Workshop & Concert Summary Vienna (10.-13.10.2023)

From 10.-13.10.2023 we were holding a live-electronics workshop at mdw within our PEEK ‘Études for Live-Electronics’ Project. Workshop Presenters will be:

The Live-Electronics Workshop was a 4-day event that focused on the intersection of performance, composition, and artistic research in the field of live-electronics. The workshop was at mdw and had a concert evening at the Klangtheater/Future Art Lab. Participants were students from the fields of composition and music performance.

Timeframe:

  • Tuesday 10.10.2023 till 12.10.2023 two blocks each day from 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM & 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM (Workshop)
  • Friday 13.10.2023 from 10:00 AM – 8:00 PM: Showcase Concert (6:00 PM) including Soundcheck and Setup

Documentation:

Photos by Stephan Polzer (mdw).

Summary:

The attendees of the workshop at mdw were all instrumentalists, composers, or singers with experience in working with live-electronics tools such as Max/MSP or Csound. Overall, the workshop participants worked on a live interpretation of the composition ‘Stria’ by John Chowning, explored the development of live electronic performances using the underlying Frequency Modulation (FM) Synthesis, and explored the combination of liv- electronics with the traditional Vietnamese instrument Dan Bau.

For the concert “Stria” a tape composition by John Chowning was performed live by the workshop attendees Seo Yoon Jang and Yilin Yang, using performance material that was developed by Dustin Zorn during this project. For further experiments, FM modulating oscillators were replaced by live voice input. The results were presented to the audience as an improvisation entitled “Mr. Modulator” with Paul Schuster, Karlheinz Essl, Seo Yoon Jang and Yilin Yang. Under supervision of Luong Hue Trinh, the group of Tom Aitken and Yuheng Chen developed a structured improvisation using Max/MSP and the Dan Bau.

Finally, Luong Hue Trinh’s composition ‘How can I be tender’, written during the artistic research phase of this project, was performed by Tim-Tarek Grund. He performed on the Grain Bau, a new electronic interface, that was developed in this research project and combines performance gestures related to the traditional Dan Bau, with a granular synthesizer in Pure Data.