Saturday, June 03, 2006

Week 11 ..Stephen Whittington

Stephen Whittington (b.1953) Composer, pianist, writer and music critic.
Director - Electronic Music Unit at the the Elder Conservatorium Adelaide where he teaches composition, music theory, acoustics and electronic music.
"As a pianist, he is renowned as an interpreter of contemporary music."
List of few works:
^1988 - X is Dead , Homage to Pierre Boulez
^1994 - Distributed Improvisation live to air on ABC - Fm
^1996 - 1988 - Distributed Synchronicity experiments
^2000 - Music Of The Spheres,
Contemporary Art Center of South Australia
^2003 - Pitch Web Improvisation , Museum Brisbane
^2005 - Present Ongoing experiments using VOIP (Voice Over internet Protocol)

Distributed Music Performance : "Any music perfrormance in which the performers are not in close proximety to one another. They may be anywhere from the other side of the hall to the other side of world"... OR may be in a different galaxy.
This can get really interesting when tried with people of similar thinking or close ones.The result can be taken as a measure of their closeness to one another.
It would give even more interesting result when tried with people who have no clue whom they are playing with and dont know each other or may be they are playing totally different genre of music ..
I think the later one is an extreme case, "Handle with care" .
I can imagine that music and cant stop saying, "WHAT"....

^ Ventures in Vocoding (Hardware of software implementation of speach based compression algorhythm)
^ Utterence : Any human vocal sound including but not restricted to speech and speech like sounds.
Music Of Spheres : Performers will assemble a variety of quotations related to the idea of music of spheres.
Read : Serious Immobilities : On the centenary of Erik Satie's Vexations - Stephen Whittington


References :

Whittington , Stephen .2006. Presentaion at the Forum : Ventures in vocoding and Distributed Music Performance. 25 May ' 2006.University Of Adelaide
Original image source : http://www.emu.adelaide.edu.au/about/staff/stephen.whittington.html

2 comments:

weimer said...

haha i like what you've done to stephen!

great performance in forum the other day! as a piano player, i like watching people use the standard piano with technology like that. not because i think that synthesizers are over-used or are detracting from conventional piano playing, it's just a combination of sounds that i think works really well. it would be reasonble assume that a eletric piano would suit an piece composed for keys and laptop, however, the grand piano part suited the stuff you made in Reason really well! the 'solo' style piano playing and the epic style of the piece reminded me a lot of a band called sigur ros... have you heard of them?

Ben said...

I loved the piece, but I think you should figure out a way to intergrate the laptop into the piano. Maybe just sitting it on top, where the manuscript paper would go. "The computer IS my manuscript!"