Sever Tipei and James Bohn
We are please to announce the arrival of a Silicon Graphics O2 System in CMP. The new addition:
One of the main purposes of the O2 will be to handle Leland Smith's notation program SCORE and the automatic music notation software under development (GrafChord). It does not have a sound card (yet) but it has analog output and is connected to the sound system in room 5045A.
SCORE and other software will be ported to the SGI O2 soon and the aging TriStar will be donated to other less fortunate but needy School of Music users.
If you have a project which requires extensive computations in sound analysis / synthesis or if you want to use SCORE, please contact Arun Chandra, CMP System Manager and ask for an account.
Sever Tipei's paper Who Is the Composer? An Emerging Paradigm was accepted for presentation at 1997 International Computer Music Conference to be held next September in Thessaloniki, Greece and it will appear in the proceedings. The paper promotes the idea of speculative music and notes that, an experimental composer involved in high performance computing can no longer work as a lonely individual and needs to become a team member.
On Wednesday, March 12th, a concert of computer music was presented as a part of the 1997 Cyberfest Celebration at the University of Illinois. This celebration was a commemoration of the birth of HAL the computer from Stanley Kubricks film 2001. Other events included in the celebration were: "the Big Iron Reunion" (those who worked on the ILLIAC series computers), a screening of a 70mm print of 2001, and colloquia on various computer oriented topics.
The concert featured compositions by current and former UIUC faculty members: Herbert Brün, Lejaren Hiller, Erik Lund, John Melby, Heinrich Taube, Sever Tipei, and Scott Wyatt. Hiller's work, the Computer Cantata was performed by the University of Illinois New Music Ensemble, with Erik Lund conducting, and Julianne Cross singing the solo vocal part. The Prolog and Epilog to the third strophe of this work utilizes sound synthesized by the CSX-1 computer. Written in 1980, Herbert Brün's U-TURN-TO was created using Brün's program SAWDUST to generate the sound. John Melby's composition Layers, a solo tape piece based off of Shenkerian ideas, was commissioned by the Venice Biennale in 1981. HeinrichTaube's Swansongs utilzes synthesized and highly processed cello sounds in the tape part. Curses, by Sever Tipei, was performed by Amy Kuebel, Laura Moglia, Teresa Winner, and Tipei himself. Private Play by Scott Wyatt is a dynamic composition for solo tape presented in eight channels. Erik Lund's planes, terrains & auto-mobiles was composed for the University of Illinois Contemporary Chamber Players for the 1993 Asian Contemporary Music Festival.
Also presented were works by graduate students: James Bohn, Chin-Chin Chen, and Andrew Walters. These three works were commissioned by Scott Wyatt for the University of Illinois School of Music Centennial Celebration, and are included on the compact disc waveFORMation. The concert, which was organized by Professors Wyatt and Tipei, was easily one of the best produced music events at the University of Illinois in quite some time.
Released this spring, waveFORMation is a collection of new works from graduate students at the University of Illinois. Dennehy's composition Metropolis Mutabilis: An Exercise in Musical Miscegenation was awarded the third prize at the fifteenth annual Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo. Moth to Flame, by Andrew Walters, was performed at the 1997 SEAMUS conference in Kansas City, Missouri. Chin-Chin Chen's Points of Departure was presented at the 1996 Midwest Composer's Symposium. This disc, which was remastered Scott Wyatt and pressed by Denon Digital Industries, is available from the represented composers or from Figaro's.
