Department of Music

Concerts

WTJU Broadcast 1: TechnoSonics Transmission Festival Launch
Wednesday, 10/19, 7-9pm 91.1 FM
In this two hour radio broadcast we will play music by composers featured on this year's TechnoSonics festival and orient listeners to the coming five days of concerts, talks and workshops. Sound art created by student and faculty composers, including works composed in the 300-person TechnoSonics (MUSI 2350) digital sound art composition class will be broadcast. Host Kyle Chattleton will talk with sound artists and performers featured on the festival, including Music Department Chair, composer and TechnoSonics producer, Matthew Burtner.

Concert 1: Transmission of Place
Thursday, 10/20, 8pm Old Cabell Hall Auditorium
The concert features performances by featured ensembles the Albemarle Ensemble and Rivanna String Quartet, and visiting saxophonist, Susan Fancher. We explore how places transmit across space and exude a unique energy. The force ofGravity itself is the subject of UVA Alumni, Elliott Grabill's piece. Judith Shatin's Storm explores the connection between meteorological, planetary and human struggle. Matthew Burtner's Threnody (Sikuigvik) from Sound Cast of Matanuska Glacier, brings the sonic presence of a glacier into the concert hall in stunning surround sound diffusion. Christopher Luna's Geyser creates a transcription of an Icelandic geyser into an ensemble of telematic pianos. The concert also features music by CCT Visiting  Scholar, Israeli composer, Kiki Keren-Huss; and by UVA's own Rachel Devorah Trapp.

Colloquium: Anna Friz, Radio is not a Container
Friday, 10/21, 3:30pm, Old Cabell Hall, Room 107
Transmission Artist, Anna Friz, joins the festival from Berlin to talk about her radio art. Anna Friz began her sound career broadcasting on campus/community radio CiTR Vancouver in 1993. Since then she has created audio art and radiophonic works for extensive international broadcast, installation, or performance in more than 25 countries, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. She also composes multi-channel atmospheric sound works for theatre, dance, film, and solo performance that are equally able to reflect upon public media culture or to reveal interior landscapes. Anna holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from York University, Toronto and is Assistant Professor of Sound in the Film and Digital Media Department of University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a steering member of the artist collective Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music based in East Iceland and a long time affiliate artist of Wave Farm in Acra, New York. Anna is also an itinerant member of the Toronto-based collective Public Studio, which together won a 2014 City of Toronto commission to create a new permanent sound installation in the Lee Lifeson Arts Park in North York, Toronto.

Concert 2: Transmission of Time
Friday, 10/21, 8pm Old Cabell Hall Auditorium
The concert features a performance of a large-scale radiophonic work, Uncoordinated Universal Time, by Anna Friz. The piece uses the "zero hour" of Universal Time, a global network of cesium clocks linked via shortwave bands since 1972. CCT Visiting Scholar Zhen Wang from China presents her video piece, Awake; and the concert also includes music by UVA sound artists, Travis Thatcher, Peter Bussigel and Max Tfirn. A video installation on the UVA Lawn by Luke Dahl and Travis Thatcher will precede the concert. 

Concert 3: See/Hear Transmission
Saturday, 10/22, 4pm 2nd Street Gallery
TechnoSonics teams up with the 2nd Street Gallery See/Hear series to create an interactive event for the public. The event will feature a workshop/performance allowing audience to experience the cutting edge new technologies being developed by the Composition and Computer Technologies Program in the University of Virginia's McIntire Department of Music. Luke Dahl will unveil a new gesture-based control system using the MYO arm-band sensors, Symmetry Study No. 1. UVA PhD student, Ben Robertson will present Ectype, for zither, alumitone, mixer and laptop.

WTJU Broadcast 2: Anna Friz, Transmission Listener
Sunday, 10/23, 1am 91.1 FM
Anna Friz will perform her work Dear Listener live on-air on Jackson Patton-Smith's WTJU show. If the air grows ever thicker with signals, if every building and every pocket holds an antenna, if everyone becomes a sender, who is left to listen? Somewhere, perhaps even close by, there is a listener who hears it all: every squelch, every click, all the encrypted conversation, all the two-way cross talk, all the moving traffic, all the air to ground to air loops, all the late night automated playlists, all the lonely college radio hosts, all the last truckers with a handle, all the repeater towers, all the radio telephones, all the satellites, all the stars. Surveillance or persistence or fool’s errand? Dear Listener, this is the one show which is made just for you.

Talk 2: Miller Puckette, Interactive software design for Pluton
Sunday, 10/23, 1:00pm, Old Cabell Hall, Room B011
Software designer and UCSD Music Professor, Miller Puckette will talk about his software for Pluton, a large scale piano and interactive computer piece composed in 1988. Pluton was the first piece to use the Max software. Puckette developed Max/MSP and PD, in which Pluton was written for this modern performance.

Concert 4: Jazz Ensemble with Electronics
Sunday, 10/23, 3:30pm, Old Cabell Hall Auditorium
The Jazz Ensemble concert will feature a collaboration with electronic music in addition to its normal jazz band programming.  Piece for a Northern Sky by Matthew Burtner serves as the basis for an expansive improvisation with the ensemble and Jazz Ensemble Director, John D'earth.

Concert 5: Interplanetary Transmissions and Pluto
Monday, 10/24, 8pm, Old Cabell Hall Auditorium
Pluton (1988) by Philippe Manoury is a large scale composition in a series of pieces named for planets in our solar system and scored for piano and computer. The computer senses the pianists playing through a MIDI interface and uses the data to synchronize the computer with the piano (using score following) and also as a source of additional control. We will precede the full performance of the piece with interplanetary transmissions recorded by NASA.