Princeton Sound Kitchen presents Generals Concert

Ellie Cherry, analog synthesizer and digital mixer;

Greg Chudzik, acoustic upright bass;

J Clancy, glockenspiel and drum set;

Jonathan Collazo, performer 2; Erika Dohi, piano;

Aliayta Foon-Dancoes, violin; Travis Laplante, tenor saxophone;

Daniel Matei, performer 1; Lara Saldanha, piano

Ryuichi Sakamoto

andata from async

Video:

Ryuichi Sakamoto, acoustic piano and synthesizers

Scenes from the film Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, edited by Ellie Cherry

Ellie Cherry

Night Circuits

Live performance:

Ellie Cherry, analog synthesizer and digital mixer Greg Chudzik, acoustic upright bass

This piece began to take form about a year ago as a first attempt to work with analog synths, inspired by the otherworldly warmth of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 2017 album async. The way his music crackled and breathed out living sounds that were mesmerizingly both intimate and alien seemed possible only with the analogue electronics I had so long avoided—primarily from intimidation. With this warm-crackly sound quality in mind, I entered what soon became a sunk-cost corn maze full of detours, dead ends, and frenzied late-night meltdowns over the existence of so-damn-many types of USB. Knowing next to nothing about analog equipment, I had acquired and begun learning the Behringer 2600 under the naïve assumption that all synths must sound pretty much the same. To my disappointment, the sounds coming from the Behringer were not delicately warm crackles, but stubbornly buzzy bleep-bloops. I was deep in battle with the Behringer, trying to find creative ways to suppress and circumvent its characteristic old-school sci-fi sounds, when I came across a documentary about Sakamoto filmed during the same period of his life when he was working on async. The documentary opens with Sakamoto visiting an old grand piano that had been damaged in the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Inspiringly, Sakamoto demonstrates no need to force the weathered piano into any pre-conceived sounds; rather, he patiently and appreciatively tries to understand the sounds it naturally and uniquely makes. Observing Sakamoto’s compelling interaction with the broken piano made me rethink my relationship with the Behringer 2600. Simply trying to imitate Sakamoto’s sound by forcing my instrument to be something it is not was, I realized, fundamentally incompatible with Sakamoto’s practice. So I abandoned the struggle to disguise my Behringer as a KORG or Prophet and instead invested more time in understanding the properties that make the Behringer 2600 unique. Since then, performing with and composing for my synth has become significantly more rewarding. Although this piece ended up light years from where I expected it to, I feel fortunate that during the process of writing it I discovered a role model whose profound artistic and life philosophies have positively shaped my own.

The title Night Circuits is a nod to the 1972 sci-fi film Solaris, which inspired Sakamoto’s album async.

Nicolas Berge

HOW TO pt. 2

 Video:

Veronique de Raedemaeker, violin and voice Ramón Gardella, percussion

Filmed by Nicolas Berge

Audio production by Simon Spillner

Bobby Ge

You Have Entered the Public Domain

Live performance:

Aliayta Foon-Dancoes, violin

J Clancy, glockenspiel and drum set Fixed media

No art exists in a vacuum. Everything owes its existence to something earlier, and this cycle of ideas forms the backbone of creativity. The public domain—the body of work free from copyright restriction—is one of the most important fixtures of today’s creative landscape, providing a rich library of source material for artists of any medium.

The Disney Corporation has long had a difficult relationship with the public domain. Most famously, when their copyright on Steamboat Willie was set to expire, Disney aggressively lobbied the US government to pass the Copyright Act of 1976 (derisively called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act by its critics) to dramatically extend copyright term limits for all intellectual property.

The law’s worst effect was to cast the public domain as a villain to be guarded against, a stance that could not have been less prescient. The world was on the cusp of the digital era, a time of unprecedented availability of information, and such a newly protectionist approach to IP would eventually lead to the kinds of headaches artists of all kinds face today, from remixes getting ‘copystruck’ by content monitors to exclusivity restrictions that vary confusingly from country to country.

In 2024, Steamboat Willie finally ran out its copyright limit. Hundreds of thousands of memes sprang up to crassly mock Disney, and this piece—as much as it is a joyous celebration of the public domain—is proudly suffused with that same kind of over-the-top, meme-worthy contempt.

It was an absolute delight to create this piece, and I must also give credit to Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, and John F. Kennedy for providing such wonderful source material to supplement Mickey with.

Jessie Marino

throw me to you and back again

 Live performance:

Daniel Matei, performer 1 Jonathan Collazo, performer 2

kennedy taylor dixon

WE AS HUMANS

Video:

kennedy taylor dixon, performer

Audio and video production by kennedy taylor dixon what does any of it really mean?

– INTERMISSION –

Alban Berg

Piano Sonata No. 1

Live performance:

Lara Saldanha, piano

Travis Laplante

A Room With No Walls

Live performance:

Travis Laplante, tenor saxophone Erika Dohi, piano

Although I had cursorily listened to Alban Berg’s music when I was younger, I had lumped his music in with a certain kind of 12 tone music, which I had a difficult time finding emotional and/or spiritual resonance with. Because of this, I never pursued diving deeper into his oeuvre. Recently, my piano teacher Peggy Kampmeier recommended Berg’s Piano Sonata No. 1 (his only piano sonata) which I hadn’t spent time with before. When I listened to the Berg sonata, I was struck by how much feeling was present and found myself surprisingly moved and curious. This was both a revelation and a lesson for me in how I sometimes form a judgment of a composer’s work before properly giving it a chance, or how I wrongly assume that if I don’t care for some pieces by a composer, that I won’t relate to the rest of their work.

In Berg’s sonata, I am inspired by his straddling of romanticism and atonality, with the music sounding often like both and neither at the same time. I am drawn to this harmonically ambiguous territory because there is a fleeting sense of “home” in an expansive harmonic landscape. I am also attracted to how Berg creates expression and an elastic sense of time with an extensive use of ritardandos and accelerandos. Finally, I love how exploratory Berg is in Piano Sonata No. 1, and I sense that he is often operating from a place of following his ear and intuition rather than adhering to formulas or rules.

Composing A Room With No Walls was an opportunity to engage with Berg’s approaches to chromaticism and melodic shape and attempt to let them permeate into my pre-existing musical sensibilities. I also spent a great deal of time acclimating my ear to some of the unusual chords and modes in Berg’s sonata in order to open myself up to a vast harmonic field. As importantly, I tried to remain in an exploratory state throughout the compositional process, embracing that sonic expansion was more important than the security of my ego.

Daniel Lopatin

A Barely Lit Path

Performed by Oneohtrix Point Never

Video:

Directed by Freeka Tet

Written by Daniel Lopatin and Freeka Tet

Art direction by Daniel Lopatin and Freeka Tet Audio production by Oneohtrix Point Never

Nathan Schram

Let me out

Video:

AI supervision by Alex Wettig Audio mixing by Davis Polito

Video production by Nathan Schram

This work is about our lives and the lives of artificial intelligences. I composed and recorded all of the music myself however the video material was produced using a newly developed,

open-source AI video generation technology called Stable Diffusion. That is not to say that I just typed in “weird music video” and magic appeared, but the computation really was the heavyweight in this artistic partnership. I held a more curatorial role by controlling input material and editing together a cohesive narrative from the various generation techniques. Much of the original material are photos from my life and childhood.

A special thank you to Alex Wettig for assisting my usage of an AI technology that, frankly, should not be available to me. Instead of spending the day’s precious hours writing groundbreaking machine learning technology, he painstakingly walked me through basic computational processes so that I could show my daughter what a zebra cow would look like (it’s cool!).

Thank you to Davis Polito for his assistance in honing the sound of this music. His expertise in the mixing process helped me find a new clarity and power.

The simulations presented in this work were performed on computational resources managed and supported by Princeton Research Computing, a consortium of groups including the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE) and the Office of Information Technology’s High Performance Computing Center and Visualization Laboratory at Princeton University. Thank you to Music Department Chair, Dan Trueman, for sponsoring my proposal.

Text:

Well I don’t know where I’ve been but the world seems to know my fate.

My friends seem to not be worried but I know that I’m to blame.

I’ve lost many things to a world not mine and I’ve drank and spoke thoughts unkind.

I just want to be at peace. To feel.

Let me out.

Turning my head around when did we go wrong?

I tried to solve it

but I ate the words that tell the false tale.

Why do I hold myself so dearly while I carry this shame so closely?

Darling little photo satellite,

What mistakes protect our children? How small the universe?

How vast the atom? The sun?

The guilt? The joy?

Why do I hold myself so dearly While I carry this shame so closely?

Let me out.

Ellie Cherry is an electroacoustic composer fundamentally compelled by the belief that as an artist she is first and foremost an observer: be it the acoustic properties of the bark of a beech tree or the childhood experiences of an audience member, every element in our shared reality is worthy of consideration. Her composition therefore takes a holistic approach, in which spectral theory, physics, psychoacoustics, and historical and political context are all thoughtfully intertwined. She is particularly interested in exploring how new music composition can provide an effective platform for activism, frequently addressing topics such as environmentalism, gender and class inequality, and trauma.

Greg Chudzik is an active performer across numerous genres on the double bass and electric bass. Currently, he can be seen performing regularly with several new music groups, including Signal Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, and Talea Ensemble. Greg is also a member of several bands, including Empyrean Atlas, Bing and Ruth, and The Briars of North America. He has worked with numerous influential figures in contemporary music, including Steve Coleman, Steve Reich, Brian Ferneyhough, Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin, Helmut Lachenmann, Charles Wuorinen, Alex Mincek and Tristan Perich. Greg’s recording credits include playing on the Grammy-nominated Barcelonaza by Jorge Leiderman, Pulse / Quartet by Steve Reich on Nonesuch records, Morphogenesis and Synovial Joints by Steve Coleman on Pi Recordings, No Home of the Mind and Tomorrow Was the Golden Age by Bing and Ruth on RVNG records, the album Americans by Scott Johnson (Tzadik records), multiple recordings with Signal Ensemble on New Amsterdam and Mode Records, the album Grown Unknown by Lia Ices (Secretly Canadian records), the album Inner Circle by Empyrean Atlas, and the album High Violet by The National on 4AD records. Greg’s debut album Solo Works, Vol. 1 was released in July of 2015 and features original pieces of music written for bass guitar and electronics. His follow-up album Solo Works Vol. 2 features original compositions for double bass quartet and will be released in 2019.

J Clancy is a percussionist, drummer, sound artist, and improviser based in Brooklyn, NY. They collaborate and create through a broad spectrum of critical and queer sonic / musical approaches while also maintaining a wide-ranging career as a freelance art handler and installer. To date, they have given world and / or US premieres of nearly 100 works involving percussion. J is the founding percussionist for several groups dedicated to new and experimental chamber music, including InfraSound, panSonus, and Blackbox Ensemble (for which they are also the Operations Director). They are also the drummer for Dumpweed, a NJ-based metalcore band, and Swirlons, a NY-based avant-garde metal project. J has additionally performed with established new / contemporary music groups including Contemporaneous, SEM Ensemble, Da Capo Chamber Players, Hong Kong New Music, and Nief-Norf, but most often with their friends, comrades, and communities. They love mutual aid, birds, film, yerba mate, and upcycling.

New York–based percussionist Jonathan Collazo has worked with a diversity of artists such as Valery Gergiev, Natalie Merchant, Sō Percussion, Maria Schneider, and Tan Dun. He has performed in venues on four continents, collaborated on hundreds of new and rediscovered works involving percussion, and has composed scores of acoustic and electronic music.

Jonathan was a student of Sō Percussion and Jason Haaheim at the Bard Conservatory of Music and a student of John Ferrari and David Cossin at the Manhattan School of Music in the Contemporary Performance Program. He is currently a percussion fellow at the Bard Conservatory, active within the New York contemporary music scene, and freelances in the tri-state area.

Kennedy Taylor Dixon is a composer, violist, and scholar currently residing in Princeton, New Jersey. Described as a “vibrant musical voice,” Dixon often writes for herself and is also passionate about collaborating with members in her musical community. Recent highlights of her career include recipient of Westminster College’s inaugural Hear and Now Emerging BIPOC Composer Commission (April 2023), Tetractys New Music: Here Be Monsters Commission (May 2023), New Music Gathering performer participant (June 2023), and Bang on a Can Composer Fellow (July 2023). Dixon has worked with numerous artists throughout her career, such as JACK Quartet, Sō Percussion, ~Nois, F-Plus, Boston Children’s Chorus, Parker Ramsey, Michael J. Love, and more. Dixon holds a MA in Music Composition in addition to her dual undergraduate degrees in Viola Performance and Music Composition from Western Michigan University. Dixon is currently pursuing her PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University as a President’s Fellow.

Described as “virtuosic” (The New York Times) and as a “barrier-defying artist” (Mix Magazine), Osaka-born and New York-based pianist Erika Dohi is a multi-faceted artist with an eclectic musical background. From highly polished traditional classical to bold improvisation, she is a dynamic performer whose timeless style and unidiomatic technique set her apart in contemporary NYC avant-garde circles. Dohi’s debut solo album, I, Castorpollux, was released in May 2021 on the label 37d03d, founded by Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Aaron Dessner, and Bryce Dessner (The National). The album is a profound personal excavation set to a gripping landscape of wild, genre-fluid composition; a virtuosic, but emotionally generous convergence of the technical and the spiritual. With understated piano and keyboards at its center, I, Castorpollux is equal parts hazy nostalgia, science-fiction soundtrack, and electro-acoustic experimentation. The album features contributions from various artists, including Channy Leaneagh (Poliça), Andy Akiho, Immanuel Wilkins, Ambrose Akinmusire, Jeremy Boettcher (S. Carey), Emily Wells, and Zach Hanson (S. Carey). It is produced by William Brittelle, a vital modern composer himself. I, Castorpollux has received much attention in the press: “The Best Ambient Albums in May 2021” (Bandcamp); “Best of the Week” (Brooklyn Vegan and JAZZIZ Magazine); “retro-futuristic piece of poetry” (Mixmag); “pianist Erika Dohi plays piano like you’ve never seen before” (MinnPost); “a rising voice in New York’s creative scene” (DCist). The album the was featured on The New York Times ‘Playlist’ and WNYC’s ‘New Sounds / Soundcheck’, and BBC World Service’s ‘Music Life.’ The project was featured at Liquid Music Series with pianist David Friend and composer Jerome Begin at The Parkway Theater (Minneapolis), Bop Stop Jazz (Cleveland), Constellation (Chicago), Earshot Jazz Festival (Seattle), Emerald City Music Series (Seattle),

Rhizome (Washington D.C.), Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW Festival along with Sō Percussion, Bonny Light Horseman, and Daniil Trifonov. Erika was most recently featured at the Ecstatic Music Festival at Kaufmann Music Center (NYC) along with Circuit des Yeux, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and Bergamot Quartet. Dohi is the co-founder of BLUEPRINTS Piano Series and accompanying festival, In Visible Roads, in collaboration with Metropolis Ensemble, as well as flute and piano duo, RighteousGIRLS, whose album gathering blue has been hailed by Downbeat as “one of the most adventurous new music debut albums in recent years,” receiving 4.5 stars as “The Best of Album of 2015.” She has performed composer William Brittelle’s Spiritual America with Metropolis Ensemble at The Hollywood Bowl opening for Bon Iver and TU Dance, Central Park Summer Stage with Ensemble LPR, and international festivals including Sounds from a Safe Harbour (Cork, Ireland), Eaux Claires (Eau Claire, WI), the D.C. Jazz Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, and Tokyo Experimental Festival. She is part of the six-piano ensemble Grand Band, performing at Peak Performances at Montclair State University. She is also a pianist for a composer and trumpet player, Wadada Leo Smith’s Kikuyu Ensemble, and has performed at various festivals including Big Ears (Knoxville), Vision Festival (NYC), Harlem Stage (NYC), SFJazz (San Francisco) as part of ECM’s 50th Anniversary. As a composer, Dohi has participated in Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at Mass MoCA, and Atlantic Center for the Arts with composer Judd Greenstein. She has been commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble, Switch~ Ensemble, Grand Band, and American independent entertainment company A24 for the Song Reader box set project for the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Dohi has received New Music USA’s 2022 Creator Development grant, and 2023 Figure 8 and Forgotten Futures Artist in Residency Program.

Aliayta Foon-Dancoes is an award-winning Canadian violinist, composer and interdisciplinary collaborator. Until this Fall she lived in London, England, regularly working with the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC, and 12 Ensemble, and has performed at the Musikverein, Wigmore Hall, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg and the Philharmonie de Paris. As a former member of the Echea Quartet, Aliayta has been aired on BBC, CBC and NPR, and won prizes including the International Anton Rubinstein Competition, the Paris Biennale’s ‘Tremplin’, and the Royal Overseas League. Aliayta’s recent work includes the BBC Proms, a collaboration with Patti Smith and Pathway to Paris, work with Max Richter at the Barbican Centre, and performances alongside Patrick Watson at Live At Lost River. In Spring, 2023 Aliayta made her debut on the spoons at London’s King’s Place with internationally acclaimed 12 Ensemble in an arrangement of Brian Eno’s Ambient 2: Plateaux of Mirror. Although critically unacclaimed, Aliayta continues to pursue the spoons on the international stage, at parties, and in her parent’s backyard. Aliayta holds a BA from the University of Victoria, a MA from the Royal Academy of Music and has held Chamber Music Fellowships at both the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music (London). In Fall 2023, she began a PhD in Composition at Princeton University.

Bobby Ge is a Chinese-American composer and avid collaborator whose work, often collaborative in nature, focuses on themes of home, communication, and hybridity. Winner of the 2022 Barlow Prize, Ge has received commissions and performances by groups including the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony, the Albany Symphony, the US

Navy Band, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Harbin Symphony Orchestra, the Sioux City Symphony, Music from Copland House, Bergamot Quartet, Tesla Quartet, JACK Quartet, and Mind on Fire. He has created multimedia projects with the Space Telescope Science Institute, painters collective Art10Baltimore, the Scattered Players Theater Company, and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. He is currently pursuing his PhD at Princeton University, and holds degrees from University of California, Berkeley and the Peabody Conservatory.

Travis Laplante is a composer, improviser, and saxophonist. Laplante leads the acclaimed tenor saxophone quartet Battle Trance, as well as Subtle Degrees, his duo with drummer Gerald Cleaver. Recently, Laplante has composed long-form works for new music ensembles such as the JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire, and the ~Nois Saxophone Quartet. Laplante is also known for his raw solo saxophone concerts and being a member of the avant-garde quartet Little Women. He has performed and / or recorded with Tyshawn Sorey, Caroline Shaw, Ches Smith, Peter Evans, Sō Percussion, Ingrid Laubrock, Mary Halvorson, International Contemporary Ensemble, Michael Formanek, Buke and Gase, Darius Jones, Mat Maneri, Julia Bullock, and Matt Mitchell, among others. Laplante has released 12 critically acclaimed albums as a leader or co-leader on New Amsterdam Records, Aum Fidelity, Skirl, Tripticks Tapes, Out of Your Head Records, and NNA Tapes. Laplante has toured his music extensively and has appeared at many major international festivals such as The Moers Festival (Germany), Jazz Jantar (Poland), Saalfelden (Austria), Jazz em Agosto (Portugal), Earshot (Seattle), Hopscotch (North Carolina), and the NYC Winter JazzFest. As a composer, Laplante has been commissioned by the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), the JACK Quartet, Roulette Intermedium, Yarn/Wire, the Yellow Barn Music Festival, the MATA festival, and The Jerome Foundation.

Daniel Matei is a New York–based Hungarian-Romanian percussionist, composer, and improviser with a keen interest in the collaborative and ever-evolving nature of music. He has recently performed with ensembles such as Sō Percussion, Contemporaneous, Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra, Talujon, TACETi, Tactus, The Orchestra Now, and participated in a project with the New Chamber Ballet, at venues including Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, DiMenna Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Opera America, MASS MoCA, The Clark Institute, Banff Centre for the Arts, Tenri Cultural Institute, and Brooklyn Armory. Daniel is a recent graduate of Manhattan School of Music’s Contemporary Performance Program, where he studied percussion with David Cossin and John Ferrari, and composition with Reiko Füting. He received his BM and BA from Bard College, where he studied with members of Sō Percussion. These days he is most excited about Noise Catalogue, an ensemble he co- founded that won the 2023 Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Junior Award.

Nathan Schram is a member of the Attacca Quartet and the Founder & Artistic Director of Musicambia, an organization that develops music education programs in prisons throughout the United States. Albums of his original music have been released on New Amsterdam and Better Company Records. He has a wife and daughter and adores living in Princeton.

Pianist Lara Saldanha has been praised for her versatility, fresh programming, and communicative gifts as both a performer and teacher. Lara is equally at home as a soloist and collaborator in the worlds of new music, standard repertoire, and historical performance. Lara did significant research and performances in all three areas during her doctoral work at Stony Brook University, which she completed in 2023. Lara looks forward to appearances with Kollective366 in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and being part of Cincinnati Song Initiative’s inaugural class of fellows in 2024. 2023 included concerts at the Valley Cottage Young Masters Series, Music IC Festival in Iowa City, National Federation of Music Clubs conference in Norfolk, VA, and Icicle Creek Center for the Arts in Leavenworth, WA. Past performance highlights include playing Pierrot Lunaire in 2019 and soloing in Vijay Iyer’s Rites of Holi in 2018 with the Mannes American Composers Ensemble, soloing in Saint Saen’s Carnival of the Animals with the Texas Festival Orchestra in 2018, performing Joan Tower’s Black Topaz for the composer at the Round Top Festival Institute, and two concert tours of India in 2017- 2018, among many others. Lara is a committed music educator; she has been awarded Teaching Assistantships at both Stony Brook and Mannes and has a thriving studio of around 25 students in New York City. Lara is passionate about making concerts accessible to all, and frequently gives lecture-recitals at community centers, schools, and homes. She has been a frequent performer at Groupmuse house concerts since 2016 and DOROT since 2018. Lara’s teachers include Christina Dahl at Stony Brook (DMA), Vladimir Valjarevic at Mannes (PDPL and MM), Alan Chow at Northwestern (BM / BA), Serguei Milstein at the Geneva Conservatory of Music in Switzerland, Inna Terekhov, and Neya Korsantia.