Release Date: December 11, 2020
Catalog #: RR8043
Format: Digital & Physical
21st Century
Avant-Garde
Electroacoustic
Electronic
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Mind & Machine, Volume Three

Organic And Electronic Works

Gemma Peacocke composer
Jeffrey Bowen composer
Hubert Howe composer
Kyle Vanderburg composer
Navid Bargrizan composer
Julius Bucsis composer

MIND & MACHINE VOLUME THREE offers a new look into the Ravello Records series of electro-acoustic and electronic music lauded by critics as “interesting and captivating” (Cinemusical). This latest edition features an array of composers and sound-artists who offer his or her own striking exploration into the means by which technology can be used to alter time and form to create entirely new musical experiences.

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Performance Video

Jeffrey Bowen – What Will Sound (was already sound)

Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Skin (Version for Alto Saxophone & Electronics) Gemma Peacocke José Antonio Zayas Cabán, alto saxophone; Gemma Peacocke, electronics 7:02
02 What Will Sound (Was Already Sound) Jeffrey Bowen Maja Cerar, violin; Jeffrey Bowen, electronics 9:14
03 Improvisation on the Undertone Series Hubert Howe Hubert Howe 7:38
04 Creatures from the Black Bassoon Kyle Vanderburg Kyle Vanderburg 8:33
05 Lava Ilogica (Version for Electronics) Navid Bargrizan Navid Bargrizan 9:48
06 Yellow Julius Bucsis Julius Bucsis 3:04

SKIN
Recorded 2019 at the University of Iowa School of Music Recital Hall in Iowa City IA
Recording Engineer James Edel

WHAT WILL SOUND (WAS ALREADY SOUND)
Recorded March 1, 2020 at Oktaven Audio in Mount Vernon NY
Session Producer & Engineer Ryan Streber
Assistant Engineer Edwin Huet

IMPROVISATION ON THE UNDERTONE SERIES
Performed, recorded, and engineered by Hubert Howe

CREATURES FROM THE BLACK BASSOON
Recorded December 7, 2011 at The University of Oklahoma in Norman OK
Performed, recorded, and engineered by Kyle Vanderburg

LAVA ILLOGICA
Recorded 2016 at the University of Florida‘s Electronic Music Studio in Gainesville FL
Recorded and engineered by Navid Bargrizan

YELLOW
Recorded March, 2011 at the composer’s home studio in Williamstown NJ
Performed, recorded, and engineered by Julius Bucsis

Executive Producer Bob Lord

Executive A&R Sam Renshaw
A&R Director Brandon MacNeil
A&R Quinton Blue, Jacob SMith

VP, Audio Production Jeff LeRoy
Recording Sessions Director Levi Brown
Audio Director, Editing & Mixing (track 2) Lucas Paquette
Mastering Shaun Michaud

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Patrick Niland, Sara Warner

Artist Information

Gemma Peacocke

Composer

Composer Gemma Peacocke grew up in Hamilton, New Zealand, and she moved to the United States in 2014. She writes a broad range of music including art-pop songs, EDM-inspired tracks and orchestral music. She has a particular love of interdisciplinary work and often collaborates with artists, writers, and theatre designers.

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Jeffrey Bowen

Composer

Jeffrey Bowen is a composer and guitarist currently living in Seattle, Washington. His compositions feature gradually evolving processes and explorations of liminal spaces, and have been performed by Pascal Gallois, Maja Cerar, Beta Collide, Ensemble DissonArt, and the Luminosity Orchestra, among other ensembles in the USA and Europe.

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Hubert Howe

Composer

Hubert Howe was born in Portland, Oregon and grew up in Los Angeles, California, where he began his musical studies as an oboist. He was educated at Princeton University, where he studied with J. K. Randall, Godfrey Winham and Milton Babbitt, and from which he received the A.B., M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees. He was one of the first researchers in computer music, and became Professor of Music and Director of the Electronic Music studios at Queens College of the City University of New York. He also taught at the Juilliard School from 1974 through 1994. In 1988-89 he held the Endowed Chair in Music at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. From 1989 to 1998, 2001 to 2002, and Fall 2007, he was Director of the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College.

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Kyle Vanderburg

Composer

Composer and Sound Artist Kyle Vanderburg (b. 1986) grew up in southeast Missouri where the Ozark foothills meet the Mississippi River valley. Raised on southern gospel and American hymnody, his music walks the line between eliciting nostalgia and devising innovative sonic worlds. His electronic works often play with familiar sounds in new contexts (like a teakettle that turns into a thunderstorm, or duct tape that brings about the apocalypse); his acoustic works feature memorable melodies and a very fluid sense of time.

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Navid Bargrizan

Composer

Nearly all of Navid Bargrizan’s compositions explore intonational and tuning concepts, ranging from just intonation and extended equal temperaments (e.g. 24-tone or 36-tone equal temperament) to various microtonal concepts adopted from diverse musical cultures. Since 2014, his experiments with microtonality have resulted in 13 premieres and more than 40 performances of his works in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Austria, including at New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium, Eastern Music Festival, Florida Contemporary Festival, and conferences of the Society of Composers, Inc.

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Julius Bucsis

Composer

Julius Bucsis is an award-winning composer, electric guitarist, and visual artist. His compositions span a range of genres and include works for acoustic and electric instruments as well as computer generated audio and video. Since 2011 his works have been presented at almost 200 events across the world. His compositions have been included on albums released by Ablaze, Ravello Records, RMN Classical, and Soundiff. He received a Doctor of Arts degree from Ball State University.

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José Antonio Zayas Cabán

José Antonio Zayas Cabán

Saxophonist

Recent winner of the New Music USA Project Grant, and now McKnight Fellow, has presented performances and taught master classes throughout Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. A native Puerto Rican (born and raised in Mayagüez PR) and musician activist, Zayas Cabán now resides in Minneapolis MN and is building an artistic career focused on developing projects, albums, and collaborations that address, respond to, and raise awareness about current events and social issues.

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Maja Cerar

Maja Cerar

Violinist

Violinist Maja Cerar’s repertoire ranges from the Baroque to the present, and her stage experience includes performances with live electronics as well as theater and dance. Since her debut in the Zürich Tonhalle in 1991, she has performed internationally as a soloist with orchestras and given recitals with distinguished artists. She has played at festivals such as the Davos “Young Artists in Concert,” Gidon Kremer’s Lockenhaus Festival, the ISCM World Music Days in Ljubljana, the ICMC (Singapore, Barcelona, New York, Texas), SEAMUS (Texas, Arizona, Florida), the “Viva Vivaldi” festival in Mexico City, and numerous others. In 2016, she was the featured performer at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, an event of the New York Philharmonic Biennial, and in 2019 she was a featured performer at the Diffrazioni Multimedia Festival in Florence, Italy. Her collaborative works have been featured at the “Re:New Frontiers of Creativity” symposium celebrating the 250th anniversary of Columbia University and “LITSK” festival at Princeton University. Since 2014 she has also created her own works, fostered by The Tribeca Film Institute’s “Tribeca Hacks” and by the Future Music Lab at the Atlantic Music Festival, involving robotics and wearable motion sensors. Maja Cerar has premiered and recorded numerous works written for and dedicated to her. She has worked with many composers, including Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Sebastian Currier, R. Luke DuBois, Beat Furrer, Elizabeth Hoffman, György Kurtág, Alvin Lucier, Katharine Norman, Yoshiaki Onishi, Morton Subotnick, and John Zorn. She graduated from the Zurich-Winterthur Conservatory and earned a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Columbia University, where she is currently a member of the Music performance faculty.

www.majacerar.com

Notes

This country was built and is constantly remade from the illogics of skin tone—of difference, of the meaning of particular skin tones, of how those who “pass” for other groups become unreadable and illegible. U.S. land was made from the genocide and theft of Indigenous nations and lands. It was designed to service white land-owning and people-owning elite. Anxieties about “mixing,” about the ways sexuality plays out between people, between races, between and among genders, are endemic to this system. Born and raised in New Zealand and currently residing in Brooklyn, composer Gemma Peacocke arrived in the U.S. curious about its racial logics “and the relationship between violence and sexuality.” The co-founder (with Washington) of Kinds of Kings and PhD candidate at Princeton University merges past and present bodies and ideas “wending between the intricate layers of privilege, power, and shame associated with race and sex, down into the dark roots of the country’s history.” And yet, skin is also a point of connection, “a place of weathering, of impact, of touch.”

Skin is composed for alto saxophone and electronics and explores a variety of techniques and textures, as a cognate, to performer José Antonio Zayas Cabán, to “different shades of skin color.” It sounds like an exploration, an aural mapping of this unfamiliar, colored, textured world. The piece opens atmospherically, with static, rhythmic, trilling electronics reminiscent of scratches, as the saxophone joins with long tones. At 1:31, Cabán plays the piece’s main motive (repeated again at 4:37, 5:01, and 5:21) slowly, but with energy, as if trying it out for the first time against the slower-moving “background” of electronics. Extended techniques like bending pitches by quarter tone abound. At 3:02, the piece slides into the long, low, reedy tones of an electronically-modified saxophone. The saxophone explores new modal territory, playing around the harmonic minor scale. After the electronics play a long, descending pitch, the piece returns (4:25) to the rhythmic percussion and opening motive, faster, more confident. In addition to quarter tone pitch-bending, the saxophone makes use of other extended techniques, like flutter tonguing (5:16). After a long, ascending tone (5:59), an analog to the previous descending tone, the piece ends suddenly, with a quarter-tone pitch bend.

— Gemma Peacocke

I composed What Will Sound (was already sound) after having two aesthetic experiences. One was an introduction to the art of William Kentridge, specifically through his video installation What Will Come (has already come). In this work, anamorphic charcoal animations are projected onto a white circle, which supports a cylindrical mirror in the center. When viewed directly, these charcoal figures are difficult to make out, but by moving to a certain vantage point, one can recognize familiar images, reflected in (and corrected by) the mirror’s convex surface. What struck me at the time was how one has to take in the work, eyes flitting back and forth between the distorted charcoal drawings and their reflections, in a kind of perceptual dance between two contrasting perspectives.

This encounter with Kentridge’s art primed me for the second experience, which occurred while hearing a performance of J.S. Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, by the violinist Luke Fitzpatrick. While listening, I felt my attention travelling between a conspicuous gestural surface (of bow hair on string, of heavy attacks and arpeggiated arcs) and a more recessed harmonic aura. It was a dynamic, spatial experience, and I became fascinated with the idea of exploring this narrow but fertile musical territory.

While composing What Will Sound (was already sound), I used a recording of Luke’s performance to produce a transcription of the complex rhythms of this gestural surface, which then formed the temporal scaffolding for the violin material. The live electronic component acts in a manner somewhat analogous to Kentridge’s cylindrical mirror: through its series of convolution filters—derived from the same recording—the electronics extract periodic components from the gestures of the violin, building harmonic resonances apart from, yet dependent upon, the live violin material. The violin and electronics are thus interdependent elements, which realize the piece’s material together, as an oscillation between the immediate moment of live performance and a secondary plane of historical resonance.

I am grateful to Luke Fitzpatrick for his role in the genesis of this piece, and to Maja Cerar for developing it into its present form.

— Jeffrey Bowen

The undertone series is a subharmonic sequence of partials that inverts the intervals of the overtone series. This idea has existed for a long time, but it has had no practical application in music because it cannot be produced in any simple way by musical instruments. There are no problems producing it in computer music, because any frequencies can be produced.

In using the undertone series, the partials go down from the fundamental rather than up. In the overtone series, the number of partials doubles above each octave: there are two in the first octave above, four in the next, eight in the next, sixteen in the next, and so forth. The higher you go, the closer the partials become. In the lower registers, sine tones sound very muffled and indistinct. It is only when they get into the register of the octave below middle C that they begin to sound like normal tones. In fact, most of the tones below this area produced by musical instruments consist of complex sounds that include many upper partials.

With the undertone series, more and more partials are clustered into the lower registers, where they are more indistinct. This means that the “fundamentals” have to be in very high octaves in order to produce usable components, and that only fundamentals at least one octave above middle C are useful at all.

In this work, there are many tones that originate one to two octaves above the highest note on the piano. Those notes are audible, but we don’t usually hear them in music. For notes in the extreme high range, the piece uses only “upper” partials (which are actually lower), and notes in the lower range use only “lower” partials (which are in the higher range).

The work was composed in 2019 and generated by the csound program. It is a companion piece to my composition Improvisation on the Overtone Series, written 43 years earlier.

— Hubert Howe

Creatures from the Black Bassoon is, as the title suggests, a virtual menagerie of beasts and environments fashioned entirely from processed and unprocessed sounds of the bassoon. Key clicks, reed squeaks and squawks, multiphonics, notes played through various stages of assembly and disassembly, and other traditional and extended techniques are organized by similar properties into species. Some of our creatures appear to be cute, chirpy, fuzzy critters, while others are vicious predators. These beings are placed in a number of tableaus of length devised by the golden ratio, with certain sections designated as “windows” with substantial contrast to the surrounding sections.

— Kyle Vanderburg

Several years ago, I read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s seminal philosophical treatise Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (originally published as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, 1922) in German––the language it was initially written in. Although, throughout the years, I have gone back to TLP, I delved into the English version of the book for the first time in 2014. As I compared the latter with the German version, I noticed the abundance of materials that have got lost in translation. I was not surprised to figure out later that the first English translation of this text turned up to be, in fact, quite controversial, as scholars juxtaposed it with the German text. My piece Lava Ilogica metaphorically addresses the issue of translation; all that gets lost in translation when a dense, complicated philosophical text, such as Wittgenstein’s, is translated to another language. I chose parts of TLP that I found most meaningful, and recorded four voices reciting these sections in German and English––shout out to Dr. James Paul Sain, Dr. Morgan Rich, and Dong Jin shin, who kindly recited the text, beside myself as the fourth reciter. Then, I multiplied the voices, digitally manipulated them, and mixed them down to a “volcano” of words, sentences, effects, and sounds, where an almost unrecognizable “lava” pours down the hill for approximately 10 minutes, making Wittgenstein’s “logical” construction somewhat “illogical”; Hence, the title: Lava Ilogica. In 2016, this composition was presented at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival and Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium in 16 channels, as well as the Unbalanced Connection electroacoustic concert series at the University of Florida in 8 channels.

— Navid Bargrizan

Yellow was inspired by the observed behavior of the sub atomic particles produced in particle accelerators. After a collision between the accelerated test particles, new particles appear, scatter in all directions, and disappear. The piece was composed in 2011. It is the fourth movement from a four-movement composition, A Glimpse beyond the Event Horizon. When I composed the longer piece, I considered each movement to be a complete composition. Yellow was accepted into the International Csound Conference 2013 held at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, WOCMAT 2013 held in Luzhu, Taiwan and CICTeM 2019 held in Buenos Aries, Argentina.

— Julius Bucsis

Explore more albums in this series

Mind & Machine, Volume Two

Mind & Machine