Electroacoustic Environments
Longtime SMO electronic musician and Cornish College of the Arts faculty member Marcin Pączkowski curates this concert of immersive electroacoustic music. The program reflects and interrogates the darkness of the season, with live and electronic sound diffused throughout Raisbeck Auditorium‘s state of the art Meyer Sound acoustic constellation of speakers. Tristan Murail’s classic spectral work Winter Fragments depicts scenes of a Northeast winter, Agata Zubel’s Shades of Ice combines virtuosic writing for cello and clarinet with electronics and her own field recordings from a glacier in Iceland, and longtime UW DXARTS Research Scientist Ewa Trębacz’s ambisonic soundscape work Umbrae (Shadows) explores memory, interruption, and loss. Works by Joanna Bailie and Marek Chołoniewski draw on SMO musicians’ hallmark skills improvising and utilizing extended techniques, and round out a program highlighting music from the Polish diaspora and beyond.
PROGRAM:
TRISTAN MURAIL: Winter Fragments (2000)
EWA TRĘBACZ: Tharsis (2024)
AGATA ZUBEL: Shades of Ice (2011)
JOANNA BAILIE: Artificial Environments Nos. 1-5 (2011)
MAREK CHOŁONIEWSKI: Passage (2001-2013)
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ABOUT THE CURATOR:
Marcin Pączkowski (pronounced `marr-cheen pawnch-`koav-skee) is a composer, conductor, digital artist, and performer, working with both traditional and electronic media. As a composer, he is focused on developing new ways of creating and performing computer music. His pieces involving real-time gestural control using accelerometers have been performed worldwide, including International Computer Music Conference in Daegu, Korea, Music of Today concert series in Seattle, Washington, Northwest Percussion Festival in Ashland, Oregon, Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium in Toronto, Canada, and the Audio Art festival in Kraków, Poland. As the Music Director of Evergreen Community Orchestra, he presents concerts of diverse repertoire to local communities. He is also involved in performing new music and has led premieres of numerous works in Poland and the United States. His conducting performances with Inverted Space ensemble include Anahit by Giacinto Scelsi, featuring Luke Fitzpatrick on violin, Flurries by Brian Ferneyhough, and Hermetic Definition by Joël-François Durand. He is also active in the Seattle-area improvised music community performing on various instruments. He received grants and commissions from Seattle Symphony, eScience Institute, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and from Polish Institute of Music and Dance. He received his Ph.D. in Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. He also holds Masters’ degrees from the Academy of Music in Kraków, Poland, and from the University of Washington.
ABOUT THE COMPOSERS:
Born in Le Havre in 1947, Tristan Murail received advanced degrees in classical and North African Arabic from the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes, as well as a degree in economic science, while at the same time pursuing his musical studies. In 1967, he became a student of Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory, and also studied at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, graduating three years later. In 1971, he was awarded the Prix de Rome, and later received a First Prize in composition from the Paris Conservatory. He spent the next two years in Rome, at the Villa Medicis.
Upon returning to Paris in 1973, he co-founded the Ensemble L’Itineraire with a group of young composers and instrumentalists. The ensemble quickly gained wide recognition for its fundamental research in the area of instrumental performance and live electronics. In the 1980s, Tristan Murail used computer technology to further his research in the analysis and synthesis of acoustic phenomena. He developed his own system of microcomputer-assisted composition, and then collaborated with Ircam for several years, where he taught composition from 1991 to 1997, and took part in the conception of the computer-assisted composition program “Patchwork”. In 1997, Tristan Murail was named professor of composition at Columbia University in New York, teaching there until 2010. Again in Europe, he continued giving master-classes and seminars all over the world, was guest professor at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg for three years, and is currently guest professor at the Shanghai Conservatory.
Ewa Trębacz (pronounced Eva Trembatch) is a Polish-American composer living in Seattle. Collaboration understood as an exchange of creativity, is essential to her work. Exploring the unique interaction between the human subjects and their acoustic environment, she often uses space as a catalyst for improvisation, working through Ambisonic recording sessions in acoustically inspiring spaces. By overlapping such recordings on live performances, she strives to create an illusory continuum between real and synthetic spaces. Ewa comes from Kraków, Poland, where she first studied violin performance at the M. Karłowicz School of Music in Kraków, then continued her music education at one of Poland’s best conservatories, the Academy of Music in Kraków, where she studied composition under Bogusław Schaeffer, graduating with a Master’s degree in 1999. In 2004 she became one of the first doctoral students at DXARTS, graduating in 2010 with her audiovisual immersive work Errai. Currently Ewa works at DXARTS as a Research Scientist, and focuses on electroacoustic music and immersive arts. Her works have been presented, performed or broadcast in over 30 countries on four continents, and have been featured in Organised Sound, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and many other music magazines. In 2009, her work things lost things invisible for Ambisonic space and orchestra, was recognized as work recommended by the 56th UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in Paris, representing 27 radio stations from around the world. Her monographic CD was released in 2013 by the Polish Radio, Polish Composers’ Union and Polish Music Information Center.
Agata Zubel is a composer and vocalist. Known for her unique vocal range and the use of techniques that challenge stereotypes, Zubel gives concerts throughout the world and has premiered numerous new works. She has worked together with the world’s leading ensembles – Klangforum Wien, Ensemble InterContemporain, musikFabrik, London Sinfonietta, Ictus, Eighth Blackbird, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Seattle Chamber Players, Münchener Kammerorchester, Neue Vocalsolisten, Remix Ensemble, 2e2m Ensemble, as well as The ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Staatsoper Hannover, Sinfonia Varsovia, Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice and others.
The British composer Joanna Bailie was born in London and now lives in Berlin. She studied composition with Richard Barrett, electronic music at the Institute of Sonology, Royal Conservatoire of The Hague, and in 1999 won a fellowship to study at Columbia University. She completed her PhD at City, University of London in 2018. Her music has been performed by groups such as Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Contrechamps, The Ives Ensemble, Ensemble Nadar, Ictus Ensemble, Ensemble Modern, Asamisimasa, L’instant Donné, EXAUDI, Ensemble Mosaik, Explore Ensemble, Ensemble Musikfabrik, KNM Berlin, Zwerm, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and The SWR Vokalensemble. She has written solo pieces for Mark Knoop, Francesco Dillon, Heloisa Amaral and Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir. She has been programmed at events such as the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Musica Strasbourg, Darmstadt, ECLAT, Wien Modern, Huddersfield, SPOR Festival, MaerzMusik, Rainy Days Festival Luxembourg, Venice Biennale, November Music, Borealis Festival, and Ultima. Her recent work includes chamber music
and installation, and is characterized by the use of manipulated field recordings and other sound media together with acoustic instruments. She is also interested in the interplay between the audio and visual as evidenced by her works incorporating camera obscura, and film. Together with composer Matthew Shlomowitz, Joanna founded Plus-Minus Ensemble in 2003. In May 2010 she was the guest curator at
the SPOR Festival in Aarhus, Denmark and in September 2015 she curated and produced the Cut and Splice Festival for BBC Radio 3. She has taught composition at HMDK Stuttgart, the Luxembourg Composition Academy, the ReMusik online composition course, The Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, City, University of London, and at the 47th edition of the Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music. In 2016 she was a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin- program and in 2023 she was awarded the Kunstpreis Berlin for music.
Marek Chołoniewski is a performing musician of contemporary classical and experimental music and the director of the Electroacoustic Music Studio in Kraków. He was born on 23rd of October 1953 in Kraków. Chołoniewski studied music theory and composition with Bogusław Schaeffer, electronic music with Józef Patkowski as well as the organ with Leszek Werner at the Academy of Music in Kraków. He is now a lecturer at the Department of Composition of his alma mater. In 2011, he received a title of associate professor of musical arts. Since 1976, he has also been working in the Electroacoustic Music Studio in the same academy and since 2000, he has been acting as a director of this institution. Since 2012, he has been the director of the Audiosphere Lab of the Intermedia Department at Kraków’s Fine Arts Academy.
Choloniewski writes instrumental, electroacoustic, music for theater, film and radio, author of sound and video installations, audio–visual, outdoor and net projects. A world renown lecturer, composer, sound artist and live art performer. He has given concerts, workshops and lectures in Europe, North and South America as well as Asia.