FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Anthony Cheung
(415) 939-8045
Final Concert of the 2005-2006 Season
8 p.m., Saturday May 6, 2006
(pre-concert talk at 7:30 p.m.)
Miller Theatre & 116th and Broadway
Tickets are $15, $8 for students and seniors
Hear the Future. The Columbia Sinfonietta has teamed up with IRCAM to present the kind of work for large ensemble and electronics that is difficult to hear in America. Featuring New York and US premieres by Rand Steiger, Tristan Murail, and Joshua Fineberg.
New York, NY, 4/1/2006 - The Columbia Sinfonietta will perform the final concert of its current season on Saturday May 6, 2006 at Miller Theatre, conducted by its Music Director and Co-Artistic Director Jeffrey Milarsky. The concert will focus on large-scale works for Sinfonietta-sized ensembles and electronics. Such works have been difficult to produce in New York because of their combination of large instrumental forces, extreme virtuosity and complex technological demands. We are able to do this by joining forces with IRCAM, Columbia University, Harvard University, the Argento New Music Project, the French-American Fund for Contemporary Music, and the Florence Gould Foundation, to take over Miller Theatre for a week of rehearsals and workshops. We will combine New York's finest musicians with the technological expertise of IRCAM, the world's leading institute for new music and electronics.
The concert covers the developments over the last decade in the world of mixed instrumental and electronic music. Joshua Fineberg's Empreintes (1995) was the first work at IRCAM to have an entire ensemble (14 players) analyzed by the computer in real-time. The computer uses these analyses to constantly optimize the correspondence between the electronics and the ensemble -- taking imprints (empreintes in French) of the ensemble's sound to produce the electronics. Rand Steiger's Ecosphere (2002) employs an ensemble of 16 players and draws on the geographer Robert Bailey's work on terrestrial ecosystems. This piece uses real-time audio signal processing for spatialization, resonance, reverberation, delay, cross synthesis, and just-intonation pitch-shifting, to create a breathing, interacting organism out of the ensemble and the electronics. This will be the work's New York premiere. The final work on the program is Tristan Murail's Pour adoucir le cours du temps for 19 instruments and electronics (2005), which was written in collaboration with Marseille's GMEM studios using their technology to augment the forces of the traditional chamber orchestra, both spatially and sonically. The piece was first performed by the Prague Philharmonia; this will be its US premiere. The composers will be present and will speak briefly about their works during a pre-concert talk at 7:30.
More information about all the events during IRCAM's visit to America (public, pedagogical and artistic) can be found at www.music.columbia.edu/ircam2006/.
Individual tickets are $15 ($8 for students and seniors). They are available, in advance or on the day of the concert, from the Miller Theatre Box Office [Broadway at 116th Street, New York, NY 10027 Ð Tel. (212) 854-7799].
Concert #4 May 6, 2006 MILLER THEATRE 8pm
Jeffrey Milarsky, conductor
Rand Steiger (USA) - Ecosphere (2001/2002) for 16 instruments and electronics
IRCAM computer music designer : Olivier Pasquet
New York Premiere
Joshua Fineberg (USA)- Empreintes (1995) for 14 instruments and electronics
IRCAM computer music designer : Eric Daubresse
Tristan Murail (France) - Pour adoucir le cours du temps (2005) for 19 instruments and electronics
GMEM computer music designer : Laurent Poitier
US Premiere