ICMC/25/d4/1120 Concert n11/04 Gutai
Gutai, for piano, transducers and quadraphonic diffusion
#Description
Short
- Inspired by the Japanese post-war art movement; contact-miked piano frame drives feedback into four corner loudspeakers while transducers excite the soundboard with processed harmonics.
Long
- Gutai is a piece written as an exercise in self listening for the performer and an immersive listening experience for the audience.
- the performer reads a graphic score, and sculpts an improvisation through it.
- Every musical choice has potential to come back later through electronics.
- responsibility of the performer to always be listening and to respond to the decisions they made previously in the performance. Simultaneously, these captured bits of the improvisation will be played back by the speakers surrounding the audience, giving them an inside look at the creation of the improvisation and surrounding them with the pianist’s choices. The hope is that with each performance, the player will be able to understand themselves as an improvisor through coming to terms with the consequences of their own musical decisions and that the listeners can experience the creation of the work.
#Composer Person/Austin Engelhardt
- Composer/technologist, University of Kansas
- Research on embodied performance in networked spaces
- #Bio
- Austin Engelhardt is a composer and improviser whose work is dedicated to challenging and reshaping communication through music. Raised in rural Kansas, Austin came to the musical world later in life, only learning to read music at the age of 20. This late start did not hinder his passion; instead, it fueled a relentless ambition to redefine and expand musical notation. His artistic vision, deeply influenced by the aesthetic nature of sound, draws inspiration from the abstract. Austin earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri – Kansas City and a master’s degree from The School/New England Conservatory. He has studied under esteemed teachers including John Mallia, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Paul Rudy, Yotam Haber, and Michael Miller.
- Person/Hidemi Akaiwa, #Piano
- Hidemi Akaiwa is a Japanese pianist and composer. At the age of 30, she shifted from a successful corporate career to focusing on jazz music. She received a full scholarship to School/Berklee, where she participates in the college’s Global Jazz Institute, Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, Planet MicroJam Institute, and Interdisciplinary Arts Institute. These experiences have allowed her to study with world- class musicians including Danilo Perez, kenny Werner, Terri Lyne Carrington, Kris Davis, Billy Childs, David Fiuczynski, and many others. Her passion is to create a new art form infusing the tenets of Japanese Zen with the sounds of jazz and microtonal contemporary classical music.