Electronic Music Midwest (review)

[Editor’s note: Selected reviews are posted on the Web at http://www.computermusicjournal.org (click on the Reviews tab). In some cases, they are either unpublished in the Journal itself or published in an abbreviated form in the Journal.]

Electronic Music Midwest (EMM) celebrated its 19th annual festival in September of 2019, with three days of engaging electroacoustic music and inspiring collaborations. Hosted at the Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC) by KCKCC professor Ian Corbett, who served as both Technical Director and Festival Co-Director, and Kay He, who served as the Creative Director. EMM’s nine concerts showcased regional and local electroacoustic composers and performers, including special guest artist saxophonist Drew Whiting and the Kansas City-based Mid America Freedom Band. Although the works presented involved familiar, fixed media and live electronic performance formats, the music frequently incorporated collaborations with instrumentalists, video artists, and technologists that added a particular currency to them.

The Mid America Freedom Band (MAFB), and the pieces they played, offered a compelling example of how collaboration enhanced EMM’s concert selections. The presence of a local, large ensemble that was willing to engage with contemporary music, and specifically music beyond their typical repertoire, set the stage for a series of concerts that often featured works built in collaboration with, or inspired by, a collaborator. That the Mid America Freedom Band is composed of LGBTQIA performers and actively programs LGBTQIA composers is a clear welcoming gesture for both new and returning EMM attendees about the equity and inclusivity for which electroacoustic spaces are striving.

In bookended performances conducted by MAFB Artistic Director Lee Hartman, works by EMM’s Organization Advancement Director Robert Voisey and Jessica Rudman combined Mid America Freedom Band’s concert band instrumentation with electronics in compelling ways, allowing these often separated musical ventures to work together. Voisey’s work Doomsday’s Passed (You’re Dead Already, Zombie) used mass textures and a graphic score that played with, and against, concert band tropes, with the electronics supporting and enhancing the dense sound masses. I was impressed with the ensemble’s thoughtful and creative interpretation of the score. Rudman’s From the Blue Fog closed out the first concert with sparse moments that often blurred the space between idiomatic, acoustic playing and distinctly electroacoustic practices, cultivating the atmospheric nostalgia for summertime music festivals and forest sounds in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

Special guest artist Drew Whiting’s remarkable saxophone versatility was on display throughout the concert series. During Christopher Biggs’s Transduction, Whiting embodied the work’s gigantic, frenetic electronic presence while playing in front of an exquisitely rendered video background. He channeled a similar aggressiveness throughout Brett Masteller Warren’s structured improvisation Feedbacz, maintaining the high energy level it required. In contrast, he provided a subtle, supporting role throughout Eli Fieldsteel’s gentle Depth of Field, allowing Fieldsteel’s performance on his LightMatrix controller to take center stage. Whiting’s performance of Alexis Bacon’s Ötzi was especially outstanding as he found a communicative balance between the music’s hard, percussive framework and its tender melismatic reprieve, delivering Bacon’s enticing ancient and modern technology-themed work with timeless grace.

Corbett’s Tesseract, one of several multichannel works programmed throughout the festival, also reflected EMM’s presence at KCKCC’s Performing Arts Centre in being written specifically for the space’s 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos speaker set up. Corbett’s music was explosive, with fast-moving metallic gestures shooting from speaker to speaker. Although a shorter work, Tesseract succeeded in demonstrating the expressive capability of the concert space. This capability also enhanced other fixed media works including: Michael Smith’s Discords, Han Hitchen’s Hot Oil, and Jennifer Jolley’s Paint My Chopper Pink.

Like Corbett, Smith also took advantage of the multichannel possibilities of the space in Discords, using slow, gradually evolving textures that emerged from the corners of the space and fluttered across the stereo field...