Welcoming French composer Raphaël Cendo to June in Buffalo 2013!

Following up on our last post on Ensemble Linea and the French constituency at June in Buffalo 2013, we thought we’d introduce French composer Raphaël Cendo, who will be on the June in Buffalo 2013 composition faculty. Cendo was born in Paris in 1975 and was educated at IRCAM, where he specialized in composition and electronics. Cendo has been teaching composition at the Conservatory of Nanterre since 2008.

Raphaël Cendo

Raphaël Cendo has had a very illustrious education and career, and has studied with many great composers, including Allain Gaussin, Brian Ferneyhough, Fausto Romitelli, and Philippe Manoury, and has had works commissioned and performed by L’Itinéraire, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Nouvel Ensemble Modern, Ictus, and MusikFabrik, among many other ensembles.

Alex Ross featured an interesting post on Raphaël Cendo and his percussion piece Scratch Data, performed by Belgian percussionist Tom De Cock, which can be found here.

Cendo's music has enjoyed tremendously popularity, as well as many performances at a diverse array of festivals, including Ars Musica Brussels, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Voix Nouvelles Royaumont, Présences, and Musica Strasbourg. From 2009 until 2011 he lived and worked at the Villa Medici in Rome.

Below is the audio from Cendo’s remarkable Charge, for seven instruments and electronics:

Link to this post here.

Remembering Emmanuel Nunes...

We at the Center were sad to hear of the passing of great composer and musical thinker Emmanuel Nunes earlier this month. Emmanuel Nunes produced a vast and diverse output of instrumental and electroacoustic works that intimately link space and time, movement and metamorphosis, and numerical symbolism and organic processes. Nunes, originally born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1941, had been living primarily in Paris since 1964, where he spent twelve years as a Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire de Paris and later worked at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). Nunes has also taught substantially at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, and the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, as well as at the Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, where he studied extensively throughout the ‘60s.

Emmanuel Nunes

In an interview with our friends at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Nunes remarked about his time studying with the Darmstadt gang, and how it pushed him to develop his own separate, distinct voice, “I learned quite a lot from the courses by Pousseur, Ligeti, and Boulez. At that time Stockhausen did not come to Darmstadt, and among the crowd of composers having a subscription to Darmstadt, two extremes were in: either the so-called sérialisme intégral, or the graphic scores tendency proclaiming their illusion of liberty. Quite often the acoustical result was nearly the same.

“During those years I still did not compose really, my knowledge in terms of musical technique was more than incipient, but I did have a kind of internal compass, which detained me from stepping into such paths. As I used to say to my students: It is more important for me to know what I do not want, than to know what I want.”

Nunes’ work will be featured substantially at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2012: Litanies du feu et de la mer I and Litanies du feu et de la mer II will be performed by Noriko Kawai, Improvisation IV - l'électricité de la pensée humaine will be performed by Quatuor Diotima, and Nachtmusik I will be performed by the Remix Ensemble.

Listen below to Nunes’ La Main noire (2007) for three violas, performed and recorded in the studio by Christophe Desjardins, with accompanying video art by Sol mineur 5.

Edmund Campion

Beginning an alphabetical series of posts on June in Buffalo 2011's Senior Faculty composers, Edmund Campion leads the way. As a composer specializing in electroacoustic music, his pedigree is impeccable: he received his doctorate at Columbia and studied at the Paris Conservatory with the late master Gérard Grisey. Major commissions for IRCAM and Radio France followed, among them Natural Selection for interactive electronics and a full-scale ballet titled Playback. ME (2003- present) a work for baritone and interactive software, "explores the rise and development of consciousness in its egotistical, patriarchal sense." ME, a highly theatrical piece with a generous dose of black humor, is based on texts by the poet John Campion. It calls for an "in-ear prompter" that feeds the singer computer-generated material, which he has to imitate in various ways, and a child's hula hoop, which is used as a prop in various ways throughout the piece. The fascinating details can be found here, at Campion's website.

Campion's distinctive sensibility also comes through in Outside Music, described by Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer as "a rambunctious piece for synthesizer and live instruments." Reviewing a performance at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 2006, Dyer wrote, "The synthesizer is constantly invading the personal space of the instruments by duplicating their timbres. The piece ends, like Haydn's 'Farewell Symphony,' when the players walk off the stage one by one, leaving the synthesizer unattended, playing on all by itself."

In addition to composing and teaching, Campion is the co-director of CNMAT, the Center for New Media and Audio Technologies at UC Berkeley. Visit CNMAT's website for an abundance of vital information on computer music and new music in general, including free downloadable software tools, publications, and audio/video for streaming.

From Singapore to Buffalo...and back

Diana Soh

As noted in our previous post, UB's composition program has a global reach. Composer/pianist/singer Diana Soh came to Buffalo from Singapore to study with David Felder. Not only is she earning her PhD, but she ended up working for UB's Center for 21st Century Music as an assistant to Managing Director J. T. Rinker.  She's returned to her native country, where she has just been appointed to the Music Faculty of Singapore's School of the Arts. Her career is flourishing: she has just been nominated for the prestigious Gaudeamus Prize, and has been selected for the IRCAM 1 course in Paris. But she retains many fond memories of the Center.

"I really miss Buffalo, all my friends and working with JT and David on Center events as well as being a graduate student there. I find that the artists that the center brings to UB are all top-notch and I have learnt so much from each and everyone of them. Not just musically but especially in the more human aspects. Some of whom I still keep in contact with, with no other reasons than that we got along and I regard them as friends.

"The next best thing, besides having David as your teacher, is the numerous opportunities to have your works read by important ensembles like Ensemble Surplus and the Arditti Quartet, JACK quartet and numerous others. And to have real life feedback with such established groups. I'd like to think that such an opportunity is priceless...well, put it this way, even if you had x amount of $ to spend, these groups just might not play your music, but if you are a UB student, they have been hired just for you to workshop and record your music! Amazing right?

"The program is also very supportive of our external activities, premieres, festivals etc and provides a flexibility much needed for a developing composer. Also I must highlight strongly that the centers support of the new and untested is very encouraging and of extremely high standards on the global scale...as this is not the case in most parts of the world, be it for financial reasons, sense of security or even a matter of 'taste.'

"Also, it's exciting to have monthly lectures by renowned musicians and composer to share their work and their views and to have masterclasses with them. I found the composition program to be enriching and stimulating with a varied group of composers and mentors like David and Jeff who are experienced experts that have helped me blossomed over the past 4 years. The electronic studies with Cort Lippe has also yielded brilliant students like Chikashi Miyama among others. 

"There is a sense of camaradarie in the Buffalo group of composers and no one is shy to share their views which makes for a great platform of exchange. I miss them very much and I urge them to make full use of their time in Buffalo as once we are out in the real world...life is different."