Hello from New Mexico! I am currently at the University of New Mexico as an invited composer at the Robb Trust Symposium. I gave a Master Class yesterday to a group of very stylistically diverse composers, and have been enjoying working Ekmeles Ensemble and Will Lang on Hear, a semi-theatrical work - using special masks and tubes with analog electronics – based on archival recordings of cowboy songs from the Robb Trust Archive, which will be premièred on Thursday April 7th at the Cathedral of St. John in Albuquerque alongside premières by Karola Obermueller, Peter Gilbert, and José-Luis Hurtado, and reprised in NYC at St. Peter’s Church in Chelsea on Saturday April 9th. See here for more programme details:

https://ekmeles.com/wp/2022/02/unm-robb-composers-symposium/

Today I also had the great pleasure of meeting this year's featured artist of the Robb Symposium, pianist Emanuele Arciuli, and to hear his extraordinarily sensitive interpretation of my Étude 1 bis d'après Scarlatti, which he will be performing tonight. I hope this will be the first of many future collaborations with this wonderful musician!

Coming up in NY after that: on 20 April at the DiMenna Center, a performance by Canto d’Alma by the Argento Ensemble, sung by Ariadne Greif and conducted by Michel Galante. (You can order tickets here or sign up for the live-streaming here.) It is always a pleasure working with Argento Ensemble, and continuing our exploration of the life and music of Alma Mahler together...

Then on 21 April, JACK Quartet will pre-première A Complete History of Music (Volume 1), a large-scale work for quartet and electronics first commissioned by Die Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik in 2020 at Merkin Hall, alongside world premieres by Khyam Allami and George Lewis. To prepare this work, we will be in residency at EMPAC. Many thanks to Wittener Kammermusik, EMPAC, and also Montclair University for their support for this ambitious work - needless to say, I am very excited to see it come to fruition after many delays due to the pandemic, and so delighted to be a part of this programme. (Tickets are available here.) I hope to see you at some of these concerts - it will be good to be back in NY!

 

 

 

In a difficult year - with many cancellations - I was delighted to have two new works premièred via radio broadcast: a brief excerpt of the 20-minute quartet with electronics commissioned for JACK quartet by Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik broadcast on WDR Radio last Spring, A Complete History of Music (Appendix 2):

 

And this month, another new work with electronics is being broadcast, one composed in a - spiritually close but physically distanced - collaboration with flutist Keiko Murakami for contrabass flute and her extraordinary voice. Il y a plus d'eau que prévu sur la lune was commissioned by France Musique for Anne Montaron's Alla Breve radio show, which features world premières presented first in five short segments of two minutes each, followed by a broadcast of the complete work. It was recorded and mixed in the historic studios of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) at Radio France (pictured above).

You can hear the complete work - along with a portrait interview with myself and Keiko, also featuring other compositions - below or directly on the France Musique streaming site.

You can also listen to the binaural version directly here.

Coming up in 2021-22: Portrait concert in Ruhrtriennale 2021 in August, JACK quartet première in Cologne in October, and new works for Klangforum Wien, Ekmeles with trombonist William Lang, and the Saint Lawrence String Quartet.

After a Spring and Summer of cancellations, I am happy to be able to announce some upcoming concerts and remote events this Fall. 

In September, 2E2M will be performing Pastorale - Hommage à Alfred Schnittke for piano quintet alongside the work to which It pays homage, Alfred Schnittke’s own piano quintet. This concert will take place on Saturday, September 12th, at 8PM, in the new Festival 
Ensemble(s) . 

On Sunday, 4 October, Omaggio a Berio , composed for the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2012, will be featured in the Daniel Pearl Harmony for Humanity Concert broadcast. 

Then on Sunday, 22 November, I will be joining the Tiptoe Company in presenting the immersive concert experience Hacking the piano at Wien Modern. This concert, first performed at the Transit Festival in 2018, will feature Im blutstrahl des mondes alongside the music of Tim Mariën, as well as live electronics performance in the interludes punctuating the concert. Anneleen de Causmaecker will once again be providing the scene design, 
featuring her light and sound boxes. 

I am particularly delighted to announce that I am working with Keiko Murakami on a new work for contrabass and electronics, featuring both Keiko’s newly acquired instrument and her extraordinary vocal ability, which you can hear, for instance, in her interpretations of Richard Barrett’s fascinating pieces for flute and voice, 
Dying words. The new work will have a radiophonic première at the end of 2020, in the Alla breve broadcast of Radio France. The 10-minute work will first be heard in smaller excerpts over the course of several emissions, and then in its entirely in the final broadcast. 

Some highlights to look out for in 2021 are the (postponed) première of A complete history of music for Jack Quartet - which you can hear an excerpt from here - and a portrait CD release (once again, postponed from 2020). 
Here’s hoping the year 2020 finishes better than it started…

This week I will be on the East Coast for some presentations, a Master Class, and a concert, on the following dates:

Wednesday 10 April: an intensive day with Seth Woods' students of the Masters Program in Digital Music, presenting my own work and hearing about their projects in the morning, then meeting for a Master Class in the afternoon

Thursday 11 April: presentation on my work at Brandeis at 4PM, entitled Transgression, re-purposing, and aura: an overview of recent work

Then off to MIT to perform some feedback with metal and instruments with the wonderful musicians of Dinosaur Annex in their Not so heavy metal concert, Sunday, April 14, 2019 at 7:30pm

I would also like to say how much I enjoyed my time in Chile last month, and give a big thank you to Rodrigo Cadiz of the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, André Mestre and Felipe Otondo of the Institute of Acoustics of the Universidad Austral in Valdivia, and most especially to Mauricio Carrasco and the wonderful students of his Artes Musicales y Sonoras course.

I have a lot of impressions to process from that time - also of the natural beauty of the mountains, lakes, rivers and coastline - but most especially I was impressed by the theoretical and aesthetic sophistication the students are gaining through their interdisciplinary education. Mauricio's approach opened my eyes in some ways to the degree to which students can be challenged and their horizons widened. I also enjoyed meeting lecturers in other domains, such as design, and seeing the development of interdisciplinary projects.

Another thing which struck me was the students' political engagement. I found out there is a very strong #metoo movement among students, both in Santiago and in Valdivia, which has led to coordinated mobilisations and massive strikes, and also to artistic expressions such as murals, spontaneous lists of feminist and female-identifying artists, writers and philosophers. I also witnessed students speaking out to teachers and authorities, both to call out lack of representation and praise it where they could find it.

In all, it was a very important experience for me, and I hope to be able to come back again soon!

Marco Fusi; Patricia Alessandrini and Mauricio Carrasco, Casa da Musica, Porto, 2011

Here are some events coming up over the next month:

- 'Focus on Composition' Seminar and Master Class, UCSD, 26 February

- Performance of Black is the colour (Omaggio a Berio) by Ensemble Paramirabo : Carte Blanche James O'Callaghan, 2 March, Salle Multimédia, Conservatoire de musique de Montréal

- Feedback performance with Marco Fusi, alongside new works by Stanford composers Charlie Sdraulig, Julie Herndon, Chris Lortie, Julie Zhu, and Davor Vincze, 8 March, CCRMA Stage, The Knoll, Stanford University (free entry)

And then I will be heading to Valdivia, for a residency at the Universidad Austral de Chile with dear friend and longtime collaborator Mauricio Carrasco, for whom I composed menus morceaux par un autre moi réunis and Funeral Sentences. More details on those plans to come...

In the meantime, if you are in the Bay Area, stop by CCRMA (the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics) at Stanford for the yearly open house on 1 March - come and see the instrument petting zoo, as well as talks and live music!

Here are some upcoming concerts in February (I thought I would add some February flowers here as I obviously don't have photos from these concerts yet.)

Friday-Saturday 1-2 February, Palo Alto (7.30PM): My Stanford première at Bing Concert Hall, in the free CCRMA @ Bing concerts

Wednesday 6 February, NYC (8PM): guitarist Neil Beckmann gives the New York première of menus morceaux par un autre moi réunis with electronics performer Caitlin Cawley at Future Space

Monday, February 11, San Francisco (8PM): Earplay Ensemble performs Hommage à Purcell , alongside works by Stephen Blumberg, Tristan Murail, and a world première by Hi Kyung Kim, at the Taube Atrium Theater in their Mise en abyme season opener (tickets available at the door)

Stay tuned for another performance in the Grains of Sound festival later this month (details to come).

I don't seem to be able to keep up with writing about events as they happen, so here is a post looking back at the past year, with a few previews for 2019:

My 2018 began and ended at the Estalagem da Ponta do Sol Residency for Contemporary Music and Electronics, as we have decided to move the yearly residency from January to December, with a visit to Madeira-ITI in nearby Funchal.

It also marked my move - after five years at Goldsmiths, University of London - to Stanford University, where I am now teaching Composition and performing research at CCRMA. I am very grateful for all of the support I received for my research and creative work at Goldsmiths, and definitely plan to keep exchanging ideas and collaborating with my fabulous former colleagues working in interactive creative technology there, especially Freida Abtan, Rebecca Fiebrink, Mick Grierson, and Atau Tanaka. 

I had an enchanting springtime in London before my departure, including two concerts with Riot Ensemble and one last electronics workshop and concert at Goldsmiths featuring Ewa Justka and Heather Roche (thanks to the Goldsmiths Public Engagement initiative, the Henriksen Foundation, and Weisslich). Some of this work is set for a UK CD release (stay posted for updates on this in the next few weeks), and I will be back in London in 2019 for a première by the Britten Sinfonia at the Barbican on 2 November in their Life Rewired series, as part of an event focussing on the work of Ada Lovelace in relation to Artificial Intelligence. There will be some UK reprises of earlier work as well, including performances by the Explore Ensemble of Tracer la lune d'un doigt - featuring the 'Piano Machine' - in their Augmented Instruments tour, 19-23 June in Oxford, Leeds and London.

Autumn was marked by two premières of new works with electronics: one in the Moving Sounds Festival in NYC, with the Argento Ensemble (conducted by Michel Galante), and the other by Tiptoe Company in the Transit Festival in Leuven (with my sincere thanks to both of these festivals as well as the Austrian Cultural Forum, Q-02, and Champsdaction for their support) - both have been wonderful collaborations for me, beginning with residencies with both ensembles, and continuing in future projects.

I am also enjoying my new musical life in the Bay Area. I was delighted to be a featured composer in the Grains of Sound festival in October, and am looking forward to joining them again in February for a performance of menus morceaux par un autre moi réunis. Also this coming February, Earplay Ensemble will perform Hommage à Purcell. The first time I came to San Francisco was for their performance of Trio d'après Schoenberg five years ago, so it will be a very special occasion for me to perform electronics with them again, now that we are neighbors.

Also planned for 2019 so far are residencies at the Universidad Austral de Chile, MIT (with Dinosaur Annex) and at the Scientific Delirium Madness project at Djerassi.

If you would like to receive quarterly updates from me via email, please subscribe at AlessandriniUpdates@gmail.com

Wishing you all a peaceful and joyful 2019!

Here are some highlights from 2017:

Peyee Chen in Parlour Sounds, Edinburgh International Science Festival, Summerhall, Edinburgh 2017

The year began working on the theatrical multimedia performance Parlour Sounds with Peyee Chen, Scottish Ensemble Red Note and musicians from the Conservatoire de Paris' Diplôme d'artiste interprète programme at the lovely Woodend Barn in Banchory, and presenting a workshop version as part of their Sound Series, thanks to funding from Sound and Music and Diaphonique. The performance was premièred in the Spring at the Edinburgh International Science Festival and reprised at the Conservatoire de Paris, receiving a five-star review from the Scottish Herald.

Much of the rest of the summer was spent co-editing a special edition of Array, the yearly publication of the International Computer Music Association, alongside live-coder and researcher Shelly Knotts. This edition highlighting feminist perspectives on computer music practice was released in hard copy at the 43rd International Computer Music Conference/6th Electronic Music Week in Shanghai in October, and will be available in a new digital release for ICMC 2018 in Daegu.

In the Autumn, I worked with Explore Ensemble and Konstantin Leonenko in creating a new system to mechanically excite the strings of the piano, and composed a new work for it, Tracer la lune d'un doigt, premièred by Explore in the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Once again, the British press looked kindly on my work.

Trying out a prototype of the piano excitation system, with Nicholas Moroz and members of the Explore Ensemble, Goldsmiths, October 2017

Manca Festival 2016, RECITAL GUITARE et TECHNOLOGIES

SOLO III : Récital guitare et technologies - Festival MANCA 2016

Au musée national Pablo Picasso “La Guerre et la Paix“, Vallauris

Dimanche 27 novembre à 11h

Christelle Séry guitare, Alexis Baskind réalisation informatique musicale
Patricia Alessandrini “Menus morceaux pour un autre moi réunis“, 4 miniatures pour guitare et électronique, 2009

+ Christopher Trapani, Liao Lin-Ni, Facundo Nicolás Llompart, Panayiotis Kokoras, + Vinko Globokar

CIRM, Centre National de Création Musicale

Premère of Leçons de ténèbres for ensemble and electronics by Ensemble Recherche at Donaueschinger Musiktage 2016

Sunday 16 October, live broadcast at 11am on SWR Radio. Programme: Peter Ablinger, Wieland Hoban, Patricia Alessandrini, Martin Smolka