Collaborative team Elainie Lillios (musical arts) and Bonnie Mitchell (digital arts) will exhibit an interactive audio/visual installation piece at Techfest 2012-13, 3-5 January 2013, in Mumbai, India. Now in its 15th year, Techfest is Asia’s largest Science and Technology festival, hosting over 92,000 attendees and reaching an international audience of scientists, technicians, and artists. Their project Inhabitants, explores the concept of influence, employing abstract 3D visuals and electroacoustic sound to metaphorically examine how our lives shift direction based on people with whom we come in contact. While abstract visuals surround the viewer, poetic text pours from the ceiling into mid air and participants must catch the “meaning” of the piece onto hand-held projection screens. Accompanying electroacoustic music intensifies and enhances the immersive experience. Elainie Lillios is Associate Professor of Composition, and Bonnie Mitchell is Professor of Digital Arts. They have been collaborating for over 10 years, creating abstract sonic/visual environments and animations.
Category Archives: composition
BGSU Faculty Lillios and Mitchell exhibit collaborative media installation at Techfest in India
Collaborative team Elainie Lillios (musical arts) and Bonnie Mitchell (digital arts) will exhibit an interactive audio/visual installation piece at Techfest 2012-13, 3-5 January 2013, in Mumbai, India. Now in its 15th year, Techfest is Asia’s largest Science and Technology festival, hosting over 92,000 attendees and reaching an international audience of scientists, technicians, and artists. Their project Inhabitants, explores the concept of influence, employing abstract 3D visuals and electroacoustic sound to metaphorically examine how our lives shift direction based on people with whom we come in contact. While abstract visuals surround the viewer, poetic text pours from the ceiling into mid air and participants must catch the “meaning” of the piece onto hand-held projection screens. Accompanying electroacoustic music intensifies and enhances the immersive experience. Elainie Lillios is Associate Professor of Composition, and Bonnie Mitchell is Professor of Digital Arts. They have been collaborating for over 10 years, creating abstract sonic/visual environments and animations.
New York’s Argento Chamber Ensemble Performs Lillios
New York’s famed Argento Chamber Ensemble will present works by BGSU composition faculty member Elainie Lillios on their upcoming “Argento Performers Series: Lunar Movements” concerts, December 15-16, 2012. Hailed by Alex Ross as “an essential source of adventurous new music”, Argento’s series celebrates the 100th anniversary of “Pierrot Lunaire”, with performances of Arnold Schoenberg’s masterpiece juxtaposed with recent and premiere compositions. The concerts will include Lillios’s alto flute and live electronics pieces “Among Fireflies” and her collaborative experimental animation “2BTextures”, created with BGSU digital artist Bonnie Mitchell. Concerts will take place at the Austrian Cultural Forum at 11 East 52nd Street, New York. For more information visit: http://www.argentomusic.org/current.html#series
Profs. Sampen and Shrude guests for Kent State’s John Cage Celebration
On December 1, 2012, Distinguished Research Professors Marilyn Shrude and John Sampen visited Kent, Ohio as special guests for Kent State University’s “John Cage Celebration.” Shrude and Sampen’s lecture presentation was entitled “In Celebration: John Cage and the Saxophone” and was followed immediately by a performance of Cage’s composition FOUR 5 as directed by BGSU alumni Dr. Jeff Heisler.
This Kent State lecture was a repeat performance of Shrude/Sampen’s presentation at the World Saxophone Congress in Scotland last summer. Included in their talk were specific details and film footage from Cage’s residence at BGSU in 1986 as well as television interviews with Dr. Shrude and a discussion of Cage’s subsequent commission for Sampen and the BGSU saxophone class. FOUR 5 was one of John Cage’s last compositions before he died in 1992.
In addition to the featured lecture, Dr. Shrude also presented a guest masterclass for the Kent State composition department.
Going deeper into the music
Music education and performance reached a crescendo the week of Nov. 5 when the College of Musical Arts was visited by two nationally known professionals plus the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.
Seated in a small room in the Moore Musical Arts Center on Nov. 7, a group of student composers and faculty sat listening to a recording of an orchestral composition, each intently following along on the large scores before them.
What was unusual about the day was that the compositions were those of four of the students, and they had been performed the previous day by 72 members of the Toledo Symphony Orchestra in Kobacker Hall.
For student composers, having their work recorded by a full orchestra is a “golden ticket” to auditions and interviews, said composition faculty member Chris Dietz, who organized the orchestra’s visit. “It can be used to advance their careers.”
Furthermore, critiquing the pieces was none other than Bill McGlaughlin, a conductor, composer, musician and national radio personality. Perhaps best known for his work in broadcasting, as host of Peabody Award-winning “St. Paul Sunday” and “Exploring Music” (heard daily on Toledo’s WGTE-FM), as well as programs from Wolf Trap and the Library of Congress, he spent 25 years as an orchestral conductor, receiving numerous awards for adventurous contemporary programming.
The fact that the McGlaughlin’s residency as part of the annual Hansen Series coincided with the visit from the symphony was a happy coincidence, said Dietz. “It’s made the learning experience even more profound.”
Now McGlaughlin was listening to portions of works by graduate students Evan Williams, Corey Keating, Mark Witmer and Zachary Seely, offering comments and advice from the most practical (from “Have them warm up the tamtam (gong) so when it comes in it’s not so harsh,” to adding additional notation to make “conductors’ lives easier” and not writing notes that are too difficult for the musicians to reach) to the most aesthetic (“I love the way that dissolves,” and “That’s a great line, reminiscent of Sibelius,” “That’s a slinky chromatic” and “Don’t feel you have to rush it; give people time to get to where you are and let them luxuriate in that.”)
Interspersed with his critiques and questions, McGlaughlin shared a lifetime’s worth of musical memories, from driving in a car with the pioneering composer John Cage through the mountains of California to his difficulty in getting composer William Bolcom to say anything about his work even when they were to appear on a program. Thus he was understanding when trying to draw out Seely about his composition “Work for Orchestra 1.b.”
A first-year graduate student from New York, Seely said that while his composition sounded quite close to how he had heard it in his head, listening to it performed by the symphony was “pretty surreal.
Having that experience plus the input from McGlaughlin was an “extraordinary opportunity and something students at our level don’t often get,” said Keating, a second-year graduate student from California.
In contrast to Seely and Keatings’ compositions, which called for textural variations and unusual percussion effects and rhythms, Williams’s “Prelude in Tempore Belli (Music in a Time of War)” took a more traditional approach and contained several musical “quotes” from American military ballads.
“Overall, (McGlaughlin’s input) was really helpful. I see now there are several parts that I have to go back and work more on,” he said.
Also in the room was the couple who made McGlaughlin’s visit to BGSU possible. DuWayne and Dorothy Hansen, who funded the annual series dedicated to bringing top-level musicians to the college and the community. This year’s series also brought well-known jazz vocalist Karrin Allyson to campus for intensive work with the University’s jazz lab bands and vocal groups. Both McGlaughlin and Allison also gave public performances during their campus stay, he conducting the Wind Symphony and she singing with Jazz Lab Band 1.
The Toledo Symphony visit was thanks to the generosity of longtime supporter Karol Spencer, combined with funding from several areas of the University.
Wrapping up the reading session, Dietz asked McGlaughlin his opinion about the prospects for orchestras. “There’s a tremendous future for orchestras and I think the country is ready to come back. You’ve got the future in your hands. You’ll do really well,” the veteran musician predicted.
By offering opportunities like this, the College of Musical Arts is doing its part to make sure that happens.
Lillios’s “Backroads” featured on Australian concert and workshop
Elainie Lillios’s (Associate Professor of Composition) electroacoustic work “Backroads” will be the featured composition at a November 27 and 28 sound diffusion workshop and concert sponsored by the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) Sound Studios at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Organized for invited guests, the workshop and performance will showcase RMIT’s newly built Design Hub, and will serve as the pilot event for a new collaborative electroacoustic concert series.