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Bülent Arel, born in Istanbul in 1918, studied piano and conducting at the Ankara Conservatory. In 1950, he became a sound engineer at Radio Ankara. In 1959, he received a one-year Rockefeller Foundation grant that allowed him to study at the Columbia-Princeton Center for Electronic Music. As recorded by Filiz Ali, his biographer, Arel's time at Columbia-Princeton was a period of great personal discovery. Ali quotes Arel: "Over the past two weeks I have spent three days in the laboratory. My anxiety has subsided as I focus on my beloved oscillators. I'm working on white noise, the erased fundamental of upper-tones, noise compression in narrow bandwidths, sound modulations, desired width of sound tapes, etc. and performing etudes by listening to examples of electronic music while creating pseudo-partitions…My aim was to create sounds that have never been heard before.” http://emfinstitute.emf.org |
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After a relatively short career as a mechanical engineer, Michael Pounds turned his energies toward composition, studying at Bowling Green State University, Ball State University, the University of Birmingham in England, and the University of Illinois, where he is currently completing a doctoral degree. He has studied electro-acoustic composition with Jonty Harrison, Scott Wyatt, Guy Garnett, Cleve Scott, Jody Nagel, and Burton Beerman. His recent awards include the 1998 ASCAP/SEAMUS Student Commission Award, a Residence Prize at the 25th Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition, and a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship for studies in England. Mr. Pounds began teaching in the Music Engineering Technology program at Ball State University in 2000. He writes: “From its conception, Critical Mass was to involve the accumulation of sounds, evolving from individual events to conglomerations that begin to have their own identities. These masses of sound are given shape and movement, and become discrete events in themselves. The title suggests an increasing intensity that reaches a point where an abrupt change is imminent. This change may be catastrophic, as in a nuclear reaction, but perhaps it can also be a sudden transformation into something new and wonderful.” Critical Mass was realized at the Experimental Music Studios of the University of Illinois. http://www.cmusicforum.com |
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Kristi McGarity is a graduate student in music composition with a background in both acoustic and electronic media. She earned a degree in oboe performance at the University of Michigan, and has since returned to her hometown of Austin to seek a Master of Music degree from the University of Texas, where she studies composition with Russell Pinkston and Donald Grantham. Recent awards and honors include prizes in the 2001 ASCAP/SEAMUS Commission Competition and the Athena 2001 Festival Competition. McGarity writes: “The words in so many days to be here are all quotations from interviews conducted in shelters for families, teenagers, and children. Special thanks to Claudia Hampston Daly, executive producer of For Kids' Sake Radio, for permission to use excerpts from the radio program "Lives of the Children." Thanks also to Lesley A. Martin for permission to use a quotation from Mary Ellen Mark's book "A Cry for Help," published by Umbra Editions in 1996.” http://www.uiowa.edu/~cnm/36.020406.html#0 |
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A member of the Brandeis University faculty since 1990, Eric Chasalow directs the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio. He produces the biennial BEAMS Electronic Music Marathon, on the Boston CyberArts Festival. Since 1996 he has curated The Video Archive of Electroacoustic Music, an oral history project chronicling the pioneer electronic music composers and engineers from 1950 to the present. A product of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, Chasalow studied composition with Mario Davidovsky and flute with Harvey Sollberger. He has been honored by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chasalow writes: “In music for tape, I have always found it critical not to give up concern for pitch and carefully conceived rhythms just because timbre has become a foreground element. Even when dealing with sounds that are not discreetly pitched, pitch and register still control the dramatic progress. In And It Flew Upside-down, I have created basic materials derived from very rich distorted sounds and popular singing. These materials are mostly very gestural, so it was a challenge to find the right transpositions and ordering to create a larger dramatic structure without simply becoming repetitious. Although much of this material is made of vocal and guitar samples, I have added layers that paraphrase the articulated, active electronic textures of early Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music center compositions, such as Davidovsky’s early Synchronisms and Babbitt’s Ensembles for Synthesizer.” http://www.ericchasalow.com
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