for vocal sextet and toy noisemakers
performed by Ekmeles
recorded by David Adamcyk at Scholes Street Studio, New York
composed, mixed and mastered by Katherine Balch

forgetting

Performing ATOM, for flute and electronics, a series of pieces born from the collaboration with Francesco Di maggio, to develop his interactive instrument.
Wearing Genki rings, I could trigger samples or chaotic seqs, select effects, change envelops and colour parameters unding the space around me (x,y,z + SPEED).

Atom III - stereo v. for Flute And Live Electronics - Francesco Di Maggio (Feat. Tiziano Teodori)

Composition:
Boris Bezemer

Performance:
Ensemble Resilience
Natalie Kulina (violin)
Marco Danesi (bass clarinet) 
Tomek Szcsepaniak (percussion)
Paolo Gorini (piano, seaboard) @paolo-gorini

Live at:
Club Fluxus, TivoliVredenburg – Utrecht, The Netherlands

More info:
www.borisbezemer.nl/index/under-water

Underwater

A short study that explores the relationship between two string trios tuned differently – one that is performed live in standard tuning and another tuned down 50 cents (1 microtone) that is pre-recorded.

I wanted the material to be mostly static, allowing the listener and the performers to perceive and experience the tension between the live and pre-recorded elements, with the only movement in the work being the persistent tremolos in both trios as well as the slow swells in dynamics and the gradual harmonic change based around double stopping with the open strings as the basis of the harmony.

Performed by Kirkos Ensemble (Violin - Erin Hennessey, Viola - Ali Comerford, Cello - Yseult Cooper Stockdale)
Live Performance recorded by Darby
Tape Part recorded by Jonathan Nangle

With thanks to Kirkos Ensemble, Paul Scully, Sebastian Adams, Robert Coleman, The Hugh Lane Gallery and Darby

Between Two Trios (2022)

Program Notes:

We all inhabit familiar spaces. The most familiar of places, those that we feel most attached to and contained by, are fertile grounds for the unexpected.

In massive, cookie cutter style apartment complexes of the mid-20th and 21st centuries, we see individuals decorating identical spaces in myriad ways, expressing culture, tastes, and trends. If you enter different units in the same building, you have a feeling of a familiar space – a space which might appear different in the most superficial of ways, but at its core, is simply a replica of a space. How we interact with these familiar spaces is determined by the relationships that we have formed with our own space. We explore different spaces in a similar way, imbuing these spaces with simultaneous meaning and purpose.

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Performed by Open Union
Modular Synth: Peter Bell
Electric Guitar: Patrick Ellis

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Bio:

Paolo Griffin is a composer based in Toronto, Canada, whose music explores focused/unfocussed listening, repetition, generative composition, and microtonality, while maintaining a focus on close collaboration and creative spontaneity with the performers he works with.

Paolo is the Artistic and Executive Director of Freesound, a Toronto-based collective that consists of a core group of the city's most adventurous young musicians and interpreters of contemporary music. Freesound present concerts throughout the year with an interest in the work of emerging composers.

A fierce advocate of accessible arts and inclusive practices, Paolo is also the Managing Director of Xenia Concerts, a Toronto-based charity that focuses on presenting accessible concerts and musical events for autism and neurodiverse communities. Through his work with Xenia, Paolo has helped to shape such programs as Sound.colLAB - a collaborative project in which seven neurodivergent artists have co-created an original piece of music under the mentorship of
professional musicians.

2022-23 engagements include lectures at the Sibelius Academy in Finland, and the Tuckamore Chamber Music Festival's Widening the Circle initiative where he appeared as a mentor composer. Other events include premieres with the Continuum Ensemble, with saxophonist
David Zucchi in Toronto, and at the Aurore Renaissance Music Festival in Helsinki. Paolo's music has been featured in at festivals across Canada, including Ottawa Chamberfest, Toronto Summer Music, and Big Lake Arts Festival. His music can be heard in concert and on the radio
by performers and ensembles such as Continuum Ensemble (CA), Residentie Orkest (NL), The New European Ensemble (NL), Avanti! Chamber Music (FI), Thin Edge New Music Collective(CA), Duo Holz (CA), Freesound (CA), and more.

Paolo holds degrees from the University of Toronto and the Royal Conservatoire of the Hague where he studied with Peter Adriaansz and Martijn Padding. Other teachers have included Linda
Catlin Smith, Anthony Tan, Juhani Nuorvala, Chaya Czernowin, Mayke Nas, Matthew Whittall, Jukka Tiensuu, Rodney Sharman, Gary Kulesha, Nobert Palej, Huba de Graaff, Jan van de Putte,
Ana Sokolovic, Peter Ablinger, Christopher Theofanidis, Mario Garuti, Dmitri Tomozco, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Chen Yi.

Paolo's sits on the board of Musicworks Magazine. His work and research is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canadian New Music Network.

Paolo Griffin - Familiar Spaces (2022)

Guillaume Dufay (1400-1474) Messe Se La Face Ay Pale
Arrangement by Marco Blaauw, for 6 trumpets and electronics

Recorded in March 2023, Cologne by Niklas Werani 
Edited and Mix, Niklas Werani and Marco Blaauw

Performed by The Monochrome Project

G. Dufay, Messe Se La Face Ay Pale for 6 trumpets and electronics

A Day in the Life of: a work for two baroque violins and viola da gamba, was written as a musical conversation with ChatGPT-3.5. The 17-minute work explores various style inspirations provided by the AI in reaction to daily “journaling” about work and life, and therefore consists of an almost moment-by-moment progression reflecting various autobiographical narratives. In reaction to this narrative, GPT produced a somewhat obscure sonnet (incorrectly structured) to summarise the work:
In the end, then, we are but archives of ourselves,
and our great works of art are but echoic memories.
As we become more entangled in our memories,
our lives become tied into the past.
What is form then, other than the question of
when to start and when to end? And even then, does the
question itself not defeat its purpose?
So, we compose ourselves and our memories,
and hope that we’ll be remembered, as we have remembered.
Even the stars are mere memories of when those vast
forces pushed the strings apart to create momentous gravity.
Computational psychiatry is a new field of study within large language models like ChatGPT-3.5, and attempts to understand when and why such models succeed or fail/misbehave. Initial studies have shown that GPT-3.5 responds strongly to prompts that are designed to induce anxiety, and resultantly the framework scores higher in general anxiety questionnaires than human controls. Critically, GPT-3.5 shows a strong increase in biases when prompted with anxiety-inducing texts; it is therefore likely that how prompts are communicated to large language models has a strong influence on their behaviour in applied settings.
The current creative output exploited this interestingly human behaviour and manipulatable nature of GPT-3.5 in a long-form dialogue over the span of three months, to generate compositional prompts in reaction to daily journaling about work and personal life. In the short term, GPT-3.5 was able to effectively recurse into older portions of the dialogue and generate useful creative prompts. However, in the longer term, the AI appeared to become increasingly confused, then unstable. and ultimately incoherent in its generated dialogue. The resulting music reflects this loss of coherence as gradual structural decoherence, and then liquidation of material.
Harmonically, the work is built on overtone possibilities of open strings, and entire structural portions of the music use only natural harmonics. Sometimes, these harmonic series are juxtaposed and combined to create larger harmonic structures, somewhat akin to (but not trying to emulate) the uhadi. Against that, smaller form is articulated as oscillations between the inherently harmonic quality of open strings in combination, and more textured sounds of dissonances against open strings. The use of just intonation rather than tempered tuning further enhances these qualities, and creates increasingly coloristic tuning in chromatic deviations.
The journalling origins of the composition presented unique challenges in unifying form and style, although a central harmonic foundation contributed greatly to a consistent tonal palette. What is especially interesting in this experiment is how, as GPT became less coherent and more recursive, it automatically began to re-prompt for older structures which naturally led (somewhat) to a sense of material rounding/unification.

A Day in the Life of

Performed by Signum Quartet
Boulez Saal, Berlin
September 2024

Unfettered and Alive

Performed by Ensemble Klang during Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2017 at TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht

The Atlas Slave by Ensemble Klang(Gaudeamus 2017)

Written for the 'Hyperorgan' at Orgelpark, Amsterdam. Performed by Ere Lievonen (15.02.20)

The Path Contorts as the Traces Fade

ANNA KHVYL / Детально-експериментально / 14.06

South African composer based in Den Haag, Netherlands.

Unfettered and Alive

Lise Morrison

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