[NewMusicEvents] Mills Music Now: CCM Composers with Stephen Vitiello concert - November 13 - Mills College

[Steed Cowart]

The Mills College Music Department and the Center for Contemporary Music present
Mills Music Now 2009-2010

CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY MUSIC COMPOSERS, with special guest STEPHEN VITIELLO

Photocells, crackle boxes, metal objects, burned out light bulbs, coincidences, Bay Area Rapid Transit,
polyrhythms in quadraphonic space – brave new worlds of music and sound.

For more details and sample recordings, please visit:
http://musicnow.mills.edu/concert6.php

Friday, November 13,  8:00 pm
Littlefield Concert Hall
$15 general, $10 seniors and non-Mills students
Free to Mills students, faculty,staff, and alumnae/alumni
Tickets may be purchased at the door, or online at:
http://www.boxofficetickets.com (keywords: Mills College)
Wheelchair accessible

Mills College
Music Department
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA 94613
http://musicnow.mills.edu
To subscribe to email Music Newsletter contact: concerts at mills.edu
Concert Line: 510 430-2296

Stephen Vitiello:
New and old works for photocells, guitar, field recordings and forgotten loops.

Chris Brown: Poly1 (2009)
"Poly1" (2009), for live computer synthesis, explores polyrhythm in quadraphonic space. It is played using
new homemade software called "Ritmos", which is an interactive metronome that can play in many different
tempi and meters at once.

John Bischoff: Sidewalk Chatter (2009)
An analog "crackle box" circuit (made by STEIM in Amsterdam) is used as a sound-making input for
triggering a digital audio response via laptop computer. As a performer plays the circuit by touching
exposed metal traces, a computer program analyses peak loudness and pitch contours in the analog
sound and generates its own synthesized voices based in part on that information. Thanks to James Fei
for "crackle box" line-out mod.

Maggi Payne: Glassy Metals 7/27/09
A continuation of my fascination with the sounds of metal objects, Glassy Metals explores the sounds of
tungsten filaments in burned out incandescent light bulbs, magnetic (iron oxide) tape rushing across a
head stack, small ball bearings, ball chains of various sizes, sheet metal, tiny gear motors, bikes, BART
(Bay Area Rapid Transit which permeates the sonic landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area), freight
trains, and various other metal objects.

Some sounds are used in their raw state; others, such as the BART train, which now sounds like the wind,
are transformed beyond recognition. Selecting only small portions of the spectrums of several sources
and layering them results in new constructs with constantly fluctuating details. The ending exaggerates
these perturbations, as sources emerge from the texture and fold back in as if they are fluttering insects
hovering close to us briefly, then flitting away, only to return later. Although several sources are cyclic,
none are precisely so, nor are they synchronous with other sources combined in the layers, so apparent
synchronous relationships occur briefly, then drift apart.

Glassy Metals takes its title from non-crystalline (amorphous) metallic materials.

Alex Ketley & Les Stuck: Theater-Irrelevant (2009)
Theater-Irrelevant is a single mixed-media work that challenges the notions of site-specificity and aims to
create a new work that is modular by design and free from the confines of creating and presenting work
in a formal theater space. The piece consists of a distilled movement vocabulary, deliberately chosen for
its effectiveness in a diversity of situations, venues and cultural contexts. This project has been generously
supported by one of six Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Choreographer Collaboration Grants. Theater-Irrelevant is also supported by Headlands Center for the Arts
and the Maggie Allessee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), as well as The San Francisco
Conservatory of Dance. For more information visit: www.foundryprojects.org.

Conception: Alex Ketley, Les Stuck
Creation: Alex Ketley, Christian Burns, Andrea Flores, Kara Davis, Les Stuck, Malinda LaVelle, Joy Prendergast

James Fei & Steven Vitiello
Untitled collaboration