Education | Courses Taught | Compositions | Credits-Commissions | Discography | Education-Awards | Interviews | Performances | Program Notes | Recording | Reviews
Education- MFA, Mills College, 1972
- MM, University of Illinois, 1970
- Yale University, 1969
- BM, Northwestern University, 1968
- MUS 47/147: Introduction to Electronic Music
- MUS 159: Seminar in Musical Performance, Composition, and Improvisation
- MUS 161/162, 261/262: Sound Techniques
- MUS 164/264: Advanced Recording
2006 fff, for solo flute
2006 Santa Fe, (8 CD installation work), for Atrium Sound Space, Benildus Hall, College of Santa Fe
2006 Stretching the Boiling Point, electroacoustic
2005 Motor Rhythms, electroacoustic
2005 Molecular Nanotechnology, electroacoustic—field recordings
2004 FIZZ,electroacoustic
2004 Eclectic Dielectric, collection—field recordings
2004 It's Elemental, electroacoustic using unprocessed field recordings
2004 ReCycle, electroacoustic
2004 Brass Mirrors, electroacoustic
2004 Ringtones, for carillon
2003 38 continuous elements (including silence), for Rock's Roll (after Royoanji) installation
2003 Distant Thunder, electroacoustic
2003 Reflections, for solo flute
2003 Of All, for solo flute
2003 Flight, for soprano and up to eight sustaining instruments and/or electronics
2003 Ping and Pong, electroacoustic*
2002 Fluid Dynamics, electroacoustic
2001 System Test (fire and ice), electroacoustic, with four electroluminescent-wired imagers
2001 breaks/motors, electroacoustic*
2001 Holding Pattern, for piano and three EBows
2001 Forest Song, for two groups of participants
2001 Past/Presence, installation for piezo-driven CD headphones, CD, LEDs
2000 Suspended Time, for orchestra
2000 White Turbulence 2000, electroacoustic quad DVD, with photomicrographic slides*
2000 HUM 2, for 8 live trombones or 1 live and 7 recorded trombones or 8 recorded trombones
1999 Pontpoint Visuals, video (photomicrography and video) for Gordon Mumma's Pontpoint
1999 Sweet Dreams, electroacoustic
1999 Fountain, installation (piezos, fountain, trigger to MIDI converter, Morpheus)
1999 Close-ups, tape (electroacoustic)
1998 Raw Data, tape (electroacoustic)*
1996 Minutia 0-13, for one to three pianos
1996 Apparent Horizon, tape (electroacoustic), with video*
1996 Moire', tape (electroacoustic)*
1994 Liquid Metal, tape (electroacoustic), with video
1993 Aolian Confluence, tape (electroacoustic)*
1992 Resonant Places, tape (electroacoustic)*
1991 Desertscapes, for 2 spatially separated choirs (S1S2A1A2)*
1991 Heavy Water, tape (electroacoustic)
1989 Phase Transitions, tape (electroacoustic)*
1988 Song of Flights, soprano and piano
1987 Ahh-Ahh (ver 2.1), tape (electroacoustic)*
1987 Airwaves (realities), tape (electroacoustic), with video*
1986 Back To Forth, tape (electroacoustic)
1985 Shimmer, tape (electronic)
1985 Subterranean Network, quad or stereo tape (electronic), staging*
1984 White Night, quad or stereo tape (acoustic sources)*
1983 Scirocco, for live flute with digital delay, and quad or stereo tape*
1983 Solar Wind, for quad or stereo tape (electronic) and video or slides*
1982 Crystal, for quad or stereo tape (electronic) and videomicrography*
1982 Lo, quad or stereo tape (electronic) and videomicrography
1981 Circular Motions, quad or stereo tape (electronic) and video
1981 Ling, quad or stereo tape (electronic) and photomicrographic slides
1980 Blue Metallics, quad or stereo tape (electronic) and photomicrographic slides or 16mm film
1980 Rising, quad or stereo tape (electronic) and slides and/or dancers
1979 Lunar Dusk, quad or stereo tape (electronic), electronically generated slides*
1978 Lunar Earthrise, quad or stereo tape (electronic), abstract slides*
1977 Spheres, quad or stereo tape (electronic) and electronically generated slides
1977 Spirals, quad or stereo tape (electronic) and electronically generated slides
1976 Transparencies, quad or stereo tape (electronic) and electronically generated slides
1975 Farewell, quad or stereo tape (acoustic) and scenic slides
1974 Allusions, quad or stereo tape (electronic), dancers, special lighting and video-processed 16mm film
1973 HUM, quad or stereo tape and live flutist (or seven live flutists)*
1973 Orion, electronically generated film, with electronic sound track
1973 VDO, electronically generated, video-processed film, with electronic sound track
1970 Inflections, for solo flute*
*published
2007 Commissioned by the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios for a work celebrating their 50th anniversary (2008-09) for CD publication
2004 Reflections selected for the National Flute Association High School Soloist Competition 2005 repertoire, first round
2003 Commissioned by flutist Nina Assimakopoulos for the solo flute work, Of All
2002 Commissioned by the National Flute Association for the solo flute work, Reflections, for the 2004 High School Competition
2001 Commissioned by Sarah Cahill for Holding Pattern, for piano and three EBows
2000 Commissioned by Abbie Conant for HUM 2, for 8 trombones ( 1 trombone and tape with 4 or 8 channel distribution)
2000 Commissioned by Starkland label for White Turbulence, for DVD in quad and stereo, with visuals
1999 Commissioned by composer Gordon Mumma for the visuals for his electroacoustic work, Pontpoint, titled Pontpoint Visuals
1998 Commissioned by Annea Lockwood for a soundscape contribution for her work, Floating World
1991 "Lost Place," electroacoustic music and sound effects for feature-length 35mm film
1991 Commissioned by video artist Ed Tannenbaum for "Heavy Water"
1988 Commissioned by New Song for "Song of Flights," soprano and piano
1988 Composed the music for "Faces," Ed Tannenbaum's Technological Feets
1987 Commissioned by choreographer Nancy Bryan for "The Living Room"
1986 Composed "Back to Forth" for Ed Tannenbaum's video performance at CADRE, San Jose, CA
1985 Composed the music ("Shimmer," "Flights of Fancy," "Contest," "Flexible Face") for Ed Tannenbaum's video performance at SIGGRAPH '85
1985 Commissioned by Hartt School of Music, Hartford University for "Subterranean Network"
1984 Commissioned by choreographer, Betsy Kagan for the music for "Rondo"
1984 Composed the music ("FX" and "Dance") for Ed Tannenbaum's video performance at SIGGRAPH '84, Minneapolis
1984 Composed the music ("Gamelan") for Ed Tannenbaum's Technological Feets
1984 Composed the music ("Hikari") for Ed Tannenbaum's touring video installations throughout Japan
1983 Composed the music for "The Story," radio play produced by Eric Bauersfeld
1983 Composed the music for Ed Tannenbaum's video performance, "Maytricks," premiered in Chicago
1982 Composed the music for Ed Tannenbum's video performance work, "Three Movements With Two Movements," premiered at 80 Langton
1981 Composed the music for "Inventory," a twenty-five minute dance choreographed by Marcia Sakamoto, Moving Space Dance Company
1977 Synthesizer sound effects for Country Joe McDonald's album, "Goodbye Blues," Fantasy Records
1975 Composed the music for the Ashland Shakespearean Festival production of "Winter's Tale," Ashland, Oregon
1974 Composed the music for "House Party," dance/film/sound event choreographed by Carolyn Brown for the Among Company, presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Merce Cunningham Studio, NY
1974 Composed the music for "Synergy II," choreographed by Carolyn Brown for the University of California Dance Theatre, premiered at the Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Berkeley
1974 Composed the music for and engineered for "Voices," an NEA-funded one-hour radio play by Susan Griffin for KPFA Radio; composed music for television production of same for KQED, Northern California Emmy Award for 1974
2007 System Test (fire and Ice) on 2007 Computer Music Journal DVD, 'Far and Wide'
2007 60X60 double CD compilation (2004-2005) (:60 Fizz), Vox Novus label
2006 ReCycle on Women take back the noise compilation CD, Ubuibi
2006 It's Elemental, soundscape, published on overheard and rendered CD compilation, and/OAR label.
2006 Of All performed by flutist Nina Assimakopoulos, released on Points of Entry CE, Laurels Project, Volume I, Capstone Records
2005 American Music Center, New Music Box: music informed by science (brief article, images, soundfile)
2005 Twice around the earth compilation CD participant, ReR MEGACORP label
2004 Rock's Roll (after Royanji) Exhibition, Art in General (participation in installation April-June and in CD release), NYC
2004 Restart excerpt used on The Last Signal compilation CD, Independent Opposition label
2004 60 Spin included on 60X60 compilation, Capstone Records
2003 Lab Faucet included on The Lab–20 Year Anniversary CD compilation
2003 Ping and Pong: beyond the pail, 2 30-minute works released on CD on the and/OAR label
2001 breaks/motors on the Mills CD titled Oasis: Music from Mills 2001
2001 Moiré was chosen by Jordon Belson for the soundtrack for his film/video work, Bardo
2000 White Turbulence, four channel electro-acoustic and visuals on Immersion, DVD-V, DVD-A, 13 composers, Starkland label
1999 Aeolian Confluence, HUM, and Inflections on the CRI CD titled The Extended Flute
1999 Raw Data on the Digital Narcis ltd. CD titled END ID
1998 Chris Mann Piece on The Frog Peak Collaborations Project 2-CD set, Frog Peak label
1998 Liquid Metal and Apparent Horizon (two of my video/audio works), and an interview were broadcast on the Women of Vision series aired on PBS station KCSM TV 2X in August and 2X in December
1997 Desertscapes on the Master Musicians Collective CD titled Desertscapes
1997 She Began is on The Time is Now CD (Melody Sumner Carnahan, writer), Frogpeak label
1996 Moiré is on the Asphodel CD titled Storm of Drones
1995 Contributed a musical "letter to the editor" for the premiere issue of Control, a CD-ROM
electronic magazine on Sound Media and the Digital Arts
1994 Resonant Places is on the Consortium to Distribute Computer Music (CDCM) CD, Centaur
1991 Ahh-Ahh, Phase Transitions, Subterranean Network, White Night, Scirocco, Crystal, Solar Wind are on Crystal CD, Lovely Music label
1988 Airwaves (realities) on Another Coast CD, Music and Arts
label
1986 White Night, Scirocco, Crystal, Solar Wind on solo Lovely Music LP
1986 Subterranean Network Mills College Centennial album
1985 She Began, Ultrasounds Radio Series, nationwide broadcasts
1984 Crystal (video), nationwide satellite distribution via the Learning Channel, October of 1984 through January,1985
1980 Lunar Dusk and Lunar Earthrise, Lovely Music label
1978 Flutist and bowed psalter player on Jacques Bekaert's album, Summer Music, Lovely Music label
1977 Flutist on David Behrman's album and CD, On the Other Ocean (re-released on CD in 1996), on Peter Gordon's album, Star Jaws, and on Blue Gene Tyranny's album, Out of the Blue, Lovely Music label
Education
1972 MFA., Mills College (electronic music and the recording media)
1970 M. Music, University of Illinois at Urbana
1969 Yale University
1968 B. Music (with distinction), Northwestern University
Awards
2006-07 Faculty Research Grant, Mills College
2005-06 Mary Metz Chair, Mills College, 2006-07
2003-04 Sarlo Award for Excellence in Teaching, Mills College
2003 Faculty Research Grant, Mills College
2003 Faculty Travel Grant, Mills College
2002 Honorary Mention, works for dance or theatre category, 29th Concours International de Musique et d'Art Sonare Electroacoustique de Bourges 2002 for System Test (fire and ice)
2002 Faculty Research Grant, Mills College
2001 Faculty Travel Grant, Mills College
2000 Honorary Mention, program music category, 27th annual Les Concours Internationaux de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges for Sweet Dreams
1999 Honorary Mention, Prix Ars Electronica for Apparent Horizon
1999-01 NARAS grant to archive Mills Music Dept. holdings
1998-1999 Faculty Research Grant, Mills College
1998 Honorary Mention, Prix Ars Electronica
1997-1998 Faculty Development Grant, Mills College
1994-1995 Faculty Research Grant with Professor David Bernstein, Mills College
1993 Barlow Competition, third place winner for Desertscapes
1989-1990 NEA Composer's Grant 1987 NEA Interdisciplinary Arts Grant
1987 Mention, 15th Int'l Electroacoustic Music Competition, Bourges, France
1983-1985 Artist-in-Residence, EXPLORATORIUM 1983 Mellon Grant (video)
1983-1984 Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowship Grant (video)
1982 Second prize winner, 3rd Concorso International. "Luigi Russolo" per giovani compositor di Musica Elettroacoustica
1979-1980 NEA Composer's Grant
1972 Mills Crothers Award for outstanding composer, Mills College
1970-1972 Full fellowship and teaching assistantship, Mills College
1969-1970 Full fellowship, University of Illinois, renewed for '70-'71
1967 Pi Kappa Lambda honorary fraternity
Interviews: excerpted from various interviews with Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, Joel Chadabe, Gavin Borchert, Birgitta Driesel, Paul Robinson and others
My father bought me a reel to reel tape machine when I was eleven or so. I recorded all the keyboard parts of the Bach B minor flute sonata on flute so that I could play along with it. A subsequent machine had several speeds and "sound-on-sound" so that I could overdub several lines at different speeds (without vibrato) and end up in the correct octaves. Accompanists were hard to come by, and I liked being self-sufficient. I began recording professionally in 1968 in Chicago. At that time I was primarilly a flutist and played on many sessions while obtaining my B. Mus. degree at Northwestern University. I felt it important as a performer to learn as much as I could about engineering in order to tailor my playing style for session work, which is different from my performance playing style. When I went to Mills College there was a recording studio and I was hooked. I currently record digitally, and edit using my Sonic Solutions digital audio workstation.
In college I found I was running out of extended techniques on the flute and wanted to expand my sound capabilities. I was also performing pieces such as Davidovsky's Synchronisms II (electronic tape and flute) and Haubenstock-Ramati's Interpolation, Mobile per flute (1, 2, et 3) which required some technology. Fortunately I was studying at the University of Illinois at Urbana at the time Gordon Mumma was in residence. Gordon Mumma showed me how to build circuits and I built my first ring modulator there from one of his circuit designs. Jim Beauchamp, Ben Johnston and Sal Martirano were there also. There was a classical studio there with a few Moog modules, and I loved working in it.
My first electronic compositions were made using the Moog Synthesizer. Orion was one of the first, and I used the Moog to generate both the audio and the visuals for the piece. The visuals were oscilloscope images which I filmed in 16mm. The sound was generated separately from the images, and was subsequently electroprinted onto the edited 16mm film. Allusionswas a film/video/dance work with quadraphonic sound which used two dancers (Carla Blank and myself), video feedback, colorizing, and a great deal of optical printing to build up density and to overlay images. The music for Allusions was generated using the Moog, and dealt with localization and spatialization. The other early pieces which followed, Transparencies, Spheres, Lunar Earthrise and Lunar Dusk all dealt with localization and spatialization and were quadraphonic. Transparencies, Lunar Earthrise, and Lunar Dusk all used abstract slides as well. I continue to use video in my works, including Circular Motions, Io, Crystal, Solar Wind, Airwaves (realities), Liquid Metal and Apparent Horizon.
For the last several years I have recorded natural sounds as my sound sources, and have transformed them using convolution, phase vocoding, extensive layering - whatever is available.
I'm totally hooked on technology and have been for many years. I love sound, I love timbre, I love working spatially. I do, however, try to keep things in perspective. The technology is only a tool to accomplish a musical idea. The flute is a tool, the phase vocoder is a tool. The music is the important factor.
I was being interviewed the other day, and the "why do you do tape music" question came up again. It occurred to me that aside from the control one has in the studio setting and the ability to do many things that just aren't possible in live performance (or financially feasible due to the number of samplers, etc. it would take to perform live), that there are a couple of other factors involved.
When I do a tape composition I have absolutely no excuses. I take complete responsibility for any imperfections in the mix, the sounds themselves, the structure, etc.. It is what it is. I could always wish for more or better, but it is the final product.
When my tape compositions are played back in a concert setting I prefer to be present - and to run the console myself. That way I can hopefully equalize and make subtle level changes to more closely match what the piece sounded like in the original mixing environment, or I can choose to take advantage of special characteristics of a specific venue to enhance or adjust the sound of the piece.
I also often listen to both live and taped music with my eyes closed. In my own music I like to think of taking people out of themselves and into the musical spaces that I create, so that they no longer feel "in the place where they're sitting" but in this kind of virtual world that I've developed. I like to take them on a journey with me if they are willing to come. If people are conscious of their current surroundings it makes it a bit harder to accomplish. Since so much of our perception is visual - I believe it's around 85%, when one closes one's eyes or otherwise has less visual content to contend with, one can focus much more directly on sound.
Of course most of the music we hear is recorded music (electronic music) - from CD's, cassettes, radio and television broadcasts, films, etc.
On the other hand, many of my pieces have a video component. Hopefully the music also stands on its own, but when played with the video people may choose to ignore the video or focus on it.
I have also had the pleasure of collaborating with video artist Ed Tannenbaum, who uses dancers and his digital video processors to create stunning live performance works. I've also had many of my works choreographed by wonderful choreographers/dancers, including Carolyn Brown, Molissa Finley, Marcia Sakamoto, Betsy Kagan, Nancy Bryan, Carla Blank and Jody Roberts and have composed music for film, video, radio and theatre.
When asked about being a recording engineer and composer who happens to be a woman, the only answer I have is that it never even occurred to me that I couldn't be. Naivity or perserverance.
2007 Festival FUTURA, "Nuit Blanche," Paris (Fizz)
2007 Painted Pictures, Vox Musica vocal ensemble directed by Daniel Paulson, Sacramento, CA (Desertscapes)
2007 Electro Acoustic Revue (EAR), Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Ireland (Motor Rhythms)
2007 Free Play Six: Listening Chamber, electro-acoustic music from around the world, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI (Distant Thunder)
2006 Improvised (flute) with Joëlle Léandre, Lauren Newton, Phillip Greenlief, Gino Robair, and Chris Brown, Concert at Mills College, Oakland, CA
2006 Mills College, Oakland, CA (Motor Rhythms)
2006 LAIM + CECh + RedAsla Cycle of concerts, Santiago de Chile (Fizz)
2006-2007 Santa Fe, an 8 CD sound installation in the Atrium Sound Space at the College of Santa Fe (12/15/06-2/15/07)
2006 36th Festival Synthèse 2006, Bourges, France (Molecular Nanotechnology)
2006 An Ear to the Earth, A Festival of Music, Sound, and Ecology, NYC, Electronic Music Foundation (Resonant Places)
2006 Voices on the Edge: International Women's Electroacoustic Listening Room Project, 5th Annual Women in New Music Festival, Cal State Fullerton, studio 1, BIMhuis in the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam, Beijing, and Shanghai
2006 San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2006, ODC (Motor Rhythms)
2005 35rd Festival Synthese Bourges 2005 (Molecular Nanotechnology)
2005 Garden of Memory Walk-Through Event #8, Chapel of Chimes, Piedmont, CA, 20th Century Forum
2005 Open Ears festival in Kitchener, Ontario (HUM 2)
2005 Merging Voices: Fourth Annual Women in New Music Festival, California State University, Fullerton
2005 Pictures at an Exhibition, Peninsula Women’s Chorus, St. Patrick's Seminary, Palo Alto, CA and Mission Santa Clara, Santa Clara, CA (Desertscapes)
2005 UNCG New Music Festival, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (Apparent Horizon)
2004 Symposium on the Future, EMF @ Chelsea Art Museum (Distant Thunder)
2004 SElectric Pacific 2004: Music for Digital Media, The Center for Research in Electro-Acoustic Music, San Jose State University (Distant Thunder)
2004 Harvest Moon Festival, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada (HUM 2)
2004 Mills College (Songs of Flight, Apparent Horizon, Distant Thunder)
2004 National Flute Association 2004 Convention, premiere, Reflections
2004 Garden of Memory Walk-Through Event #7, Chapel of Chimes, Piedmont, CA, 20th Century Forum
2004 Field Effects, San Francisco (Fluid Dynamics, Distant Thunder)
2004 Discrete Palettes Art Exhibit of three photos + performance (FIZZ), 21 Grand, Oakland, CA
2004 Zeppelin 2004 Festival de Arte Sonoro, Zaragoza (Subterranean Network)
2004 Zeppelin 2004 Festival de Arte Sonoro, Barcelona, Spain (Subterranean Network )
2004 REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA (HUM 2, performed by trombonist Abbie Conant)
2004 Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan. (Fluid Dynamics )
2004 Renee Weiler Concert Hall, NYC Greenwich House Arts & New York Women Composers, Inc. (Of All premiere)
2004 CEAIT Festival, REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA (Distant Thunder)
2004 Rock's Roll (after Royoanji) Exhibition, Art in General (participation in installation April-June), NYC
2004 Excerpt of Crystal and photomicrography as part of an installation in the Kristallwelten Wattens, Vienna, curated by Harald Szeemann
2003 Pulse Field, Georgia State University (Fluid Dynamics, Liquid Metal)
2003 Music Beyond Performance SoundImageSound, Conservatory Computer Studio for Music Composition (CCSMC), University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA (Apparent Horizon)
2003 Synthèse 2003, 3rd Festival International des Musiques et Créations Electroniques, Bourges, France
2003 Technosonics Computer Music Festival, University of Virginia
2003 SEAMUS, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, System Test (fire and ice)
2003 Mills College, Oakland, CA (Fluid Dynamics)
2003 KINETICA 3 tour of Jordan Belson's film, Bardo, using Payne's Moiré: The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC
2003 Women's Listening Room Event - Cal State University at Fullerton, CA
2003 Garden of Memory Walk-Through Event #6, Chapel of Chimes, Piedmont, CA, 20th Century Forum
2002 Concert of Electroacoustic and Multimedia Works by Women Composers, Florida International University, Miami, FL (Apparent Horizon)
2002 New Adventures in Sound Art, Toronto, Canada (Sound Travels) 8 channel diffusion of System Test
2002 Sound Culture - Arizona State University West, Phoenix, AZ
2002 New SFTMC Transparent Tape Music Festival 2, 17 channel diffusion of breaks/motors
2002 Garden of Memory Walk-Through Event #5, Chapel of Chimes, Piedmont, CA, 20th Century Forum
2002 Denison University in Granville, Ohio, East Carolina University in Greensboro, North Carolina, Univ. of Maryland in Baltimore, Maryland , Virginia Commonwealth University in Blacksburg, Virginia, Virginia Technical University in Blacksburg, Virginia, Eastern Trombone Workshop in Washington, DC, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, Univ. of North Carolina in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia (HUM 2 performances by Abbie Conant)
2002 KINETICA 3 tour of Jordan Belson's film, Bardo, using Payne's Moiré: High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, Anthology Film Archives in NYC, and Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, WA
2002 Mills College: Electronic Music, Composers from the Center for Contemporary Music and guest artist Francisco Lopez
2001 KINETICA 3 tour of Jordan Belson's film, Bardo, using Payne's Moiré: SIGGRAPH 2001, The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco Cinemateque, The Museum of Modern Art NYC, Cinematheque Ontario-Toronto, Canada, Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, Anthology Film Archives in NYC, Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, WA, and The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC
2001 Ruth Crawford Seegel Festival, Brooklyn College, CUNY, NYC (Holing Pattern-pianist Sarah Cahill)
2001 Merkin Hall, NYC (Holding Pattern pianist Sarah Cahill)
2001 CEAIT festival at CalArts, Valencia, CA
2001 Ought-One Festival, Montpelier, Vermont
2001 Waveform 2001, Australasian Computer Music Association Conference, Australia
2001 Joyce SoHo, NYC; The Dance Center at Columbia College, Chicago (Airwaves choreographer Wendy Rogers)
2001 Trossinger Musikhochscule, Germany, GEDOK Stuttgart, Germany, Kosmos Frauenraum Wien, Austria, and Gesellshaft fŸr, Neue Musik MŸnster, MŸnster, Germany (HUM-2 trombonist Abbie Conant)
2001 Tonic, New York City
2001 San Franciso Girls Chorus (Desertscapes), Magen Solomon, conductor
2001 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF) 2001, Cell-Space
2001 Fifth Annual Santa Fe International Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music
2001 SEAMUS 2001 AudioClip Web concert
2001 Trinh T. Minh-Ha's film, NIGHT PASSAGE
2001 Venue 9, San Francisco, CA
2001 Tuva Space, Berkeley, CA
2000 San Francisco Conservatory
2000 The Electroacoustic Music Center at Dept of Music, Univ of Wisconsin Milwaukee
2000 Electronic Music Concert, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth
2000 University of Wisconsin at Madison
2000 Alverno College, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
2000 CNMAT, UC Berkeley, Abbie Conant, trombone, with 8 channel diffusion
2000 MicroFestival(Musique Acousmatique), The Delivery Room, San Francisco
2000 Fourth Annual Santa Fe International Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music
1999 Virginia Film Festival / Virginia Center for Computer Music event, Charlottesville, VA
1999 NWEAMO's First Annual Portland International Electro-Acoustic Music festival
1999 'Imaginary Space' Australasian Computer Music Conference at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
1999 Northwestern University, Contemporary Music IV
1999 20th Century Project Bourges 1999 Synthese, Bourges, France
1999 Technological Feets with video artist Ed Tannenbaum, Mills College, Oakland, CA
1999 Bang on a Can Marathon, NYC.
1999 Vidarte Festival at the National Center for the Arts in Mexico City
1999 CEAIT Festival, Cal Arts
1999 Seamus '99, San Jose State University
1998 Liquid Metal and Apparent Horizon (two of my video works), and an interview were broadcast on the Women of Vision series aired on PBS station KCSM TV 2X in August and 2X in December
1998 Next Wave Festival eXstatic project, Australia
1998 Pacific Marathon III (West Coast), Cultuurcentrum de Oosterpoort, Netherlands
1998 Not Still Art Festival in NY
1998 Second Annual Santa Fe International Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music Festival
1998 Video Salon '98, ElectroAcoustic Music Center, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
1998 Soundscape - Music for the Brooklyn College Art Gallery Exhibition, Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music
1998 Gina Gibney choreographed two works for a Danspance Project performance Coming from Quiet, NYC
1998 Deborah Hay choreographed three works for concerts, Austin, TX
1998 Gail Chodera choreographed a work for Cal Arts Faculty Dance Concert
1998 Loose Ends/Connections www netcast with Pauline Oliveros, Brenda Hutchinson (CCM studio), Beth Coleman, Zeena Parkins (Harvestworks), Scott Rosenberg, Helen Thorington (Morton Street) and again with same CCM components, Shelly Hirsch and Dan Pugliese (Harvestworks), Helen Thorington (Morton Street)
1998 Garden of Memory Walk-Through Event #3, Chapel of Chimes, Piedmont, CA, 20th Century Forum
1997 OPUS415 No. 3, New Music Marathon, San Francisco
1997 Music for Electronic Media, San Jose State University
1997 Liquid Metal, ÉnCue Séries XVI, Concordia University, Montreal
1997 Solar Wind (Trace), performed by choreographer/dancer Molissa Fenley at the JoyceTheater in Manhattan
1997 Oberlin College, Ohio
1997 Newsense Intermedum, Seattle/Tacoma, WA
1997 Cultural Labyrinth series at Kommotion, SF
1997 Garden of Memory Walk-Through Event #2, Chapel of Chimes, Piedmont, CA, 20th Century Forum
1996 "Apparent Horizon" selected for Sonic Circuits IV Festival of Electronic Music, scheduled to tour 14 venues in the US, Canada and Australia 1996-1997
1996 Western Front, Vancouver, Women in View Festival
1996 Open Space, Victoria, Canada
1996 Texas A+M
1996 "Solar Wind," "Ahh-Ahh" and "Resonant Places" performed by choreographer/dancer Molissa Fenley at the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Project Festival, NYC. and the NY Performing Arts Center.
1996 SoundCulture '96, San Franciso Art Commission Gallery and Mills College
1996 Garden of Memory Walk-Through Event, Chapel of Chimes, Piedmont, CA, 20th Century Forum
1995 SEAMUS@Ithaca'95, NY
1995 Three Women Electronic Music Composers, Mills College, Oakland, CA
1994 Computer Music Concert Series, Clark University, Worcester, MA
1993 Akademie Der Kunste, Berlin
1993 SEAMUS '93, University of Texas at Austin
1992 New Music Across America '92 (Los Angeles)
1991 Old First Church Concerts, San Francisco
1991 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
1991 Festival of Media Arts, ZRM, Karlsruhe, Germany
1990 New Music America '90, Toronto
1990 Invitation to Interactive Art, Kanagawa Science Park, Kawasaki, Japan
1990 Lab, 100% Concentrated Music Festival, San Francisco
1988 New Song, Seattle, WA
1987 New Music America '87, Philadelphia, PA
1987 New Langton Arts, SF
1987 Composers' Forum, NYC
1987 Festival '87, MANCA, Nice, France
1986 Experimental Intermedia Foundation, NYC
1986 Silicon Valley Festival of Electronic Arts 1986, CADRE Institute of San Jose State University
1986 University Art Museum, UC Berkeley
1986 Mills College, Oakland, CA
1985 Musica Antiqua et Nova, University of Hartford, Hartt School of Music, Hartford, CT
1985 15th annual Festival International des Musiques Experimentales, Bourges, France
1985 Siggraph '85, San Francisco
1985 Video Free America, Women's Video Art Showcase, San Francisco
1985 Live Wire, UBU, San Francisco, CA
1985 Center for 21st-Century Music, Mills College, Oakland, CA
1984 Crystal (video), nationwide satellite distribution via the Learning Channel, October of 1984 through January,1985
1983 Concert from studios of the U.S., 13th International Festival of Experimental Musics, Bourges, France
1983 Lovely Music Festival, NY
1983 Cal State Northridge
1983 Axiom, Axiom, San Francisco
1983 Marin Community Playhouse
1983 New Performance Gallery, San Francisco
1983 1982 M.U.S.I.C., SF
1982 International Electronic Music Plus Festival, University of Tennessee
1982 12th International Festival of Experimental Musics, Bourges 1982
1982 Cal State Northridge
1982 Music Mostly at Midnight, Chicago
1982 80 Langton St., San Francisco
1982 Mills College, Oakland, CA
1981 New Music America Festival, San Francisco
1981 Texas Tech University, Leading Edge Series, Lubbock, TX
1981 San Jose State University, New Sounds San Jose, San Jose, CA
1980 Media Study/Buffalo, Buffalo, NY
1980 Valencia Tool, SF
1980 College of Santa Fe, Explorations in Music, Santa Fe, NM
1980 Oberlin Dance Collective, Performing Arts Forum, SF
1980 University of Tennessee, A Festival of Electronic Music, Knoxville
1979 Autumn Festival, Paris, France
1979 The American Center, Laureats Americains des Concours Internationaux de Musique Electro-acoustic de Bourges 1978/1979, sponsored by Groupe de Musique Experimentale de Bourges, Paris, France
1979 Hartt College of Music, University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT
1979 The Museum of Modern Art, Sound Art, six week installation, NY
1979 Mills College, Oakland, CA
1978 University of California at Santa Cruz
1977 Cat's Paw Palace, Intermix, Berkeley, CA
1977 Grace Cathedral, SF, CA
1976 Mills College, Oakland, CA
1976 Oakland, Museum, Ultrafilm series, Oakland, CA
1974 University of California at Santa Cruz, +5
1974 Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL
1973 Hartt College of Music, University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT
1973 Palace of Fine Arts, SF Conservatory of Music
1973 Berkeley Film House, National College Tour
38 continuous elements (including silence) was composed for an installation project titled Rock's Role (After Royanji), curated by Ron Kuivila and sponsored by Art in General. The installation at Art in General ran from April 24-June 26, 2004. This work consists of 38 elements of sound, including silence. These tracks are intended to be played in continuous random mode throughout the exhibition. It consists of a series of sounds which are all acoustic in origin. Many have been so highly processed that they are no longer recognizable, others are still recognizable if one has heard these sounds in the way I have heard them. Since the original recordings range from familiar objects recorded in unusual ways to unfamiliar objects recorded in more orthodox ways, these sounds provide an aural path into an uncommon, or otherworldy world. I build imaginary acoustical environments (soundspaces or soundscapes), at times compressing a vast world into an intimate minute one, at times examining sounds microscopically with the intent of expanding them into a universe. Perspectives shift from microscopic to telescopic to wide angle, sometimes within the same sound element. Sometimes different perspectives are layered, creating multiple views simultaneously. This is all in an effort to encourage the listener to be so immersed in the sound that they experience the sound from the inside out.
Aeolian Confluence (1993): At ten year intervals I compose a flute piece. Aeolian Confluence is the third work in this series. The first section is sampled flute, which slowly builds and rises. The second and third sections use the SoundHack convolution algorithm, with flute samples as the exclusive sources. The final section is recorded live, with several overdubs, and uses additional samples only at the very end. The piece deals with spatial concerns. The first section slowly rises, spreads, comes forward, then cascades down while rapidly receding; the second and third are very distant; the fourth section is very present, receding only at the very end.
Ahh-Ahh (ver 2.1), composed in 1987, is the music portion of a performance work, called Queue the Lizards, done in collaboration with video artist Ed Tannenbaum, and was the result of a National Endowment for the Arts Interdisciplinary Arts Grant. Very early in the collaboration, when we were first tossing around ideas, he mentioned that he would like to work with sounds of water, snakes, and whips (for gestural and spatial possibilities). He later denied saying anything of the kind.
Ahh-Ahh (ver 2.1) has as it's source material many forms of white noise, including (commercially ubiquitous) breathy vocal and unpitched but resonant flute sounds, snare drum, and pure white noise. Spatial location and modulation are of primary concern in this piece. The video for Queue the Lizards was directed by Ed Tannenbaum and is a tape of a live performance in which Ed utilized his digital video pprocessor and the Fairlight digital video processor. All video processing of the live dancer was done in real time. In live performance additional music parts are played along with the digitally pre-recorded tracks.
Airwaves (realities) (1987) attempts to convey a sense of the vast differences in perspective which individuals have regarding what is collectively termed "reality." One of the most striking close-at-hand illustrations is the contrast in the lives of the desert dwellers of Nevada and the San Francisco Bay Area urbanites. The diverging viewpoints are partially due to differences in population density and ethnic make-up, with the extreme physical contrast of the barrenness of the desert versus the lushness of the Bay Area being a significant contributing factor.
Airwaves can be presented with a video which I shot of rather static desert landscapes of Nevada. The starkness of these scenes in contrast to the sometimes active, at other times lush texture of the music, is intended to further highlight the differences between the cultures.
There are only two unprocessed "natural" sounds in this piece: the very beginning of the cars passing by and the two airplanes which fly over. All of the other sounds are derived from television and radio broadcasts, both major sources of "unrealities". These materials, most of which are dialog, are highly processed, resulting in a complete disassociation from their origin.
I started gathering the video images for Apparent Horizon (1996) six years prior to its completion. My original intent was to slowly reveal information in various landscapes by holding still on an image for several seconds, then zooming in or out or panning to reveal more detail, an unusual vista, rock formation, etc.. It occurred to me that it also might be interesting to see what might be "revealed" from an overhead view. Since it was impractical to rent airplanes for this purpose, I decided to incorporate NASA footage taken by the Space Shuttle and Apollo series astronauts. It is at times difficult to distinguish earth views from space from those taken on the earth's surface.
Many of the earthbound shots are of rather "alien" landscapes--those where I, as a human being, don't really fit in--I'm the alien here. In these often desolate places the only sounds one hears are wind, insects, a scant number of birds and animals and a rare rainstorm. I decided to take our constant human chatter and transpose it into sounds somewhat reminiscent of nature's sounds in the landscapes to which they are attached or to transform them into somewhat "otherworldly" sounds. This was an attempt to convey an aural impresion of the sensations I have experienced while in these earthbound landscapes and those sensations I imagine the astronauts might experience while viewing the earth from space. Sound sources consisted of transmissions from/through space and were from Space Shuttle and Apollo missions, satellite transmissions, and shortwave radio broadcasts. Often I chose sections that were full of static and distortion--signals which were reaching unintelligibility. There are Morse Code "crickets" at Bryce Canyon and static "rain" at the Canyonlands. Processing includes heavy equalization, convolving, extreme sample rate conversions and time compression/expansion. This is the third piece in a series of pieces which are based on transformations of human-made or generated sounds, the previous two being Airwaves (realities) and Liquid Metal.
Brass Mirrors: in the fall of 2003 I offered to temporarily store Lou Harrison's percussion instrument collection which he bequeathed to Willie Winant. When I made the offer I did it without the intent of recording these instruments, but as I kept going into the space where they were stored, they seemed to call out to be played; I could not resist recording them. The timbres and the beats within and between the various metal instruments, including brake drums, were quite alluring. In Brass Mirrors the only alterations that I made to these recordings was to reverse the soundfiles (mirrors). The swells in the second section remind me of a lake's surface, replete with layers of waves, with occasional flashes of reflected sunlight here and there from time to time. These flashes are the crossfades at the edit point (the strike) and intentionally bring out those initial transients which last only briefly after the surface has been struck.
breaks/motors (2001): One of my many jobs involves restoring/remastering recordings from the 1920s to the 1960s. One of the many fascinations I find in these recordings is in the breaks between movements, where I usually go to start working out equalization for hum, hiss, squeal, rumble, etc. removal. I took several of these "breaks," looped them in differing lengths, and emphasized the "unwanted" components for this piece. The other sound source came about when Brian Reinbolt asked me to look at a project he was working on which used a very tiny stepper motor. I loved the sound of this tiny motor and made extensive recordings of it. These two ideas sprang up around the same time, so I blended the two types of sound sources (with equalization, convolving, phase vocoding, and granular synthesis) into this composition. As with all my work, spatialization is a major interest. There is no active panning in this work as I recorded the motor at a very close distance and in enhanced stereo.
Close-ups (1999): As a child I had to investigate everything at an extremely close range - fully engaging all the senses. It's as if I needed to fuse with and become the object of my attention in order to fully comprehend it. This is the adult version, which also warps perspective by recording everything very close up. The nine natural sound sources, altered temporally and layered, but otherwise unprocessed, aren't always what they might at first appear to be.
Crystal was composed in 1982 using a Moog III synthesizer with extensive multi-tracking. Spatial location and modulation are important aspects of this work. Delicate timbral manipulation is also a major concern, with the harmonic spectrum of each voice in constant flux. Crystal is also a video work. The video portion was shot after the music was completed, and was edited to the music. The images consist of crystals forming in real time as viewed through a microscope.
Desertscapes, for two spatially separated a capella choirs (1991)
Born and raised on the High Plains of Texas, I came to love the vastness of the landscape on the large scale and minute details on the small scale (cracks in parched earth, gullies, etc.). When I moved to California in 1970 I was delighted to find the desert still so close at hand.
The four images I described, of Pyramid Lake, Death Valley, Bryce Canyon and the Devil's Playground/Kelso Dunes, represent four beautiful desert areas, each with very precious and unique characteristics. It seemed right to have exclusively female voices in this piece: Sirens calling me back to these desert haunts.
It is important that the interplay between the two choirs be audible. The sound should wash across the space, fully involving/surrounding the listener in the vast frailty of desert space.
Distant Thunder (2003): For me this work conjures up images of being in the desert while watching distant thunder storms roll across the sky, accompanied by the unforgettable sweet smell of desert rain. These storms are particularly beautiful as the rain clouds build, break apart, and reform, sending tendrils of rain down, most of which evaporate long before they touch the desert floor.
My original intention was to use the sounds of a resonant floor furnace and various adhesive tapes slowly unrolling as the primary sound sources, but after recording the furnace, I boiled water for tea, and could not resist recording the sonic patterns that emerged. I did use the sound of the furnace, but the tape unrolling was used only to impart natural spatialization through convolution with the other, more stationary sources.
fff, for solo flute (2006): I developed this, at times rambunctious, at times extremely delicate, work through improvisation. My primary intent was to explore the capabilities of the flute using extended flute techniques while leaving open the possibility for yet further development of these techniques. The timeline is somewhat flexible, and only the types of extended techniques are specified in the timeline, not specifically each specific action. This is a live solo piece, without electronic modification of any kind.
Fluid Dynamics (2002): My original intent for this piece was to use two very rhythmical sounds which I had recorded--a raucous faulty faucet in the men's washroom near a Concert Hall and a gently squeaking gas service regulator outside of Lisser Hall, both on the Mills College campus. As the piece developed, though, the rhythmic elements were set aside as the more subtle sound of gas traveling through the pipes and the softer purring sound that the faucet made on its way to the clacking rhythm took over. To these sources I added the sound of a large steel ball and a small brass ball bearing being propelled across a wooden floor, a spare MCI tape machine part rolling in a circular pattern on a linotype sheet, and a roll of very thin brass sheeting gently swaying. The other main sound is that of a large steel ball rolling down two strings of a miniature koto-like instrument I bought at Cost Plus many years ago. Paul Dresher's use of a ball bearing rolling on his string instrument (quadrachord) in his work Sound Stage reminded me of this fascinating sound, and I could not resist using a highly processed version of it in the final section of the piece.
The sources are processed using phase vocoding, convolution, granular synthesis, equalization, and extensive layering, and although a residual attachment to the original sounds remain, their origins are at times rather obscured. The spatialization is natural. Static sources are convolved against naturally moving sources so that they take on the spatialization characteristics of the moving sources.
These sounds held such fascination for me in the intricacies of their timbres, the smallest perturbations being so audible in the loudest and in the softest sounds. The dynamic potential is almost visceral for me. It is as if the listener is inside of these entities, exploring every detail from the inside out rather than being an outsider looking/listening in.
There were two sounds that primarily sparked FIZZ. The first was a barely audible disequilibrium in a toilet tank. This almost inaudible sound was cyclic, but constantly changing, with a faint rising squeak that occurred at the valve where the rod attaches, coupled with trickling water going down the refill pipe, so there was a squeak, trickle, squeak, trickle sequence. I stretched this out using granular synthesis and layered the results. There is an ebb and flow that naturally flows across the channels. It's the long section that occurs after the rhythmic high pass filtered faulty faucet valve that begins the piece. Disk drives on/off spiral us out of that section into a gratis section in which a malfunction in my system caused the loud cyclic low frequency feedback. This is accompanied by fizz, a sound which I've always loved but never got a good recording of until a student, Alison Johnson, brought in a wonderful recording of fizzing. She divulged her method to me, sparking this piece. The fizz and the feedback are totally unprocessed other than slight equalization.
Although some sounds may be somewhat identifiable, hopefully the listener will explore the piece purely for its sonic content.
Holding Pattern, for piano and three EBows(2001): When Sarah Cahill approached me with the prospect of composing a work for piano in tribute to Ruth Crawford Seeger, particularly in reference to the 9 Preludes which Sarah had just recorded, I was intrigued. Ruth Crawford Seeger's interest in timbre, particularly as represented in Preludes 6 and 9, spurred this brief work. This delicate timbral exploration's last sustained notes are those that begin Prelude 6. The Mystico marking of Prelude 6 and the Tranquillo of Prelude 9 are reflected in the character of Holding Pattern.
HUM was loosely scored and worked out in greater detail as I was playing/recording it in 1973. The 8-track tape machine I was using was full of hum, and that, coupled with the amount of humming that the flutist is required to do, suggested the title for the piece. The piece is written for seven flutes. It may be performed live, with condenser microphones and amplification, or as a single flutist (with condenser microphone and amplification) playing along with the tape. This new recording is missing the electronically generated hum, but there is still a considerable amount of humming coming from the flutist. The piece explores the instrument's wide timbral capabilities and enhances its dynamic range by the player's carefully "working" the microphone.
HUM 2 (2000) for Abbie Conant: When writing this multi-track work for trombone I could not help but to see the tie-ins to my work of 27 years prior, HUM. That work is scored for one live flutist and six taped flute parts (although it could be performed live with seven performers) which should be diffused around the performance space. HUM 2 is scored for eight live trombones, although it can be performed by one trombone plus seven taped parts, and the players (or speakers) should also be diffused around the performance space. The piece deals with expansion/contraction and involves spatial deployment of the eight performers or eight or four speakers. Ideally one should not be able to distinguish the live performer from the taped parts when performed using the tape version. The piece takes advantage of surround capability with sounds traveling around, through, and across the space (all built into scoring of the piece), with many instances of extended techniques and delicate pitch alterations (of 2-7 Hz). If the listener is in a good listening position, the space should contract--to appear to come very close (as all eight trombones get very loud) and expand outward (as all eight trombones get very soft). The expansion/contraction also takes place in the frequency domain as pitches converge and diverge and in the amplitude domain with an extreme dynamic range. This work is virtuosic. I composed the work for the trombonist, Abbie Conant, whose superb capabilities are explored in the work.
Inflections (1968) is a solo flute work which explores space/spaciousness. The spaces in between events are equal in importance to the sounds produced by the flutist. Each sound is a "precious" entity - as if each is an irregular pearl in a string of pearls. The intervening silence acts as the thread that binds them together.
It's Elemental was composed in response to a call from Phonography for works of under seven minutes duration in which recorded sounds were to be used with no layering, processing, crossfades, or editing permitted. Since these are all techniques that I use extensively, I thought I would take on this difficult challenge. The sounds consist of my floor furnace turning on while the mics were placed within the furnace housing, the sound of a Jacob's ladder which I built, tape unrolling, water boiling in a stainless steel pan, a gas service regulator with frogs contributing from a distant pond, and a faulty washer in a sink's valve.
Liquid Metal (1994): I took up canoeing in an effort to "experience nature" and to build up my upper body. I became fascinated with the water patterns visible at such a close-up range. The water had an intimate kind of beauty, very different from water viewed from a greater distance. I captured images for two years before finally sequencing them. It was only in the editing that I fully realized that water actually turns out to be rather colorless (the dictionary definition) - especially at close range and especially with the almost constant cloud cover we experienced. The video has no processing whatsoever.
The "nature" that I ended up experiencing in large part had to do with human nature. I would have loved to have paddled the California waterways hearing only the sounds of birds, water, etc., but instead much of the sound consisted of Harley Davidsons roaring down a canyon road adjacent to the river, helicopters, the Blue Angels, various prop planes, a train screeching harmonics as it went through turns in a canyon, remote-controlled model airplanes, cars driving over a bridge, jetskis and motorboats with and without waterskiers attached. The music is derived from those sounds, with only a few exceptions (seagulls, falls, wind and waves lapping against the shore).
I wanted to transform those undesirable "natural sounds" into sounds I would probably not mind hearing - or wouldn't mind hearing in my head while canoeing. I used convolving, phase vocoding, extensive layering and exteme equalizations to accomplish the transformations.
Minutia 0-13, for one to three pianos (1996) is a fully notated piece consisting of 14 separate pages that can be played in any order. The pages vary in duration from 0 - 60 seconds. The performers may repeat any page up to three times consecutively or non-consecutively. When a request was put out over the internet for a 60-second piano piece, it seemed a good opportunity to write a larger work that could be flexible in duration. The total time for this piece is specified at 0 - 12 minutes. The optimum performance involves three spatially-deployed pianos. This piece explores the piano's sonorities, coincidences during performance, performance/listening/reactive skills on the part of the performers and time/space. When two or three players are playing, it is almost as if the noise of daily life was going on in compressed form. A player produces some noise, only to be overtaken by noise from another. Some of these noises are sharp, short impulses (kids playing basketball, car doors slamming, someone hammering, doors being knocked on) and others are sustained efforts (helicopters flying over, cars slowly passing by, lawnmowers), and often the subtle, quiet sounds are drowned out by the din of human activity.
The future mechanical world I chose to explore in Molecular Nanotechnology is the miniaturized world of molecular nanotechnology. These tiniest of machines working at the molecular level will eventually be capable of such tasks as monitoring health, delivering drugs to specific sites, maintaining the body, and making repairs. This piece is a voyage of possibilities, somewhat sequential, but without a literal narrative.
Motor Rhythms uses six tiny DC servo motors as its primary sound source. My partner, Brian Reinbolt, developed a rhythmic sequence for the sextet for an installation he was working on and generously consented to let me record them. I deployed the six motors in two semicircles for maximum interplay across the channels and miked them very closely to further enhance the stereo field. Although most of the time they are processed beyond recognition, the motors are briefly revealed in their raw state as they travel dramatically to the forefront two-fifths through the work. The linked skeletal ticks which fly overhead punctuate the spatialization, elongating via resonant equalization, then convolution with the harmonics of the final feedback section, eventually blurring into sustained resonances. Motor Rhythms occasionally teeters on the brink of disaster, sounding as if it's about to fragment or rip apart from internal pressure.
All horizontal spatializiation is entirely the result of the original placement of the microphones. Depth and vertical spatialization are also carefully articulated and a fundamental concern of the piece—expanding, shrinking, stretching, and warping the architecture of the acoustic space.
Of All, for solo flute (2003): When flutist Nina Assimakopoulos approached me to write a solo flute piece for her project title "LITERARY BASED WORKS BY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AMERICAN WOMEN COMPOSERS" I was intrigued. I immediately ran through the names of a number of poets in my mind, and landed on Emily Dickinson. I asked my partner if he had a book of her poems, which he did, and when I first opened the book it opened to the page containing this poem. I marked this particular poem, then read through the entire book, only to return to this poem as being the perfect poem on which to base this piece. It is a poem about the wind, in which the first line reads: "Of all the sounds despatched abroad." Each line of the score is a literal representation of the poem. I would read a verse, then work with the ideas and images that Dickinson evoked, finalize the line, then move on to the next verse and interpret that verse in sound, and so on. It's the pure, natural, reflective sense of Dickinson's poem that I'm trying to portray in this work. I should note that this piece fulfills my intent to write a flute work every ten years starting with HUM (1973), then Scirocco (1983), Aeolian Confluence (1993), then two solo works, Of All and Reflections. (2003).
The sound source for Phase Transitions (1989) was exclusively that of the Roland D50 (550) linear synthesizer. This device seems to have been manufactured to fit the needs of "beautiful music", Hollywood film scores, and commercial advertisement music beds. Phase Transitions is an attempt to make this very interesting instrument sound as atypical as possible--loud, definitely "not beautiful", a little raucous. Since it is not possible to dynamically filter the PCM sounds on the D50, the "surf section" in the middle of the piece was sampled D50, dynamically filtered using the Ensoniq Mirage. To build up the density desired, I made a considerable number of stereo "pre-mixes" from the 16 track to the PCM recorder, and subsequently layered several of the premixes, resulting in a combining of fifty-four tracks in the densest section.
Musically the piece is based on the idea of phase transitions--the area of transition where matter changes from one state to another--such as from non-magnetized to magnetized, or liquid to solid. The transitions within sections move at differing rates per section, as do the transitions from one section to the next, just as different types of matter have very different dynamics of change through various states.
Ping and Pong 12/13/03 and 12/14/03 originated out of a call from Chris Cutler for his Out of the Blue Radio project, which is broadcast daily from 23:30-00:00 London time on Resonance FM, 104.4 FM from July 1, 2002 to July 1, 2003. In this call he asked for an unedited real-time location recording recorded anywhere in the world between 23:30-00:00 GMT, which was 3:30-4:00 PM when I recorded these works on 12/13/02 and 12/14/02. I had planned to record something very northern Californian such as the redwood forest, but the only time I had available to do this project was during a time when it was raining non-stop, making it impossible to record the subtle sounds of the forest. I opted instead to put a galvanized steel pail on my front porch and let it fill with rainwater. I tossed in my two hydrophones and turned on my DAT machine at precisely 3:30 and turned it off at 4:00. In this recording there are many layers of activity, including some very sharp high frequency sizzling sounds as the raindrops struck the surface, combined with the deeper tuned resonances of the pail as the larger droplets hit the edges of the pail and others drove deeper into the surface. Aside from these layers, the rhythmic interplay is of main interest. It was still raining the following day, so I inverted the pail and placed two condensor air mics inside the pail and recorded the sound of the raindrops hitting the bottom of the pail, resulting in a more consistent, but still nuanced sound with rhythmic variability . The resonant frequencies of the pail are more exaggerated in this version, and one hears some sounds of the environment processed through this Helmholtz resonator (the pail) as well.
I used shortwave broadcasts as the sole source for Raw Data (1998). There is only one small section which has processing, the rest being raw, unprocessed data (sound) direct from the shortwave radio, so it is full of static, distortion, clicks, pops and all sorts of wonderful, but usually undesirable artifacts. This open window to the world, with all its noise, seems to make the world bigger and more precious/precarious than it would were every broadcast received with perfect digital clarity. The piece moves from communication that was in use in the early 20th Century (Morse code transmissions) to the present (which uses the medium of shortwave and various media‹CD's, reel to reel tapes, cassettes, minidiscs, etc. as sources). As all these types of signals from around the world are available in many languages (including Morse Code) concurrently in shortwave broadcasts, it's as if the entire 20th Century were compressed in time/space.
ReCycle uses my recordings of a refrigerator, a freezer, a floor furnace, ice melting, water boiling, a Jacob's ladder I built, a faulty faucet, and noise between pieces in old 78 recordings. Some of these sounds have large cycles such as the refrigerator, freezer and floor furnace cycling on and off, but there are also cyclic patterns within their "on-times." The Jacob's ladder has an irregular cycle. The faulty water faucet, the penultimate sound in the piece, and the looped noise between pieces from an old recording at the very end have the most consistent rhythmic cycles. The "Re" in the title comes from both the use of the sounds of my re-frigerator, and the recycling of unused source materials from some of my previous works, including Distant Thunder, Fluid Dynamics, and System Test.
Reflections (2003) is a work for solo flute which was commissioned by the National Flute Association for their 2004 High School Competition. The timing for this request was perfect, as every ten years I write a flute piece and since my last flute work was Aeolian Confluence from 2/8/93, it was time to write another. The title for this work stems from the many internal reflections in the workÑthere are many phrases which echo or reflect the immediately preceding phrase. Reflections also occur on a larger scale throughout the work, with varied reflections of previous phrases. The nature of the sounds is also reminiscent of reflections on the water, with slight perturbations in an otherwise glassy surface modulating the reflections. The final reference is the use of the same first four notes for this piece that I used for Inflections, a solo flute work which I wrote in 1968. There are occasional extended flute techniques woven into the fabric of this work, and they should flow naturally and easily within the work.
I should note that this piece fulfills my intent to write a flute work every ten years starting with HUM (1973), then Scirocco (1983), Aeolian Confluence (1993), then two solo works, Of All and Reflections. (2003).
Reflections is dedicated to Walfrid Kujala.
Resonant Places (1992) was composed over a two-year period. It consists of natural sounds recorded in various resonant spaces found on location in the Bay Area. Some of the resonant frequencies are emphasized by equalization and/or digital signal processing and some sections of the piece are slightly supplemented with synthesizers. The resonant sounds/spaces consisted of a swivel chair with casters rolling across an oak floor, a tightly sealed hallway which changed frequencies as doors throughout the building opened and closed, BART in a BART tunnel, two separate stove vents inside a single house, the ocean through mailing tubes, and train and freeway sounds through sewer pipes in an industrial area of West Berkeley. As the piece progresses the sense of space collapses and expands depending on the original resonant body locations and microphone placement within these bodies. The transitions tend to lift the listener out of the aural space and to deposit them into another, completely different space.
Santa Fe (2006) is an 8 CD installation work for the Atrium Sound Space, Benildus Hall, College of Santa Fe. In selecting sounds from for Santa Fe I primarily used sounds that are evocative of the beautiful landscape, skies, weather, and wildlife in and around Santa Fe. The sound sources are quite varied and are so highly processed that they take on new meaning in this new context. There are some exceptions, such as one CD of very recognizable sounds, and two CDs derived from an installation piece (Fountain) which uses water droplets from a small fountain to trigger synthesized sounds, so the fountain in effect becomes the performer. Those sounds, although not of natural origin, are driven by nature.
Scirocco, composed in 1983, is a piece for live flute and digital delay with pre-recorded tape. The tape portion is composed exclusively of flute processed through a digital delay. Multiphonics, whistle tones, and humming while playing are some of the techniques used to create complex timbres. Dense textures were built by layering up to thirty-two tracks of processed flute. SCIROCCO is reminiscent of HUM, another multi-tracked, although unprocessed, flute piece composed ten years earlier.
Solar Wind (1983) is an electronic piece based on synthesized audio representations of bow shock interactions of Saturn and Venus with the solar wind as observed by Voyager, Voyager-2 and the Pioneer-Venus Orbiter. The source tape was generously supplied by the project director of the plasma wave instrument, Fred Scarf, of TRW, for NASA. The plasma wave instrument detects phenomena associated with solar wind interactions in space. The instrument, placed aboard this spacecraft, gathers information and analyzes it using a sixteen-channel spectrum analyzer. The data is transmitted to Earth and drives a computer which controls the amplitude of a sixteen-voice music synthesizer. In some bow shock interactions the actual frequencies of the phenomena are replicated; in others, some frequency shifting was necessary. Time compression is set to a 480:1 ratio. The final sequence of the composition uses the source tape with minimal manipulation. The middle section of the piece (bow shock sequence) uses the source tape, but heavily modified. The remaining segments are loosely based on the source tape.
Songs of Flight (1988) consists of two works for soprano and piano, Song of Flight (the tern) and Song of Flight (the robe), commissioned by New Songs and premiered Ann Obery and David Mahler.
In keeping with the visual imagery of Gary Snyder's two poems, Straits of Malacca 24 Oct 1957 and The Feathered Robe, these settings seek to complement the pure, rather stark narrative delivery of the text with a piano accompaniment which seems to shadow the voice at times, and to gently surround the voice at other times. It is an effort to extract the listener from her/his current surroundings and to move her/him into the timelessness that the poetry evokes.
Stretching the Boiling Point: contorting boiling water to a slow, smooth journey across space, bubbles crackling, then the physical stretching of the bubble's surface echoed many times over across time—the theme of this gentle, brief foray is water. Minute detail of water is revealed in the very close miking of the sound sources, and is further revealed as the recorded sounds are stretched and segmented in time via granular synthesis.
Subterranean Network, commissioned by Hartt School of Music in 1986, is an electronic work which seeks to evoke a sense of the experience of the tunnel fighting in Cu Chi during the Vietnam War. These tunnels, from which the Viet Cong fought much of the war, were dark, narrow, poorly ventilated hell holes, filled with booby traps and inconceivable real and psychological terrors which plagued the American soldiers, known as tunnel rats, whose duty it was to explore them. These men, if not killed by booby traps, snakes, spiders or scorpiions, were in constant threat of ambush in the tunnels.
Sweet Dreams (1999): I have always been fascinated by richness of environmental sounds. After years of using heavily processed environmental sounds (to the point where they are no longer recognizable) as the sonic basis for many of my works I decided to compose a piece using only unprocessed (although cleaned up) environmental sounds. As a thread to tie these sounds which I've collected for almost thirty years together I decided to use those sounds which wake me or keep me awake nights. Of interest to me is how some sounds seem to stay in the background and others become unnaturally present in the darkness. I've emphasized these perceptual anomalies, as well as exaggerated the spatialization in this work. The piece is intended to played over speakers, but listening in headphones will make the spatial and proximity effects even more apparent. I recorded all but one sound myself--I could not resist putting in one "baa" from the cloned sheep, Dolly.
Some of the recordings I used for this piece were made as far back as 1972. Wanting to make technically better quality recordings of some of these early soures, I went back to the same source locations I had used before. I most often found them to now be intolerably noisy. The increased air traffic, freeway traffic, and human intrusion on what were once quiet locations made it impossible to capture clean sounds: the bird menagerie was filled with air traffic and the airplanes had so much air traffic and cars so constant it was difficult to isolate the sounds. Everything was difficult to record cleanly and it took an enormous amount of editing and cleaning up of the background noise to make the location recordings usable. In many instances I ended up using the original recordings.
System Test (fire and ice) (2001): This work, which primarily uses my recordings of Jacob's ladders, ice melting, and papers sliding against each other as the sources, is a rather dramatic piece, which I attribute to the dynamic/dramatic character of the Jacob's ladder. There is such a powerful intensity in the discharges, accompanied by wonderful sizzling, hissing, crackling sounds, and powerful low frequencies; danger is always present. The sources are convolved, stretched, granulated, eq'd and further processed many times over, then whirled into this intense piece. There is also a visual component for this work, using four electrolumuniscent wired "imagers" in a very dark presentation space.
The source material for White Night (1984) consists of digital delay processing of spoken names or portions of names of fellow artists. These fragments set up micro-rhythms which interlock, then slowly shift phase. Because the source fragments are essentially static in regard to texture, pitch and timbre, the composition is built on subtle rhythmic interactions among combinations of fragments, with amplitude and density determining the overall structure. White Night is a French expression for a sleepless night of the type characterized by the mind's relentless repetition of thoughts.
White Turbulence 2000: When I first started thinking about White Turbulence 2000, I thought it might be interesting to have water as a unifying theme. I recorded many sounds involving water with microphones and hydrophones and processed them using phase vocoding, convolving, and extreme equalization. As I started putting the piece together, I thought it might be playful to incorporate some obvious quadraphonic effects (the convolved airplane at the beginning) in addition to the more subtle spatialization techniques I used such as continuously varying phase relationships. Other sounds include waves lapping against the shore, an old toilet tank slowly filling with water, a brass ball spinning very fast in a stainless steel bowl with a small amount of water, etc. There is a mix of recognizable (although processed) sounds and sounds processed beyond recognition. While working on this piece I recalled the difficulty of layering complex sounds which were spatially oriented with other complex sounds of another spatial orientation. The space tends to become confused or to simply collapse when layering the sounds. This piece is therefore reminiscent of many of my early quadraphonic pieces (1973-1985) which are more episodic rather than thickly layered.
Recording-Editing
2007 Historical remastering of 2 CD set of works conducted by Monteux for CD release on Music and Arts label
2007 Historical remastering of 7 CD set of works conducted by Munch for CD release on Music and Arts label
2006 Historical remastering of 13 CD set, Sunday Evenings with Pierre Monteux for CD release on Music and Arts label
2005 Historical remastering of 12 CD set of Prades Festival (Casals) for CD release on Music and Arts label
2005 Historical remastering of 4 CD set of violinist Francescatti/ORTF for CD release on Music and Arts label
2005 Historical remastering of 2 CD set, VEGH Quartet performing Bartok String Quartets for CD release on the Music and Arts label
2005 Historical remastering of 2 CD set, Cantelli conducts, for CD release on the Music and Arts label
2005 Historical remastering of 2 CD set, Fine Arts Quartet performing Bartok String Quartets, for CD release on Music and Arts label
2004 Historical remasting of Claudio Arrau Piano Concerti CD for Music and Arts label
2004 Historical remastering of 8-CD set of Hungarian String Quartet
2004 Archived 25 CDs of material from the Pauline Oliveros Archives for Rennselaer and Mills Archives
2004 Historical remasting of 8-CD set of Fine Arts Quartet
2003 Edited Lou Harrison's just intoned National Steel Guitar work, David Tanenbaum, guitar, for New Albion CD
2003 Recorded and edited main dialog for Dido's Revenge, a radio work by Melody Sumner Carnahan
2003 Archived 19 CDs of material for the CCM Archives
2003 Historical remastering of 1930s to 1960s recordings of Morini performing Tchaikovsky and Brahms vln concerti, Wagner's Tristan & Isolde, Huberman performing Tchaikovsky and Brahms vln concerti, Mahler Symphony No. 4, Haskil performing Mozart and Schumann pno concerti, and Casadesus performing works by Saint-Saens, Franck, and Ravel
2003 12 CD set of Cantelli conducting NY Philharmonic from 1949-1952
2002 Edited Bun Ching Lam's opera, Wenji
2002 Archived 9 CDs of material from Ramon Sender's archives for CCM Archives, Mills College
2002 Edited Lou Harrison's Threnody, Simfony #13 and Music for Violin with Various Instruments for CD release on New Albion label. David Abel, Julie Steinberg, William Winant, plus other performers
2002 Edited Lou Harrison'sThrenody, Plaint, Variations, Tandy, Jahla for CD release on New Albion label, David Tanenbaum, guitar
2002 Historical remastering of 4 CD set of Abendroth conducting various works, Klemperer conducting Bach's Brandenburg Concerti 4 and 5 (Annie Fischer) and Magnificat, Furtwangler conducting Beethoven Brahms Violin Concerto and Quintett for Clarinet and Strings (Adolf Busch), 6 CD set of Knappertsbusch conducting Bruckner, 5 CD set of Casals Festival, Francescatti performing Tchaikovsky, Bruch, Saint-Sa‘ns violin concerti, 4 CD set of Kleiber conducting Beethoven, Morini performing Tchaikovsky and Brahms Violin Concerti, Kapell performing Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto for Piano and Khachaturian's Piano Concerto, Szigeti, Schnabel, Fouruier performing Schubert Trio in Bb Major, Monteux conducting Schumann Piano Concert (Schnabel), 4 CD set of Verdi Falstaff, Aida Othello excerpts, and 3 CD set of Leinsdorf conducting Wagner's Lohengrin.
2001 Digitally recorded and edited the five Beethoven cello sonatas on original instruments, Stephen Harrison, cello with George Barth, fortepiano, Stanford Media Solutions
2001 Digitally recorded and edited Christian Wolff's Tuba Song, for solo tuba, Tzadik label
2001 Remastered 1930's to 1960's recordings of Emil Gilels: Mozart, Beethoven, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Balakirev; Badura Skoda/Furtwangler: Mozart; Heifitz: Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Korngold; Abendroth: Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner; Schuricht: Wagner, Mendelssohn, Reger, Haydn, Schubert, Bach, Franck, Debussy, Rachmaninoff; Geiseking: Scriabin, Beethoven, de Falla, Hindemith; Jochum: Bruckner, Mozart, Mahler; Bruno Walter: Strauss, Brahms for the Music and Arts label
2000 Co-produced, digitally edited Lou Harrison's Rhymes with Silver, New Albion label
2000 Digitally recorded Gordon Mumma's Trios, for two sets of trios
2000 Archived 31 CDs of works from Mills Music Dept. archival holdings
2000 Recorded/digitally edited my HUM 2, Abbie Conant, trombonist for discrete 8 channel diffusion
2000 Digitally recorded three two and one-half hour presentations of the San Francisco Performances presentations with the Alexander String Quartet and Robert Greenberg, for subsequent radio broadcast
2000 Remastered works by Schubert, Bach, Brahms, conductors Kempff, Klemperer, Busch, and several performers, including Hotter for the Music and Arts label
1999 Digitally edited Chana Bloch/David Del Tredici's six-song cycle, Chana's Story (Miriam Abramowitsch, soprano)
1999 Digitally recorded/edited Terry Riley's Zamorra for two guitars and Dai de los Meurtos #1 and #2 for guitar and percussion, performed by David Tanenbaum, Gyan Riley, Willie Winant, New Albion label
1999 Digitally recorded three two and one-half hour presentations of the San Francisco Performances' "The String Quartets Plus" with the Alexander String Quartet and Robert Greenberg, for subsequent radio broadcast
1999 Remastered Furtwangler recordings (Beethoven), Van Beinum recordings, Wagner's Gotterdammerung (1942), Parsifal, and Meistersinger, works by Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and performances by Fischer, Haskil, Menuhin, Gieseking, and Arrau for release on the
Music and Arts label
1999 Archived 22 CDs of works from Mills Music Dept. archival holdings
1998 Archived 66 CDs of works from Mills Music Dept. archival holdings
1998 Digitally recorded John Zorn's Music for Children, performed by the Abel/Steinberg, Winant Trio, Tzadik label
1998 Recorded Luc Ferrari's Cellule 75, performed by Chris Brown and William Winnant, Tzadik label
1998 Recorded Wendy Reid's Tree Piece #31, Tom Dambly, trumpet; Joel Davel, percussion
1998 Digitally recorded/edited Milhaud at Mills: A Celebration in Song, Music and Arts label, Sara Ganz, Donna Petersen, Elizabeth Eshleman, sopranos, Belle Bulwinkle and Julie Steinberg, pianists
1998 Archived 66 historical CDs from the CCM archives for preservation purposes
1998 Remastered Abendroth conducting Wagner, Brahms, Schumann, and Tschaikovsky for 2-CD release
1998 Remastered Furtwangler conducting Wagner, for 2-CD release
1998 Remastered Richter, solo piano recital, 1963/Leipzig, for CD release
1998 remastered Milhaud's Christopher Columbus, Mitropoulis, conductor, for 2-CD release
1998 Digitally recorded three two and one-half hour presentations of the San Francisco Performances' "Nationalism and the String Quartet: Dvorak, Janacek, and Bartok" with the Alexander String Quartet and Robert Greenberg, for subsequent radio broadcast
1997 Digitally recorded and edited Annea Lockwood's I give you back for CD release on the CRI label, Elizabeth Eshleman, soprano
1997 Remastered 2 CD's for composer/performer Ben Goldberg, Eight Phrases for Jefferson Rubin, released on the Victo label
1997 Remastered Graham Connah's CD sour note seven, RR label
1997 Remastered Bruckner Symphonies 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 for 6-CD release
1997 Remastered Mahler Symphonies 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 for 6-CD release
1997 Remastered Toscanini at La Scala for 2-CD release
1997 Digitally recorded (1996)/edited Schubert's Schwanengesang song cycle,
Allen Bonet, tenor, Andrea Liguori, piano, released on CD,1998
1997 Digitally recorded three two and one-half hour presentations of the San Francisco Performances' "The String Quartet in Vienna: Mozart, Schubert and Brahms" with the Alexander String Quartet and Robert Greenberg, for subsequent radio broadcast
1997 Digitally edited the Barry Guy/Gustafsson/Strid trio with pianist Marilyn Crispell for CD release on the Music and Arts label
1997 Digitally restored/remastered a CD of Gieseking playing works of Schumann for the Music and Arts label
1997 Digitally edited/mastered performances by George Lewis and Miya Masaoka for CD release
1997 Digitally edited/mastered Non Stop Flight by Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Band for CD release on the Music and Arts label
1997 Digitally mastered "The Time is Now," for author, Melody Sumner Carnahan for CD release on the Frogpeak label
1996 Digitally recorded/edited Tibetan Monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery for CD release
1996 Digitally remastered Haydn Society's 1950's releases of Ralph Kirkpatrick, harpsicord, for CD release
1996 Digitally edited Bun-Ching Lam's "Trio" for violin, piano and percussion, performed by the Able/Steinberg/Winnant Trio, for CD release
1996 Digitally edited Rachel Rudich, flute and piano, for CD release
1996 Digitally recorded new works by David Behrman for trumpet and electronics, spoken voice, koto, trombone and electronics, and played flute with electronics: David Berhman, composer and electronics, Toyoji Tomita, trombone, Mia Masaoka, koto, Tom Dambly, trpt
1996 Digitally recorded and edited Cage's "Sonatas and Interludes" for CD release on the Music and Arts label, Julie Steinberg, piano
1996 Digitally recorded Milhaud songs for CD release, Mills College faculty members performing
1996 Digitally recorded the Lisle Ellis jazz ensemble for CD release on the Music and Arts label
1996 Digitally recorded and edited Schubert songs for CD release, Allen Bonet, tenor
1996 Digitally edited "Vespers," by Aleksei Shipovalnikov, sung by Slavyanka, Russian a capella chorus, for CD release
1996 Digitally recorded six two and one-half hour presentations of the San Francisco Performances' "The Beethoven Quartets: A Musical Diary" with the Alexander String Quartet and Robert Greenberg, for subsequent radio broadcast (nine programs total)
1996 Digitally edited Braxton/Teitelbaum Merkin Hall Performance for CD release
1996 Digitally edited/remastered/restored Monteux conducting the San Francisco Symphony for CD release (10-CD set)
1996 Digitally recorded and edited Marilyn Crispell at Yoshi's and digitally edited Marilyn Crispell at Woodstock for CD release
1995 Digitally edited/remastered/restored Wagner's Ring Cycle, Furtwangler conducting, for CD release (12-CD set)
1995 Digitally edited Braxton "Live at Yoshi's" (4-CD set)
1995 Digitally recorded and edited Mozart's Quintet, K. 581 for string quartet and clarinet for CD release, Alexander String Qt.
1995 Digitally edited Brahms' Quintet, Op. 115 for string quartet and clarinet and Schubert's Quintet for piano and string quartet for CD release, Alexander String Qt.
1995 Digitally recorded/edited two solo concerts for two CD releases, Marilyn Crispell, piano
1995 Digitally recorded Bun-Ching Lam's work, "Trio," written for the Abel/Steinberg/Winnant trio, for choreographer June Watanabe
1995 Digitally recorded three two and one'half hour presentations of the San Francisco Performances' "The Beethoven Quartets: A Musical Diary" with the Alexander String Quartet and Robert Greenberg, for subsequent radio broadcast
1994 Digitally recorded/edited/produced Schubert's "Winterreise" for CD release, Miriam Abramowitsch, soprano, George Barth, fortepiano
1994 Digitally recorded Gordon Mumma's "Than Particle" for CD release, Gordon Mumma, electronics, William Winnant, percussion
1994 Digitally recorded/digitally edited Rzewski's "To the Earth," for CRI CD, William Winnant, percussion
1994 Digitally recorded/digitally edited Rzewski's "Whangdoodles" for CRI CD release, Able/Steinberg, Winnant trio
1994 Digitally edited Bach Suites for CD release, Robert Hill, harpsicord
1994 Digitally edited Inference, for CD release, Marilyn Crispell, piano and sax duo
1994 Digitally edited Hyperion, for CD release, Marilyn Crispell, piano, sax
and percussion trio
1994 Digitally recorded Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #5 for CD release, Linda Burman-Hall, harpsichord, UCS
1994 Digitally edited Oluyemi Thomas' "Positive Knowledge" for CD release, sax, bass clarinet, percussion , voice
1993 Edited digital recording of jazz saxophonist Julius Hemphill for CD release on the MAP label
1992 Recorded, mixed portions of Sheila Davies' "What is the Matter with Amy Glennon?" radio play, published on the Radius series CD's, What Next? Recordings, Nonsequitur label
1992 Edited digital recording of pianist Marilyn Crispell for CD release on the MAP label
1991 Edited digital recording of works by Bartok, Prokofiev, Martin, & Barber for CD release on MAP label, Diane Walsh, pianist
1990 Edited digital recording of Scriabin sonatas 6-10 for CD release on MAP label, Boris Berman, pianist
1989 Edited digital recording of DeBussy Etudes and Faure Fantasies for CD release on MAP label, Jeffrey Swann, pianist
1989 Recorded and edited live performance for CD release on MAP label, Marilyn Crispell, pianist
1989 Recorded six C. P. E. Bach Sonatas for CD release on Centaur label, Leta Miller, flutist
1989 Edited digital recording of Nancarrow, Carter, etc. for CD release on MAP label, Ursula Oppens, pianist, nominated for1990 GRAMMY AWARD
1989 Edited digital recording of Scriabin sonatas 1-5 for CD release on MAP label, Boris Berman, pianist
1988 Produced ANOTHER COAST CD for MAP label, Carl Stone, Paul Dresher, Paul DeMarinis, Laetitia Sonami, Maggi Payne, artists. BEST PICK OF 1988--NEW YORK TIMES
1988 Edited digital recording of Bach's Art of Fugue for CD release on MAP label Robert Hill, harpsicord
1988 Edited digital of recording of Mendelssohn cello works for CD release on MAP label, Terry King, artist
1986 Produced, recorded, and edited Liszt piano works for CD release on MAP label, Jeffrey Swann, artist
1986 Co-produced, recorded, and edited harpsicord works for CD release on MAP label, Igor Kipnis, harpsicordist
1984 Technical director of audio and video for Oakland Ballet's production of "Les Bitches," Public Broadcast Association
1982 '84 Recording engineer and video assistant, Xerox Research Center (PARC)
1982 Audio mixer, Bob Ashley's Atalanta, Cal Arts, Valencia, CA
1982 Engineer for M.U.S.I.C. Festival, San Francisco, 3 days, 36 performances
1972-'81 Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, recording engineer for the 12-track studio and film sound mixer for the film studio
1981 Sound recordist and mixer for video production of "Les Noces," Public Broadcast Association
1980 Recording engineer for Speaking of Music Series, EXPLORATORIUM, for broadcast on Pacifica Radio Stations
1979 Recording engineer for Joseph Celli's album, ORGANIC OBOE, Real Art Ways release
1979 Re-recording engineer for portions of Gordon Mumma's album, DRESDEN INTERLEAF, Lovely Music label
1978 Engineer for KPIX Television one-hour special on teenage problems
1977 Recording engineer, Jackie Humbert and David Rosenboom's album, MY NEW MUSIC
1977 Recording engineer for California Arts Council funded video documentation of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Grassroots Theatre
1976 Recording engineer for Robert Ashley's MUSIC WITH ROOTS IN THE AETHER, a fourteen hour video portrait of seven composers and their music
(engineered for composers Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma and Terry Riley)
1972-1974 Recording engineer for composers Gordon Mumma, Christian Wolff, Alvin Lucier, Roger Reynolds and Barbara Kolb for a Ford Foundation grant at the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College
"Payne seems interested in the surreal, the inward, the micro and the accumulation of physical and psychological tension. The compositions and sounds have incredible depth, a profound logic and, though not 'pretty,' an irresistable beauty."---Tom Grove, Option (Crystal CD)
"Payne is due applause for her impressive melding of music theory, technique and style."---Darren Bergstein, i/e (Crystal CD)
"Ms. Fenley...performed to a magical score by Maggi Payne."---Jennifer Dunning, New York Times (Solar Wind, Ahh-Ahh, Resonant Places)
"She draws on a combination of impressive musicality and advanced studio craft to produce weird aural landscapes that are as unsettling as they are beautiful."---Rich Anderson, The Herald, Provo, Utah (Crystal CD)
"Her music, dating back to 1982 on this disc, is some of the most sensitive and interesting electronic music I've heard, combining a wide range of sound materials, beautiful, menacing, quiet."---Taylor, American Record Guide (Crystal CD)
"Maggi Payne marshals her electronic forces never less than commandingly."---Mike Silverton, Option (Crystal CD)
"She manages to tightwalk brilliantly, and in this piece most movingly, between taut, angular dissonances and intervals of sheer, emotion-laden simgularities that, together, made for the most successful, single work of the evening."---Jim Jordan, Express (Subterranean Network)
"Her pieces generally begin slowly and silently with gradual crescendos into climactic whooshes and whirls of crackles, clinkety clunks, swirling wind and sound waves like night insects weaving in and out of audible range."---Sammy Prestianni, Retriever (Crystal CD)
"Maggi Payne's...processing of car and airplane sounds into a scintillating harmonic continuum captures some part of that comfortless contemplative attitude the desert inspires."---Kyle Gann, Village Voice (Airwaves)
"Scirocco...create(s) a rain forest where instruments call to each other like chrome birds."---Richard Kadrey, The Chronicle Whole Earth Catalog
"...all share in the sheer sensual possibilities of sound."---Allan Ulrich, San Francisco Chronicle (Another Coast CD)
"It is an emotional moment, rich in color and spirit."---Richard Pontzious, S.F. Examiner (Ling)
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