Author: Ralph Lewis, Composer

At this June’s New Music Gathering, Robin Meiksins and I presented about DuoTube, YouTube as a collaboration space, and our experiences presenting it. We had initially intended to present it as part of an event NMG called YouTube party where we would have worked with Portland area artists to show audience members how to play the piece, then perform it together and talk about it.

In the virtual format, Robin and I stuck to sharing about the experiences we have had sharing DuoTube and also played it together. While I plan to do a more extensive discussion about those performance and presentation experiences at some point soon, being able to share an indeterminate work can jump right into has been a special experience. It’s been played by people ranging from the high school age summer music camp class I taught, to recital halls full of professors and graduate students at conferences, by electronic music ensembles, to people passing by a UIUC community concert we’re about to do and join in. While it is imperfectly accessible (needs a computer and access to internet), it’s been eye-opening for me about how to welcome people to different aspects of contemporary music.

I deeply appreciate Robin Meiksins as my collaborator on this project. DuoTube was inspired by her wonderful YouTube channel and her drive to make YouTube a performance space.

This July has been a month of collaborative energy thanks to the number of projects All Score Urbana has been supporting. In this version of All Score, I was joined by teaching artists DuoMotive (Michelle Li and Mike McAndrew), Nick Ortiz, and Chris Raymond.

This week we started sharing some of the compositions people have been making with us on All Score’s Facebook page. Getting to support different musical ideas people have is so much fun.

I’m excited to share that my paper “Revisiting the Music Box-Like Foundations of Rebecca Saunders’ Compositions” was accepted to the Special Call for Papers from Students & Recent Graduates for the Sixty-Third National Conference of The College Music Society.

On November 22, 2019, Sisters Akousmatica‘s Moonah Community Radio Festival broadcast a collaborative work by the composition students I teach at Illinois String Academy from Moonah, Tasmania, Australia. I’m very proud of the students’ teamwork during the recording, imagining, and realizing “Joyous Hippopotamus.” Take a listen at 41:41 in this broadcast recording.

I highly recommend exploring the entire festival’s recordings and the works they commissioned for it. I particularly enjoyed how often they engaged with people at Moonah Arts Centre with so many warm, interesting conversations.

This fall was a busy, stressful, and rewarding one. While there have been several wonderful things I’ve been able to do in 2019, being able to do research about Aaron Cassidy’s music at the University of Huddersfield was the experience I had hoped to do the most. I’m so glad I was able to go.

For everyone at Electronic Music Midwest who are participating in DuoTube, Click here or use the video below as your interactive instrument. I recommend pressing play, pausing it and allowing it to buffer a bit before using it in rehearsal or performance. Thanks for joining in on the fun!

 

I am very delighted with the recent premiere “Can’t Take You Anywhere” by Stephen Marotto. The work is for cello and electronics and I am looking forward to receiving the documentation from SPLICE Institute but the streamed video can be viewed here for now.

Update: below is the audio recording from the premiere (with better audio quality compared to the streaming audio.)