French Premiere. April 5th, 2015. Ensemble 2e2m. Pierre Roullier, dir. Shigeko Hata, sop.

Program Note:

Act is a work that is concerned with the way musical ideas are heard and seen, and how the form emerges from shifts in attention from one to the other. A theatre of relationships emerges in this musical context, whereupon each performer’s physical presence and sounds are weighed against poetic, spatial, technological and physiological circumstances.

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Initially, the soprano is silent, contrasting with an ensemble that appears unified as one mass. Gradually, however, sub-groups emerge. The way the players are spatially arranged divides the instrumentalists into four heterogeneous sub-groups; at other points, the two percussionists cooperate as a duo, the strings as a quintet, and the trombone and woodwinds as a quartet. There is a special trio that consists of the trombone, clarinet and baritone saxophone equipped with laryngophones (a sort of throat microphone, of military origins), thereby isolating vocal utterances that originate in the larynx. With this special tool, the utterance of these three players engenders a sort of argument with the soprano, and her singing becomes increasingly expressive. This animates the entire group, and the work gradually opens up towards an end which is familiar yet unresolved.


Act (2014), for soprano and 12 players, Ensemble 2e2m

Jason Thorpe Buchanan is an American composer of operatic, orchestral, chamber, electroacoustic, and intermedia works which explore fragmentation, multiplicity, intelligibility, behavior, and the integration of live performance with technology. He is Artistic Director of the [Switch~ Ensemble] and Artistic Associate/Lecturer in New Media and Digital Technologies for Music at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden, Germany in the Hybrid Music Lab. He served from 2018-2022 as Department Chair/Lecturer in Composition, Theory, and Electroacoustic Music at the College of Music, Mahidol University in Thailand, 2022 Interim Managing Director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative at the University of Missouri, and 2020 Visiting Lecturer in Composition/Interim Director of the Electronic Music Studios at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin. His works have been described as “an unearthly collage of sounds”, “sharply-edged”, and “free jazz gone wrong—in a good way.”
        Jason is the recipient of a 2010-11 Fulbright Fellowship at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, Germany as a visiting scholar, commissions from the Mizzou International Composers Festival for Alarm Will Sound (2013), Iktus Percussion (2013), the International Horn Society for the Eastman Musica Nova Ensemble, soloists Jeff Nelsen, Michael Walker, and conductor Brad Lubman (2014), Ensemble Nikel/Tzlil Meudcan (Israel, 2014), the Blue Water Chamber Orchestra as winner of Iron Composer (2014), the NY Virtuoso Singers (2015), the Earle Brown Music Foundation for the Talea Ensemble and TIME SPANS Festival (NYC, 2017), the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium for the TACETi Ensemble and augmented conductor (2019), and for TACETi and extended no-input mixer (2020), a fellowship and commissions from Royaumont for the Talea Ensemble+EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble (2016), and the Académie Voix Nouvelles Ensemble (2017), a German/American Fulbright Commission (2011), the Howard Hanson Orchestral Prize (2014), two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards (2014 & 2015), an American-Scandinavian Foundation Grant (2015), 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the Brush Creek Foundation (Wyoming), and 2015 Artist-in-Residence at USF Verftet/City Council of Bergen, Norway.
        As a nominee for the 2015 Gaudeamus Prize, three works were presented by Insomnio, the New European Ensemble, and Slagwerk Den Haag at Gaudeamus Muziekweek (NL). His works walkside, lost and gimme shelter (2015), commissioned by Gaudeamus for Slagwerk Den Haag and by Eklekto Percussion Geneva, both explore the structural intersection of precise physical gestures, fragile sounds, and speech alongside live audio and video processing. As 2018 Artist-In-Residence at the Embassy of Foreign Artists in Geneva, Switzerland, he developed a new, interactive processing environment for surface, tension (2018), responding directly to the discrete physical gestures of performers and governing the behavior of both signal processing and triggering through wearable technology, sensors, and gestural tracking. Scenes from his multimedia opera Hunger have received performances at Darmstadt (2014) with Ensemble Interface, The Industry’s FIRST TAKE in L.A. (2015) with wild Up, and the MATA Interval Series in New York City (2015) with the [Switch~ Ensemble]. “Hunger is a kind of training session in mental disintegration… An ungodly opera needs ugly music, singers who produce primal sounds, an electric guitar that sounds scraped raw, a wailing orchestra effects, cuts the ear like a knife. Buchanan delivers.” – L.A. Times
        Mentors have included Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Steven Takasugi, Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin, Raphaël Cendo, Peter Michael Hamel, and Georges Aperghis. Jason served for three years as Executive Director of the Valencia International Performance Academy & Festival (Spain), for two years as a Curator for the San Francisco Center for New Music, as founding Director of the TICF International Academy for Young Composers, and as a Faculty Artist at the International Composition Institute of Thailand. As a doctoral student, he served as course instructor in electronic music and composition, board member of OSSIA, and assistant conductor for the Musica Nova Ensemble with conductor Brad Lubman at the Eastman School of Music. 
        As a guest composer, conductor, and lecturer, he is widely sought internationally at institutions such as the University of Chicago, Stanford University, TRANSIT Festival (Belgium), TIME SPANS Festival (NYC), Chamber Music Campania (Italy), the Eastman School of Music, University of Miami Frost School of Music, Music Science Share Educators Conference (Shanghai), Queens New Music Festival, MATA, the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory (Singapore), the Bergen Center for Elektronisk Kunst (BEK, Norway), and dozens of Universities throughout the United States. He holds a Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music, and degrees in Composition and Music Technology from San José State University (BM & BA, 2008) and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (MM, 2010), where he taught courses in composition and theory as a graduate student. Current projects include "Ecology of Disruption" for Line Upon Line, a percussion trio with generative electronics, lights, and video, an immersive collaborative work for the [Switch~ Ensemble] at EMPAC, and development of new systems for gestural tracking and interactivity within the Hybrid Music Lab, Dresden. 
www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com

PANG Chun-ting is a Hong Kong composer whose musical interest lies in the production of unstable sounds through the combination of pitch-based and noise-based materials. His recent outputs are characterized by high level of economy with the help of cyclic structure. 

After graduating from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, he was awarded CASH Scholarship for Overseas Studies to further his studies as New England Conservatory. In 2015, He graduated from the Ph.D. program at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York under the support of Dean’s Fellowship and Dissertation Fellowship. His principal teachers include Dr. David Felder, Prof. Malcolm Peyton, Dr. John Mallia, Prof. Mak Wai-chu and Prof. Law Wing-fai. 

Pang has received additional training from renowned composers including Chaya Czernowin, Brian Ferneyhough, Jukka Tiensuu, Raphaël Cendo and Augusta Read Thomas during his residencies at prestigious Royaumont Voix Nouvelles (France), Dian Red Kechil International Young Composers Residency (Singapore), Sävellyspaja (Finland) and Composers Conference at Wellesley College (USA). In addition, Pang has taken part in various composition courses and festivals and this led to performances of his music by various top ensembles such as Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Arditti Quartet (UK), Ensemble Linea (France), Cikada (Sweden), Quatuor Makrokosmos (Switzerland), MATCH Percussion (Australia) and Ensemble Ascolta (Germany). 

His current projects include a percussion duo for Ms. Foo Pui-yee and Mr. Thierry Miroglio.

Act (2014), for soprano and 12 players, Ensemble 2e2m

davidcoll