Seventeenth Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival (review)

Established in 1992, The Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival (FEMF) is a highly prestigious festival in the field of electronic music, attracting some of the most important composers from North America, Europe, Asia, and South America. Most of the composers attending are at the professional and faculty level, with approximately 30 percent of the program comprising works from graduate students in composition and electronic music. Taking place in Gainesville, Florida, the “fifth most rocking city inAmerica” (according to Esquire), FEMF is right at home on the hopping University of Florida campus and provides a great atmosphere for the exchange of cutting-edge ideas. In the past, FEMF has featured composers-in-residence as diverse as Jon Appleton, Paul Lansky, Charles Dodge, and Cort Lippe. For the 17th annual festival, held 10–12 April 2008, the composer-in-residence was the internationally renowned Annea Lockwood. Thanks to Director and Founder James Paul Sain and his wonderful team of student and professional helpers, FEMF 17 was a wonderful and stress-free festival that was a joy to all concerned.

The first juried concert of the festival opened with Vera Stanojevic’s Voyages for fixed-medium electronics and piano (played by the composer). Initiating what was to become somewhat of a theme of this first concert, Voyages took as its starting point recordings of contemporary poets reading their own works. This material was then subjected to various processes in order to sonically mesh with the live piano accompaniment while simultaneously providing textual points of reference for the piece. The use of voice was also prevalent in Ted Coffey’s Never ate so many stars, featuring a poem by Jean Valentine. However, in Mr. Coffey’s piece, the voice was offset by the surrounding texture rather than subsumed in it. Field recordings, glitch and groove elements, and granular textures served as the counterpoint to the voice in this work. A piece that very effectively conveyed a narrative was Robert Honstein’s Fantasy Triptych, moving through three sections with its own unique logic. Konstantinos Karathanasis’s Pollock’s Dreams: Liquified Sounds also formed its own narrative by means of a smooth progression from the purely gestural/electronic to the ambient/natural. The piano (played by David Goldblatt) made its second appearance of the evening in Barry Moon’s POP. Based on a “random visit to the music store,” POP is intended to evoke the “Rock/Pop” section with its driving rhythms and tight relationship between electronic and acoustic elements. The fixed-media compositions of this first concert also included Neil Flory’s Dark Inside Shift, a continuous undulation of electronics with physical immediacy, and Elizabeth Hoffman’s Venus, an almost sculptural exploration of metallic textures. The only video work of the evening was Sylvia Pengilly’s Impossible Spaces, a series of three vignettes that examine the use of different geometrical shapes in fractals

The second juried concert began with Michaela Reiser’s Excitations, a work for performer (Ms. Reiser herself) and biofeedback sensors. Pulse and blood flow are sonified into a sort of minimal-electronic pulse-scape that alternately lulls and excites. Other works for performers in this concert included Adam Hardin’s piece for interactive electronics and improvisatory elements, Echolalia (featuring bass clarinet by Russell Brown), as well as Heather Stebbins’s rush me to shadows, a modal contemplation featuring virtuosic celloplaying by the composer. Another theme of this concert (and also of the festival) was the use of recognizable real-world sound sources in an acousmatic setting. Dominic Thibault’s Nuit noire, nuit grise deftly mixed sounds as identifiable as a garbage truck into non-programmatic, acousmatic gestures while Paul Riker’s Cubicle took as its starting point a perfectly common-place environment and twisted it into a symbolic interplay of the real and unreal. Similarly, Anthony Reimer’s Puttin’ In Time . . . As it Goes By juxtaposed the ominously real sound of a ticking clock with the processed echoes of students in practice rooms, and Tohm Judson’s Oma delivered a nostalgic mix of pentatonic bells and chirping birds. Braxton...