Experimental Music & D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form

Posted on October 28, 2017 by Ann Warde

On Growth and Form in Experimental Composition and Analysis: Music by Pozzi Escot and James Tenney
On Growth and Form 100 conference – Dundee and St Andrews, Scotland
Univerisity of Dundee, 15 October 2017
Research Seminar at the University of York, 18 October 2017
This conference celebrated the centennial of the publication of D’Arcy Thompson’s seminal book On Growth and Form. Its focus on formal similarities across biological and geological phenomena has had a profound impact not only on biological research but also on artists, including architects and musicians. Composer and theorist James Tenney begins two of the chapters of his MetaHodos with quotes from Thompson’s text. My presentation investigates connections between Thompson’s ideas and Tenney’s text, which he used as a basis for early experimental computer-generated pieces realized at Bell Labs in the 1960s. Pozzi Escot’s interest in Thompson is also presented as clearly linking of music and mathematics in her analysis of Chopin’s first Prelude.
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Amplified Silence @ Ithaca Porchfest

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Ann Warde

. . . preparing a performance of Cartridge Music (John Cage, 1960)
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Music, Animal Sounds, Perception

Posted on May 11, 2017 by Ann Warde
Animal Voices in Three Compositions:
– Olivier Messiaen, VI. L’alouette lulu (Excerpt With WoodLark) (1956_58)
– Dawn’s Chorus (2008)
– Imagined Environments (2016)
Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY
Composition Seminar
25 April 2017
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VCCA 2017

Posted on March 12, 2017 by Ann Warde

At the Virginia Center for the Contemporary Arts, along with field recording in the Blue Mountains, an overnight autonomous recording I made through an open window unexpectedly captured coyote voices. And during preparation for a performance, I realized there were just-audible links between John Cage’s Sonatas 14 & 15 and the sounds of metal that might be heard by gently strumming Richard Lippold’s Gemini.
25 February 2017
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Toward a Critical Musical Practice

Posted on December 15, 2016 by Ann Warde
Seminar: Sound Work – Composition as Critical Technical Practice
Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium
23 November 2016
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Scientific Listening

Posted on November 30, 2016 by Ann Warde
DisPerSion Lab
York University, Toronto, Canada
10 November 2016
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Beautiful Sounds . . .

Posted on September 30, 2016 by Ann Warde
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in Ithaca NY at the 2016 Porchfest
. . . John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes, for prepared piano, composed in 1948, create unexpectedly inviting, gentle buzzes, bells, resonant gongs, and extended piano sonorities. In-between the piano’s strings are pieces of rubber and plastic, small, medium, large bolts, furniture bolts, screws, hardware nuts, an eraser . . . . . . and out of the piano come . . . delicate bells . . . expansive gongs . . . hi-hat cymbals . . . drums  . . .
as if suspended  in  t  i  m  e   &    s    p    a    c    e
18 September 2016
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Spectromorphology, Human Affinities, Animal Voices

Posted on July 10, 2016 by Ann Warde
MuSA Conference
Karlsruhe, Germany
1 July 2016
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The Spaces of Animal Voices

Posted on June 30, 2016 by Ann Warde
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During 2015-16 I worked at the Contemporary Music Research Centre, at the University of York, investigating ways to listen to spatial interactions among animal sounds, and to how sound changes as it travels through air and water. How might music composition facilitate an exploration of our perception of animal voices and our connections to them? Starting from the composition Dawn’s Chorus we made Imagined Environments.
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Patrick Wood

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Ann Warde

Four Hands Vier Hände
Pomfret School, Connecticut
November 2015
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