The 2025 New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival is now over. I am very happy to report that in spite of travel problems caused by the Trump administration, in response to which some foreign composers and performers chose not to come to the United States, the festival went well. I expect that it will continue next year.
My own piece, Pianissimo, is now online on Bandcamp.
Without prejudice to pieces that I did not hear, or even to pieces that I did hear, here are some of the pieces that stood out for me personally (in the sense that I think I would enjoy hearing them again), with streaming links if possible, in composer order:
Hector Bravo Benard, In the Fog.
Aleksandra Bilinska, and then… Subekumena, Hommage a Barbara Buczek from the Cycle #2020.
Nicole Carroll, Abstracted Hexagonal Ruin.
Nolan Downey, Unring the Bell.
Du Xiaohu, exclusively in the sound of Chu.
Gerald Eckert, Nen IV - closer, the link is only to the first section of this piece.
James Dashow, Negli Angole della Bottega del Suono.
Allen Fogelsanger, Sun Burning: a collaborative real-time movement/sound composition.
Jon Forshee, Story of the Face, Part 1.
Joel Gressel, Unmeasured Time.
Ragnar Grippe, The Moment
Kim Hedas, Lein
Mara Helmuth, Conjuring
Hubert Howe, Inharmonic Fantasy No. 19
Antoine Jackson, “Come what may…"
Jinwoong Kim, Zodiac, for piano and live audiovisual
Eric Lyon, Margaret, Dancing
Andrew May, Shape Shifter
Clemens von Reusner, EREMIA
Ana Rubin, Cave, River, Sun
Eli Stine, Where Water Meets Memory
Pieces for which I have been unable to locate a direct link may (might) still be found on the Sheen Center’s YouTube channel here.
My request to composers and performers: At the same time that a work of yours appears in a public venue, please publish a link (if at all possible) to an online release of that work!
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Looking back at the combined International Computer Music Conference/New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival held July 16th through the 23rd on and near the campus of New York University, I here offer my reflections as one of the organizers, as a composer with a piece in the conference, and as an audience member for many of the concerts.
I was also a referee for music, but that does not enter into my remarks.
First, I will briefly mention pieces I liked well enough that I would probably go out of my way to hear them again. Please note, I did not attend all the concerts, I do not mention pieces for which I was a referee but that I did not hear in concert, and I have my own biases and predilections in the field of electroacoustic music. I am mainly but by no means only interested in algorithmic composition and in through-composed music for fixed media, what we used to call "tape music."
Where possible, I provide hyperlinks to online renderings of the pieces.
Concert 3, Monday June 16, 16:30, Hebrew Union College sanctuary
Ewan Stefani, black drums rolled, fixed media. Complex and accomplished collage of sampled/processed sounds.
Concert 7, Tuesday June 18, 16:30, Hebrew Union College sanctuary
Angelo Bello, Ricercar, fixed media. Builds on years of experiment based on the algorithmic synthesis/composition methods of Iannis Xenakis. I have heard a number of Bello's pieces and this one was by far my favorite, especially as there was a change of texture towards the end of the piece where melodic whistles and glissandos introduced a different mood.
Concert 12, Wednesday June 19, 20:00, Loreto Theater
Naotoshi Osaka, Kakekagami, with Kourtney Newton on cello. A lot of interesting goodies in the sounds.
Natasha Barrett, Dusk's Gait, fixed media. My interest in this spatialized, hyper-realistic pseudo-collage of "natural" sounds never flagged.
Concert 16, Thursday June 20, 20:00, Loreto Theater
Mara Helmuth, Sound Dunes, with Esther Lamneck on tarogato. Harpies skirling wild and free.
Orlando Garcia, separacion, with Enzo Filippetti on soprano saxophone. Very nice drone that kept me listening through over 12 minutes.
Zurine F. Gerenabarrena, Barne, with Patti Cudd on percussion. Frankly this was mostly just Cudd playing with the electronics providing some sonic decorations and fillips. But what playing! Virtuosity on Cudd's level is totally engaging.
Concert 22, Saturday June 22, 20:00, Grand Hall of the Kimmel Center.
Russell Pinkston, Zylamander, with Mark Zyla on French horn. Jazz harmony, rhythmic, an engaging mix of electronic and acoustic sounds and processes.
Concert 24, Sunday June 23, 16:30, Grand Hall, Kimmel Center
Dafna Naphtali and Jen Baker, Clip Mouth Unit, with Jen Baker on trombone and Hans Tammen on blippo box, processed vocals by Dafna Napthali. Slushy sludge, slipping and sliding with lots of processing, musical. Note: the hyperlink is to a different performance from this group.
Concert 25, Sunday June 23, 20:00, Loreto Theater
Mario Davidovsky, Synchronisms No. 11, with Ross Wrightman on double bass. Just good.
Kang Shinae, Aruna, fixed media. The sounds were a bit muddied, perhaps from over-processing, but very musical and with spiritual content.
Timothy Sapp, There Is a Piece Missing, interactive electronics. Wonderful and inventive. The multiple controllers actually contributed to and drove the music.
Rainer Burck, Lamento industriale, fixed media. Really enormous sounds, like a foundry in Heaven (or Hell), musically coherent.
It has been a continuing topic of discussion among the organizers of the NYCEMF how best to present this music. Currently the festival is funded almost exclusively from registration fees. In order to generate enough revenue to pay for theaters etc., a large number of composers must be registered. This has several effects: the audience consists mostly of the composers and some of the performers (and associated friends and family), many pieces are scheduled, and the overall quality of the pieces is, I think, somewhat watered down compared to a festival where a smaller number of pieces would be selected with an eye towards attracting a wider audience.
If the concerts consisted exclusively of pieces on the level of those above, there should be no trouble attracting a wider audience, not to mention more critics and music journalists. But then the difficulty of finding, renting, and running theaters becomes greater.
If someone out there wants to generously assist the future of music in New York City, please grant sufficient funds to the New York City Electroacoustic Music Society to rent, on an annual basis, a suitable venue for the festival. I will spell it out. The venue should have two or more theaters, each seating at least 200, both suitable for the diffusion of electroacoustic music which means a dry sound without a lot of echo and preferably a square shape, acoustically isolated from street noise. The festival has been borrowing really good speakers from Genelec, as normally music theaters do not have speakers adequate for the demands of electroacoustic music, but an exception would be delightful. And there should be a room or so for installations and just generally hanging out and talking. Ideally, this venue will be located where the life in the city is, which means lower Manhattan, Williamsburg, East New York, or such.
Ayako’s piece “Kishimu, Irodoru” has been selected for the International Computer Music Conference - New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (ICMC-NYCEMF) in NY, US on June 16-23, 2019.
2019年6月16日-23日にニューヨーク（アメリカ）で開催される ICMC-NYCEMF にて、電子音響音楽作品《軋む、彩る》が上演されます。
Just got this beautiful edition of #OpenSpaceMagazine! My response to Elsa Justel's piece at #NYCEMF 2017 is finally out! Thanks to Judy Klein, Russell Craig Richardson, and the superb editors of OS, and of course, Elsa, for her amazing #Marelle! (at Hudson Heights, Manhattan)
I have two pieces upcoming in this festival, Parachronic (algorithmically composed fixed medium) at 8 PM Tuesday July 17, and Swum (interactive visual music) at 4 PM Thursday July 19.
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As part of the currently ongoing New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, I will be presenting two of my pieces.
This Friday, June 23, at 1 PM, in the Experimental Theater at the Abrons Art Center on the Lower East Side, I will perform Unperformed experiments have no results, a piece of real-time, interactive visual music in which I will improvise the parameters controlling the generation of both abstract visuals and music, including the harmonies. The title of the piece refers to the experimentally validated fact that, prior to observing an entangled state of a physical system, it does not exist in a definite state but only in a superposition of potential states. In other words, prior to observation, the physical world does not exist with determinate values (although of course it does actually exist!).
Then later, on Friday, July 14, at 7 PM, at National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, my piece Black Mountain will be performed. This is a fixed medium piece for which I used a parametric Lindenmayer system to generate the score.
Both pieces use Csound for synthesizing the sound.
There’s a lot of good stuff going down at the NYCEMF, so I hope to see you there.
Hello everyone! It is late summer, things are really getting hot and humid (in New York City at least), and it’s time to catch up on what has been happening during the sunny months. On June 13th I had the wonderful experience of performing at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, directed by Hubert Howe. Thank you for thinking of me Hubert! I played Anamnese for flute and…
This is my piece Sevier, from the 2016 New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival.
I composed this piece using csound.node, which runs Csound in the context of a Web browser with HTML, JavaScript, WebGL, and other features of HTML5.
The piece is based on a parametric Lindenmayer system that not only generates notes, but also a pattern of chord transformations that are applied to the notes. The notes are rendered using a Csound orchestra controlled by HTML sliders.
This and other pieces (and other Csound goodies) may be found at my GitHub site (https://github.com/gogins/gogins.github.io).
