August 13, 2020
Delighted to be included in longtime collaborating composer Pamela Madsen’s chapter in BETWEEN THE TRACKS: MUSICIANS ON SELECTED ELECTRONIC MUSIC, out on MIT Press and edited by Miller Puckette and Kerry L. Hagan – A collection that goes beyond the canon to analyze influential yet under-examined works of electronic music. The contributors, many of whom are composers and performers themselves, offer their unsung musical heroes the sort of in-depth examinations usually reserved for more well-known composers and works. They analyze music from around the world and across genders, race, nationality, and age, discussing works that range from soundscapes of rushing water and resonating pipes to compositions by algorithm.
I’m featured in Pamela Madsen’s chapter focuses on the collaborative process of creating BROKENHEART with the composer, improviser, flutist and electronic musician Anne La Berge, the writer, visual artist, and filmmaker Quintan Ana Wikswo, and flutist, composer, and performer Jane Rigler. The three of us have worked often together on works that include BROKENHEART, explored here through a series of interviews Madsen conducted.
La Berge is a precursor of some of the important things contemporary composition has now come to mean.
– The Wire
Subjects in this remarkable book also include the collaboration of performer and composer, as seen in the work of Anne La Berge, Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian, and others; the choice by Asian composers Zhang Xiaofu and Unsuk Chin to embrace (or not) Eastern themes and styles; and how technologies used by composers created the sound of the works, as exemplified by Bülent Arel’s use of voltage-control components as compositional tools and Charles Dodge’s resynthesizing of the human voice.
BETWEEN THE TRACKS is available at MIT PRESS here or wherever you select your books.
Contributors
Taylor Ackley, Marc Battier, Valentina Bertolani, Kerry L. Hagan, Yvette Janine Jackson, Leigh Landy, Pamela Madsen, Miller Puckette, David Rosenboom, Jøran Rudi, Margaret Anne Schedel, Juliana Snapper, Laura Zattra
Composers
Bülent Arel, Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio, Anne La Berge, Unsuk Chin, Charles Dodge, Jacqueline George, Salvatore Martirano, Teresa Rampazzi, Hildegard Westerkamp, Knut Wiggen, Gayle Young, Zhang Xiaofu
EDITORS
Miller Puckette
Miller Puckette is Professor in the Music Department at the University of California, San Diego. He has authored Max and Pure Data (“Pd”), programming environments for music and multimedia works.
Kerry L. Hagan
Kerry L. Hagan is a composer and researcher working in both acoustic and computer media. She is on the faculty of the Digital Media and Arts Research Centre at the University of Limerick.
From contributor Pamela Madsen:
Great to see this book Between the Tracks-Musicians on Selected Electronic Music published! My chapter focuses on the collaborative process of the composer, improviser, flutist and electronic musician Anne La Berge with interviews I conducted with her about her piece Brokenheart, which Jane Rigler and I performed with her. This porous process of improvisation was continued on – with further process of expanding and integrating with Quintan Ana Wikswo’s video and text pieces and others. Thank you all for the generous sharing of your work! Loved the process of writing this chapter – interviewing and discussing work while in residence at WISC- The Women’s International Studies Center, Santa Fe. Thank you book editors extraordinaire- Kerry Hagan and Miller Puckett for this opportunity!
