Archive

Please tell us more about your thoughts about duets and the evolution of your playing in this format.

Selections from a 1996 concert at CNMAT, featuring improvisations with Indian Ghazal tradition vocalist Shafqat Ali Khan, and live electronics with composer/improviser David Wessel.

Swiss saxophonist Urs Leimgruber and American composer/improviser David Wessel perform a series of solos and duos. Violist Nils Bultmann joined them for the final piece of the evening.

Two sets of improvised music with German pianist Georg Graewe and electronics composer/improviser David Wessel.

Trio improvisation with Steve Lacy (soprano saxophone), George Lewis (trombone), David Wessel (live electronics) from the Berkeley Edge Festival, June 7, 2003

Concert of improvised music, featuring AACM member and multi-instrumentalist Douglas Ewart, cellist and bassist Kash Killion, instrument builder Walter Kitundu, and live electronics by David Wessel.

Why do we create art and what do we expect it to do? This is the question posed in 68. In the beginning we witness the creative act: a poet, writing and speaking out the earliest fragments of his poems; discovering through experiment his voice, both physically and figuratively.

This is a unusual piece for piano and electronics, written for Sebastian Berweck. The electronics are based of recordings of shovelling mud and the piano part involves a variety of transcriptions. Here's the original program note:

“Distance, no matter how close the object may be.” – Walter Benjamin

Night Edge I
for singer, dancer, flute and prepared piano
written by Evelyn Ficarra with collaborating improvisers Heather Frasch (flute), Aurora Josephson (voice), Myra Melford (piano) and dancer Paige Sorvillo. Commissioned by Shie Shoji for her group Shonorities.

This piece takes its starting point from a poem in the Tanka form (31 syllables) by medieval Japanese poet, Izumi Shikibu.

ASTRONOMIA, (1995) (duration 10') for marimba and quadraphonic tape is the third from a set of four pieces entitled Quadrivium. The four pieces in Quadrivium are designed to be played either individually or together as a complete uninterrupted cycle. All the pieces are focused in one way or another on sound spatialization.

Practice
For full orchestra and computer
In association with the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), UC Berkeley

Selected Performance History:

American Composers Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, March 17, 2006 (premiere)
American Composers Orchestra, Annenberg Center, Philadelphia, March 18
Berkeley Symphony with Kent Nagano, June, 2006 (Full Orchestral Version)

Ronald Bruce Smith’s “Constellation for orchestra and live electronics,” produced in collaboration between Berkeley Symphony and UC Berkeley’s Center for Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT).

The World Premiere was given by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Kent Nagano on November 10, 2000; it was revised in 2003.

whatWALL? (2003)

For alto saxophone and quadraphonic tape
Written for and dedicated to Brian Sacawa.

Mathematica, for solo flute(s) and quadriphonic tape is the first from a set of four pieces entitled Quadrivium. The four pieces in Quadrivium are designed to be played either individually or together as a complete uninterrupted cycle. All the pieces are committed in one way or another to exploring the spatialization of sound.