14th Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, 2005 (review)

The 14th annual Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival (FEMF), directed by its founder, James Paul Sain, was presented at the University of Florida, Gainesville, 7-9 April, 2005, with Morton Subotnick as guest Composer-in-Residence. Nine concerts of new electroacoustic/computer music compositions included a broad spectrum of fixed-media audio, video, and DVD pieces, as well as various mixed-media combinations of instruments, voice, soloists, ensembles, electronics, and dance, many works performed with interactive computer music/video involvement.

All FEMF concerts were produced in the University of Florida, Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, Black Box Theater, an intimate but excellent sounding venue equipped with eight-channel playback, the loud-speakers surrounding the audience for optimal listening. Five of the nine concerts were "juried concerts," including works submitted for consideration, then selected for performance. Two ongoing programming traditions, instituted by Mr. Sain in the 1990s, provide FEMF with a national/ international flavor: (1) invited/curated concerts by other well established university/college electroacoustic music studios in the USA; and (2) an annual concert of European electroacoustic music curated by FEMF Associate Director Javier Alejandro Garavaglia. Additionally, Mr. Sain carries on an established FEMF practice of welcoming works for performance by past FEMF Composers-in Residence, giving festival participants an opportunity to hear recent compositions by widely recognized practitioners—your present writer included, I'm gratified to mention.

Concert 1: Electroacoustic Music from the Florida Electroacoustic Music Studio (FEMS)

The first of four curated concerts was presented by the resident University of Florida studio, FEMS, as a morning concert on the first day. Cast as a beat-oriented metaphor for the disorientation experienced by a person with Attention Deficit Disorder, composer Tim Reed's harmonica sounds seemed to wander aimlessly about the space in his Invisible Vectors. Russell Brown's Catchpenny featured violist Sally Barton in dialogue with pre-recorded viola pizzicati, then arco, then patterns, scales, and sustained sounds, all about discrepancies between just and tempered tuning—playing out a rather dry essay on same.

The title of Patrick Pagano's DVD piece, Taking a Picture of Taking a Picture, tells it all: mixed sonic textures combined with visual collaborator Amy Laughlin's album of flickering photo images. The program continued with Chan Ji Kim's Awaiting, nicely mixed, with sustained tones, and reflectively soulful. As annotated by the composer, Joo Won Park's Binge was a "textural variation on seven percussion samples," looped and variously combined imaginatively, much as a human percussionist might have improvised. New Reactions, by Samuel Hamm, colorfully sets a short, recited poem of the same name by Neil Flory, expertly exploring a variety of time-stretching processes. The last and best piece of the concert was What the Bird Saw by Suk-Jun Kim. The beautifully chosen and creatively diffused sounds were, as the composer described in his notes, "bits of oblivious memories . . . watching what a bird would see and listening to what a bird would hear."

Concert 2: Music from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music

The afternoon concert of the first day was curated by composer Mara Helmuth, director of (ccm)², the College Conservatory of Music Center for Computer Music at the University of Cincinnati, featuring performances by its own resident NeXT Ens Ensemble. Three mixed-mood, fixed-media pieces opened the concert: Maria Panayotova-Martin's DVD piece, Il Semforo Blu (heard again in full stereo in Concert VII), with animation by Fang Zhao; Kazuaki Shiota's Crumble; and Matthew Planchak's etudes (. . . scapes), the best conceived/ realized of the three.

The remaining six pieces on the program were for different combinations of the instruments of the ensemble (flute, piano, violin, cello, percussion) and electronics, juxtaposing more musically evocative experiences. Cassini Division, by Margaret Schedel, for four instruments with programmed Max/MSP computer interaction and video projection, explored abstract formulations of the harmonic series, sustaining attractively complex sounds and sights, like the gravitational resonances of Saturn's moons, her metaphorical allusion. Jennifer Bernard...