Performance at Arts First Dance Festival 2009

On Saturday, May 2nd, I will be performing the premiere of PPP, a new series of three short studies for dancing clarinetist:

• Puppet a reflection on puppetry in music and dance
• Perpetuum mobile remembering a Butoh performance
• Pipo a clarinet is just a piece of wood

Arts First is Harvard's huge annual celebration of the arts. This year, hundreds of students and faculty take part to performances all around the campus, from April 30th to May 3rd. The crazy Performance Fair is taking place on Saturday May 2nd, 1-5 pm in 12 sites around Harvard Yard.

I'll be performing on Saturday at 2:30pm in the Dance Festival, in Lowell Hall. If you attend, make sure to stop by and say hello after the performance!

Ballade - A New Dancing Clarinetist!

Today April 25th, my friend Megumi Tabuchi is performing my composition Ballade for dancing clarinetist. Megumi Tabuchi is a great clarinet player, and I am thrilled that she chose this piece as part of her musical theater recital. She decided to link the Ballade to "Dance", a text by the composer Georges Aperghis, with whom she has been working a lot. Thank you Megumi!

Score

For this occasion, I engraved the music. It's still a draft, but compare to the manuscript!

Aqua Solo - Composition for solo double bass

You are invited to the premiere of Aqua Solo, taking place on Saturday, April 25th, 2009, 8pm, in Paine Hall, Harvard University.

Aqua Solo is a solo for double bass written after my double bass concerto Aqua.

I have been working for several weeks with the soloist Alex Tarbert, a complete bass player and very sensitive musician. He sounds great on both arco and pizzicato, and I'm sure the performance will be stunning.

Three excerpts of my manuscript

Inspiring bass solos

The double bass solos that I listened to when I was composing the concerto included:

• Maknongan, by Giacinto Scelsi
• In & Out, by Pascal Dusapin
• Valentine, by Jacob Druckman
• Trittico per G.S., by Brian Ferneyhough
• The Ozell Tapes: The Official Bootleg, by Marcus Miller

I also used the book Les modes de jeu de la contrebasse/Modes of playing the double bass by Jean-Pierre Robert. This great bilingual book comes with 2 CDs and is a reference for composers and performers. You can find it through the French online store fnac.com.

Program notes

I just wrote program notes for this last HGNM (Harvard Group for New Music) concert of the 2008-2009 season:

In 2001, I founded the Ensemble New Flore. For our 2004 tour “Spirales”, I composed Aqua for double bass solo, aquaphone, clarinet, and live electronics. The piece was played by the Ensemble New Flore in Strasbourg, Bouxwiller, and Geneva, and by the Ensemble de Musique Interactive in Montbéliard, and at the French Institute in Florence (see pictures of this performance, with the aquaphone, on http://www.flickr.com/jfcharles ). Aqua Solo is a set of two pieces for solo double bass. The first part, Prelude, is played arco, and reminds us that the double bass is a descendant of the viol. The second part is a Blues, played pizzicato.
During the coming months, I intend to turn it into Aqua Duo, a work for double bass solo accompanied by clarinet and live electronics.
Aqua is the fourth part of the Arc-en-ciel. This cycle includes Magma, for contrabass clarinet, stones, and live electronics – Wu jú sè, for clarinet, double bass, Chinese opera gongs, and dancer – Rêver, for singing dancer and dancing clarinetist – Zygomatic, for voice and live electronics – Passage libre, for percussion and live electronics.

Update

Audio live recording of the concert.

Huseac Studio Users Group

Huseac, the Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition, is one of the great resources the Harvard Department of Music offers. I like most the history section of the web site!

The Studio Users Group is an informal forum for all the Huseac studio users to meet, share, and learn from each others. Last week, Robin Hodson of Avid/Digidesign/Sibelius was here to demonstrate features of the integration between Pro Tools DAW and Sibelius notation software.

The next meetings

This Wednesday, April 14th, 2009, from 2 to 4pm, I'm sharing my most recent Max/MSP/Jitter patch. I'll explain not only the patch "under-the-hood", but also the process I followed to get from the idea ("intelligent" or "transient-aware" granulation) to the working patch.

That's the idea. Together, we'll see how to get to the Max patch...

Next Wednesday, April 21st, Ean White, technical director of the studio, will explain & demonstrate the use of the new SoundField Surround microphone system.

April 28th may be a Max/MSP/Jitter patches mixer. Composer and Teaching Fellow Bert Van Herck will show how he used Max/MSP to model a real-world micro-tonal organ he will be composing for, and all participants are encouraged to bring patches of their own.

Lapalu - Viola and Live Electronics

Here is the live recording of Lapalu, a composition for viola and live electronics.

Garth Knox, viola - Jean-François Charles, live electronics - Bert Van Herck, sound diffusion.
February 14th, 2009, Paine Hall, Harvard University.
You can also listen to the track on last.fm.

Spectral Sound Processing in Performance Time

In this composition, all of the electronic sounds are generated live, processed during the performance out of the viola sounds.

The instrument that I developed for this piece is an implementation of many of the graphically-based audio techniques I described in the article "A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing with Max/MSP and Jitter". For instance, you can hear some transient-aware time stretching as soon as 00:28. The live electronics are playing back the first viola arpeggios considerably slower. Details of the vibrato in the initial pizzicato chords become audible.

Sonic transformations that used to be done in studio can now be realized during the performance of a piece. That is what I call performance-time sound processing.