Tag Archives: unruly music

Unruly Music Festival – March 8-10

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dal-niente

This weekend is the Spring Unruly Music Festival, and features both performances and new piece premieres of mine. Friday night I’ll be performing in Cage’s Song Books. Saturday night an acoustic piece of mine, Pixelism, will be premiered by the Dal Niente ensemble. I’ll also be joining the group on stage for a piece involving live electronics. Should be a fun weekend!

All concerts are at 7:30 in Vogel Hall.

Thursday, March 8:
Minneapolis percussionist Patti Cudd (of Zeitgeist) integrates electronics into performance with atypical solo percussion instruments, including bass drum and cajon, in a concert of music by Daniel Almada, Jeff Herriott, Cort Lippe, Eric Lyon, Chris Mercer, and Barry Moon.

Friday, March 9:
A celebration of John Cage (1912-1992) for his 100th birthday, featuring performances of music from across his career.

Saturday, March 10:
Dal Niente presents the US premiere of “The Brightest Form of Absence,” an exploration of the Mojave Desert and Death Valley by Siemens Prize-winning composer Hans Thomalla, featuring soprano, 13 instrumentalists, and live electronics. The ensemble will also premiere new works written for them by UWM faculty and student composers.

Collision (2011) at the Unruly Music Festival

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‘Collision’ is a piece that revolves around a machine conductor that directs the players and their improvisations. The conductor decides when and how to ‘collide’ the players together, forcing them to play at the same moment in the same way. This is the driving force of the piece: players can improvise in and out of the collisions, but they are never allowed to stray too far from one another.

The instrument used is Napsynth, my early research into multi-touch control that eventually became TC-11. The trackpads gather the multi-touch data using a program called Tongseng. Then Processing and Pd are used to analyze and distribute the control data for synthesis. The visuals also feed from that data, and are drawn using OpenFrameworks.

David Collins joined me for this performance at the Unruly Music Festival at Vogel Hall in 2011. Collins is a Milwaukee native, composer, and performer.

Collision (2011) at the Unruly Music Festival from Kevin Schlei on Vimeo.

Unruly Festival Performance – This Thursday

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David Collins and I will be performing this Thursday night, 7:30, at Vogel Hall as part of the Unruly Music Festival. We have an exciting set of pieces that use multi-touch controllers, motion sensors, and networked laptops to drive our custom synthesis code. The second half of the concert features UWM composers Chris Burns and Amanda Schoofs improvising while generating live animations.

We will be premiering a new piece of mine, Sp]|[n, which uses GyrOSC with a hacked open hard drive to create a spinning controller. The data pushes a granulated piano sample to random resting points, where it evolves into sinewy sonic waves. David and I will be improvising along side it with a new multi-touch instrument for iPad.

Purchase tickets online, or call the Marcus Center box office at (414) 273-7206.

FALL 2011 FESTIVAL
October 27-29, 2011

Thursday, October 27:
Music by Milwaukee artists making innovative use of technology in live performance. David Collins and Kevin Schlei integrate multitouch control devices, networking, and animation into their joyous grooves; “Fieldwork,” with Christopher Burns and Amanda Schoofs, pushes electric guitar and voice into new sonic territory.

Friday, October 28:
Renowned English musician John Butcher presents an evening of improvisations for solo saxophone. Butcher is celebrated for his distinctive approaches to timbre, gesture, and musical time – this is an extraordinarily rare opportunity to hear him perform live in Milwaukee.

Saturday, October 29:
Chicago ensemble Dal Niente opens their Unruly Music residency with an evening of chamber music for clarinet, saxophone, violin, cello, percussion and piano, in a program combining 20th-century classics by Anton Webern, Iannis Xenakis, and Giacinto Scelsi with new works by Aaron Einbond and Edgar Guzman.