Newsletter no. 13

Written By ACTOR Research Team

Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration Project

November, 2021

Newsletter no. 13 — Subscribe here

ACTOR OUTCOMES

PUBLICATIONS

A new publication involving an ACTOR member has been made available:

For the full bibliography, please visitACTOR publications.

PRESENTATIONS

Robert Hasegawa, in collaboration with Luis Velasco-Pufleau and Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis, is hosting an online speaker series, "Poetics and Politics of Twenty-First Century Music." Fabien Lévy will be presenting a talk titled "Chroniques responsables, chroniques déchantées" on November 11 at 10am EST. All lectures will be presented via Zoom and are open to the public with registration at the following webform: https://bit.ly/3EGMfyP.

PROJECT UPDATES

 
 

Composer-performer Orchestration Research Ensembles (CORE) - Round 2: 2021-2023

A new round of the CORE project is now in motion at the Haute école de musique de Genève, McGill University, Université de Montréal, University of British Columbia, and University of Toronto. The aim of these ensembles is to give composers and performers ample time to explore the orchestrational possibilities of the ensemble and to collaboratively imagine and solve orchestrational challenges specific to the collection of instruments. The ensemble for this round in 2021–2022 is a septet comprised of flute, bass clarinet, trombone, vibraphone plus hand-held percussion, piano, violin, and cello. Concerts and recording sessions are planned for Spring 2022. A special pilot project with this septet plus live digital sound processing and spatialization will be conducted in 2022–2023 by the University of California, San Diego. Martha de Francisco and Ying-Ying Zhang from McGill University will visit UCSD in January 2022 to work on the optimal microphone placement for both acoustic and mixed music ensembles.

AWARDS & HONOURS

Jorge Ramos selected for National Showcase of Young Creators

Jorge Ramos' electroacoustic work — Paysage — was selected to participate in the final event of the National Showcase of Young Creators by The Youth Foundation (Fundação da Juventude), in partnership with the Portuguese Institute for Sports and Youth. Read more

UPCOMING EVENTS

Society for Music Theory (SMT) 2021 Annual Meeting

4-7 November, Online
SMT's annual meeting will be held online and will feature presentations by ACTOR members:

  • Ben Duinker (University of Toronto) — "Unpacking Interpretive Difficulty in Contemporary Music"

  • Jason Noble (Université de Montréal) — "Comparing Temporal Fictions in Tonality and Triadic Post-Tonality: Chopin's Fourth Ballade as a Link Between the Ages"

  • Lindsey Reymore (McGill University) — "A Timbral-Motivic Analysis of Obermüller’s different forms of phosphorus for Solo English horn"

  • Jeremy Tatar (McGill University) — "Emergent Timbres and Motor Mimesis in Screw Music"

  • Joshua Rosner (McGill University) — "Opening the Door: A Multifaceted Approach to the Analysis of Text Setting in Kate Soper's Door (2007)"

  • [PANEL] Provincializing Western Art Music Syntaxes: Chris Stover (Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University), Anna Yu Wang (Harvard University), Organizers: Michael Tenzer (University of British Columbia), Noriko Manabe (Temple University), Co-Chairs

  • [PLENARY SESSION] Teaching Music in the 21st Century: Leigh VanHandel (University of British Columbia) — "The 21st-Century Theory Graduate Student"

International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference

7-12 November, Online
Several ACTOR members will be presenting at the 22nd International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference, which will be held virtually November 7–12:

  • Axel Berndt—"The Music Performance Markup Format and Ecosystem"

  • Ben Hayes, Charalampos Saitis, & Gyorgy Fazekas—"Neural Waveshaping Synthesis"

  • Néstor Nápoles López, Mark R H Gotham, & Ichiro Fujinaga—"AugmentedNet: A Roman Numeral Analysis Network with Synthetic Training Examples and Additional Tonal Tasks"

  • Lindsey Reymore, Emmanuelle Beauvais-Lacasse, Bennett Smith, & Stephen McAdams—"Navigating noise: Modeling perceptual correlates of noise-related semantic timbre categories with audio features"

Narrative and Music Conference

15-17 November
Brussels

Jimmie LeBlanc will be presenting "Musical Minimalism and the Powers of the False: Gilles Deleuze's Falsifying Narration in Two Pages (for Steve Reich) (1968) by Philip Glass" on November 16 at the Narrative and Music conference in Brussels. Read more

ACTOR-CIRMMT Symposium on Orchestration Research

[Hybrid Event]
17 November | 4:30-6:30pm EST
In-person**: McGill - Room A832 | 555 Sherbrooke St.
Online: Join Zoom Meeting

The event will include four presentations on the composer-performer collaboration based on the papers listed below. A discussion period will follow.

  • Composer-performer Orchestration Research Ensembles (CORE) – Stephen McAdams, Eliot Britton, Keith Hamel, Roger Reynolds, Caroline Traube

  • Documenting Composer-Performer Collaboration on Orchestrational Problem Solving – Yuval Adler, Robert Hasegawa, and Joshua Rosner

  • Orchestrational Thinking and Composer-performer Relationships in the Context of a Collaborative Creation Process – Justine Maillard, Caroline Traube, Lindsey Reymore, Stephen McAdams

  • E-Rock: Creating Blend, Combining Styles, and Composing through Collaboration – Eliazer Kramer

Registration is required for in-person attendees. REGISTER HERE
** In accordance with regulations from the Gouvernement du Québec and McGill University, presentation of a vaccine passport will be required for entry in addition to regular COVID-19 precautions, including wearing a mask and distancing.

ACTOR TMC Proposal Abstract Workshop

6 December
9:30-11:30am (EST) | 3:30-5:30pm (CET)
Online:  Join Zoom Meeting

The ACTOR Training and Mentoring Committee (TMC) is hosting a Zoom workshop on conference proposal abstract writing. The event is open to all ACTOR student members. Three short presentations will be held followed by breakout sessions for small working groups. Each group will be led by an established scholar. The workgroups will discuss abstracts submitted in advance by participants. Pre-registration is required by 30 November to have your abstract workshopped - REGISTER HERE. Workshop sessions will be available in English, French, and German (depending on submissions).

ACTOR BUSINESS

ACTOR Workshop report available

We would like to inform all ACTOR members that the report of the Y3 Workshop is now available in the Data Repository. Please take a few moments to review the notes from each session and check all action items assigned to you. This will help us ensure that activities and research being carried out within every working group will proceed as expected. Should you have any comments, suggestions, or questions on how to access the report, please do not hesitate to contact us.

ACTOR FOUNDING MEMBERS

Jean-François Rivest

Montréal conductor Jean-François Rivest was recently appointed Principal Guest Conductor and Music Advisor of Quebec’s premier chamber orchestra, I Musici de Montréal. He has been Artistic Director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Laval and of Ottawa's Thirteen Strings Ensemble, as well as Conductor in Residence of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (OSM).

He has worked for several pedagogical institutions and has been teaching violin, orchestral conducting, and a variety of advanced performance classes at Université de Montréal since 1992. He is the founder, Artistic Director, and principal conductor of the Orchestre de l'Université de Montréal (OUM).

From 2009 to 2015, he was Artistic Director of the Orford Arts Centre (now Orford Music), where he presided with great success over its prestigious International Academy and Festival. In 2011, he was awarded the Opus Prize for the Artistic Director of the Year.

Rivest, who trained at the Conservatoire de Montréal and at the Juilliard School, quickly established himself as one of the foremost Quebec violinists of his generation. His main teachers were Sonia Jelinkova, Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay.

As the father of four children, family is at the centre of his life. He is passionate about nature and outdoor activities, such as scuba diving, sea kayaking, climbing, trekking, expeditions, and photography. He holds a Private Pilot License and flies his good old Cessna regularly. Jean-François Rivest believes that the many facets of nature are a vital source of artistic inspiration!

Rand Steiger

Rand Steiger was born in New York City and lives in San Diego, where he draws inspiration from the natural landscape and the long history of experimental music in Southern California.

Many of his compositions combine orchestral instruments with digital audio signal processing. They also propose a hybrid approach to just and equal-tempered tuning, exploring the delicate perceptual cusp between a harmony and a timbre that occurs when tones are precisely tuned. Some examples include: Ecosphere, developed at Ircam and premiered by the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris; Traversing, premiered by the Southbank Sinfonia in London; Cryosphere, premiered by the ACO at Carnegie Hall; A Menacing Plume, premiered by the Talea Ensemble; and the Coalescence Cycle, premiered on a Miller Theater Composer Portrait Concert by the International Contemporary Ensemble. More recently he created a series of works for the Arditti, JACK and Flux Quartets, and was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to create an installation with Yuval Sharon that embedded 32 loudspeakers in clouds hanging in W.D. Concert Hall that played a series of compositions throughout the day for the entire 2016/17 season. Soloists he has composed for include Maya Beiser, Claire Chase, Peter Evans, George Lewis, Susan Narucki, and Steven Schick. 

Steiger was also active as a conductor and led a series of critically acclaimed concerts with the Ensemble Sospeso in New York City in the early 2000's, and the California EAR Unit in Los Angeles in the 1980's and 90's. He holds the titles of Distinguished Professor and Conrad Prebys Presidential Chair in Music at U.C. San Diego. A former Guggenheim and Rome Prize Fellow, he also served as Visiting Professor in 2009 at Harvard University, and was Composer-in-Residence at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology from 2010 to 2013. 

 For further information please see http://rand.info

FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

ACTOR Funding Opportunities Reinstated!

We are glad to announce that, following the removal of the global travel advisory by Global Affairs Canada and directives from McGill University, ACTOR will reinstate its Student Exchange Funding and Satellite Meeting Funding in the Winter 2022 semester.

The Student Exchange Funding aims to support ACTOR student members conducting research within the ACTOR project's mandate at an ACTOR partner institution. A maximum of $2,500 CAD per applicant in support of travel and living expenses will be provided. The minimum length of the exchange is 2 weeks. Exchanges must be between ACTOR partner institutions. Applications may be submitted online by 5:00pm (EST) on November 30, 2021. Please note that, before submitting an application, it is important to verify the travel restrictions at both the home and host institutions/countries.

The purpose of the ACTOR Satellite Meeting Funding is to increase ACTOR's visibility at international conferences by supporting the organization of adjunct meetings involving at least 2 ACTOR members. A maximum amount of $300 CAD will be provided. Applications will be accepted continuously, but must be submitted at least two months prior to the conference date.

For more information on how to apply and to access the online application form, visit ACTOR Funding Opportunities.

OPEN CALLS

Contributing to TOR

We encourage all ACTOR members to share their research (in progress or completed) with the ACTOR community via the Timbre and Orchestration Resource (TOR). This may include an article, blog, or video submission containing information on project ideas, experiments, external resources/tools, teaching materials, analysis, or anything related to timbre and orchestration that you deem relevant. We believe that only in doing so will we truly benefit from the expertise and feedback from the world-class team of scientists, artists, and humanists involved in ACTOR. If you have any questions about the submission process, please contact Kit Soden. 

Read more

ACTOR Research Team