The Mills College Music Department and the Center for Contemporary Music present Mills Music Now 2015-2016
MILLS PERFORMING GROUP: ZONES OF INFLUENCE
BY DAVID ROSENBOOM – a propositional cosmology activated in music for percussion and algorithmic instruments with auxiliary keyboard and glissando parts.
With performers William Winant: solo percussion; David Rosenboom: electronics,piano, violin; and Jinku Kim: video performance.
Saturday, January 30, 2016
8:00 pm
Littlefield Concert Hall
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For detailed information, please visit the Music Now webpage:
http://musicnow.mills.edu
Free to Mills students, faculty, and staff
$15 general/$10 seniors, non-Mills students, and Mills alums
Tickets may be purchased at the door, or online at:
http://www.boxofficetickets.com (keywords: Mills College)
(Mills Alums may purchase the student tickets at Box Office Tickets.)
Wheelchair accessible
Free parking on campus
Mills College
Music Department
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA 94613
________
Part I
The Winding of a Spring
a) The Stochastic Part
b) The Tripartite Structure
Part II
Closed Attracting Trajectories
a) Melody Set 1
b) Melody Set 2
Part III
Given the Senses the Real Pregeometry
Part IV
Epigenesis, Ontogenesis, Phylogenesis, Parthenogenesis
Part V
The Buckling of a Spring
Zones of Influence is a propositional cosmology activated in music. It is an example of propositional music, a point of view about composing in which composers might build proposed models of worlds, universes, evolution, brains, consciousness or whole domains of thought and life, and then proceed to make dynamical musical embodiments of these models, inviting us to experience them in spontaneously emerging sonic forms. My process for composing Zones of Influence in the early 1980s involved building such models with the idea that once built, they would be activated by the gloriously unpredictable virtuosity of a master performer. Everything was to be energized in vigorous live performance. So, the models became instruments.
The propositional models in Zones of Influence explore ideas about evolution and morphogenesis, thresholds of perception crossed when things transform themselves into other things, the nature of predictability and what it means to know something about a physical system and the dynamical nature of catastrophic change.
Among the many elements of musical language heard in the dynamical models of Zones of Influence, musical shapes are always prominent: shapes heard as melodies, shapes describing changes in speed, space and time, shapes in the microcosms of sound waves and the macro-forms of whole movements, the shapes of transforming functions that bend sound waves and musical forms into new sounds and forms, the shapes of probability rhythms that govern likelihoods for things happening and the shapes of glissandi swirling in a counterpoint matrix. All these shapes are related to each other. Most are derived from transformations of just two, freely composed, 60-note melodies, called the Origin Melody and Target Melody, which act as musical DNA for the entirety of Zones of Influence. All in all, 306 interrelated melodies appear, and every one results from some way of transforming the contours of the Origin Melody into those of the Target and vice versa. In the counterpoint structures of Zones of Influence shapes upon shapes emerge and intertwine up and down a holarchy of musical forms.
Some of these shapes are smooth, with only subtle changes appearing from shape to shape and sounding close to each other. Some are jagged, with mutated shapes moving far away from and bearing only distant, perceived relatedness to either the Origin or Target. This world of shapes led me to construct a system of counterpoint, within which the shapes are combined and recombined, like vines or veins intertwining, sharing features that refer to one another or to the Origin and Target. This sonic recombination produces newly emerging musical entities, and for this performance, Jinku Kim has added visual interpretations of this recombinant counterpoint. I hope that joyful musical explorers, active creative listeners, will find endless discoveries awaiting them in the fabric of this musical space. Zones of Influence is, most of all, an invitation to enjoy listening like a pioneer.
History
Zones of Influence was written during 1984 and 1985 for William Winant. We premiered the various parts of Zones of Influence in succession, as they were completed, and subsequently performed them all in many concerts in the U.S. and Canada for about ten years. At that time, the electronic parts were realized with the Touché, a digital keyboard instrument developed by Donald Buchla and myself in 1979. The interactive technology required to realize Zones of Influence has evolved through several iterations. The version offered today is the first that finally realizes all aspects of the propositional musical model I envisioned in the mid-1980s. Music technologist, Martijn Zwartjes, collaborated with me to create a new synthesis instrument, which we call the Touché II. I have used a variety of software tools over the years to develop the algorithmic compositional models.
Zones of Influence has been released on a double-CD with an extensive program booklet by Pogus Productions: http://www.pogus.com
Bios
David Rosenboom (b. 1947) is a composer, performer, interdisciplinary artist, author and educator known as a pioneer in American experimental music. During his long career, he has explored ideas about the spontaneous evolution of musical forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, multi-disciplinary composition and performance, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art and literature, interactive multi-media and new instrument technologies, generative algorithmic systems, art-science research and philosophy, and extended musical interface with the human nervous system. He holds the Richard Seaver Distinguished Chair in Music at California Institute of the Arts, where he is Dean of The Herb Alpert School of Music and serves as a board member of the Center for New Performance. He taught at Mills College from 1979 to 1990, where he held the Darius Milhaud Chair and was Professor of Music, Head of the Music Department, and Director of the Center for Contemporary Music. In the 1970s he was founding faculty and a professor in the Music Department at York University in Toronto. He studied at the University of Illinois in the 1960s with Salvatore Martirano, Lejaren Hiller, Kenneth Gaburo, Gordon Binkerd, Paul Rolland, Jack McKenzie, Soulima Stravinsky and others and was later awarded the George A. Miller Professorship as a visiting artist there. He has also taught or held positions in the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo, at Bard College, Simon Fraser University, San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale and Ionian University in Greece. His work is widely presented around the world. Website: http://www.davidrosenboom.com
William Winant (b. 1953) is a multi-faceted percussion artist, who has performed with some of the most innovative and creative musicians of our time, including John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Anthony Braxton, James Tenney, Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, Joan LaBarbara, Yo-Yo Ma, Mark Morris, Mike Patton, Takehisa Kosugi, Christian Wolff and many others. Composers who have written for him include John Cage, Lou Harrison, John Zorn, Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, David Rosenboom, Larry Polansky, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, Terry Riley, Fred Frith, and Wadada Leo Smith. He is principal percussionist with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and has been featured as a guest artist with many important groups, including Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Berkeley Symphony, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Oingo Boingo, Kronos Quartet, Sonic Youth, Mr. Bungle and in numerous projects with New York composer, John Zorn. He appears regularly on festivals worldwide and can be heard on many recording labels. He teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Mills College and the University of California at Berkeley. From 1984 to 1992 he was Artist in Residence at Mills College with the critically acclaimed Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, which premiered and recorded many new works for violin, piano and percussion. Also at Mills College in the 1980s, he and colleagues, David Rosenboom and Anthony Braxton, formed the innovative performer-composer group, Challenge, which performed widely and released several recordings. Winant and Rosenboom were also core members of the Maple Sugar performance art collective in Toronto in the late 1970s, when they also worked at York University. Website: http://williamwinant.com
Jinku Kim is a composer, performer and multimedia artist currently residing in the New England area. His work focuses on pushing the boundaries of interaction through sound installation and audio-visual performances. His works have been performed and installed at various places including REDCAT, CEMC at Stanford University, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, Mills College, STEIM in Amsterdam, Beyond Baroque in Venice CA, Machine project in Los Angeles, Figment NY, videoformes25/25 in France, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and various others.
Audio:
Zones of Influence, Part I excerpt
http://www.davidrosenboom.com/sites/default/files/media/mp3s/Zones%20of%20Influence%20Part%20I%20excerpt_0.mp3
Zones of Influence, Part V excerpt
http://www.davidrosenboom.com/sites/default/files/media/mp3s/Zones%20of%20Influence%20Part%20V%20excerpt_0.mp3
Cost: $15 general, $10 seniors and students