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 Tharsis for contrabass clarinet and electronics evokes the vast space of a Martian plateau shaped by raging elements, and features SMO core musician Angelique Poteat. 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:
AGATA ZUBEL: Shades of Ice (2011)
JOANNA BAILIE: Artificial Environments Nos. 1-5 (2011)
EWA TRĘBACZ: Tharsis (2024) – US Premiere
~ intermission ~
TRISTAN MURAIL: Winter Fragments (2000) – Hervé Bailly-Basin (video artist)
MAREK CHOŁONIEWSKI: Passage (2001-2013)
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PERFORMERS:
Julia Tai, conductor
Sarah Pyle, flute/piccolo
Angelique Poteat, clarinets
Mikhail Shmidt, violin
Christine Lee, cello
Cristina Valdés, piano
Bonnie Whiting, sampler/vibraphone
Marcin Pączkowski, electronics
FROM THE CURATOR:
I am thrilled to curate this concert, featuring works for instruments and electronics. In my past collaborations with SMO as a computer musician, I’ve had the privilege of presenting electronic and electroacoustic realizations that complement the exceptional artistry of SMO’s musicians. When invited to curate an entire program dedicated to the combination of acoustic instruments and electronics, I set out to create an experience that not only is musically compelling, but also introduces PNW audiences to music of Polish composers, and composers whose music is seldom performed in the area. Additionally, each piece on this program incorporates electronic or electroacoustic elements, including live processing and pre-recorded material, conveying a variety of environments.
This concert is hosted by Cornish College of the Arts, where I started teaching in 2023, at the Raisbeck Auditorium. This space is uniquely equipped with spatial sound capabilities and artificial reverberation. Several pieces on the program take advantage of these features, enriching the auditory experience.
The program opens with a piece by Agata Zubel, an accomplished Polish composer and vocalist, who is known for her innovative use of extended performance techniques and electronics. In Shades of Ice, instruments, electronics, and field recordings from a glacier in Iceland converge to create a frozen musical sculpture that unfolds in time and space.
Joanna Bailie’s Artificial Environments shifts the focus inward, offering a reflection on the compositional process itself. Recordings of spoken text provide insights into the piece, while the field recordings transport listeners from the outer worlds of snow, ice, and space to diverse environments across Europe.
Ewa Trębacz’s Tharsis moves beyond our own environment; it is named for an enormous Martian plateau. Trębacz’s works extensively explore the dimensionality of sound; the immersive Ambisonic soundscape invites listeners to imagine a journey beyond Earth.
Opening the second half of the concert is a modern classic: Tristan Murail’s Winter Fragments. Calm and chilly, this piece evokes winter landscapes and vast spaces. Like the works of Ewa Trębacz and Agata Zubel, it invites the listener to explore the intersection of music and the natural world.
The program concludes with a truly distinctive work by Marek Chołoniewski, my mentor at the Academy of Music in Kraków, where I began my compositional journey. His piece stands apart as it incorporates sensors that musicians “play” to generate sheet music in real time. They then perform the newly created notation without prior rehearsal or preparation, offering a dynamic and unrepeatable experience.
I hope you enjoy this evening of innovative works that push the boundaries of music and technology, joining SMO musicians on a one-of-a-kind journey.
– Marcin Pączkowski
PROGRAM NOTES:
AGATA ZUBEL Shades of Ice (2011)
With an area of 8.5 thousand square km, Vatnajökull takes up one twelfth of Iceland, and its ice cap is up to 1 km thick. This is the world’s largest glacier this side of the polar circle. Its ice volume is larger than the aggregate volume of all the European glaciers.
When Vatnajökull begins to breed, it fills the lake called Jökulsárlón with small icebergs. The landscape on the surface of the ice cap is far from monotonous – it is speckled with ragged ridges, with crevasses, with a whole palette of colours from dirty black to crystalline “icy” blue.
Typical of the Icelandic landscape are also the roaring waterfalls appearing where rivers flow out of the glaciers. Geologists have found evidence of at least two catastrophic glacial floods in the valley of the Jökulsá River since the end of the last ice age. During those periods, at least 400 thousand cubic metres of water flowed down the valley every second – more than three times the maximum volume of flow in the Amazon.
– After the “Insight Guide” to Iceland
JOANNA BAILIE Artificial Environments Nos. 1-5 (2011)
Artificial Environments Nos. 1 to 5 is actually the second completed set of pieces in a series of works that seeks to contextualize music and its processes through explanation. The explanation itself is fiction (even science fiction) and serves as an unreliable auditory programme note that is integrated into the sound world of the piece. Scratch the surface of this explanation a little though, and it becomes clear that the text is simply a metaphor for the compositional techniques that have been employed in making the music. On a broader level, but in a very small and modest way, the work is an attempt to introduce the outside world into the contemporary music concert hall. The recorded sounds in Artificial Environments Nos. 1 to 5 were captured in locations around Europe — the hills of Umbria, Copenhagen, Malmö, London and various places in central Brussels where I live. The recordings of the voice were made with the help of CESARE in Reims and De Pianofabriek kunstenwerkplaats in Brussels.
– Joanna Bailie
EWA TRĘBACZ Tharsis (2024) – US Premiere
– written for and dedicated to Julian Paprocki
Tharsis is the name of an enormous Martian plateau, a vast space on a scale incomparable to those on Earth, shaped by the raging elements. The musical notation of the piece has an open form and serves as a map for improvisation and creative interpretation. The notated motifs correspond directly to similar ones in the spatial electronic layer, which should be treated as an equivalent of a traditional musical score. The performer co-creates the piece in direct interaction with electronic sounds and the space in which the piece is presented, and evolves with each subsequent, unique interpretation. The piece was created in close collaboration with Polish virtuoso of contrabass clarinet, Julian Paprocki, who provided all the instrumental samples for the electronic layer. The piece was premiered in Poland in 2024 and has been recently released on an album “Surface of Timbre” – a collection of new works for contrabass clarinet and electronics, commissioned by and performed by Julian Paprocki (label: Requiem Records – OPUS Series 112 | 2024).
TRISTAN MURAIL Winter Fragments (2000)
This title… is at one and the same time an acknowledgement of the festival where the piece is to be created (“Sounds of winter and today”), and the experience of a genuine winter last year, particularly where we now live, to the north of New York, a region of lakes and small mountains. The lake in front of our house was frozen over, and there were sixty centimeters of snow all round. For the most part the sun shone brightly and its intense light bathed the house, which is open to nature all round. Sometimes a violent storm would arise, followed by silence, and the blinding light would come back. Perhaps the “fragments of winter” are there. … Using exactly the same grouping (flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano) I’ve written pieces which sound quite different. Winter Fragments uses the same instruments, not for symbolic reasons but for practical ones, and will sound quite different again. There are also the electronic sounds which melt into the ensemble. I am trying therefore to renew the experience of Bois Flotté for small ensemble and synthetic sounds, but in a fairly different style, with different musical and sound vocabulary.
– Tristan Murail
MAREK CHOŁONIEWSKI Passage (2001-2013)
The composition consists of four parts: I. Introduction, II. A Theatre of Gestures, III. The Score, IV. A Film. The first two parts are a performance in which the musicians operate a computer music system through quasi-theatrical actions, thus creating a live, multidimensional sound structure. Each musician performs his or her own independent part. The computer system simultaneously creates a score which will provide the basic tone material for parts III and IV. The musicians perform instrumental parts which they see appearing on monitors. Additionally, the movement of the instruments and the change in the positions of musicians in part III influence the way in which the sounds of acoustic instruments are transformed. The last, 4th part of the work is an audio-visual spectacle in which film projection (computer animations) generated by the movements and gestures of musicians is coupled with interactive transformations of instrumental sound.
The passage (cf. the title) from part II to III of the work constitutes a major technical problem. The material, in the form of a traditionally composed score, appears in front of the musicians’ eyes for the very first time at the moment of the performance. The composition has many versions: the material “composes itself” each time in a slightly different way. Therefore, the musicians perform Parts III and IV a vista. The approximate graphic score composition generated by gestures is tempered and rhythmically averaged by an interactive computer system. The overall concept of the piece excludes the possibility of prior preparation of individual parts by each musician. Gestures are the principal source material in Passage. They take two distinct forms: – of geometric figures, – of musical expressions. A gesture performed higher, i.e. closer to the source of light defines a higher value – higher pitch, whereas a gesture closer to the floor, farther from the source of light defines a lower value – lower pitch. An interactive optical computer system reacts to the changes in the position of the hand.
– Marek Chołoniewski
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:
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
ABOUT THE PERFORMERS:
Praised by the Seattle Times as “poised yet passionate,” Julia Tai has conducted orchestras around the world. Recognized as a prominent innovator of the contemporary music world, she has worked with legendary composers, performers, and ensembles such as Seattle Chamber Players, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Ensemble Modern. She is currently is the Music Director of Missoula Symphony Orchestra & Chorale, and the Co-Artistic Director of the Seattle Modern Orchestra.
Sarah Pyle, flutist, currently lives in Bremerton, Washington and works on projects involving intersections of visual art, music, and nature. She is a specialist in contemporary music and holds degrees in flute performance and environmental studies from Oberlin College & Conservatory.
Clarinetist and composer Angelique Poteat has performed with Seattle Modern Orchestra since 2012 and also performs with Yakima Symphony Orchestra, Northwest Sinfonietta, Saratoga Orchestra, Bellingham Festival of Music, and Sunriver Music Festival. She was the 2022-23 Artist-in-Residence with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. In addition to solo features with several of her regular orchestras, she has also performed as a soloist with the North Corner Chamber Orchestra and as a featured guest artist with Emerald City Music. Angelique released an album of her chamber music, “Six Seasons,” in 2024 and also performs on that album.
Mikhail Shmidt, violin, has been a member of the Seattle Symphony since 1990 and has collaborated with such diverse and distinguished composers and musicians as Alfred Schnittke, Steve Reich, John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, Giya Kancheli, Paul Schoenfield, Dmitri Sitkovetsky, Vadim Repin, and many others. Born in Moscow, he began his musical education at the age of five, and graduated cum laude from Gnessin Institute of Music. Since immigrating to the United States in 1989, he has established himself as a leading chamber musician. He was a founding member of the Bridge Ensemble and is a member of Seattle Chamber Players and Music of Remembrance.
A Paris Fulbright Fellow recipient, Christine Lee pursues a wide range of creative, musical projects; while her passion is in chamber music, she also devotes her time towards teaching and solo engagements. In the ‘24-’25 season, Christine began her third year as Artist-in-Residence faculty member at the University of Washington School of Music, where she coordinates and coaches both undergraduate and graduate level chamber ensembles.
Recently hailed by Fanfare Magazine as “excellent” and “clearly sensitive,” pianist Cristina Valdés is known for presenting innovative concerts with repertoire ranging from Back to Xenakis, has toured extensively with the Bang On a Can “All Stars,” and has performed with Seattle Chamber Players, the Mabou Mines Theater Company, the Parsons Dance Company, and Antares. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington, and Director of the UW Modern Music Ensemble.
Bonnie Whiting’s (she/her) work centers on the relationship between percussive sound and the voice, performing, commissioning, composing, and championing music for the speaking and singing percussionist. She is Co-Artistic Director of Seattle Modern Orchestra and she has performed with the country’s leading new music groups: Ensemble Dal Niente, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, and red fish blue fish percussion group. She is Chair of Percussion Studies and the Ruth Sutton Waters Associate Professor at the University of Washington School of Music.