Issue Project Room (May 5th, 2013), Joe Panzner / Greg Stuart

Performed by Donatienne Michel-Dansac, Lionel Peintre, Richard Dubelski and Amit Gilutz, ManiFeste-Académie-2014

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Miscellaneous Romance is a modular project based on 'missed connections' ads from online dating websites. These texts are curated and fed to text-to-speech software, generating sound-files which form the base of the piece’s tape part. Live performers on stage interact with these tracks through rules laid out in the score. Each new version keeps this general conception while the music and texts are adapted to reflect the locality in which they are performed. Miscellaneous Romance no.1, is scored for bass clarinet, prepared violin, prepared piano and electronics, and was premiered by Talea Ensemble in 2012 in Ithaca, New York, and subsequently performed by the Argento Ensemble, as well as recorded by improvising artists Annie Lewandowsky and the Cornell Avant-garde Ensemble (CAGE). Miscellaneous Romance no.2, for bass clarinet, prepared piano and electronics, was written for a performance by the Platypus Ensemble in Vienna, Austria. 

Miscellaneous Romance no.3 was written for Donatienne Michel-Dansac, Lionel Peintre and Richard Dubelski for IRCAM’s 2014 ManiFeste-Académie. As a musical source material it makes use of a quintessential parisian love song, Edith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose. The percussion part as well as the singers’ improvisations are all based on this song, a part of which also appears in the tape part towards the end of the piece. All the texts used in the piece were collected on Paris’s cyberspace on websites such as craigslist, except the text for the chanson, which appears in a distorted form achieved through repeated automated translation on google’s translator. 

The piece was created with the support of a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship. 


Miscellaneous Romance no.3 (Paris)

performed May 11, 2014 at Spectrum, NYC

Jason Brogan (electronics, direction)
Jack Callahan (synthesizer)
Tucker Dulin (trombone)
Tim Feeney (percussion)
Sarah Hennies (percussion)
Sam Sfirri (piano)
Greg Stuart (percussion)

recorded live by Lawrence de Martin
mastered by Jason Brogan

Michael Pisaro - fragile being, hopeful becoming (2013)

Commissioned by the Dartmouth Contemporary Music Lab, and premiered by its students on May 23, 2016.

Instructions for any number of musicians and field recordings.

A Fable (sample)

Stone Mill

A live recording of Michael Pisaro's "asleep, desert, choir, agnes" (2016) for 22 musicians and 2-channel electronics, written for the University of South Carolina Experimental Music Workshop. The concert took place on September 20, 2016 at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, SC.

asleep, desert, choir, agnes (2016)
Michael Pisaro

University of South Carolina Experimental Music Workshop
Greg Stuart, director

Adam Bailey, Amanda Ferguson,Colby Hesseltine, 
Anna Kulangara, Kelsey Lantz, David Long, Jeremy Martinez, 
Clayton Mims, David Munn Carstensen, Belvin Olasov, Neema Patel, 
Jessica Rotheiser, Bailey Seabury, Justin Stombler, 
Joelle Strom, Nathan Wichmann; percussion/voice

Michelle Beck, horn
Brian Bethea, saxophone
Michael Pisaro, electronics/electric guitar
Philip Snyder, flute
Greg Stuart, percussion/melodica
Emily Stumpf, flute

Recording: Jeff Francis

Program Note:
Agnes Martin called a significant series of paintings from 1997 With My Back to the World.  By “the World” I think she meant what we sometimes call the “real world” – of commerce and the art market, of social life and family, of media and entertainment. But there are multiple worlds, and those paintings are emissaries from another world: of solitude and quiet, of nature and light, and of an emptiness so austere that it becomes radiantly full. This is a world that, unlike the day-to-day life in cities, requires full engagement to perceive at all. 

Martin abandoned New York and her painting career in 1967 (at the age of 55), and resettled in the New Mexico desert. When she began painting again in 1973 her work was markedly different: both lighter in color and mood and deeper in affect. This impression is nearly impossible get from photographs of the paintings, as it seems to lie as much in the manner in which the painting asks us to engage with it as it does with shape or color.

What I hope to do with asleep, desert, choir, agnes is to call up a series of sonic fragments of that world, not as they might actually have been if we’d recorded them, but as if their sonic traces had placed themselves onto one of her canvases. 
–Michael Pisaro

asleep, desert, choir, agnes

A contact mic is connected to the edge of wind gong and sent into a modular rig via Music Thing Modular Mikrophonie preamp. The signal is split and sent to a Doepfer A-124 “wasp” filter while simultaneously being sent to a Zlob Modular T.H. SVF. Both modules output a bandpass filtered signal and are again split. One set of paths go to a Bastl ABC mixer and the other paths go to a Blue Lantern CMOS Ringmod. The Ringmod output is also sent to the mixer. The main output of the mixer is sent to a contact speaker that is placed at the center of the wind gong. Julie tweaks the knobs while Brett messes with the gong.

WindGong - feedback loop (first attempt)

A piece for two dan bau and Javanese gamelan instruments, composed for and performed by Khac Chi and Ngoc Bich, with Micheal O'Neill, Ben Rogalsky, and myself. Premiered at Vancouver Pro Musica's Further East Further West concert series on 29 January 1998. This studio recording from Gamelan Madu Sari's album New Nectar, uploaded with permission of the publisher.

New Nectar

thinly, roundly

"The music on "Fleas" was made entirely from objects found at thrift stores and flea markets including a dozen small bells and a bass drum someone had converted into a lamp with Lou Reed’s face painted on it before throwing it out. Not exactly music made from trash, but music made from objects of little monetary value that someone decided they didn’t want anymore. Objects usually tell you how to play them if you’ll allow it." - Sarah Hennies, New York 2017. Risograph printed edition of 100 with download card.

Sarah Hennies -Fleas (Excerpt)

A musical response to a hypersexualized moment on the bandstand from 2017. Made using Max/MSP, sine tones, and the audio recording of that moment and the (freely improvised) music that happened immediately after.

If you like how this sounds, please visit my website: https://erisdejarnett.com

A Fable (sample)

Tim Feeney

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