October 17, 2005
Extensible Toy Piano festival to be held at Clark University November 4-5
WORCESTER, MA-Last spring, The Extensible Toy Piano Project sponsored an international composition competition that attracted dozens of entries from around the world. The project will culminate with a festival at Clark University on Friday, Nov. 4 and Saturday, Nov. 5, which will feature the winners of this competition in two concerts and a symposium "Play!: Contemporary Composition, Technology and Listening."
The Extensible Toy Piano Festival is sponsored in part by the Group for Electronic Music (a joint endeavor by Clark University and the College of the Holy Cross) and the Higgins School of Humanities at Clark.
The concerts will present nine world premieres by composers from Japan, Germany, Australia, the UK, Greece and throughout the United States. Featured solo performers include Phyllis Chen (International Contemporary Ensemble/Chicago) and John McDonald (Tufts University).
The compositions range from a microtonal/related-complex-tempo-structures-tape piece built from toy piano samples to an extended free improvisation by Steven Drury's Callithumpian Consort with an "extensible" toy piano instrument (a computer-assisted, post-prepared-piano noise-maker). Music will be performed using laptop computers as instruments, and computers will be used to process live-performed toy piano.
Symposium presentations are divided into two sessions: "listening" and "composing/performing." The listening topics include a discussion of Milton Babbitt's and John Cage's writing in the context of Frederick Hollander's toy ballet from Dr. Seuss's film "The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.," a narratological analysis of Radiohead's Idioteque, and a theoretical account of listening to "ubiquitous" music.
In the second category, there are talks on German techno-chameleon Uwe Schmidt, "networked-performance blogs" and a recent public space installation.
Kyle Gann, composer and music critic from The Village Voice, will deliver the keynote address, "The Toy Piano in the Post-Prohibitive Age," on Saturday, November 5 at 7 p.m.
"John Cage, that incorrigible musical adventurer, brought the toy piano from a treasured plaything to a bona fide musical instrument," said Matt Malsky, associate professor of music at Clark who serves as one of the directors of the Extensible Toy Piano Project (David Claman, assistant professor of music at the College of the Holy Cross is the other director). "Our aim is to bring it into the 21st Century."
All events will be held at Clark University's Traina Center for the Arts, 22 Downing St., Worcester, and are free and open to the public. For more information and a schedule of events, visit www.clarku.edu/xtp/xtp.html or call 508-793-7340.
Clark University is a private, co-educational liberal-arts research university with 2,000 undergraduate and 600 graduate students. Since its founding in 1887 as the first all-graduate school in New England, Clark has challenged convention with innovative programs such as the International Studies Stream, the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the five-year BA/MA programs with the fifth year tuition-free for eligible students.
Angela M. Bazydlo
Associate Director of Media Relations
Clark University
Worcester, Mass.
phone: 508-793-7635
www.clarku.edu
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