Chirp: NEC's Music Technology Showcase | Night 6 - Music Beyond the Threshold: A Concert of Computer-Assisted Music

New England Conservatory students electrify the Black Box Theater during Chirp, a six-night music technology performance series showcasing live electronic music and cutting-edge music tech.

Tonight's concert was curated by faculty member Stratis Minakakis. Join Minakakis and students for a pre-concert lecture from 7-8 p.m. 

Program includes my For Felipe M. for solo amplified saxophone, with video design and programming by Ben Eidson, I will also be conducting notes, echoes, too, from that veiled realm by Xiaofeng Jiang.

In NEC Composers’ Series, pianist Jihye Chang performs Lowell Etudes: Three Etchings on Solitude to close out the program.

More info here.

Program Notes

“For a good voice hearing is a torture.” This line from “Beethoven”—which I happened upon randomly when leafing through a collection of poetry at a Philadelphia bookstore —was my first introduction to the work of Robert Lowell (1917-1997). From this epigrammatic summation of Beethoven’s late style to his intimate confessions of his struggles with bipolar disorder, Lowell’s best lines strike at the center of things with an electrifying sense of precision.

A quintessential Bostonian of aristocratic origin, Lowell often used New England as the setting for his works. Of all his depictions of the area, I felt a strong kinship with his portrayal of a certain Boston kind of solitude: “The loneliness inside me is a place / Harvard where no one might always be someone. / When we’re alone people we run from change / to the mysterious and beautiful / I am eating alone at a small white table, / visible, ignored” (excerpt from “Eating Out Alone”).

Lowell Études: Three Etchings on Solitude traces its origins to the aforementioned lines, interwoven with remote resonances of Debussy’s “...Des pas sur la neige...” (Prèludes, Book I, No. 6), a masterful exploration of acoustic space and memory.

–Stratis Minakakis

Dalia Chen and Stratis perform Skiagrafies II for flute and piano resonance.

Please join us for an evening of music combining acoustic instruments and voices with amplified objects, electronic sounds, and video. The program features recent work by Andrea Pensado, Judy Dunaway, Tamar Diesendruck, Amber Vistein, Amanda Justice, and Stratis Minakakis. We are also excited to offer a rare performance of Ronald Roxbury’s "Four Driscoll Songs" (1974) interpreted by Lautaro Mantilla and Jon Starks. Additional performers include guest artists Rose Hegele (voice) and Dalia Chin (flute); and Dan McGee, Aleksis Martin, Grant Houston, Yi-Mei Templeman, and astronaut Tyler Bouque. The concert is free.

More info here: https://necmusic.edu/events/composer-series?ct=t