The Goethe-Institut Boston was wired for sound on Saturday night: Hans Tutschku “A Composer Portrait.” Five performers were also wired to explore the virtuosic and poetic possibilities of instrumental and electronic sounds. Tutschku’s compositional discoveries set him apart from today’s circuitry circuit.     [continued]

This past weekend saw the conclusion of a two-part academic conference (and accompanying concert) jointly hosted by the Harvard Group for New Music (HGNM) and the Goethe-Institut Boston with the original title, “New Tendencies of Contemporary Music in Germany.”     [continued]

Paavali Jumppanen, Jeffrey Means, and Hans Tutschku performed Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte for piano, percussion, and electronic sounds at the Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Sunday Concert Series causing at least one listener to wince while covering her ears. On the other side of the program, Jumppanen’s idea of Robert Schumann’s Carnaval could be best described as a jumble.     [continued]

The Stir! concert of music for piano, percussion and electronics at the Gardner Museum on Thursday night left me underwhelmed by the new pieces but blown away by the warhorse Kontakte by Karlheinz Stockhausen. Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen will return to the Gardner on Sunday with Schumann’s Carnival along with a reprise of Kontakte.     [continued]

Electroacoustic music concerts in Boston have shown some real signs of promise in this fringe area, but there were only glimpses of such in “Sonic Landscapes” Saturday evening at the Fenway Center. All but one of the evening’s five entries fell short of the mark.     [continued]

Handful upon handful of various sized black loudspeakers encircling the audience appeared nearly to outnumber the dedicated, if not curious, folks who turned out for the Roger Reynolds Portrait Concert presented by Hydra’s Concert 2 at Harvard’s Paine Hall on Thursday night.     [continued]

This past weekend was Hans Tutschku’s second “festival” of the year, where space and technology would share the limelight. Last fall, he curated “Sound in Space Festival: The Art of Interpretation of Electro-acoustic Music.” This spring, he has been curator of a two-day festival “Jour, Contre-jour”held in John Knowles Paine Concert Hall Friday night and last night.    [continued]

“Sound in Space Festival: The Art of Interpretation of Electroacoustic Music” concluded with “North American Works” on Saturday evening, November 20th at the Fenway Center in Boston. The three-day festival included pairs of workshops, programs of Sound in Space competitions, and portrait concerts featuring the music of Daniel Teruggi and Ludger Brümmer.     [continued]    [continued]

“Sound in Space Festival: The Art of Interpretation of Electroacoustic Music” at Fenway Center, Boston continued into the evening Friday, November 18 with “Finalist Concert2.” Hans Tutschku, key festival organizer, welcomed a larger audience on a comic note by reading a printing error, placing spaces in wrong places, that seemed coincidental with the emphasis given space throughout the Festival. All competition finalists’ compositions began to sound much alike, generic electroacoustic compositions relying too much on similar sounds, especially obvious crescendos and diminuendos, harsh unsurprising slashes, groans and drones; more discretion, fewer bombardments, and less insistence on “electroacoustic  tempo” would have helped to create lasting power and meaning. The winner will be announced Saturday night at a reception at the Goethe-Institut Boston.      [Click title for full review.]    [continued]

“Sound in Space Festival: The Art of Interpretation of Electroacoustic Music” at the Fenway Center in Boston reconvened on November 18 with “Interpretation Workshop 2.” Composer-researcher Daniel Teruggi, recounting the history of the electronic movement, interjected his philosophical bent, his own experience with perception, and his ruminations on the subject. Where Tutschku understands the movement of sound through multi-sources as diffusion, Teruggi argues for projection. Had the two-hour-plus lecture been modeled on Tutschku’s master class (lesser experienced student competition finalists working with experienced composers), a lot more could have been gleaned about the art of electroacoustic interpretation. Teruggi did perform some passages from his own powerful, affective compositions illustrating diffusion — or projection— as he would have it.    [Click title for full review.]    [continued]

“Sound in Space Festival: The Art of Interpretation of Electroacoustic Music” at the Fenway Center in Boston continued into the evening of November 17 with “Finalist Concert 1.” At the urging of Harvard Professor Hans Tutschku, key festival organizer, the composers drew graphs of their pieces for the purpose of achieving the most effective diffusion of their compositions with the Harvard ‘Hydra’ Speaker-Orchestra” (at least three rings of eight speakers specially placed and adjusted. With a graph, composers can practice interpreting their pieces just as pianists would practice Chopin — through expression. In the electroacoustic world, space (diffusion) and amplitude are the means toward that end.          [Click title for full review.]    [continued]

Interpretation Workshop 1 of the“Sound in Space Festival: The Art of Interpretation of Electroacoustic Music,” on November 17 certainly was one of the most surprising times that I can recall ever listening to loudspeakers making music. This was not a “workshop,” but a master class. Three competition finalists alternately sat at the console placed in the center of a space (formerly a church sanctuary). Tutschku demonstrated how, by his moving its many faders, he could interpret a finalist’s composition. Akin to a conductor, Tutschku directed “carloads” of speakers, his “orchestra, ”set up all about the space. There is another master class at 4:00, Friday, November 18 in the same space, 77 St. Stephen Street in Boston.      [Click title for full review.]    [continued]

Immediately noticeable as soon as Chiara Quartet opened with Mozart’s String Quartet No. 14 at Sanders Theatre on November 16 was the unity of ensemble and the enthusiasm with which the group played. Tutschku’s new piece, “behind the light – for string quartet and electronics” combined Chiara’s live performance with sounds assembled and modified from material they played in the electroacoustic studio. The piece is atonal – the excitement was provided by sudden shifts in dynamics, with loud crashes of tone clusters followed by pianissimo reflections. In Schubert’s Quintet in C Major, a masterpiece of chamber music composition, cellist Paul Katz’s calm assuredness brought under control sometimes over-enthusiastic playing of the Chiara. Katz used vibrato, of course, but it was restrained.      [Click title for full review.]    [continued]

“Ahem. Is this on? [taps on the microphone]” Thus began the concert on Friday, December 10th for HYDRA: The Sound Space Experience, at Harvard’s Paine Hall. The state-of-the-art orchestra of thirty-two loudspeakers provided nine electronic sound worlds, a testament to the composers’ inspired imaginations and hopefully, the fertile future of this cutting-edge format. Mark Applebaum’s Pre-Composition took shape as a riotous, irreverent satire on the factional world of contemporary music. Edgar Barroso’s Binary Opposition succeeded as a complex portrait of unease. Hans Tutschku’s Firmament-schlaflos (2010) manufactured a swirling, multi-layered, metallic ocean, meticulously sculpted waves of sound undulating throughout the hall. The other six pieces emerged from an undergraduate assignment to record objects spinning and materials that did not have standard musical function. [Click title for full review.]    [continued]