DCS Concert

The DCS Concert was held November 12th in Pollack Hall at 8pm.

"Kontakte (1959), for four-channel tape" - Karlheinz Stockhausen

 Kontakte - an enormously successful early electronic work - exists in
 two versions. The first one, presented on this concert, is the
 quadraphonic tape composition by itself. The second version adds a
 pianist and a percussionist playing with the tape. [NB: the latter
 version will be performed by the SMCQ on November 15 in Redpath Hall,
 with pianist Brigitte Poulin and percussionist D'Arcy Gray.] The
 following comments were made by Stockhausen at an introduction to a
 performance in Stockholm in 2001.
  

 "Kontakte means 'contacts'; what is in contact. First of all, in
 Kontakte there are families of sounds. I started making, in 1958,
 families of sounds. I made a lot of sounds with a special technique
 of pulse technique (that is not important now), which had no
 association. They sounded strange, from very complex noises to very
 clearly pitched sounds, a whole series, and I worked already at the
 very beginning in transposing these sounds, or producing them, with
 many different scales, so no longer with chromatic scales, but with
 42 different scales. The largest was the fifths, for the biggest or
 widest noises, and the smallest was the fifths subdivided in more
 than 30 steps, because it was possible for the first time to work
 with these scales, and I was very interested to see what happens if I
 work with all different kinds of steps... Kontakte is the first work
 which not only allows, like in Gesang der Jünglinge,...which was the
 first electronic music for four tracks, when sounds rotate and then
 contacts between different angles of the room, but in Kontakte it
 goes much further. I constructed a special rotation table with
 microphones around it and a speaker in the middle, and sounds on the
 speaker, and then it rotates up to 6 revolutions per second, and I
 recorded these rotations through the microphones on a multi-channel
 machine, and now I can project them in the hall."

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"Resonances (2005, revised), 
 solo percussion and live electronics " - Jacob David Sudol                                
 Fernando Rocha , percussion

 Resonances (2005) is entirely based upon the physical
 phenomena of resonance. In this work, metallic percussion is
 emphasized. In Zen/Buddhist philosophy, a bell's ringing, or
 resonance, represents eternity's fabric. In this work the ringing of
 the bell is expanded to include the resonance of metallic percussion
 instruments (bells pitched and unpitched), the spatial environment of
 the performance, and the physchological resonance of musical ideas.

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"Losing Touch (1994), solo percussion and tape " - Edmund J. Campion                                   
 Fernando Rocha , percussion

 En composant Losing Touch pour vibraphone solo et bande, j'ai voulu
 réaliser une sorte d'unité timbrique en dérivant la majorité des sons
 électroniques de l'analyse et de la resynthèse d'échantillons
 préenregistrés de vibraphone. Cette démarche incluait la mise au
 point de vibraphones échantillonnés, ainsi que d'instruments hybrides
 dérivés du vibraphone, obtenus à l'aide du programme Additive,
 développé à l'Ircam. Pour la seconde partie de mon travail
 précompositionnel, j'ai isolé tous les ensembles numériques
 construits à partir des facteurs du nombre 120. Chacun de ses
 constituants, lorsqu'on en fait la somme, est égal à l'un des
 facteurs (c'est à dire: 1+2=3, ou bien 2+5+6+10+12+15+30+40=120, etc
 ). Dans cette pièce, ces ensembles numèriques fonctionnent en tant
 que durées. Bien entendu, ces procédures techniques n'ont en fait été
 qu'un outil au service de fins purement subjectives. Les ensembles
 rythimiques et harmoniques ont été conçus comme une alternative ou
 plutôt un enrichissement des pratiques harmoniques et métriques
 occientales et non-occidentales traditionelles. Ainsi, ici, le temps
 frappé est défini par la simultanéité rytimique périodique
 sous-tendant le système. Les canons circulaires qui en résultent ont
 été conçus pour être spatialisés ainsi la polyphonie plus évidente et
 produisant un effet global de matière sculptée, à l'intérieur de
 l'oeuvre.

"Vers le vide (2005, world premiere), 
 saxophone and live electronics " - David Adamcyk                              
 Adam Kinner, saxophone

  Register and spatialisation are the two main parameters used in the
 composition of Vers le vide. The register of the piece evolves from
 very wide at the beginning to extremely narrow and high at the end.
 During this process, the electronic part constantly circulates in the
 six speakers, and adds and substracts layers to the saxophone,
 mimicking a swelling and contracting effect.

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 Biographical Notes:

 David Adamcyk recently completed a Master's degree in composition at
 McGill University under the supervision of Brian Cherney. His works
 have been performed around Canada and most recently at the Banff
 Center for the Arts and the National Arts Center in Ottawa. His piece
 for solo clarinet, wind symphony and electronics, Balbuzard, was
 awarded a second prize at the SOCAN young composers competition.
 During 2005-06, David Adamcyk is Guest Composer of the McGill Digital
 Composition Studios.
 
 Edmund J. Campion was born in Dallas Texas in 1957. He received his
 Doctorate degree in composition at Columbia University and attended
 the Paris Conservatory where he worked with composer Gérard Grisey.
 In 1994 he was commissioned by IRCAM (L'Institut de Recherche et
 Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris to produce a large scale
 work for interactive electronics and midi-grand piano (Natural
 Selection) (ICMC 2002). Campion is currently an Associate Professor
 of Music at the University of Berkeley in California where he also
 serves as the Composer in Residence at CNMAT (The Center for New
 Music and AudioTechnologies).
 
 Fernando Rocha is Professor of Music at Minas Gerais Federal
 University (UFMG) in Brazil. He holds degrees from UFMG and Sao Paulo
 State University. He is currently pursuing his doctoral degree at
 McGill University with D'Arcy Philip Gray. He has performed in many
 contemporary music festivals in Brazil, Argentina, United States,
 Portugal, and Canada. From 1999 to 2004, he directed the UFMG
 Percussion Ensemble performing seventy-two concerts and recording a
 CD. In 2004, Rocha hosted the 1st International Percussion Festival
 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil with musicians from Brazil, the United
 States, Portugal, France, and Canada.
 
 Adam Kinner is a fourth year jazz performance student at McGill
 University. He has performed extensively in Montreal, Toronto and the
 north-eastern United-States. His interests range from funk/rock bands
 to music and dance improvisation groups.
 
 Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 - ) is a modern composer. Born in Burg
 Modarath, near Cologne (German: Koln), he studied at the Cologne
 Musikhochschule and University (1947-51), at Darmstadt in 1951 and
 with Messiaen in Paris (1951-53). From 1954 to 1956, at the
 University of Bonn, he studied phonetics, acoustics, and information
 theory and composition. After lecturing at the contemporary music
 seminars at Darmstadt (1957), Stockhausen gave lectures and concerts
 in Europe and North America. Stockhausen has worked with serial and
 electronic procedures, with spatial placements of sound sources, and
 with graphical notation. In most of his works, elements are played
 off against one another, simultaneously and successively: in
 Kontrapunkte (1953) pairs of instruments and extremes of note values
 "confront" one another; in Gruppen (1959) fanfares and passages of
 varying speed are flung between three full orchestras, giving the
 impression of movement in space. Stockhausen has written over 300
 individual works. Since 1977 he has been working on a single enormous
 opera in seven parts, entitled Licht. In the early 90's he gained
 access to all the recordings of his music he had made to that point,
 and began his own record company to make this music permanently
 available on compact disc. He also designs and prints his own musical
 scores
 
 Jacob David Sudol was born in Des Moines Iowa. He is a second year
 masters student at McGill University where he studies with
 composition John Rea and electronic music with Sean Ferguson. In May
 2004, Jacob graduated from the University of Arizona with a
 Bachelors' of Music in Composition (with honours) and Piano
 Performance. His previous mentors include Dan Asia, Dan Coleman, and
 Craig Walsh in composition. Jacob is currently composing a
 large-scale work for ensemble and live electronics as student
 composer in residence for the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble and
 the Digital Composition Studios.