritus of Music Roger Reynolds, a Pulitzer prize-winning American composer known for blending traditional music with sounds newly enabled by technology. In “PERSISTENCE,” Reynolds; Miller Puckette, UC San Diego Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music; Peter Ko and Alexis Descharmes, cellists; and Jacob Sundstrom, composer in computer music, showcase a live cello performance in conversation with technology. A six speaker system allows for a more immersive experience in Atkinson Hall’s auditorium. 

Bios 

Roger Reynolds is known for his integration of diverse ideas and resources, and for seamlessly blending traditional musical sounds and those now enabled by technology. His work responds to texts both poetic (Beckett, Borges, Stevens, Ashbery, Dickinson) and mythological (Aeschylus, Euripides, Heraclitus). He is noted for “wizardry in sending music flying through space: whether vocal, instrumental, or computerized”[ TheVillage Voice]. In 1969, Reynolds accepted a tenured appointment at UC San Diego and helped establish its Music Department as a destination program. Reynolds won early recognition with Fulbright, Guggenheim, and National Institute of Arts and Letters Awards, and also grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, and a Fellowship from the Institute for Current World Affairs. In 1989, Reynolds won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for the string orchestra composition, Whispers Out of Time. His over 150 compositions are published by Edition Peters, New York; several dozen CDs and DVDs of his music have been commercially released; and he is author of five books and numerous journal articles and chapters, some of them the result of collaborations with American, Canadian, and French scientists. Other collaborators have been choreographers Lucinda Childs and Bill T. Jones, as well as theater directors Tadashi Suzuki (Shizuoka, Japan) and Tina Parker (Massachusetts and London). His performer partners have included Irvine Arditti (London), The Arditti Quartet, Steven Schick (San Diego), Yuji Takahashi (Tokyo), Alexis Descharmes (Burgundy), Pablo Gómez Cano (Encinada), Anthony Burr (San Diego), Eric Huebner (Buffalo/New York), and Jacqueline Leclair (Montréal). In 2009 Reynolds was appointed University Professor — the first artist to be so honored in the University of California system’s history. In 1998, the Library of Congress established a Special Collection of his work. His scores and correspondence are also included in the Paul Sacher Collection in Basel, Switzerland. Reynolds has held guest appointments at Harvard, Yale, Amherst, University of Illinois, Darmstadt, Sibelius Academy, and CUNY.  Reynolds has received commissions from the Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Diego, and National Symphony orchestras, the French Ministry of Culture, the Suntory Foundation, The BBC Proms Festival, the British Arts Council, and the Siemens Foundation. Reynolds will be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May.

Miller Puckette is a UC San Diego Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music and former associate director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. He was a member of MIT’s Media Lab from its inception until 1987, and then a researcher at IRCAM (l’Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Musique/Acoustique), founded by composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. At IRCAM he wrote Max, a widely used computer music software environment, released commercially in 1990 and now available from Cycling74.com. Puckette is also the author of Pure Data (Pd), a real-time performing platform for audio, video and graphical programming language for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works, written in the 1990s with input from many others in the computer music and free software communities. Puckette obtained a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from MIT (1980) and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard (1986), winning a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship and the Putnam Prize Scholarship. 

Peter Ko is a cellist, active performer and teacher pursuing his Doctor of Musical Arts at UC San Diego. As a performer, his training and projects have taken him across the United States, Mexico, Canada and Europe. His collaborations with other renowned musical artists include work with Mark Fewer, the Dover String Quartet, Steve Schick, Aleck Karis and Charles Curtis. Ko has performed at the soundSCAPE music festival in Italy, with the Palimpsest ensemble, and currently serves as principal celllist for the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus. He holds a Master of Music from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and a Bachelor of Arts from UC San Diego.

Jacob Sundstrom is a composer and UC San Diego Ph.D. candidate whose work has branched out into several mediums and fields including new media, installation and data-driven art. His musical work has been performed by ensembles including Inverted Space, the JACK Quartet and the Seattle Chamber Players. It has been performed or played in places as diverse as Radiophrenia in Scotland, art galleries and underground venues in Seattle, and the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C). As a researcher, Sundstrom has helped develop brain-computer musical interfaces for use in performance settings and novel spatialization algorithms. His work has been published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience and his spatial work in IEEE. 

Alexis Descharmes is an active ambassador of numerous cello repertoires and one of about eleven members of his generation to be selected by “Diapason” magazine as a representative of the French cello. Born in 1977, and trained at the Paris Conservatoire, Descharmes was the winner of the Valentino Bucchi (1997) and Avant-Scènes (1999) competitions. He has been supported by various foundations (Fondation Jean Brizard, Fonds Instrumental Français, Fondation Meyer, Mécénat Musical Société Générale and Fondation Natexis), and worked in the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Alternance and Ensemble Court-circuit. He collaborates regularly with IRCAM on many projects. The dedicatee of some fifty contemporary works, concertante and solo alike, Descharmes’s discography consists of some twenty recordings, in solo or with ensembles with which he has appeared at numerous festivals and in some thirty countries. Descharmes joined the Orchestra of the Paris National Opera in 2006. Since 2004, he has collaborated regularly with the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. for the Contemporary Music Series of La Maison Française. He became a member of the NGA New Music Ensemble in 2010.

DETAILS:

Dust surrounds us at all times. The most common dust particles, composed of our dead skin cells, can be found gathering quietly in places around our homes. Even the most common dust mixes with cosmic stardust and particles that have traveled by wind from remote and distant places. Migration of dust from the Sahara Desert across the Atlantic ocean to the rainforest of South America occurs throughout the year and replenishes the soil with nutrients and supplies phytoplankton with phosphorus and iron. Depending on where we live, the dust composition varies widely. In places like the Salton Sea, where the supply of water has ceased, wind abrades the exposed sea playa and transports dust particles that contain unhealthy amounts of toxic chemicals such as cadmium present in pesticides, causing asthma and other respiratory ailments for local residents. As noted by Hannah Holmes in “The Secret Life of Dust” in 2001, our world can be understood through a grain of dust that travels far and wide without borders.

But how do we study and visualize something mostly invisible, like dust particles?

“Everything is Dust” is a collaborative project with Sarah Aarons, an isotope geochemist, Ph.D. student Emmet Norris from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Victor Castaneda H, multimedia artist, and Heige Kim, an M.F.A. candidate from the University of California, San Diego’s Visual Arts Department. They are working on a speculative visual/aural art installation using the movements of dust particles in real time. By using a similar scientific instrument that collects dust in specific research sites such as the San Jacinto Peak in Riverside County, “Everything is Dust” metaphorically and abstractly visualizes how we share and interact with the nearly invisible layers of dust particles through an immersive installation comprised of real-time video feeds, data visualizations, and sound interlaced with archival material of dust at the Qualcomm Institute’s Calit2 ‘Black Box’ Theater.

Bios

Sarah Aarons was born and raised in Alaska. She obtained her Ph.D. in Geology from the University of Michigan in 2016, and she then received a University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine, followed by the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Chicago. Sarah joined the faculty at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego in 2019. Sarah’s research focuses on understanding and tracking earth surface processes in a variety of environments on both geologic timescales and throughout the modern. Some examples of research projects include tracing mineral dust sources in Antarctic ice during major climate transitions, probing the utility and application of newly developed isotope systems, and exploring the ecological significance of dust in a variety of environments.

Victor Castaneda H was born and raised in San Fernando Valley. He received an M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego. Castaneda H’s work deals with lapses in memory to create new ones by filling in the gaps of those memories, and he is currently working on his idea of the non-body. In which the experiences of the world’s organisms outside of the self can merge with the body and if it is even possible to achieve. He works with sculpture, digital spaces, and sound. His recent exhibitions include Oolong Gallery and his performance at The Brown Building.

Heige Kim’s multidisciplinary practice is tangible and conceptual investigations into everyday materials, remnants of our life that have been discarded in a forgotten landscape of waste sinks. Through artistic transformation and drawing upon scholars and artists across disciplines, she re-frames accumulating waste and explores the role of art in social and environmental change and art’s potential to form new relations. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and community-based projects in New York and California and working on her M.F.A. thesis.

Emmet Norris is interested in the interaction between climate systems and anthropogenic systems on the earth’s surface. He uses isotopic source apportionment techniques to characterize natural and anthropogenically emitted PM to understand their effect on climate, air quality and bioavailable nutrients. He has worked with dust from the artistic and emotional perspective as a designer with Studio Roosegaarde in The Netherlands, from the nutrient perspective as a farmer until age 18, from the human rights perspective with Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) in India, and on geologic timescales as a Ph.D. student. Being fully human looks like being part of nature, then asking questions and taking action as part of an intact ecological system.

Big thanks to Amy Alexander, Memo Akten, Xandro Segade, Anya Gallaccio, Janelle Iglesias, Grace Grothaus, Fred Lee and Henry Haoyu Wang for their help with creative and technical development. This project was made possible with generous support from the expert team at the Qualcomm Institute and Visual Arts Facilities.