I realized in February or March of this year that I hadn’t been to any conferences during the 18-19 academic year. This bugged me. It’s hard to maintain a dialogue with other composers when you’re sitting in your office all the time. Of course, the Spring semester was filled with creating a composition lecture series for a class, so at least I wasn’t just watching Netflix.
I ramped up some submissions this summer, and I went to NYCEMF/ICMC in June, VU3 in Park City, UT in July, and the Aspen Composers Conference in August.
Considering Park City and Aspen were paper/presentation submissions, I spent most of June preparing for the July paper (Cloud Music: Audience Participation and Cloud Computing in Electroacoustic Music) and most of July preparing for the August paper (Inspiration/Perspiration: Creating a map of the music composition creative process). It was nice doing some word-thinking instead of note-thinking, but now I need to write something like 20 minutes of percussion quartet music by the end of the year. But that’s a different conversation.
NYCEMF/ICMC was a blast, as always. I spent a bunch of time with Josh and Ioannis, and worked several concerts as technical staff. OU had a good showing this year, I think five of us had works through the conference. We spent more time in Greenwich Village this year (the conference moved from the lower east side to NYU), so I got my bakery fix at Mille-Feuille and spent way too little time at Strand Bookstore (I bought a volume of Ginsberg poetry).
I spent part of July in the mountains of Utah. The VU 3 Symposium for experimental, electronic, and improvised music was hosted in Park City, and it was an incredible experience I might write more about later. It was chock full of weird technical stuff, presented in a non-judgmental and non-hierarchical way. Not that normal conferences are necessarily judgy, I think that’s just my insecurity coming out.
Anyway, it was a validating and supportive group (reminding me a lot of the last CFAMC conference I attended), and nearly immediately after I returned home, I dove into revising a paper on creativity that I presented the next month at the Aspen Composers’ Conference (which was well-received). Because of all that, this summer was a season of creativity, spending a bunch of time around creative people, thinking about the creative process, how we teach creativity, and so on.
And then I have airport downtime and I check Facebook. Jeez! Facebook! How little original content there is on Facebook. Aside from the Ads. Or from pages I like. So much of it is shared content. So little of it is thought-provoking.
I originally had a listing of the top thirty or so posts, categorized by original vs. shared content, if there was any commentary, things like that, but it just got to be tedious. The simple point is that there was/is a vivid discrepancy between the creativity at the conferences and the creativity (or lack thereof) in my browser.
This has caused me to look closer at the creative research I’m doing, and how I can better focus on 1) presenting it to a wider audience, and 2) integrating more of it in my own work.
And that’s the plan for this fall.
It’s already July!? It’s already halfway through the summer semester!
The spring semester has been my busiest semester as a professor. Let’s recap:
At NDSU:
At VCSU:
At NoteForge/As a Composer
Some of these things were successful due to my hard work. Some of these things were successful due to my dumb luck. Some of these things could be greatly improved.
Turning Comp I at VCSU into a lecture class was a ton of work. It was fun, and I learned a great deal about video editing, but it took up way more time than I was expecting. Luckily, with those videos in “maintenance mode” now, I’ll have some tweaks but most of it can stand.
I built that class around my ideas about the creative process, which I’m beginning to codify into something tangible. I’m presenting a poster about the process at this year’s ATMI conference.
I didn’t do a bunch of conferences/festivals this year, mostly due to a focus on teaching since VCSU was a new thing. I’m ramping up those things this summer, with a piece at NYCEMF/ICMC last week and a presentation at the VU 3 Symposium in Park City, UT next week.
I wrote a piece for bass clarinet duet + piano, and I started on a tuba sonata that I’m really enjoying, though it’s taking a while trying to find time to write. Which reminds me–This semester I started booking dedicated creative time, so that I’m in the studio working on composition-related things every morning until 10. This worked…most of the time.
I picked up a faculty fellowship in Entrepreneurship, and as a part of that I’ve spent a bunch of time thinking about how to update NDSU’s Music Entrepreneurship class. That’ll be it’s own separate post I’m sure.
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be presenting Cloud Music: Audience participation in electronic music , at the the 2019 Vu 3 Symposium in Park City, Utah!
Cloud Music is a work for audience participation and cloud computing. Audience members load a website on their mobile device, specify values, and then submit those values to a web server. The web server is periodically polled by a Max patch, which uses the user-specified data to launch Cloud sprites, which then drift across the screen. If a user specifies that a cloud should be a thunder cloud, it reacts with other thunder clouds.
Cloud Music is the first proof of concept in an ongoing project to unify audience participation, cloud computing, and interactive performance.
The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF) is always a fun time with great music and incredible people. This year they’re hosting the International Computer Music Conference as well, and I’m pleased to announce that Tempest in a Teakettle, which I presented there in 2017, will be returning to the program for this year as well.
The full list of works is available at https://nycemf.org/list-of-accepted-works/. Looks like I’m in good company!
Dear Kyle Vanderburg,
I am pleased to inform you that your work: REVERIE OF SOLITUDEwas selected for the third edition of Diffrazioni – Firenze Multimedia Festival – March 26-31, 2019 sound, light, art, technology, neuroscience, nanotechnology, robotics.
in the category: ACOUSMATIC
Congratulations!
Best regards,
Alfonso Belfiore
