Join us for an evening of groundbreaking music and multimedia art presented by New Arts Collaboration. This concert showcases the world premieres of The Reef, Points Becoming, and Toy Phantasy, each bringing a unique blend of sound and visuals. These pieces delve into themes ranging from the fragility of marine ecosystems to the dynamic processes of transformation and imagination.
Featuring performances by the guest pianist Motoko Honda, composers Maria Kallionpää, Mark Winges, Vera Ivanova, the audio/visual group Dilate Ensemble, and visual artists including Andre Veloux, Anne Stagg, Jody Zellen, and Yalan Chang, the event promises to be an inspiring fusion of artistic disciplines. Experience the synergy of music, technology, and visual art in a setting that pushes the boundaries of contemporary performance.
Presented with New Arts Collaboration
About the music:
The Reef (World Premiere) is based on a sample recorded at Thailand's Mu Koh Lanta National Marine Park. Being somewhat limited in its spectral composition, the excerpt consisted of a swimmer proceeding towards a coral reef. The video element of the premiere was created by assigning colours to different hexadecimal bytes of source code of sound files of the piece, producing colour bar codes. Andre used the Lego colour palette to facilitate the creation of physical artworks from these colour bar codes.
The goal of this series of works discussed above is to draw attention on the importance of protecting our marine environments. Together with the real-time video artwork, the music of The Reef paints a picture of the gradual damaging that pollution causes to the coral reefs. However, with the help of computer-based analysis, also the vivid colors of such ecosystems were translated into music, giving us a gleam of hope. Maybe it is not too late to do something?
Points Becoming (World Premiere) is a one movement work with two contrasting moods / sections. Throughout, the piece explores how a “point” becomes “something else”. In the first section, individual notes expand into chords and short, staccato chords expand into wider, sustained notes and chords. In the slower, second section, widely spaced notes (“points”) contract, or narrowly spaced notes expand. In this sense, the music is always “becoming”.
The animation for Points Becoming is part of an ongoing series that features simple shapes and stick figures that when seen together form a larger dream-like narrative about the trials and tribulations of life. These animations explore the relationship of an imagined past and future, taking into consideration the years of the pandemic and the effects of isolation. The are figures anonymous silhouette signs for everyone and are meant to evoke emotions and sympathy without having faces. It is their actions and interactions and how we project onto them, that gives them life.
Toy Phantasy (World Premiere) for piano and fixed audio was composed in 2022-2023 for Luo Ting, the first performer of the work. The piece has been inspired by the poem by John Updike Player Piano, originally published in The New Yorker. While the poem is about player piano, some of its characteristics and specific words used by the author (“click,” “chuckling,” “pluck”) reminded me of a different, but related instrument – a toy piano, which I sampled and included in the piece along with select words from the poem. Most intriguing for me were certain words in this poem (such as “misstrums”), which led me into writing a phantasmagoric piece with pre-recorded spoken and sung words borrowed from the poem and transformed freely, using computer software and my imagination.
Ting Luo, pianist, and director of New Arts Collaboration. Ting has curated a multimedia music and art project New Arts Collaboration since 2020. She actively collaborates with artists from multiple disciplines including visual artists, composers, and sound artists. Works by NAC have been featured in The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art’s Digital Shorts Film Festival, New Music Gathering Conference/Festival, and are programmed in Old First Concert Series, The Center of New Music, Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium, etc. She performed her original piano compositions as well as solo and ensemble works by classical composers and living composers in prestigious events including The 2022 Bethany Arts Community Multidisciplinary Residency and Dragon’s Egg Presents at University Settlement in New York, Hot Air Music Festival in San Francisco, the Contemporary Art Music Project Festival - CAMPGround22 in Tampa, NowNet Arts Conference 2022 in Stanford, etc. LTingarts.com
Critically-acclaimed Japanese-born pianist/composer/interdisciplinary media artist Motoko Honda has created a distinctive sound through her holistic approach to music, her collaborative sensibility to multiple art forms and inspired use of innovative technologies. Portrayed as a “Keyboard Alchemist” (Chris Barton, Los Angeles Times) and the “Embodiment of a Muse” (Greg Burk, metaljazz.com), Honda has fascinated critics and audiences alike with her genre-defying innovative approach to piano playing and composing: “Imagine Radiohead teaching Franz Liszt how to rock a Kaoss Pad; or John Cage facing off with Bud Powell over prepared piano”(Matthew Duersten, stompbeast.com). www.motokohonda.com