As a part of the Reembodied Sound 2024: Festival & Symposium on Transducer-based Music and Sonic Art, and co-presented by the Rensselaer Department of Arts and the curatorial program at EMPAC, David Tudor’s landmark 1973 sound performance-installation Rainforest IV will be presented in Studio 2.

Rainforest IV grew out of a 1973 workshop in Chocorua, New Hampshire that included a group of artists who would soon become the collaborative Composers Inside Electronics: David Tudor, John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, Linda Fisher, Ralph Jones, Martin Kalve, Paul DeMarinis, and Bill Viola. In this performed installation, each composer designs and constructs their own sculptures, which function as instrumental loudspeakers under their control. Each sculpture produces sound material that display the object’s resonant characteristics.

For Reembodied Sound, Driscoll and Edelstein, along with Rensselaer professor Matthew Goodheart, guide Rensselaer Arts Department students in choosing and sonifying their chosen objects. This version of Rainforest IV will be mounted as an installation and durational performance in EMPAC Studio 2 and symposium participants are invited to move freely among the sculptures, creating their own sonic environment as they roam.

A 2014 recreation of Rainforest IV. Courtesy the Internet Archive.

Co-presented by the Rensselaer Department of Arts and the curatorial program EMPAC, Reembodied Sound 2024 brings together composers, sound artists, scholars, researchers, engineers, and audiences to investigate issues of aesthetics, ethnography, technical design, compositional techniques, and pedagogy. The symposium and festival of transducer-based music and sound art aims to share practical information, inspire artists with new tools and possibilities, and lay a foundation for scholarly discourse and technological investigation in this burgeoning field through presentations, sound art installations, and a final concert.

In simplest terms, a transducer is a device that converts one form of energy into another form. In the wake of composer John Cage’s work, everyday items, anything from household appliances to industrial detritus, became ripe for musical exploration. In 1973, Cage’s colleague and collaborator David Tudor created Rainforest IV, which used surface speakers—an electric transducer—to excite the sonic possibilities of such objects. 50 years later, music which utilizes speaker transducers has become more ubiquitous, able to unlock the musical potential of the world around us.

Composer-performers Antonia Barnett-McIntosh and Jessie Marino’s Susceptible Chambers is an EMPAC-commissioned performance, which draws lines between the worlds of sound art, handcrafts, and experimental theater. It begins with the re-construction of a simple microphone.

Musicians have historically augmented familiar musical instruments with alternative materials to change their, and the audience’s, relationship to that object from a sonic and cultural standpoint. By designing and building specially-crafted objects, and experimenting with instrumental expansion, we can hear these materials interacting with one another—and experience the possibilities of a completely new sonic landscape, which can be discovered by playing with (a) particular combination/s of materials.

Developed during a series of residencies, Antonia and Jessie have laid the groundwork for an audio-visual performance that is both whimsical and rigorously executed. Composed from manifold permutations of “extended” microphones, the composer-performers experiment with different microphone filters and casings as well as speakers, light, and color arrangements.

Susceptible Chambers collects technologies from bygone eras—pulley systems, pianolas, needlepoint, sodium vapor lamps—and places them in conversation with bespoke, handmade and electronic objects. Antonia and Jessie's newest production draws the audience into an unusual, idiosyncratic, and playful sonic and visual world, experimenting with and challenging generally accepted practices of today’s electronic music, and contemporary music more broadly.

Machines and other intergalactic technologies of the spirit is a work-in-progress music performance by composer and vocalist M. Lamar with the experimental music duo The Living Earth Show. Drawing from the Black Futurist philosophy of revolutionary musician and thinker Sun Ra, M. Lamar’s work imagines the birth of new technologies that address the various failings of contemporary society. Like Sun Ra, M. Lamar looks to the mystical traditions and astrophysical conceptions of the past as a way to transcend our current societal landscape and provide a path towards liberation. For M. Lamar, this transcendence comes through music, a process he seeks to awaken within the listener.

Here and in his large-scale work, Lamar’s tools are primarily sonic—drawing from psychedelic rock, noise music, opera, and doom metal. His musical, theatrical, and visual approaches exist in an environment of improvisational possibility. Visually, the piece aims to evoke fantasy and memory of ancient Egypt, pre-Atlantic Christianity, and outer space as visualized in 1970s mass media and in the 2020s photography of the James Webb telescope. In sound and image, Machines contrasts, magnifies, merges, and transmutes some of the most distinctive elements of M. Lamar’s and Sun Ra’s bodies of work.

Machines continues and expands Lamar’s musical collaboration with San Francisco duo The Living Earth Show, as a follow-up to 2019’s Lordship and Bondage: The Birth of The Negro Superman which premiered at the Met Cloisters and exists as an audio recording available on all streaming platforms.

Using the unique production capabilities of Studio 1-Goodman, composer M. Lamar and the EMPAC production team will create video for his work Machines and other intergalactic technologies of the spirit, which will preview at EMPAC with experimental music duo The Living Earth Show in May 2024.

Join music curator Amadeus Julian Regucera for a pre-concert conversation with artists Jlin and Florence To in Studio 2. Café open after the pre-show, and during the preview concert.

Akoma is the latest project and album by acclaimed electronic musician Jlin. In close collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Florence To, she will be in residence at EMPAC to develop and present a work-in-progress performance. Akoma incites a dynamic and rhythmic conversation in which sound and light can create a resonance that absorbs and emanates energy into a shared space.

Influenced by “footwork,” a genre of post-house music from Chicago and typified by an athletic and hyperactive rhythmic drive, Jlin developed her complex and personal style of music in her hometown of Gary, Indiana. Exemplified on past albums such as Perspective, Black Origami, and her acclaimed 2015 debut Dark Energy, Jlin’s compositional style combines the physicality of footwork with tectonic, polyrhythmic textures and excitedly unpredictable sound worlds.

For this project, To will develop an interactive landscape that responds to Jlin’s music, utilizing various tools for outputting video and lighting design onto a variety of projection surfaces and lighting rigs. Performing together onstage In EMPAC’s Studio 1, Jlin and To will experiment with digital visual surfaces for displaying To’s highly interactive visual work alongside Jlin’s singular compositions.

Akoma album cover. Artwork: Florence To.

In this talk, artist Marina Rosenfeld will present an overview of her practice. The program also includes an informal introduction to her new project µ (mu), to be developed while in residence at EMPAC.

A 48-hour piano performance inspired by abandoned Bell Labs research on environmental recording. Photographic panels that double as the physical contours for a live sound work. These are just two examples from Marina Rosenfeld’s body of work, which merges approaches from composition, sound installation, and the visual arts. Rosenfeld’s work often seems to inject physical structures with sonic forms. Her installations explore the sculptural substrata and (in the artist’s words) “material instabilities” that underlie composed works and sound performance. Inspired by musical minimalism yet critical of its histories, Rosenfeld’s works rearticulate sound as a relational field.

While in residence at EMPAC, Rosenfeld will embark on a new project titled µ (mu) that emerges from her longstanding work with dubplates. Unlike vinyl records, dubplates are one-off and hand-cut. For this project, Rosenfeld imagines the dub plate’s surface as a distinct audiovisual realm, independent of the audio it embeds. She looks at the ways in which analog agents–a stylus or a hand–modify the sonic and visual content of the plates. The artist asks what might happen if one were to focus not on the overt sound within the dubplate but on incidental phenomena along its surface. Rosenfeld’s residency is a visual and sonic inquiry into the topography of the dubplate’s (material) grooves.

In a new program inspired by the themes of poetry and fairy tale, trailblazing pianist and composer Conrad Tao combines repertoire from the Western canon as well as provocative contemporary works which showcases his sensitive artistry and performative dynamism in the EMPAC Concert Hall.

Bernadette Mayers contemplates the idea of poetry in the opening of her work Leg of Lamb: “A line/Break could reflect/The way the sun breaks/Through the clouds or breakfast…” For Mayer, the subject of poetic form itself becomes a prism through which words may scatter and recombine meaning and affect.

Likewise, Tao–known for his rigorously assembled and thoughtful juxtaposition of old and new work–collects pieces by Johannes Brahms, Todd Moellenberg, David Fulmer, Rebecca Saunders, and Maurice Ravel to evoke fresh thematic, formal, and emotional revelation.

Moellenberg’s Leg of Lamb (after Bernadette Mayer) (2020) plays against the lyrical introspection of Brahms’s Klavierstücke Op. 118 while a new work by David Fulmer, I have loved a stream and a shadow (With glitter of sun-rays, Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back to heaven…) (2023) luxuriates in musical line and rhythmic freedom. London-born composer Saunders’ enigmatic Mirror, mirror on the wall (1994) and Ravel’s fiercely virtuosic Gaspard de la nuit (a suite of pieces after poet Aloysius Bertrand) find beauty and richness amidst the vastness of myth.

Conrad Tao is a leader of the new generation of classical music. Dubbed an artist of “probing intellect and open-hearted vision” by The New York Times, the pianist and composer has amassed a steady stream of awards and critical acclaim for his performances, compositions, and recordings.

Come celebrate a joyous close to 2023 at the RPI Holiday Concert on Sunday, December 10th, at 3pm in the EMPAC Concert Hall. The festive program will include performances by the Rensselaer Orchestra, Concert Choir, and Wind Symphony, with a reception to follow.

Wind Symphony

• Norman Dello Joio (1913-2008) – Scenes from the Louvre, arr. Robert Longfeld (1966/2019) [7’]
• The Portals [1’]
• Children’s Gallery [1’]
• Kings of France [2’]
• Nativity Paintings [1’]
• Finale [2’]
• Gustav Holst (1874-1934) – First Suite in E-flat Major [11’]
• Chaconne [5’]
• Intermezzo [3’]
• March [3’]

Concert Choir

• Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) – All-Night Vigil, Movement 6, “Bogoroditse Djevo” (1915) [4’]
• Avery Roach ’25 (b. 2003) – Kouyou (2023) [5’] *World Premiere
• Randall Thompson (1899-1984) – Peaceable Kingdom (1936) [5’]
• “Have Ye Not Known” [1’]
• “Ye Shall Have a Song” [4’]

Orchestra

• Claude Debussy (1862-1918) - Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894) [10’]
• Audrey Niedland ’26, flute
• Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) – Piano Concerto no. 1 in e minor, Movement 2 (1830) [12’]
• Rory Devin ’23, piano *Rensselaer Student Concerto Competition Winner
• Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) – Ballade in A minor (1898) [11’]

Conducted by Dr. Robert M. Whalen, III; Alex Cohen, Graduate Teaching Assistant

Nancy Mounir is in residence in Studio 1 to develop a new sound work for Shifting Center. The work will be spatialized in Studio 1 and later installed in the concert hall as part of the November exhibition. Mounir will work both with her own compositions and with archival recordings.