Newsletter no. 31
Newsletter no. 31
Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration Project
Workshop:
ACTOR's Training and Mentoring Committee will host a workshop on Designing and Delivering Effective Research and Research-Creation Presentations. Aimed at graduate students and early-career scholars and professionals, this event features as guest speakers ACTOR members Lindsey Reymore (Arizona State University) and Eliot Britton (University of Toronto) as well as Mithura Sanmugalingam (McGill University Teaching and Learning Services). This event is open to ACTOR and CIRMMT student members.
Topics will include, but not be limited to:
strategies for effective oral presentations
handling audience questions
slide design
time management
adapting presentations to different audiences
Date / Time: 27 September 10:00am-12:00pm (EDT) | 16h00-18h00 (CEST)
Registration is required, and can be done via this link:
https://airtable.com/app8gRjxBogIgqZsH/shrchomIVjK1kh74V
The event will be held on Zoom, via this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/89834484226?pwd=cTAwUjJuSjBVY09hOGRDYVYyOVovQT09
Meeting ID: 898 3448 4226
Passcode: 455016
Looking forward to seeing you there!
Project Updates
CORE Project - Haute École de Musique
On June 19 of this year, the rehearsals and concert for the second round of CORE/EROC were recorded and filmed at the HEM in Geneva, involving three composers and seven musicians from HEM. The audio and video recordings as well as the scores will be available to the ACTOR community in mid-September and mid-October. Addititonally, we will be sending out a link to a video clip of the concert shortly. We are currently preparing for Round 3 of CORE/EROC, which will add an electronic music performer to the group of musicians!
Committees
ACTOR Diversity Committee
The ACTOR Diversity Committee is pleased to announce our inaugural meeting, September 28, 12pm-2pm EDT (Zoom info below). Since this is our first meeting, the agenda will be fairly open-ended, and we hope to continue the great discussion begun in Strasbourg at Y5. All ACTOR members—students and collaborators—are welcome to attend, and your attendance does not automatically commit you to participate in future meetings.
As a reminder, our aims as a committee are twofold:
To facilitate the cross pollination of the Diversity Workgroup's research projects with other ACTOR workgroups, thereby encouraging the idea that these projects are defined by more than the "diversity" in their topics, scope, or repertoire.
To support ACTOR researchers, project PIs, and workgroup leaders in developing strategies for research design, pedagogy, and outreach that celebrate inclusivity and diversity in topics, scope, repertoire, and intended audience.
Hope to see many of you there!
https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/88306482828?pwd=QVFuTW04c045N2w3MUZDZllJTS9pZz09
Meeting ID: 883 0648 2828
Passcode: 292205
Magda Mayas
Magda Mayas, born 1979, is a pianist, researcher and composer performer living in Berlin. Over the past 20 years she developed a vocabulary utilizing both the inside as well as the exterior parts of the piano, using amplification, preparations and objects that become extensions of the instrument itself. She holds a PhD in Music Performance and Interpretation from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 2019, she is the program coordinator and teaches improvisation at Luzern University of applied Sciences and Arts. Mayas performs internationally solo and in collaboration with a large number of musicians and composers. Festivals and exhibitions include Maerz Musik, Documenta, the Berlin Biennale, Wiener Festwochen or Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. She was awarded a residency at Villa Aurora, Los Angeles in 2016 and at the Montalvo Arts Centre, USA in 2017 and 2019 and co-curated the festival “Music Unlimited” in Wels, Austria, in 2019. She has been producing radio pieces for ABC Australia and Deutschlandradio Kultur and released over 40 CDs to date.
Magda Mayas’ research interest in timbre has been an inherent part of her practice as a composer-performer and the orchestration of timbre from a improviser’s perspective is the topic of her dissertation. Currently she is part of a four-year research project concerning improvisation and ethics as well as investigating approaches and methods of timbre notation with the collective smallest functional unit.
http://www.magdamayas.com
https://smallestfunctionalunit.com/
Mark Saccomano
Mark Saccomano is a music theorist at Paderborn University and a research associate for the Beethoven in the House digital musicology project, which examines the role of piano arrangements in the reception history of 19th-century orchestral music and the choices made by arrangers when transcribing works to be performed in a domestic setting. His role includes developing tools to analyze encoded scores using Linked Data and open-source software. Mark also writes on hermeneutics, phenomenology, and the aesthetics of recorded music. He has published on the music of Éliane Radigue (Journal of Sonic Studies, 2020) and presented papers on the effects of timbre on the interaction between virtual space and actual space while listening to recorded music. He has also examined the role of texture and timbre in minimalist music, drawing on the theory of embodied perception to explain how proprioceptive awareness of the possibilities and constraints on bodily movement can inform listener interpretations of musical works.
Recently, he assumed a new position with the KreativeInstitut in Detmold, Germany, an interdisciplinary research group focusing on new media in arts and culture. He is currently working on plans to initiate a study of music encoding and data visualization techniques. The goal is to facilitate analysis of the role voicing and overtones play in harmony and chord construction in 20th century popular, jazz, and post-tonal contexts. Mark is also a member of the Edirom Virtual Research Group (ViFE), an association of researchers affiliated with the Musikwissenschaftliches Seminar Detmold/Paderborn, dedicated to the development of tools and methods for digital music editions. He previously taught music history and music theory at Columbia University in New York and was adjunct professor of music at Montclair University in New Jersey.
Photo credit: Jessica Schrader