Department of Music

No Collective Residency / Tokyo Gen’On Project

Saturday, April 30, 2022, Performances live-cast over Zoom at 9am and at 9pm (Eastern Standard Time)

The University of Virginia Department of Music presents two live-streamed concerts by the Tokyo Gen’On Project and No Collective performing works by UVA Music Graduate Students in the Composition and Computer Technologies program. The concerts mark the culmination of a virtual residency at the University of Virginia. The CCT graduate students used the restrictions of the pandemic to develop and build an uncommon virtual residency that defies the constraints of time, geography, languages and cultures, and focuses on the power of the universal language of music as well as the process of its mediation by the particular instruments used for its performance.

For this residency, No Collective, who acted as a vanishing mediator between Tokyo Gen’On Project and UVA composers, specified the primary musical instrument as Zoom, the online communication tool which many have depended on during COVID-19. The composers and performers were both encouraged to explore the specific biases and affordances of this computer program which resulted in revealing unexpected characteristics of acoustic instruments performed by Gen’On members (tuba, saxophone, piano, percussion, and electronics).

The performances will feature six world premieres of music written specifically for Zoom by Graduate Fellows at the UVA Composition and Computer Technologies program:

Juan Carlos Vasquez
Daniel Fishkin
Omar Fraire
Varun Kishore
Brian Lindgren
Matias Vilipana Stark

Performers

Aki Kuroda, piano,
Yoshiko Kanda, percussion,
Shinya Hashimoto, tuba,
Masaki Oishi, saxophone,
Sumihisa Arima, electronics

Tokyo Gen’On Keikaku / Tokyo Gen’On Project  (https://tokyogenonproject.net/)

Formed in 2012 by artists in the forefront of the Japanese modern music field, Tokyo Gen’On Project presents unique musical perspectives by providing programs with experimental composers which have never been played in Japan before, commissioning new work for their unique instrumentation and leading workshops for young musicians and composers. The current members are Sumihisa Arima (Electronics), Masanori Oishi (Saxophone), Yoshiko Kanda (Percussion), Aki Kuroda (Piano), and Shinya Hashimoto (Tuba). Their past performances include Shinya Hashimoto x Sumihisa Arima Duo Recital (July 2012), Tokyo Gen’On Project #00 (September 2012), and Workshop Series Lab #01, Playing method of Brass Instruments. Its 2013 production “Tokyo Gen’On Project #01” won the 13th Keizo Saji Prize by the Suntory Foundation for Arts.

No Collective  http://nocollective.com/
No Collective (You Nakai, Kay Festa, Ai Chinen, Jay Barnacle, Earle Lipski, et al.) makes performances that explore the physical and metaphysical infrastructures of performance. Active since 2008, the variety of their output has included music(ians), dance(rs), theatre, theory, play-scripts, picture books, haunted houses, nursery rhymes, journals, and video works. No Collective has been featured in Leonardo Music Journal (vol.24, 2014) for its innovative work with technology. Detailed studies of their performances have appeared in Perspectives of New Music (Winter, 2013), TDR (MIT Press), Brooklyn Rail, and Performing Arts Journal (MIT Press), among other eminent outlets. They also run a publishing project called Already Not Yet which publishes experimental children’s books written by children and other literary oddities (http://alreadynotyet.org).