Pamela Z, PAULA MATTHUSEN,
Ken UenoAn evening of voices and electronics
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. She uses MAX MSP and Isadora software on a MacBook Pro along with custom MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound and image with physical gestures. Her performances range in scale from small concerts in galleries to large-scale multi-media works in theaters and concert halls. In addition to her performance work, she has a growing body of inter-media gallery works including multi-channel sound and video installations.
Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered. Awards include the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Grant, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Awards, and the 2014 - 2015 Elliott Carter Rome Prize. Matthusen is currently Associate Professor of Music at Wesleyan University.
Rome Prize and Berlin Prize winner
Ken Ueno is a composer, vocalist and sound artist. Ueno’s collaborators include the Hilliard Ensemble, Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Steve Schick and SFCMP, and Frances-Marie Uitti. His music has been performed at venues and festivals around the world. He has performed as soloist in his vocal concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in New York and Boston, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Lithuanian National Symphony, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and with orchestras in Pittsburgh, North Carolina and California. Collaborating with architects Thomas Tsang and Patrick Tighe and artist, Angela Bulloch, his sound installations have been installed at MUAC, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Art Basel, and at SCI-Arc. Ueno is currently Associate Professor in Music at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professorship in Music. His bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music. www.kenueno.com
Videos featuring musicians playing at this event
BREATHING is a movement from Carbon Song Cycle (a inter-media chamber work by composer/performer Pamela Z and visual artist Christina McPhee). The work was originally written for voice & electronics, bassoon, viola, cello, percussion, and tape. This is a solo version performed by the composer (with just voice, processing, and tape), recorded at a 3/13/2014 duo concert with Joan La Barbara as part of the 2014 ROOM Series. Pamela Z is using a gesture controller (designed and built by Donald Swearingen). © 2013 Last Letter Music (ASCAP)