Newsletter no. 7
Editor’s Note
Happy Spring! We are very happy to be sharing new concerts, publications, and more from ACTOR members with you this month. Check out the “ACTOR Business” section of the newsletter for links to new pages with ACTOR membership details, events, and information about this summer’s Y3 Workshop, which will be held virtually July 12–16.
Thanks to everyone who has shared their news–we love hearing from you! You can send in your news at any time during the month via the website; deadlines for the next month’s newsletter always fall on the last day of the month.
Best,
Lindsey Reymore, ACTOR Analysis Postdoc
ACTOR Newsletter
ACTOR Outcomes
Creations & Productions
“Au clair d'un croissant" by Noriko Baba
Five ensembles joined forces at the first edition of the Festival Ensemble(s) from 11 through 13 September 2020 in Paris to honor composers of different nationalities and generations. The event included 6 concerts involving 26 composers. On the 13th, ACTOR member Guillaume Bourgogne conducted "Au clair d'un croissant" by Japanese composer Noriko Baba, performed by all five ensembles: 2e2m, Cairn, Court-circuit, Multilatérale, and Sillages. The piece is available online on YouTube.
Concert "Mécanique de l'intuition".
Last April 5th, 2021 IRCAM made available a recording of the Concert "Mécanique de l'intuition" conducted by Sébastien Boin & Guillaume Bourgogne and performed by Ensemble C Barré. The event had the technical support of IRCAM and included works by Francisco Alvarado, Giulia Lorusso, Mikel Urquiza and Francesca Verunelli.
Publications
Antoine, A., Depalle, P., Macnab-Séguin, P. & McAdams, S. (2021). Modeling human experts' identification of orchestral blends using symbolic information. In R. Kronland-Martinet, S. Ystad & M. Aramaki (Eds.), Perception, Representations, Image, Sound, Music, pp. 363–378. LNCS 12631, Springer Verlag, Cham, Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70210-6_24
Michel, P.(2020). Towards a consideration of the contemporary musical work as ‘a work in progress’ ; Closing the gaps between the score, the form and the work’s ‘becoming’, in Borio, G., Giurati, G., Cecchi, A., & Lutzu, M. (Eds.),Investigating Musical Performance, Routledge, pp. 124—135.https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429026461
Michel, P.(2020). Melody, repetition, and periodicity: A study of parallels between György Ligeti, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. In Temes, B.T., & Agawu, K., (Eds.),A tribute to György Ligeti in his native Transylvania n° 1 & 2, Cluj-Napoca : MediaMusica, pp. 133–159. https://www.academia.edu/44915048/Melody_Repetition_and_Periodicity_A_Study_of_Parallels_between_Gy%C3%B6rgy_Ligeti
Reymore, L. (2021). Characterizing prototypical musical instrument timbres with Timbre Trait Profiles. Musicae Scientiae (online first publication).https://doi.org/10.1177/10298649211001523
Presentations
Pierre Michel contributed to the webinar “Istantanee–Collective Improvisation in Europe: Techniques and Styles", March 18–20, 2021. Recordings of the webinar can be found here:
Student member Jorge Ramos passed the Doctor in Music Transfer-Exam (1st Year); his video presentation of “Technology and Timbre: An autoethnography on the influence of electronics on the composer's orchestration practice” can be viewed below, or on the ACTOR Video Series page.
Awards and Honours
Timbre perception was featured on the cover of the high-impact journal Nature Human Behaviour, highlighting an article by French colleagues Etienne Thoret and Baptiste Caramiaux with ACTOR members Philippe Depalle and Stephen McAdams.
Lena Heng received a Student Paper Award, Honorable Mention for her presentation and proceedings in the Future Directions of Music Cognition conference for “Timbre's Function in the Perception of Affective Intents” (authors Lena Heng, Stephen McAdams). The presentation can be viewed here: https://osf.io/ct9fx/
Upcoming Events
Urban Sound Symposium
Catherine Guastavino is co-organizing the second edition of the Urban Sound Symposium (April 19–21; https://urban-sound-symposium.org/), which includes sessions on sound art in public spaces. The Urban Sound Symposium is organized as an interactive 3-day virtual event, bringing together practitioners and experts from around the globe that are confronted with urban sound in their professional activities. It is organized simultaneously in Ghent, Montreal, Nantes, Zurich, London and Berlin by researchers from Ghent University, McGill University & CIRMMT, Université Eiffel, EMPA, UCL and TU Berlin.
Future Directions of Music Cognition
Hosted by The Ohio State University and co-chaired by ACTOR postdoc Lindsey Reymore, ‘Future Directions of Music Cognition’ is taking place from February 22 through May 31. The event includes a weekly online speaker series with talks by ACTOR members Zachary Wallmark (“Empathic listening: Music and the social mind,” April 26) and Stephen McAdams (“Analyzing the perceptual effects of orchestration practice through the lens of auditory grouping principles,” May 3). For a full schedule and to register, click here.
New ACTOR Member Spotlights
Jeanne Côté
Originally from Sherbrooke, violinist Jeanne Côté holds a Master's degree from McGill University and a Bachelor's degree from the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal. She has developed a keen interest in new music and collaborations with composers. Jeanne is a founding member of the Andara String Quartet, a young chamber music ensemble that has received attention across Canada. Jeanne currently teaches violin and improvisation in Montréal. She was a member of the CORE Ensemble of McGill University in 2019-20.
Jeanne is part of the Musician's Auditory Perception Project (MAP) research team. This research explores the auditory perception of musicians through compositional processes involving exchanges of various sources between composers and performers. Jeanne works closely with composer Pedram Diba and is interested in the relationship between auditory perception and physical space, specifically the "intimate" space of musicians (located a few centimeters from the body).
Camille Lienhard
Camille Lienhard studied musicology (beginning in 2007) and composition (beginning in 2009) with Mark Andre, Annette Schlünz, Philippe Manoury, and Thierry Blondeau. At the University of Strasbourg under the direction of Mathieu Schneider, his master’s thesis focused on French music of the late nineteenth century. After some time entirely devoted to composition, he took up research by bringing his work closer to the problems revealed by his experience of contemporary creation. As a doctoral student at the GREAM Laboratory of Excellence, under the direction of Pierre Michel, he devoted his dissertation to an epistemological study of pitch as a musical parameter and its evolution in the instrumental writing of the last forty years. He defended his dissertation in 2020, and the thesis is currently in press. Since 2016, Camille has been a lecturer at the Université de Strasbourg since 2016, teaching aesthetics and analytic practice. He has written on a broad range of musical repertoire and presents a monthly radio program on ACCENT4.
Camille’s research focuses on the field of contemporary art music and on a more general transhistorical philosophical questioning. This work consists of identifying the relationship of instrumental writing to complex sounds and their models, and the aesthetic implications of this link. He also aims to situate this theme in the field of a general epistemology of Western music by questioning the logic that governs musical writing and its evolution throughout the history of concepts. The main axes of his research include: 1) confronting the notions of the pitched noted as a concept of rationalization of sound material and of the “liberation of sound” as a subversion of the former, 2) connecting composition and psychoacoustics in score analysis, applying a model of simple (level of classic compositional writing) vs. complex (level of timbre and synthesis) sound functions to instrumental music, and 3) the aesthetic question of the future of musical modernism as a paradigm of “progress” in the formalization of material in the philosophical and epistemological context of postmodernity.
ACTOR Business
Chinese & East Asian Music Working Group
For the past four months, Lena Heng and Bob Hasegawa have been organizing meetings of an ACTOR workgroup focusing on Chinese and East Asian music. Our meetings so far have included discussions and presentations on Chinese music theory, the contemporary Chinese orchestra, and analysis of traditional music for Chinese instruments as well as new compositions by Jia Guoping and Guo Wenjing. In an upcoming workgroup meeting (April 8, 13:00 EDT), we'll be welcoming Lei Liang (UCSD) to talk about his piece Tremors of a Memory Chord for piano and Chinese orchestra. If you'd like to attend, contact Bob Hasegawa.
We'd like to organize a meeting later this April to plan future workgroup sessions, research directions, and publications. If you are an ACTOR member who would like to get involved with the group, it's not too late to join: email Bob Hasegawa to be added to our workgroup list. Be sure to include your full name and your preferred email. Once we determine the time that works best, we'll get in touch with everyone who responded with a meeting date and time.
Website Update
To improve accessibility and better inform our members of ACTOR’s activities, we have added three new pages to our website:
ACTOR Y3 Workshop: this dedicated webpage now includes important information for workgroup leaders as well as details about all the working groups meeting for a discussion. The full schedule is available.
ACTOR Events: with access to an interactive calendar, you may now quickly browse through ACTOR events and learn more about what has happened and what is coming up.
General Information: this page contains information about ACTOR membership categories, how to apply for membership, and other resources available to members such as the Internal Pages, the Data Repository, Publications platforms, etc.
Internal Directory
Members, if you have not yet done so, please take five minutes to fill out the google form to provide your information for the ACTOR internal directory. The purpose of the internal directory is to help members with shared interests connect. We anticipate this will be especially useful in fostering collaborations among newer members and student members.