Esther Lamneck


The Tornado Project: Flute, Clarinet, Computer


Music by
Ricardo Climent
Robert Rowe
Paul Wilson
Andrew May
Eric Lyon

Performed by
Elizabeth McNutt, flute
Esther Lamneck, clarinet

Monday, October 27, 8pm
Frederick Loewe Theater
35 West 4th Street
Admission Free




PROGRAM

US premiere
Russian Disco.......................................................................................................... Ricardo Climent

World premiere
Primary Colors............................................................................................................. Robert Rowe

US premiere
What Lies Beneath......................................................................................................... Paul Wilson

US premiere
Still Angry.................................................................................................................... Andrew May

US premiere
Trio for flute, clarinet and computer......................................................................................................................... Eric Lyon

ABOUT THE ARTISTS


Robert Rowe
Robert Rowe, composer, researcher, works with computer sound and traditional instruments. His music is performed throughout North America, Europe, and Japan and is available on compact discs from New World, Roméo, Quindecim, Harmonia Mundi, and the International Computer Music Association. He is currently Professor of Music and Associate Director of the Music Technology program at New York University.

Ricardo Climent
Ricardo Climent, composer, researcher, is currently lecturing and serving as co-director of the NOVARS, Research Centre for Electroacoustic Composition, Performance and Sound-Art, University of Manchester, UK. His compositions involve the use of instruments and electronic resources and range from interactive collaborative installations to instrumental music.

Paul Wilson
Paul Wilson's compositions involve the use of instruments and electronic resources and range from interactive collaborative installations to instrumental music. His works have been commissioned and performed by The Ulster Orchestra, Barrie Webb, Steve Halfyard, Elizabeth McNutt, Esther Lamneck, Pedro Carneiro, and Darragh Morgan, amongst others. His music is performed throughout the world.

Andrew May
Composer Andrew May is best known for chamber music in which some of the performers are live interactive computer systems. His music has been performed in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Greece, Switzerland, Germany, France, England, and throughout the United States. He teaches composition at the University of North Texas, where he directs the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia.

Eric Lyon
Eric Lyon is a composer and developer of computer music software. He has taught computer music at Keio University, The International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), Dartmouth College, and the University of Manchester, and the School of Music and Sonic Art at Queen's University Belfast. Lyon's current compositional work focuses on computer chamber music and organized noise.


Elizabeth McNutt
Virtuoso flutist Elizabeth McNutt discovered her passion for new and adventurous music almost as soon as she began playing. She has dedicated herself to this path, commissioning and premiering countless new works and becoming an expert interpreter of the masterpieces of the last century. She has worked with Pierre Boulez, Philippe Manoury, Joan Tower, and other well known composers.

Esther Lamneck
Esther Lamneck, clarinetist, winner of the prestigious Pro Musicis Award, has appeared as soloist with major orchestras, with conductors such as Pierre Boulez, and with renowned artists including Isaac Stern. She has performed throughout the United States and Europe in featured appearances at the world's leading music festivals in Spoleto and Siena, Paris, Salzburg, Mexico City, and Newport.

ABOUT THE MUSIC

Russian disco is inspired by the book with the same title written by the author Vladimir Kaminer. The book is a collection of short imaginative and hilarious stories of Berlin’s nightlife from the point of view of an ‘outsider’ based in the capital city. Similarly, this piece is also a collection of brief musical stories, as a composition mosaic-form, recontextualised from an outsider point of view.

Primary Colors is a work in progress for two of my favorite performers in the world, Esther Lamneck and Elizabeth McNutt. Though still under construction, we are presenting a significant chunk of the work tonight. The title comes from a recognition that the piece is composed of a number of highly differentiated and internally consistent blocks of material: primary colors, if you will. The computer part, written by the composer in C++, combines the sounds of the two instruments, some prepared sound files, and effects processing on all of it.

What Lies Beneath explores musical ideas developed from a few whispers and clicks from both flute and clarinet. One of the main thoughts here was to restrict the soundworld, keeping the work intimate and from never really growing beyond a murmur. The composition explores the tensions between noise or air sound and pitch, and the onset of vibrations both within and between the instrumental and computer parts.

Still Angry comes from Richard Morgan’s cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon; the full quote is “When they ask how I died, tell them: still angry.” Most of us carry around unquenchable anger these days, for various reasons: unjust wars, environmental degradation, ill-fitting clothes, crashing computers, economic imperialism, emotionally unavailable family members, the neighbor's kid's car stereo, global poverty, the decline of the artistic avant-garde... This piece goes to tell you that I'm still angry at having to choose between the various musical subcultures I love because of other people's stylistic chauvinism.

Trio, for flute, clarinet and computer, is the third in a series of computer chamber music compositions developing modes of interaction based on compositional, rather than improvisational imperatives. In these works, all computer projected materials are based on sounds captured live during performance. The computer sound is balanced to the level of the acoustic instruments, which are not amplified.