RLPF.ar

My first visit to China was in 2005, to attend that year's MusicAcoustica Festival at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Finally, a chance to return! Highlights included meeting John Chowning, one of the forerunners of American computer music and the discoverer of the Frequency Modulation synthesis technique, hearing three of his classic works on the concert hall's eight-channel sound system and learning about the composition techniques used in Phoné and Stria. Other concerts featured some surprisingly un-fussy, ballsy works from Grame in Paris, a hilarious BBC radio collage by Leigh Landy, a marvelous computer-generated video by Bret Battey, and a quiet, sensitive, touching meditation on nature by New Zealand composer Douglas Lilburn.

My experience was quite different this time. In both festivals, I was scheduled to perform a new piece. In 2005, however, I had rehearsed the piece thoroughly in advance. This year, the plan was to present a new, improvisational piece on the closing concert, together with Zhang Ruibo (who is teaching electronic music at the Conservatory in Shenyang). Since it was meant to be an improvisation, or at least loosely structured, I arrived in Beijing with a lot less code in the can and a ton to write during the week. No time for sightseeing, and I had to skip a number of the lectures in favor of all-afternoon coding sessions.

The result? A success, by reasonable standards. (Of course, I hold myself to insanely perfectionistic standards. Nonetheless, I think I could salvage some of the material and make a polished composition out of it.) My department chair says 70-80% for a world premiere is successful, and we hit that mark easily. I have no idea what it looked like to the audience, but we got good reviews from several people in the audience, including two of my colleagues from Xinghai (now doing their PhD coursework at CCOM) and no less a figure than John Chowning himself. I'll take it!

A couple of photos from the performance follow. The piece was billed as "live coding," but it didn't end up being that (not by TOPLAP standards, anyway). But, at least we projected my screen for the audience and showed a fair amount of dirty laundry. The video analysis adds a touch of wow factor.