Composers' Forum Spring 2019

Anna Clyne One of the most interesting things I found of Anna’s presentation was her use of visualizing her own musical material. She showed as an example of creating a mural for the music using colors, forms, shapes and lines to show how the music evolves and grows. This becomes a sort of visual representation which is an incredibly interesting detail of her compositional process and gives a lot of insight into the piece. Also, as much as the visualizing of the material made it ‘physical’, she also mentioned she drew what the music made her feel which I can imagine as well as being compositionally helpful, also has some therapeutic benefits potentially! For “Night Ferry” it shows the journey of the mind, a highly effective depiction of the swirling thoughts and emotions as captured so beautifully in her piece. She spoke about her background in technology and the ability technological means allow for a layering of texture, and this influence was definitely pre...

Luke Dubios  If I had to choose, I might have to pick R Luke Dubois as the most fascinating guest we have had in Composer’s Forum. Everyone has been great, but to watch the mind of R Luke Dubois in action is a spectacular site. Seeing him demonstrate and speak on algorithms, various studies, and visual data was so inspiring. Especially because of the level of integrity he seeks to maintain while collecting this data and presenting it to the masses. A great point that he made is that by being present as professor, he is able to impact his engineering students to use their level of intelligence for good (vs dangerous or damaging motives). Seeing him process information and approach problems as questions and calmly take measures to find ways to answer them without stress and frustration was awesome. I found myself trying to do the math and calculate how he fit all of these different ventures into his 40 years of life; from his DMA in composition from Columbia, to being a profes...

Last Monday, Composer’s Forum had the pleasure of hearing Luke DuBois speak. It’s difficult to pin down exactly what he does because his art goes beyond music into the visual, and interactive mediums. As soon as he walked in, questioned the weird podium that no one else seemed to notice, and immediately ask the class if we’ve seen a 1985 movie starring Madonna, I knew this was going to be an unusual class. I can’t quite pick out a favorite aspect of his presentation, because all of his pieces and installations were so different. However, all of his pieces were unified in that they based themselves on data, and presented information in a powerful and creative manner, and demanded audience engagement. For example, the first piece he explained to us was the matchmaking service he developed from the “Missed Connections” posts on Craigslist, in which he engaged hopeful romantics and used technology to creatively (and hilariously) assist them in their search. The second example he showed ...

Last Monday at Composer´s Forum we had someone that talked us about the nuts and bolts of his creative process apart from his composition process or the creation process of his pieces. Daniel Wohl quickly combined acoustic instruments with electronics as a composer in his first pieces. Nevertheless, he told us that he uses electronics to explore and get to the sounds that he does not know. Electronics is furthermore used in his pieces for obtaining the unreachable sounds by means of the acoustic instruments that feature a lot of the concert music this days. His very own music (maybe the music he writes for films and TV also, with its limitations) is conceived mainly sonically. In the first piece he showed us I could see some influences by Webern, Ligeti and Gorecki. As for the electronics, which I liked, it was curious to see that although electronics in his work are normally generated from the acoustic instruments of the piece (creating hyperinstruments), the electronics...

            This week’s guest in composer’s forum, Bora Yoon, (multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer), really inspired me in many ways I had never experienced before.             Her perspective on the relationship between sound and space, and between spirituality and sound completely fascinated me. She manipulated common sounds and vessels through which sounds can be created into really beautiful and moving music. To me, it wasn’t just music; rather, it was a total sonic experience that effected the mind, body, and soul.             The first example of her ability to create music in this way was in the very first piece she showed the class, which she explained she normally opened or closed her performances with. In this piece, she used a looper to layer sounds using objects, voice, and common instruments. While I foun...

The guest for this week’s composer forum is Bora Yoon, who is an experimental electroacoustic composer/performer from South Korea.  During the forum, the things that immediately caught my attention were the Tibetan bowls, old cellphones and all kinds of bizarre objects on the table. Through Bora’s careful manipulation, it was possible to use these materials and generate a variety of interesting sound palettes.  Bora views music as series of sound signals that vibrates in air in a mathematical pattern. The art lies in how to combine these elements and come up with a narrative which the composer wants to tell. It is what interests Bora the most, to discover the symbolic characteristics of certain instruments and repurpose them to break conventional forms. In addition to music itself, the acoustic environment in which the music is being executed is equally as important for Bora. When she works on a site-specific music project, she would always thrive to do inten...

I enjoy the fact that you know and state what you like in musical theatre-a higher dedication to the happenings on stage remaining “in-world,” as you put it. With this in mind, I commend you for giving Nico Muhly the creative respect to try and marry the traditional role of the aria with more modern inclinations. While his attempt was not successful in your estimation, you are still excited to see what comes next for him because you recognize his passion for music. I think this is so crucial because we have to uplift each other to continue our craftsmanship, even if one project seems to have fallen short of the mark. I recently watched At Eternity’s Gate (2018) with Willem Dafoe and Oscar Isaac playing Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, respectively. When they first start a friendship, Gauguin is thoroughly unimpressed by Van Gogh’s artistic output, but he pushes him to keep going and try new things. When Van Gogh does eventually reach a level of fame before his untimely pass...