In Australian art and literature, a prevalent binary opposition emerges from works classic and contemporary, a dichotomy that permeates reality as much as fiction. In Maluga, a spatial fixed media work for five channels, explores notions of bush VS city. Often poets, artists and musicians explore the pervasive nature of the city as it etches away the beauty of an ancient omnipotent bushscape. Sometimes the soft and docile manmade city-limits are tested by the harsh reality of an unforgiving desolate wilderness. Maluga (the subject) is a resurrected traditional mangrove, a reborn spit of bush in the middle of Sydney’s suburbia, a fantasy of a lost living forest in historical Australia. Surrounded by the urbanized cacophony driven by business and industry, In Maluga presents a juxtaposition between a living serene bushland and a bustling city.  The bird calls of Australian natives and the clang of a mechanized modern piano are two central samples that represent the bush VS city idiom. The audience is transported to and from a ‘happy place’, a gentle collage of nature’s orchestra and the ‘foreign’ harsh crack of industrial noise. Synthesized and manipulated sounds represent both calamity and tranquility as the listener is thrown between these opposing settings, common in a contemporary human habitat. 
This work is set in five channels, mixed in protocols with sounds manipulated using RTCmix.


In Maluga

A work for solo Harp and pre-recorded electronics, Crux is an exploration of a fading celestial phenomenon visible only in the Southern hemisphere. Digitally manipulated samples are juxtaposed with live harp as evenly spaced chimes of "gong" like material outline the temporal nature of the work. As the Harp and electronics swell to an unsynchronized dynamic climax in the middle of the work, both fade away to nothing, a programmatic reflection of the eventual dissipation of the much revered "Southern Cross".

Crux - for Harp and Fixed-media

For Dance - Fixed-Media (2008)

Commissioned by project HAMMER AND NAIL
For Tape
Premiere: Hammer and Nail 2008, Buskirk-Chumley Theatre, Bloomington 19-20 April 2008 [Choreography by Richelle Steiner]

WaterDance - [Phase Elemental]

WhirlyWind - [Phase Elemental]

EarthSong - [Phase Elemental]

BurningBush - [Phase Elemental]


In Driftwood, the performer is tasked with weaving the saxophone through a tapestry of manipulated saxophone sounds. Echoing from fixed sounds to live performance and back, Driftwood seeks to build connections between the instrument and its latent sonic content. 

Driftwood

Harald Muenz
BeethovEnBloc (2000)
Tape composition with the thirty-seven movements of the nine symphonies by Ludwig van Beethoven (EXTRACT only)

Realisation: studio of the author
Duration: 9‘26‘‘ (the SoundCloud track is a 4'41'' extract!)
Live premiere: Dec. 1, 2000, Cologne, Elektronisches Studio der Musikhochschule, Aulakonzert Neue Musik LXV
Broadcasting premiere: DeutschlandRadio Werkstatt, Dec. 29, 2000 (curator: Götz Naleppa)

BeethovEnBloc is my personal response to a monument of German “Leidkultur” [“culture of suffering” – an untranslatable pun on “Leitkultur” (“leading culture”), the political slogan introduced by the conservative party in Germany to encapsulate the idea of German culture as the dominant culture within multicultural Germany].  The composition’s only materials are the sounds of the thirty-seven movements of the nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven.

After I had tested as many of the different renditions of the symphonies as possible, the recordings were first of all cleaned, balanced and timed.  For each symphony I calculated an average movement length from the durations of its individual movements. Subsequently I used time-stretching to bring all the movements of the symphony to this duration, but without altering the pitch.  This time-consuming transformation method sometimes caused rather extreme stresses or strains to the originals. Thus for each symphony I achieved a compact overlaid form of all its movements.  These nine blocks can also be performed separately

The next stage was once again to establish an average duration of these nine assemblages (and consequently of all 37 movements), so that – again without altering pitch – each individual complex could be brought to this average length of 9 minutes 26 seconds.  Finally I superimposed these nine structures and thus achieved a compact block of all the Beethoven symphonies.

The sound composition makes possible perceptual insights which “Ludwig van” would have been unlikely to grant  At first the continuous fortissimo can be quite hard for the listener, but then one is astonished by the transparency of the sound. Which of the 37 movements is at any moment the strongest?  Once one has come to terms with the volume, the superimposed dynamic fluctuations of this hallucinatory stream of sounds flood into the ear.  Finally one is able, by further focussing one’s perception, to pursue innumerable individual threads in this shining tapestry. 
(HM, translated by Susanna Eastburn)

BeethovEnBloc

BeethovEnBloc. Tape composition with the 37 movements of Beethoven's 9 symphonies (2000; EXTRACT)

Ripple focuses upon drama and tension. Tense metallic tonal material combines and opposes rapid dramatic gestural sounds in order to create a piece in which one is constantly on edge.
Ripple was realized in 2012 at the University of Sheffield Sound Studios as part of an MA in Sonic Arts. This piece was performed at the Sound, Sight, Space and Play festival at De Montfort University in 2013.


Ripple

Unlocking the Keys (2021) is a fixed media Ambisonic work that explores three dimensional sonic space. The title serves as a metaphor for searching out (i.e., “unlocking”) the potential of sounds created from recorded piano sources, which start out abstract in nature and fully reveal themselves in the middle of the piece.  While the ideal listening experience for this piece is a periphonic sound system (a three dimensional configuration of speakers such as “dome” or 8-channel “cube”), the version provided here (stereo) preserves all of the musical material, mapping it down organically to a two dimensional listening space.

Unlocking the Keys (2021, Ambisonic electroacoustic)

harald muenz (he/him)
is a german-italian transdisciplinary artist realising instrumental & vocal, peformative and radiophonic works with an artistic focus on phonetic composition & ars acustica.
harald's compositions have been commissioned by ensembles mosaik, auditivvokal, hand werk, apartment house, modern, musikfabrik; by radio stations such as hessischer rundfunk (hr2-kultur), westdeutscher rundfunk (wdr3), bbc, deutschlandfunk, dlf Kultur, among others.
harald's works have been performed and broadcast internationally and have been documented on several cds (portrait cd nearly-fast with ensemble mosaik at coviello contemporary).
frequent collaborations with experimental poets (florian neuner, mathias traxler, cristian forte, christian filips, roža domašcyna, among others)
on the vr platform 'second life', harald (aka cuirec d’erc) has realised several interactive sound installations and has been a member of the avatar orchestra metaverse (aom) since 2017.
harald is also active as a multilingual speech performer (trio sprechbohrer), author and lecturer.
harald's music has been occasionally described by others as ‘worldly,’ ‘non-conformist,’ or ‘provocative.’

https://haraldmuenz.carrd.co/
Work list on http://composers21.com/compdocs/muenzh.htm

Artist residencies
1996 Künstlerhaus Schloß Wiepersdorf (Brandenburg/Germany)
2000 Villa Aurora (Los Angeles/USA)
2021 Künstlerhof Schreyahn (Niedersachsen/Germany)
2023 Atelier Galata (Istanbul/Turkey)

Studies
Composition at Music Universities in Cologne (J. Fritsch, K. Meyer, C. Barlow) and Stuttgart  (H. Lachenmann)
PhD in Composition from Brunel University London (J. Croft)
Phonetics at Cologne University’s Institute for Linguistics (G. Heike, G. Sachse)
„Cleaning the House“ Workshop by the Marina Abramović Institute

Teaching
2001-2005 Lecturer for Aesthetic Phonetics, Institute for Linguistics, University of Cologne (part-time)
2006-11 Artistic Director of Musikhochschule Lübeck's Studio for Electronic Music (part-time)
2005-16 Lecturer in Composition Brunel University London (full-time permanent)
2016 Decision to work as a full-time freelance composer again
2017-22 current Lecturer at International Ensemble Modern Academy Frankfurt/M. (IEMA; part-time)

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Mark Oliveiro, a Sydney native, Doctor of Music and Lecturer in Music Composition at the Australian of Institute of Music, and is a composer with diverse extra-musical interests. Whilst notions of narrative, programme and theatre, have always been a stoic component of his music; Oliveiro offers an exploration of the quintessence of ceremony inherent in all human expression. 

An obsession with history, mythology and ancient literature, renders Oliveiro’s work riddled with themes from archaeological study and obscure urban legends, alike. His music has been described as; “epic”, “unashamedly ritualistic” and “atmospheric” with “Dreamtime overtones”. At present, Oliveiro has an interest in exploring, by way of conceptual abstract and musical aesthetic, the notion of reconstructing lost or imagined performance traditions. Dance and movement, theatrics and technology, language and social media, are just some of the non-musical solutions most apt for the ever expanding, contemporary composer tool belt. 

With a keen and equal interest in music of the acoustic and electronic medium, Oliveiro’s music has been represented at national and international conferences and festivals hosted by: the North American Saxophone Alliance, the World Saxophone Congress, the International Horn Society, the Australasian Computer Music Association, the International Computer Music Association, the Society of Electroacoustic Music in the United States, Electronic Music Midwest, the British Trombone Society and many more.

Oliveiro is a graduate and distinguished alumnus of the Sydney Conservatorium, the College of Music and the University of North Texas and the Jacob’s School of Music of Indiana University. His music has been commissioned by the International Horn Society and the Meir Rimon Commissioning fund, the Australiasian Art Music Fund, the Settimane Musicali di Stresa e del Lago Maggiore, Chronology Arts, Pictures on Silence, as well as numerous professional individuals. 

Oliveiro is an active Disc Jockey and Music Educator.

Andrew Reeman has completed an MA in Sonic Arts at the University of Sheffield. During this course he wrote several acousmatic works and developed various pieces of software to aid electroacoustic composition. 

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