“Gravebirth” is a unique performance merging diverse artistic elements to present parallel narratives of social oppression and the spirit of humanity.
The performance features the poetic text “Zendegi (life)” by contemporary Iranian poet Erfan Nazar Ahari, as interpreted by Nasim Khorassani, alongside the novel “Silence” by Syusaku Endo, brought to performative art by Kosuke Matsuda. While rooted in different historical contexts, these texts converge to depict struggles against oppression and the exploration for freedom.
“Gravebirth” intertwines sound, dance, and visual images, including light and projection, to weave a narrative that resonates with the ongoing Woman-Life-Freedom movement in Iran. The sonic landscape includes sampled folksong, noise, drone, and silence, creating a rich tapestry that encompasses both performers and audience members.
Director Kosuke Matsuda, choreographer and lighting designer Elba Emicente Sanchez, and composers/sound designers Janet Sit, Kevin Schwenkler and Timothy Gmeiner, alongside visual designers/video editors Mingyong Cheng and Nasim Khorassani, have crafted a performance that transcends boundaries, aiming to redefine the essence of humanity in the face of hardship. confront social oppression. Referencing “Zendegi (Life)” by contemporary Iranian woman poet Erfan Nazar Ahari and the novel “Silence” by Japanese author Syusaku Endo, Gravebirth aims to create a hopeful and optimistic expression of solidarity for people struggling for freedom.
On Thursday, February 22 at 5 p.m., the Qualcomm Institute’s IDEAS series hosts a live performance of composer Luigi Nono’s “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura,” performed by violinist/violist Marco Fusi, musician, artist and UC San Diego Ph.D. candidate Michelle Helene Mackenzie, and UC San Diego Associate Professor of Sound Design Bobby McElver. The piece will be performed using several hundred loudspeakers in a custom wave field synthesis array built by McElver.
Prior to his passing in 1990, Nono composed avant-garde classical music that mixed traditional instruments with choir and/or electronics. “La lontananza” is one such work that explores an “ever-changing soundscape” blending recordings and improvisation on the performers’ part.
Program Notes:
Before becoming a score, “La lontananza”was a sonic space.
It was a room, filled with the sounds of moving chairs, laughing and chatting, and microphones and a violin. Luigi Nono was sitting in that space, listening and taking notes, and pasting together sounds and ideas. His fascination with sounds is mixed with respect and appreciation for all of them, from the aristocracy of the violin’s nineteenth century repertoire to the everyday experience of a slamming door. Such a composite set of elements is equally welcomed within the audio material that Nono assembled for this piece, designing an ever-changing soundscape that allows and demands that performers play along with its heterogeneous components, treading their own path within the hour of sounds that Nono has offered.
When his attention focuses on the violin, Nono sits close to the performer, entering a most intimate and secret space that listeners cannot access. Nono listens with the ears of the violinist, and together with them, explores the stuttering of the bow before the string, the uncertainty of the fingers exploring the fingerboard, searching for a way into the oscillation of the sound before it is heard. It is within these minutiae that the violin utters its first sounds, and the listeners are drawn closer and closer to the strings, within the smallest of the dynamics.
“La lontananza” is conceived as a mental space, and it develops as a real space. The recorded material and the violin explore the unique peculiarities of each room where they perform, moving through islands of sounds and clouds of silence, estranged sounds and enveloping vibrations.
Each performance develops in a different and unforeseeable experience.
Performers:
Marco Fusi
Marco Fusi is a violinist/violist, a researcher in music performance, and a passionate advocate for the music of our time.
Among many collaborations with emerging and established composers, he has premiered works by Jessie Marino, Giacinto Scelsi, Yu Kuwabara, Salvatore Sciarrino and Kristine Tjøgersen, among others. Marco has performed with Pierre Boulez, Elena Schwarz, Lorin Maazel, Susanna Mälkki, Alan Gilbert, and frequently plays with leading contemporary ensembles including Klangforum Wien, MusikFabrik, Meitar Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, Ensemble Linea. He has recorded several solo albums, published by Kairos, Stradivarius, Col Legno, Da Vinci, Geiger Grammofon, New Focus Recordings. Marco also plays viola d’amore, commissioning new pieces and collaborating with composers to promote and expand existing repertoire for the instrument. He is currently Professor of Violin at the Conservatory of Alessandria and Fellow Researcher at the Orpheus Instituut of Gent.
Michelle Helene Mackenzie
Michelle Helene Mackenzie is a musician, artist, and researcher who works across electronic, ambient, and noise music. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Music at the University of California, San Diego. Mackenzie combines electronics, synthesis, voice, field recording, and amplified objects. She has released music independently and collaboratively with ISLA, Hotham Sound, and Music From Memory’s Second Circle, and has a collaborative forthcoming release with GRM Portraits. She has performed at INA-GRM’s Live Electronics Series, Leaving Records’s Listen to Music Outside in the Daylight Under a Free, Deep Blue (various), New Forms Festival, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Interplay Festival, Polygon Gallery, Sunset Terrace, UC San Diego, and various other events. Her sound works and commissions have been shown with 221A (Vancouver), Active Cultures (Los Angeles), Albertinum (Dresden), Dynamo Arts Association (Vancouver) Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo), Esker Foundation (Calgary), the Hand (NYC), Kadist Gallery (San Francisco), National Audiovisual Centre of Luxembourg (Dudelange), Patel Brown (Toronto/Montreal), Richmond Art Gallery, SFU Galleries (Vancouver), Unitt/Pitt (Vancouver), and Western Front (Vancouver).
Bobby McElver
Bobby McElver is a sound designer and composer who works in theater, dance, music and spatial audio for the performing arts. As a member of the iconoclastic Wooster Group from 2011 to 2016, he worked closely with founder and artistic director Elizabeth LeCompte on several of their experimental works, including “Early Shaker Spirituals,” “The Room,” “Vieux Carré,” “Hamlet,” “Early Plays,” and more.
As an artist-engineer, McElver’s research focuses on developing new spatial audio technology — specifically Wave Field Synthesis and “sound holograms” — and applying the technology in context of an artistic work. In 2018 he fabricated a Wave Field Synthesis array with 372 loudspeakers based on research at The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (EMPAC). One of the most extensive WFS arrays in the world, it allows him to place sound accurately in 3D space, creating “holophones,” or sounds that float and move in physical space. He is an associate professor of sound design with the UC San Diego Department of Theatre and Dance.
QI Composer-in-Residence Miller Puckette, renowned for designing and developing two of the most widespread programs for computer music, will perform alongside guests Kerry Hagan and Irwin as part of the 2024 Initiative for the Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences (IDEAS) series.
The performance will include select musical compositions by Puckette and Hagan, working together as “the Higgs whatever,” and by Puckette and percussionist Irwin as the duo “øther.”
the Higgs whatever
Kerry Hagan is a composer and researcher who explores both acoustic and computer-based mediums. She focuses on creating real-time techniques for spatialization and employs stochastic algorithms in her musical endeavors. Hagan strives to achieve aesthetic and philosophical goals, drawing inspiration from mathematical and natural processes. Her work uniquely merges art, science, and technology across diverse domains.
In her role as a researcher, Hagan delves into real-time algorithmic methods for music composition and sound synthesis, as well as spatialization techniques for 3D sounds and electronic/electroacoustic musicology. She has showcased her music and research at SEAMUS, ICMC, SMC, EMS, and various conferences and festivals dedicated to electronic and computer music.
Working as “the Higgs whatever,” Kerry Hagan and Miller Puckette have developed a sound installation called Remnant that explores our ability to sense that someone is standing close to us, solely through the way we hear ambient sounds reflecting off them. Remnant has been presented both in Brooklyn and in Birmingham, England. Hagan and Puckette have also collaborated on several musical compositions, of which they will be presenting a sampling in concert on Thursday, January 11, 2024. One such piece, “Who Was That Timbre I Saw You With,” uses Leap controllers to make hand-gesture-to-sound translators.
øther
Irwin has engaged in the fields of music, production, composition, and sound design since the 1990s. Additionally, he has served as a supporting musician for numerous music tours across various genres along with contemporary solo live electronic performances.
Miller Puckette and Irwin are the duo “øther.” They use a pair of hand-built percussion instruments, each with a piezoelectric pickup, to drive a variety of computer processes, both as control sources and as activation for different types of nonlinear resonators.
