REMLABS HOST LATEX ELECTONIC MUSIC FESTIVAL

Office of News and Media Relations
Ellen Chang
Media Relations Specialist
713-348-6777
Email: ellenc@rice.edu

The Rice Electronic Music Labs (REMLABS) at the Shepherd School of Music is hosting the 2004 LaTex Festival which showcases the work of student composers from four Louisiana and Texas universities in electronic music.
The festival brings together student composers from Rice University, the University of North Texas, the University of Texas at Austin and Louisiana State University, who work with computers and electronic media to generate and process sounds for their new works, said Kurt Stallmann, assistant professor of composition and theory and director of the electronic music studio.

Members of Rice Dance Theater Rehearsing Choreography to Dan Sedgwick's Dancemix

The festival will present 36 new works at three concerts. All of the concerts will take place in Hirsch Orchestral Rehearsal Room at Alice Pratt Brown Hall. The opening concert starts at 8 p.m. Nov. 12. On Nov. 13, two concerts will take place at 1 p.m. and 8 p.m.

The festival will give students the opportunity to present their own compositions, hear works produced by their peers and exchange technical and creative ideas. Each concert will present four categories of work - pieces for sounds alone, pieces presented in a multi-channel speaker format surrounding the audience, pieces which include live performers and pieces which include a visual component such as animation or video.

A wide array of approaches will be used, including the use of the computer to assist a performer with live improvisation; precomposed works which explore a variety of source materials including environmental sound (insect sounds, animal sounds, human voices, the sound of a coin spinning on a table, industrial sounds), new tuning systems, synthetically produced new timbres; works for live performers with electronically produced sounds (instrumentalists, dancers and theremin player), and multi-disciplinary works combining audio and visual elements, said Stallmann.

The student composers will be working with performers, dancers, and
computers as “active partners” during the concerts. There are 10 composers, five performers and five dancers from Rice and 26 composers from the other universities.

Oboist Sonja Thoms and Composer Lembit Beecher

“The students will get the chance to present their work to peers at other universities, to collaborate with performers and to share aesthetic and technical information with peers,” said Stallmann.

One of the current trends in this field is to develop ways of using the computer as an interactive partner, which senses and responds to performance data as it is happening, he said. “One way this is being developed is through gestural control mechanisms, where some physical action on the part of the performer can be interpreted by the computer, which, in turn, generates a response,” Stallmann said.