PLOrk spring2007/ProgramNotes

PLOrk Concert, Spring 2007

• May 19th, 2007 8pm
• Taplin Auditorium

Pieces

• Nic Collins...
  • Waggle Dance:
  • Waggle Dance relies on two sets of sounds: firstly feedback between each laptop’s built-in mike and its speakers, and secondly intimate texts written and recorded by the member of the orchestra. Only the edges of these sounds, however, are heard as each laptop runs a program that, like a nervous conversationalist in the principal’s office, makes noise through a awkwardly belated attempt to self-edit (this process emulates a venerable analog signal processing device known as a “Ducker”.) Every time a computer starts to say something, it shuts itself up, but always a moment too late. The cat is never let out of the bag, but we can hear its whiskers twitching.:

• Sam Pluta...
  • title:
  • program notes:

• Alan Tormey...
  • ...to shining sea:
  • program notes:

• Ge Wang...
  • title:
  • program notes:

• Scott Smallwood...
  • Fabrics:
  • program notes:

• Anne Hege...
  • Maybe the Monolith will just calm down:
  • Music by Anne Hege. Text by Colleen Plimier. Software design by Spencer Salazar. Vocalist - Anne Hege

"For hundreds of thousands of years, mankind lived without a straight line in nature. Objects in this world resonated with each other. For the caveman, the mountain Greek, the Indian hunter (indeed, even for the latter-day Manchu Chinese), the world was multicentered and reverberating. It was gyroscopic. Life was like being inside a sphere, 360 degrees without margins...Here we have a clue to the mentality of the pre-literate, that world of oral tradition that we eventually left behind about the end of the Hellenic period. It is the mentality of the multitude, or as Yeats put it: everything happening at once, in a state of constant flux."

- Marshall McLuhan "Visual and Acoustic Space" from Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music :

• Scott Elmegreen and John Fontein
  • :
  • program notes:

Biographies

Nicolas Collins is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Music. His first laptop was a 1977 Synertek Vim, with 1k of memory. His recent book, Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking, on the other hand, is a guide to the joys of analog.