Forty Years on the Edge (review)

With 38 works by faculty, alumni, and current graduate and undergraduate composers, CEMI—Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia, University of North Texas (UNT), Denton—celebrated "Forty Years on the Edge," a festival of five concerts of experimental music over two days, 19–20 April 2004. Established originally as the Electronic Music Center in 1963 by UNT composer/professor/researcher Merrill Ellis (d. 1981), the Center grew from its subrosa, analog synthesizer–based beginnings as a faculty research project in a School of Music classroom (1963– 1970) to a dual-studio configuration in a small house owned by the University (1971–1978) to its present, fully complemented, institutional complex of digital audio/video/ graphic teaching and research studios adjacent to the surround-sound/image Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theater (MEIT) (1979–present), where the festival was presented. Altogether . . . CEMI.

Through its four decades, CEMI has grown in importance not only as a regional research, teaching, and production center for advancing new music technology but as a national (hosting the 2000 Society for Electro Acoustic Music in the United States National Conference) and international (hosting the 1981 International Computer Music Conference) model for high performance standards of excellence in the field. Each season since the early 1980s, the CEMI Event Series has featured many distinguished guest composers and performers in its intermedia concerts. As a founding member studio of CDCM: Consortium to Distribute Computer Music (1986–present), CEMI continues its leadership in the field by the production of over 30 compact discs, thus far, in the historic and critically acclaimed CDCM Computer Music Series on Centaur Records (www.music.unt.edu/CDCM/).

The pieces performed in this festival were pointedly in the experimental, mixed-media spirit of CEMI's four-decade history: video-plus-computer music; fixed-media octophonic, as well as real-time octophonic-plus-instruments; live-electronic and solo stereo computer music pieces; live ensemble-plusdancer plus-computer music; improvisatory dancers combined with instrument-plus-computer music; as well as an amplified, found-object piece and even a delightful piece for an antique, wind-up, non-electric phonograph-plus-clarinet. There were several pieces of 1980s and 1990s vintage, but most were from 2000/1/2/3/4, recently created and programmed for this occasion. The composers ranged in experience with electroacoustic/computer music media from one year to forty, demonstrably fluent practitioners of these technology-based genres. (Note: Unless otherwise identified, all composers are currently enrolled UNT music students.)

Concert 1

Autumn (2003), octophonic computer music by Yo Oto, gently rustled leaves and metal sounds through the listening space of the MEIT morning concert. Two brand-new, contrasting stereo pieces followed: Offspring (2004) by Christopher Lund, with its hybrid, fast-paced sound transformations, and Repercussion (2004) by Chapman Welch. Alumnus James Piekarski's Five Fractal Miniatures (1992), an algorithmic set of stereo pieces, expertly reminded all how important a role computer-aided composition has played in CEMI's research and development programs and studio experiments. Next, the first video-plus-computer music piece of the festival, Juxtaposition (2001), by Brent Scheihagen, opened our eyes and ears to a montage of world sights and sounds, the outsized images projected on the MEIT cyclorama. Alumna Lynn Job's Serengeti Supper (2002), composed for alto saxophone and stereo computer music, was brilliantly performed by UNT faculty theorist, Frank Heidelberger, who added a theatrical component by entering and leaving the performance space unseen. Even so, this colorful collage of world sounds was the musical highlight of the morning. The first concert closed with a second octophonic piece, Azulejo (2004) by alumnus Edilberto Cuellar, whose excitedly gestural piece, in the composer's words, "explores the paradigm between turmoil and tranquility . . . and is related to the name of a type of tile that, when one looks at it, one sees his/her reflection."

Concert 2

Late afternoon at the MEIT, the second concert opened with Chien-Wen Cheng's quietly meditative...