Percussionist Patti Cudd comes to Buffalo to perform music by UB composers and offer a master class

Patti Cudd

We’re looking forward to welcoming all-star contemporary percussionist and UB alumna Patti Cudd to the University at Buffalo later this month for an exciting two-day residency. Her visit here will kick-off with the Hiller Computer Music Studios annual Electroacoustic Black Box concert in the Black Box Theatre in the Center for the Arts on UB’s North Campus, at 7:30 p.m., on Wedesnday, March 27th. For the concert, Cudd will perform a program of pieces for percussion and electronics written by University at Buffalo composers, both past and present. The next day, Cudd will give a master class to UB graduate percussionists where they will discuss and workshop approaches to performing and interpretting contemporary percussion music.

The press release from the Hiller Computer Music for the Black Box concert follows:

“The Hiller Computer Music Studios of the UB Department of Music will present its annual spring "Black Box" concert of electro-acoustic and computer music next month, featuring works for percussion and electronics played by internationally recognized performer Patti Cudd. A member of the new music ensemble Zeitgeist and professor of music at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, Dr. Cudd has given concerts and master classes throughout the United States, Korea, Thailand, China, Mexico, and Europe and has worked closely with some of the most innovative composers of our time, including Brian Ferneyhough, Morton Feldman, Roger Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, John Zorn, and Frederic Rzewski.

Flyer for the Black Box Concert on March 27, 2013

“This year's black box concert will feature pieces by composers from throughout UB's history, including works by current and former faculty, students, and alumni. Dr. Cudd herself received her Master of Music Degree at UB, where she studied with percussionist Jan Williams. A wide variety of pieces for a wide variety of percussion instruments will be performed. UB associate professor Cort Lippe's Duo for Cajón and Computer is composed for the titular Afro-Peruvian instrument, a box-shaped drum on which the performer sits and plays by striking the box's front face with her hands. Current Ph.D. student Ethan Hayden's In Wahrheit saß ein buckliger Zwerg darin… is composed for the kalimba, a hand-held thumb piano from the Sub-Sahara. Works by UB alumni Jeff Herriott and Brett Masteller take two very different approaches at expanding the repertoire for bass drum and electronics while alum Barry Moon's Snare Alchemy explores and expands on the timbres of the solo snare drum. Former UB visiting professor Richard Dudas' piece will feature, among other instruments, the West African djembe, and rounding out the program will be an electroacoustic piece by alum Kostas Karathanasis entitled Trittico Mediterraneo.

“As a percussion soloist and chamber musician, Dr. Cudd has premiered over 150 new works, and this year's Black Box concert will feature five works composed especially for her, including two premiere performances by Dudas and Hayden. Put on with support from the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music and the UB Music Department, the concert will take place at the Center for the Arts Black Box Theatre on Wednesday, March 27th, at 7:30 p.m. Entrance is free.”

If you'd like to get a glimpse of Patti Cudd performing some contemporary music for percussion and live electronics, check out the video below of her interpretation of Cort Lippe's 2010 piece Music for Hi-Hat and Computer:

Hope to see you at the concert!

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Recent grad Leah Muir on UB: "a rare mix of performance, intellect, and experiment"

Leah Muir completed her doctoral studies in composition at UB in 2008, and is now living in Berlin. She reports:

"My doctoral study at Buffalo was a huge enrichment to my musical life and experience, and continues to be so -- in fact I think it is one of the few organizations in the US that could prepare me for the European musical life I found myself suddenly in. Right now, in fact, I am preparing for a Morton Feldman concert for the Crescendo concert series on June 10, of which I am in charge of musical direction and conducting. Morton Feldman seems to be around every turn I take.

"It was Amy Williams who first introduced me to the University at Buffalo at 19; she brought a group of composers from Bennington College to June in Buffalo. There I met David Felder, and never forgot him or my amazing musical experience during the program. I applied later to Buffalo for my Doctoral degree and was accepted on a Presidential fellowship, where I was able to gain four years of teaching experience. There I made extremely close musical relationships with musicians and composers in the program, and had many compositional breakthroughs with David as my teacher. David Felder demands excellence from his students, and I was pushed very hard to go as far as I possibly could with my own talents, and then maybe even farther. For that I am very grateful.

"Beyond my work at the Institut für Neue Musik, I have also some commissions to write this year. The first is my Doppelkonzert für E. Gitarre und Akkordeon, dedicated to Krassimir Sterev, Yaron Deutsch, Ajtony Csaba and the Mitteleuropäisches Kammerorchester to be premiered in Vienna, Austria in 2011. The second for the Münchener Biennale, is a 25 minute music theater piece to be premiered in May of 2012. Last year, I had a couple of important premieres, on Märzmusik and Wien Modern, and a slight foray into video brought on a sudden premiere at Soundtrack Cologne.

"Buffalo, where American experimentalism is still cherished, was instrumental to my development in these musical directions. David Felder, Cort Lippe and Jeff Stadelman provided an excellent scope of what is out there that is most intellectually stimulating in music, and also what reality is and could be for a composer in our current musical landscape. Beyond this, an idealistic and utopian approach to music is also coveted at the university, where experiment is fully encouraged and when followed, given free reign of the imagination. I find this mixture to be quite unique. Charles Smith and Michael Long are also an extremely important part of the program for me, because the sort of analysis they teach is rare and hard to find. In other departments, with Tony Conrad and Elliot Caplan also in the wings of the greats teaching there, I had the possibility to participate in some transmedial collaborations. Hallwalls, Soundlab and the Burchfield-Penney, beyond the University, provided yet another platform to branch out into a wider community, together with self-organized group of composers, we were able to play music and have a public." Here's Leah's unsettling and inventive Sound Bandage, scored for the offbeat combination of soprano and bass saxophones, cello, and "tape."

A student looks back

Moshe Shulman, PhD candidate in composition at UB, recently shared some observations about his music.

"2011 is my last year in Buffalo, NY. Since 2007 I was studying music composition mainly with David Felder but also with Cort Lippe and Jeffrey Stadelman one semester each. During these years I wrote for brass, woodwind, and percussion ensembles, two string quartets, mixed ensembles including voice, a little piece for piano and a couple of solo pieces. Some of these were successful, some came to be tryouts, one of these even received third prize in a Composition contest in Russia in 2009.


"When the time for writing dissertation piece came, writing for a larger ensemble with a soloist was an obvious choice, mainly because I don’t have anything like that in my portfolio. Another reason for writing a piece for solo violin with orchestra was personal. I started to play violin at the age of five and writing a dissertation piece 28 years later seems like a circle that has been completed. Thanks to David Felder, this project was approved, well-advised and will be realized on April 18th, 2011 in a recording with the Slee Sinfonietta and most talented musician and a friend, violinist Yuki Numata.

"Before getting to what I wanted to achieve in the dissertation work I will try to remember what aspects of music concerned me during these years. One of the first pieces I wrote within the walls of Buffalo University was Frozen Moments for flute, violin, cello and piano. Here are the program notes of that piece:

Frozen Moments is a piece about different states of motion and motionlessness. The piece introduces different musical moments of those states as well as arrivals and departures from them. First movement deals with the sound as motion and silence as static process. Second movement is concerned with repetitions as motionlessness and the motion between the repetitions. The third movement can be actually called anything but Frozen Moment. This movement is full of energy and motion however the static quality is present on a new level. The motionlessness is present within the motion as if one runs down the street and suddenly stops for a second. Beyond that, the motion-motionlessness states are in counterpoint in that movement which gives the listener an option to hear both actions at the same time.

"Another musical aspect that concerned me was writing for a certain instrument as if it were another instrument - for example, treating brass instruments like strings. “Subito” for Brass Quintet is the outcome of that idea. My Second String Quartet was written for the Copland House Project during November 2009. My thought was to create a set of short movements that would exist within a margin of extremes (whatever those extremes might be: speed, dynamics, motion, etc.). Some movements contrast in their extremes with other movements, while others contain their diversities within.

There were many other issues during the years, of course, but these made their way into the dissertation piece that, for now, is titled Kivunim.

"Kivunim is a Hebrew word and it can have multiple meanings. But the ones I am referring to can be translated as directions, movements, goal-oriented processes. Here, in some sense, I come back to the issue I was resolving in Frozen Moments. The soloist and the ensemble arrangement distribute naturally the roles of motion and motionlessness.

"The dissertation defense will take place on May 3^rd and everyone is welcome to attend, to listen and hopefully to enjoy."

Kudos for UB's composition department

Though it ran a few months ago, we think that The Spectrum's Oct. 17 story about UB's composition program, titled "A Department with National Renown," makes good reading anytime.

Assistant News Editor Brendon Bochacki interviewed David Felder, Trevor Björklund, Cort Lippe, and Jeffrey Stadelman, spreading the word about the department's international prominence to the entire UB community. Reports Bochacki, "Unknown to many students, the music department in Baird and Slee Halls is one of the most highly respected graduate composition programs in the nation." That may not be surprising, given the sheer size of the school -- 29,000+ students in nearly 300 undergraduate, masters, doctoral, and professional degree programs -- but it certainly bears repeating.

One of the reasons that the program attracts so many top students from around the world is its nurturing, undogmatic approach. Bochacki quotes Björklund as saying, "The composition faculty members are very interested in helping young composers bloom on their own... A lot of places tend to push people in a particular direction but UB doesn't. It tends to attract people who have a slightly different take on things."