Nothingness is Unstable by David Rosenboom - (NYEAF 2017)

Live electronic performance with life-form sounds articulated by large banks of complex digital resonator circuits, shaped with analog acoustic sources, and diffused into space with the unique Geluso 3D Sound Object. Voices excerpted from The Experiment, written for Hopscotch, a mobile opera for 24 cars produced by The Industry, blend in while they respond via brainwaves to questions posed by an anxious investigator trying to determine if Heaven and Hell are merely features of the mind. Friday July 14, 2017 @ 8 pm LOCATION: Issue Project Room 22 Boerum Pl, Brooklyn, NY 11201 Commissioned for the 2017 New York Electronic Art Festival Nothingness usually collapses into something-ness—the phenomenal particularities of experience. Musical particularities—musics of many nows, containing fine structures with created pasts and futures, also spring from initially undefined singularities of experience into multiple dimensions of mutual interactivity. In this work, Rosenboom interprets his drawings Natural Scores and harmonic cycle system Earth Encomium to explore this paradigm in live electronic performance. Life-form sounds collected in Indonesia and the US are articulated by large banks of complex digital resonator circuits, shaped by performing actions with analog acoustic sources, and diffused into space with the unique Geluso 3D Sound Object to create an immersive musical wrapping. Into this sonic environment Rosenboom also blends excerpts from his interactive piece The Experiment, which was written for Hopscotch, a mobile opera for 24 cars produced by The Industry in Los Angeles in 2015. In this scene, voices move around in 3D sound space while responding via brainwaves to questions posed by an anxious investigator trying to determine if Heaven and Hell are merely features of the mind. BIO David Rosenboom (b. 1947) is a composer, performer, interdisciplinary artist, author and educator known as a pioneer in American experimental music. During his long career, he has explored ideas about the spontaneous evolution of musical forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, multi-disciplinary composition and performance, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art and literature, interactive multi-media and new instrument technologies, generative algorithmic systems, art-science research and philosophy, and extended musical interface with the human nervous system. He holds the Richard Seaver Distinguished Chair in Music at California Institute of the Arts, where he has been Dean of The Herb Alpert School of Music since 1990 and serves as a board member of the Center for New Performance. He taught at Mills College from 1979 to 1990, where he held the Darius Milhaud Chair and was Professor of Music, Head of the Music Department, and Director of the Center for Contemporary Music. In the 1970s he was founding faculty and a professor in the Music Department at York University in Toronto. He studied at the University of Illinois in the 1960s with Salvatore Martirano, Lejaren Hiller, Kenneth Gaburo, Gordon Binkerd, Paul Rolland, Jack McKenzie, Soulima Stravinsky and others and was later awarded the George A. Miller Professorship as a visiting artist there. He has also taught or held positions in the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo, at Bard College, Simon Fraser University, San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale, and Ionian University in Greece. His work is widely presented around the world. Recent highlights have included a fifty-year retrospective of his music presented in a series of performances at the new Whitney Museum of American Art in collaboration with ISSUE Project Room in New York (2015), a six-month exhibition of his work with brainwave music at Centre Pompidou-Metz in France (2015-2016), a four-month exhibition of his work in computer music at Whitechapel Gallery in London (2015-2016), and numerous publications, recordings, festival performances, and keynote speeches at international conferences. Following his retrospective at the Whitney Museum, he was lauded in The New York Times as an “avatar of experimental music.” Website: