One of your colleagues (Music 659), artist/composer Elliot Hess, has an exhibition next week in Tjaden Galley (on the arts quad across from the Johnson Museum). His description is as follows:

"The show consists of paper sculpturesproduced from suspended fabric moulds and collages on paper. The opening will be on Thursday night from 6-9 pm in Tjaden Gallery."

I hope you can make it!

One of the great composers of our time, a man as strange and wonderful as he was influential and masterful, Karlheinz Stockhausen has died at age 79.  The official dedications can be found on his homepage:

Stockhausen Passed Away

I have also attached a recent remix/improvisation on his one of his most famous works,Gesang der Jünglinge ("Song of the Youths"), composed in 1956.  This performance was done here at CEMC in 2006.

Masterpieces of the 20th Century, Gesang der Junglinge

In lecture today we discussed repetition broadly and I introduced you to several pieces, including Eric Satie's (in)famous Vexations.  I have attached a Reason "performance" of this piece, all 840 repeats ready to play.  Notice that the file is very small, under 1 MB.  If I exported all 3360 measures as audio, it would fill a small hard drive ;) 

I invite each of you to experience this piece for yourself,  the whole thing takes around 20 hours.  You can also export the MIDI file and play it on your home system (with notably bland General MIDI sounds).  For other non-piano versions of the piece, including several remixes and re-imaginings, see ubuweb here:

http://www.ubu.com
(for those who saw guitarist Alan Licht when he performed here last month, be sure to catch his guitar and voice rendition found about half way down the page)

A manuscript of the score can be found here:

Vexations manuscript

I have also attached a PDF score .

And, of course, John Cage's description of the performance:

Cage Letters on Vexations perfromance

Please join me tomorrow May 3rd in Lincoln B20 at 12:30pm for this year's final Midday Music concert featuring works by Terry Riley and Cornell composers David Weaver, Spencer Topel, Nathan Ward, DAMAGE (Dave And Misha's Audio Generation Ensemble), and myself.  Performers include, among many others, Cornell's own John Haines-Eitzen on cello, guitarist Kenneth Meyer from Syracuse, and even YOU for one of the pieces!

I look forward to seeing you there.

Here's the link to the information and videos I showed this afternoon in lecture.  Note the software section.  It should soon contain patches and other code to make this run.

http://www.popmodernism.org/scrambledhackz

Pianist Kathleen Supove presents a concert of explosive works for piano and electronics with video (and with Ms. Supove, there is always a potential for some very interesting theater!).  Supove is artist-in-residence at NYC's Flea Theater where she is also a curator presenting the work of other emerging artists including violinist Ritsu Katsumata (mentioned on these page before).  She performs regularly as a soloist as well with Patrick Grant Group, the band Dr. Nerve, and the duo twisted tutu with composer/performer Eve Belgarian.

It promises to be an exciting evening. I hope to see you all there!

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/mono.html

I don't even know how to begin with this... check it out

I just thought I'd share this beautiful track and equally stunning video with you.  This is Mike Oldfield's second production in the "tubular bells" series, the first of which was recorded in autumn 1972, one of the earlier synthesized electronic tracks to reach a mass audience in the movie, The Exorcist.   Sentinel is a revisited version, much better in my opinion, and was released in 1992.  I was lucky enough to find this on 12" in Ithaca at a record fair last semester.  Anyways I think the music and the video are both really interesting and you might want to take a few minutes from your hectic day to lose yourself to this.

Mike Oldfield - Sentinel (Tubular Bells II)