Tonight, the Festival of New Music brings the energy of electro-acoustic and computer-based composers to Spaulding Auditorium.
Expect compositions by faculty members, multimedia and interactive pieces from graduate and undergraduate students as well as three pieces by George Lewis, a vibrant trombonist and an award-winning composer.
The Festival of New Music is part of a rich musical tradition at Dartmouth. A masters program in Electro-Acoustic Music brings students from diverse backgrounds to campus where they study the relationships between music, technology, cognitive and computer science, acoustics and related disciplines.
No one personifies the dynamism of this genre of music better than Lewis. A trombonist, composer and computer and installation artist, Lewis is also a professor of experimental music at the University of California-San Diego. Lewis concentrates on improvisational music and is well known for his real-time software programs that interact with performing musicians in concerts.
Improvisation is a musical tradition with complex social, political and cultural roots. One important influence is the musicians of the "bop" movement such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.
Lewis described improvisation as "responding to conditions." Recognizing that life is not static, "We all improvise to get along in the world."
Tonight's program consists of two parts: a selection of music from Dartmouth faculty and students and then three pieces composed by Lewis. Members of the Barbary Coast and professor Hafiz Shabazz of the World Music Percussion Ensemble will perform the first and second pieces.
The first piece, "Shadow Graph 4," composed in 1977, is "meant to make a jazz big band sound like something else." The second piece, "Smashing Clusters" is an abstracted version of the stride piano style of Willie Smith or James P. Johnson. The third piece, titled "Voyager" after the computer program of the same name that Lewis has developed over the last decade, is a computer-based composition with an orchestral scale.
Musical computer orchestrations, Lewis said, are not universal, but instead represent the particular ideas of their creators. Discussing the dichotomy of musicians versus computers, Lewis said, "I like to use computers to talk about humanity." And, in fact, Lewis doesn't see his work as illustrating this opposition but instead, as a testament to how humanity and technology have been increasingly integrated.
Technically, Lewis explained, "'Voyager' is a nonhierarchical, interactive musical environment that privileges improvisation. I wrote the program in 'dialects' of Fourth, the musical programming language created by Charles Moore in the 1970s. Several different ensembles may be active simultaneously, moving in and out of metric synchronicity." All communication between the computer program and the musician improvisor takes place sonically. This means that once a performance has begun, the computer improvisor and the musician improvisor are connected to each other as two human improvisers would be.
No matter what kind of music you prefer, George Lewis' mastery of the trombone alone warrants a trip to The Festival of New Music. Whatever your reason for coming, the entire evening promises fresh and passionate sounds produced by man and machine.
