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Matthew Greenbaum has created a body of musical compositions during more than two decades that reflects a wide variety of new music. These have included operas, works for solo piano, for small chamber ensemble, for voice and piano, for saxophone and electronic sound on tape, and for piano with chamber orchestra. He is acting chair of Composition at Temple’s Boyer College. Greenbaum's work has won the kudos of his peers. A colleague at an Ivy League university praised his “solid craft and remarkable imagination.” The rector and dean of the Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory in St. Petersburg, Russia, where Greenbaum lectured in 1991, lauded his “professional erudition.” The New York Times has called Greenbaum a member of “new music's aristocracy.” Greenbaum studied with Stefan Wolpe and Mario Davidovsky, and has received numerous awards and honors. These include a Fromm Foundation commission, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Martha Baird Rockefeller Grant, a U.S. Artists Travel Grant, and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the N.Y. Foundation on the Arts. |
Paper Dissolve is made entirely from the sound of crumpling paper, a process that changes the paper from a de facto two dimensional object to a three dimenioned one, even as its quality of “paperness” is destroyed. It was composed and realized on an Apple Powerbook using REAKTOR software.
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Mary Simoni, Associate Professor of Music Technology and Chair of the Department of Performing Arts and Technology at the University of Michigan, holds a master's degree in music composition and a Ph.D. in music theory from Michigan State University. She completed post-doctoral studies at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University; the Center for Computer Music, City University of New York; and the Electronic Music Studios of Mills College. Her music and multimedia works have been performed in Asia, Europe, and widely throughout the United States and have been recorded by Centaur Records, the Leonardo Music Journal published by the MIT Press, and the International Computer Music Association. She was President of the International Computer Music Association from 2000 to 2004 and is Associate Editor for Organised Sound published by Cambridge University Press. She has authored an e-book "A Gentle Introduction to Algorithmic Composition" published by the University of Michigan and is currently working on another book "Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music" to be published by Swets & Zeitlinger of the Netherlands. |
Simoni writes: “The composition Pane is a musical setting of a poem of the same title written by my daughter, Shannon Dowd. I was intrigued by the structure of the poem and felt it lent itself well to quadraphonic interpretation: four channels, four stanzas and four readers reading about ‘the fourth and highest pane.’” The composition was realized using phase vocoder algorithms with the CSOUND programming language.
Pane, Shannon Dowd
An early January full moon
framed in the fourth
and highest pane and hanging
over gently glowing snow;
Its outline crisp, its beams
a flashlight onto the bed
in muted tones like jazz
elbowing its way through coarse
sumer air to a gaping window.
Jazz, the moon of summer,
and moon, the jazz of winter
collide on the age-wrinkled panes
forming holiday icicles and such
warm hope and calm despair as no morning
has ever seen, midnight or noon
framed in the fourth and highest pane.
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Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Sandra James studied Afro-Cuban and Latin percussion at AMLA school of Latin Music and has a bachelors degree in Computer Science from Temple University, Philadelphia. She traveled to Cuba to study percussion, singing and dance in 1997. She studied electronic music synthesis with Maurice Wright at Temple University and has attended the electronic music composition seminar at the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM) in Paris with Jonathan Harvey and Girard Grissé . She has performed in Philadelphia and Innsbruck, Austria with classical and popular musicians and as a member of the ensemble "Los Rumberos de la Cinco", performed with Larry Harlow and Sonny Fortune in the annual Tribute to John Coltrane. She currently studies painting at the Pennsylvania of Fine Arts. |
Two Brief Studies treat themes of anxiety and angst (Damage) and quiet contemplation (Planes over a winter landscape). The studies also reflect James’s interest in texture and contrast in the visual arts. Both pieces were realized on a desktop computer using Tom Erbe’s SoundHack software, and the CSOUND synthesis language.
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Elainie Lillios is a composer whose music focuses on the essence of sound and suspension of time. Her music tries to convey different emotions and take listeners on "sonic journeys". The sounds she uses for her music are varied-- sometimes they are simple things like the human voice, cars, wind chimes, or water. Other times her sound material is less obvious, like crunching bits of tree branches, walking through winter snow, or shuffling pebbles in a bit of water. She is strongly influenced by French and British electroacoustic composers, and believes that all sound can be considered musical. Influential mentors include Larry Austin, Jonty Harrison, and Jon Christopher Nelson. Elainie teaches music technology and composition at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She was the 2003 recipient of the International Computer Association commission and won the 2002 La Muse en Circuit radiophonic competition. Her recordings are available on the Empreintes DIGITALes, StudioPANaroma, and SEAMUS labels, and on the CD component of New Adventures in Sound Art's "The Radio Art Companion". Lillios writes: “Dreams calls to mind reveries of a person on a desert caravan. Scenes play through the dreamer's mind; perhaps they are memories past or maybe longings for another time and place." Dreams in the Desert was composed in the electroacoustic studios at Bowling Green State University and in the composer's home studio. |
