Output details

Post-Paleontology

Post-Paleontology was written for Ensemble Dal Niente and premiered at the Unruly Music Festival in Milwaukee, USA, October 2011, and later broadcast on Radio SWR2 Germany, December 2011. It was performed by Das Neue Ensemble in the festival Music 21 Niedersachsen, as part of the theme ‘Music = Energy: Composition and Research’, November 2012, and recorded by Dal Niente on my portrait CD released by Carrier Records, November 2013 (see Output 1). The work presents novel applications of corpus-based concatenative synthesis to experimental instrumental playing techniques through computer-assisted composition in an acoustic context. The focus on noise-based techniques is a motivation for organizing the conference ‘Noise In And As Music’ at the University of Huddersfield, October 2013, as described in my book chapter ‘Subtractive Synthesis: noise and
digital (un)creativity’ in Cassidy, A., and Einbond, A., eds., Noise In And As Music, University of Huddersfield Press, 2013. Post-Paleontology is based on Palälontologie, a 23’ work commissioned as the result of the Concertare 2011 composition prize, for which I was one of three winners from an international pool of applicants. The prize included a commission fee of €3,000 (£2,400) and support for travel, research, and rehearsals with ensemble recherche and the Freiburger Barockorchester in Freiburg, Germany. The earlier version experimented with the unique combination of the four modern instruments with four baroque instruments (Baroque flute, theorbo, viola da gamba, and harpsichord), united compositionally through computer-assisted analysis of instrumental timbre. Lectures discussing this work have been presented at the Universität der Künste Berlin, Sound Studies Lecture series; University of California Berkeley; Schloss Solitude Summer Academy, Stuttgart, Germany; and Columbia University in 2011 and 2012.