Composition Immersion Week

The Ithaca College Composition Program is excited to announce the Composition Immersion Week, a full week of activities pertaining on music composition and its practice. During the last week of classes, students will participate in several activities with two distinguished guests, both pioneers in their respective fields.

JOHN RICHARDS

Professor John Richards (De Montfort University, UK) will be in residence from 2 -4 May. His research explores Dirty Electronics focusing on shared experiences, social interaction and critical making. He is concerned with the performance of large-group electronic music and DIY electronics. His work pushes the boundaries between music, performance art, electronics, and graphic design and is transdisciplinary as well as having a socio-political dimension. He has also written numerous texts on DIY practices, performance of electronic music, and object-orientated and material approaches in relation to sound art. For more info, please visit: www.dirtyelectronics.org

CHAYA CZERNOWIN

Professor Chaya Czernowin (Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard University) is the 2021-2022 Karel Husa Visiting Professor of Composition at Ithaca College and she will be returning to Ithaca for the second time this academic year to work with composition students from 5 – 7 May. Chaya Czernowin was born and brought up in Israel. After her studies in Israel, at the age of 25, she continued studying in Germany (DAAD grant), the US, and then was invited to live in Japan (Asahi Shimbun Fellowship and American NEA grant) Tokyo, in Germany (a fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude) and in Vienna. Her music has been performed throughout the world, by some of the best orchestras and performers of new music, and she has held a professorship at UCSD, and was the first woman to be appointed as a composition professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria (2006–2009), and at Harvard University, USA (2009 and on) where she has been the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music.

Czernowin was appointed Artist in residence at the Salzburg Festival in 2005/6, at the Lucerne Festival, Switzerland in 2013, and at Huddersfield Festival 2021. Characteristic of her work are working with metaphor as a means of reaching a sound world which is unfamiliar; the use of noise and physical parameters as weight, textural surface (as in smoothness or roughness etc), problematization of time and unfolding and shifting of scale in order to create a vital, visceral and direct sonic experience. all this with the aim of reaching a music of the subconscious, which goes beyond style conventions or rationality. For more information, please visit: www.chayaczernowin.com