Participants
Matthew Arndt, Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Iowa, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He studies musical poetics, three-voiced chant from the Republic of Georgia, and other instances of spirituality in music. He is the author of The Musical Thought and Spiritual Lives of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg (Routledge, 2018). His articles appear in the Journal of Music Theory, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, Music Theory and Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, the Proceedings of the International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony, Theoria, Theory and Practice, and Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie.
François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer, writer and theorist based in Paris. He is the Director of French Musical Research Institution INA GRM and has published several books: The Music To Come (Shelter Press), The Order of Sounds, The Infra-World and After Death (Urbanomic). He also produces radio shows for National Radio France Musique and is coeditor of the SPECTRES publication (Shelter Press). His music, often released under the Kassel Jaeger project name, has been presented worldwide.
"With a great meditative force and a musical richness nourished by very diverse sources, the music of Hélène Breschand manages to make us forget the specificity of her instrument in order to reach a singular universality" (Mouvement). International soloist, composer, author, performer in the field of creation, dedicatee of numerous pieces, she belongs to a generation of musicians eager for trans-frontal experiences. Exploring the fields of a total art, we find her in dance, cinema, theater and visual arts, with Eliane Radigue, Christian Marclay, Phill Niblock, The Dø, David Toop, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Caecilia Tripp, Christian Ubl...we find her with Elliott Sharp, in Imaginarium with Wilfried Wendling, and IRE with Kasper T. Toeplitz and Franck Vigroux. "If you still consider the harp an anachronism, just experience the range and power of Breschand in Le gout du sel" (The Wire). www.helenebreschand.fr
Juan Parra Cancino studied Composition at the Catholic University of Chile and Sonology at The Royal Conservatoire The Hague (NL), where he obtained his Masters degree with focus on composition and performance of electronic music. In 2014, Juan obtained his PhD degree from Leiden University with his thesis “Multiple Paths: Towards a Performance practice in Computer Music”. His work in the field of live electronic music has made him recipient of numerous grants such as NFPK, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and the International Music Council. Cancino is the founder of The Electronic Hammer, a Computer and Percussion trio and Wiregriot (voice & electronics), he collaborates regularly with Ensemble KLANG (NL) and Hermes (BE), among many others. Since 2009 Parra is a fellow researcher at the Orpheus Institute (Ghent, BE), focused on performance practice in Computer Music. Juan has been recently appointed as Regional Director for Europe of the International Computer Music Association for the period 2022-2026.
Tatiana Catanzaro is Professor of Musical Composition and New Technologies at the University of Brasilia (UnB, Brazil). She holds a doctorate in music and musicology from the University of Paris IV—Sorbonne. She is currently developing a second doctorate in Music Composition at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the influence of technology over musical models between the Twentieth and the Twentieth-First Centuries.
Charles Curtis is a cellist. His long creative relationships with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, and Tashi Wada have brought into being a body of distinctive works modeled on his cello-playing and performing persona. Naldjorlak (2003–2005) by Radigue is a concert-length solo cello composition made collaboratively with Curtis, in which the wolf of the cello functions as the reference for the tuning of the entire instrument. It is Radigue’s first composition for a live performer and an acoustic instrument without amplification or electronic support. Curtis is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.
Nicolas Debade is a member of INA GRM (Musical research group) since 2019. He is involved in Research projects related to the valorization and development of the Group's written and scientific productions and in charge of teaching missions (notably managing the master's degree by GRM in partnership with the Gustave Eiffel University). Graduated with a PhD in art sciences and sociology of art, his research areas are in the diffusion of innovations and practices in the art worlds, as well as the interactions between artists and publics using new technologies in the field of experimental music. He has been invited to present his work and to curate several communications and (musical) lectures through Europe (Muzički Biennale-Zagreb, Siestes électronique-Toulouse, GRIM-Marseille, GMEM-Marseille, Sorbonne Nouvelle Université-Paris, Changing The Tune-Strasbourg, Rencontres Livraisons-Lyon…). He completes his experience with a musical commitment both as composer and musician, using various synths, string instruments or keyboards, dealing with acoustic vibrations and feedbacks, concrete sounds or electronic noises. In this context, he has collaborated in various projects, album releases and concerts (Recorreguts Sonors-Barcelona, Sonic Protest-Paris, Periscope-Lyon, Nuit d’Hiver-Marseille, Mimi festival-Marseille…).
William Dougherty is an American composer, sound artist, writer, and current Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. His creative work engages with elements of loss, decay, and memory through the sounds of audio recordings and audio recording technologies. Dougherty has received recognitions and awards from the American Academy in Rome, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Cité Internationale des Arts, and the Copland House. His works have been performed internationally in festivals including MATA, Tectonics Glasgow, Donaueschinger Musiktage, and Gaudeamus Muziekweek. Dougherty has published articles and interviews in Tempo, Music & Literature, and VAN Magazine focusing on the work of experimental music-makers like Horatiu Radulescu, La Monte Young, and Pauline Oliveros. He is co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of Contemporary Music Review on the music of Éliane Radigue, has hosted feature-length radio programs at WKCR 89.9FM, and is Editor-in-chief of openwork, an interdisciplinary arts journal published by Columbia University. Dougherty holds degrees from Temple University, the Royal College of Music, and completed additional studies at the Hochschule für Musik in Basel and IRCAM in Paris. He earned his doctor of musical arts degree from Columbia University, where he then served on the music faculty as an Early Career Fellow in 2021-22.
Louise Gray is a researcher and writer. She is an associate lecturer teaching on the BA (Hons) Sound Arts and Design and MA Sound Arts at the London College of Communication. Her interests are rooted in listening (in sound art, music and performance) as parsed through methodologies drawn from psychoanalysis, oral history and feminist theory. This is a strategy to unsettle the extant musicological canon in order that is enriched with a greater frame of work and reference, reflecting multiplicities of positions and relationships. As an AHRC technē-funded doctoral student working at CRiSAP, Louise’s PhD took its cue from Pauline Oliveros’s practice of Deep Listening to conduct in depth interviews with five female composers as a way to redress their lack of representation in musical historiography. Coming out of this, was the identification of the sonic artefact, a mode of listening that occurs in a third space between a listener and speaker. This theoretical position was taken up again while as a recent technē Innovation research fellow at the Wellcome Collection, London, where her research focussed on the relationship of the self to vocality, with particular reference to the vocal production of polio patients in post-war epidemics. As Louise Gray, she has a long-standing writing practice, contributing to The Wire and many other publications. She has published a number of articles on composers Annea Lockwood and Éliane Radigue. Her chapter on female composers and technology will be published in the Cambridge Companion to Women Composers (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2021).
Katja Heldt is enrolled as a PhD candidate at Lunds University in Sweden researching on women in the studios for electronic music in the early beginnings of Electronic Music. She studied musicology at the University of Cologne, Université de Montréal and Humboldt University Berlin with a focus on electronic music, transculturality and decolonization in new music. As an author, she writes for music magazines such as Positionen, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Dissonance, Circuit - Musiques Contemporaines, The Wire, Glissando and VAN. She works for the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music and was responsible as project manager for the research projects "DEFRAGMENTATION - Curating Contemporary Music" on gender equality and diversity in contemporary music festivals and "Donaueschingen Global" as part of the 100th anniversary of the Donaueschinger Musiktage. She as born in 1988 in Germany and lives between Berlin and Malmö.
Cat Hope is an artist scholar academic whose research interests include animated notation, gender and music, Australian music, digital archiving as well as music composition and performance as artistic research. She is currently Professor of Music at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance at Monash University in Melbourne. Hope is president of the Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts (DDCA), the International Technologies of Music Notation and Representation (TENOR) Conference Committee and a reviewer for a number of journals and conferences. She was a member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts Humanities and Creative Arts panel (2016-2019) and is currently a member of the European Science Foundation (ESF) College of Experts.
Jo Hutton has worked as a recording engineer for BBC radio and music since 2000. She completed her PhD on the work of electroacoustic experimental composers Beatriz Ferreyra, Éliane Radigue, Delia Derbyshire and Teresa Rampazzi, which focusses on their methods for creating new electronic sound material in the pre-digital analogue studios of the 1960s and early 1970s. She is a regular reviewer for The Wire and Electronic Sound. She is also a composer/sound designer of experimental music and sound art and her work has been shown at the Museum of London, Tower Bridge exhibition centre, Tate Modern Shorts, and played on BBC Radio 3, Channel 4. Her re-mix of ‘Carbon Cycle’ contributed to Hannah Peel’s 2021 Mercury Nomination. Jo is on the board of trustees for Resonance FM.
Rosie K is a sound artist and vocalist whose work explores interactive digital media, innovations in opera, and ultrachromaticism. Her works have been performed in the Open Signal Festival (Brown University), Carlsbad Music Festival, the Outhaus (Los Angeles), The Wulf (CA), and venues throughout New York City including (le) Poisson Rouge and The Stone. She frequently collaborates with filmmakers Hampton Fancher, Matt Mahurin, Pablo Delcan, and Nesa Azimi on multimedia projects. As a performer, she writes and records with her band Dollshot. Other recent highlights include touring Du Yun’s Pulitzer prize-winning opera “Angel’s Bone” as Girl Angel (Beth Morrison Projects). She teaches electronic music at Sarah Lawrence College, and has been a visiting professor at NYU’s Gallatin School, where she co-founded and taught the 4th Wave Digital Arts Intensive, and she has given guest artist lectures at MIT and Princeton University. Her translation of Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s Manual of Quarter-Tone Harmony was published by Underwolf Editions in 2018.
Michelle Helene Mackenzie is a Canadian writer, musician, and artist born in Vancouver, the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She uses electronics, modular synths, field recordings, video, text, and archival research to explore sonic perception, ecological consciousness, and deep listening. Michelle holds a BA from Simon Fraser University and spent five years pursuing a PhD in Literature from Duke University, where she became interested in literatures of necrophiliac-agonies, the possibilities of sounding the unheard hills of banshee-perturbations, and the violence and cultural amnesia that devours feminine genius. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Music at the University of California San Diego.
Emanuelle Majeau-Bettez recently completed her doctorate in Musicology with option in Gender and Women’s Studies at McGill University (PhD 2022). Her dissertation focuses on the electronic phase of Eliane Radigue's career as well as on the composer's present collaborations with instrumentalists. Among other conference presentations and publications on Radigue, Emanuelle is the author of the composer’s thematic dossier, published on the Ircam's documentation database B.R.A.H.M.S, as well as the first author of “Tracking Auditory Attention in Group Performances: A Case Study on Éliane Radigue’s Occam Delta XV,” an empirical study led with Ircam, to be published in Musicae Scientiae (article accepted). Emanuelle is a member of the editorial board of the Canadian journal Circuit, musiques contemporaines and she participates in the MICA (Musical Improvisation and Collective Action, Ircam) and ACTOR (Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration) research projects. “Outside” scholarship, Emanuelle is a pianist, and she is completely passionate about surfing.
Mikhail Malt has a double training, scientific and musical (engineering, composition and conducting), he holds a thesis, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, on the use of mathematical models in computer-assisted composition and an HDR, at the University of Strasbourg, with a thesis on representation in computer-assisted composition and musicology. Currently, he is a researcher in the Representations Musicales team—UMR 9912 STMS at Ircam and Associate Director of Research at the IReMus — (UMR 8223)—Sorbonne Universités. Mikhail Malt pursues his research and composition activities on the subjects of modeling, creative systems and the epistemology of representation.
Louis-Michel Marion plays the double bass and the viola da gamba. He approaches these assemblies of wood, strings and horsehair as virgin lands from which to extract a sound material to model—material that he shares in projects of improvised music and/or contemporary writing, alone or in the company of a musicians, choreographers, authors, visual artists, and other poets of all practices. Fascinated by Éliane Radigue's solo cello piece “Naldjorlak,” he contacted her in 2014. Since then he has collaborated with her in her monumental cycle OCCAM OCEAN, playing solos, duos and trios with clarinetist Carol Robinson and harpist Hélène Breschand.
Luke Nickel is an award-winning Canadian audio visual artist, virtual roller coaster designer and independent researcher currently living in Berlin. Nickel’s work takes the form of experimental sound compositions, videos, simulated roller coasters and illustrations. His work knots together themes of memory, transcription, queer identity and gravity. He has collaborated with internationally-established soloists and chamber ensembles such as Mira Benjamin, Heather Roche, Quatuor Bozzini, and EXAUDI and shown work in festivals such as Sound Forms (Hong Kong) and the HCMF. About his work, scholar Jennie Gottschalk writes that “there is an unusual quality of rawness” (Experimental Music Since 1970). In addition to his artistic work, Nickel has received a Ph.D from Bath Spa University and actively publishes on topics such as orally-transmitted experimental music, Éliane Radigue and roller coasters. Nickel also co-founded and curated the Cluster: New Music + Integrated Arts Festival in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada from 2010-2020. Nickel is also an avid illustrator of rocks.
Composer and performer Neil O Connor studied at Trinity College, Dublin (M.Litt/PhD Electroacoustic Music) and IRCAM (Paris) and has been involved in experimental & electro-acoustic music for the past two decades, performing in Ireland, Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa and the US. His work has been shown/performed at MOMA, New York, Institute of Contemporary Art, London and has held residencies at the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art and EMS – Swedish Institute of Electro-Acoustic Music, Stockholm, Sweden. He has worked / collaborated with members of the Philip Glass Ensemble, the Glenn Branca Ensemble, Bang On a Can Ensemble and the RTE Symphony Orchestra. His electroacoustic works have won award and mentions at Noroit-Léonce Petitot (Arras, France), Euphonie D’Or des Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique (France) and Musica Nova Electroacoustic Music Competition, (Czech Republic). Neil has published with Bloomsbury, Routledge, Rowman & Littlefield and Cambridge University Press. He is currently the director of ULEMS - University of Limerick Electronic Music Studios.
Douglas Osmun is a composer and improviser working largely in the domain of digital media, exploring how contexts shape interactive experiences or improvisatory structures, and how they blur the boundaries between composer, performer, audience, and artificial intelligence. He is a Ph.D. Candidate in Composition at the University of California San Diego studying under the advisorship of Michelle Lou. His music has been performed internationally, being heard at the SEAMUS National Conference, the SCI National Conference, NYCEMF, Neofonía Festival de Música Nueva de Ensenada, NSEME, the BGSU Graduate Conference in Music, and the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.
Megan Steinberg is an experimental composer and abstract turntablist based in London. She works with found sound, chance procedures, graphic scores, quietness and microtonality. As a free improv abstract turntablist, Megan is interested in furthering the repertoire and exploring performance techniques for the instrument. In 2018 she embarked on a Finnish tour with solo turntable material, and has performed with other musicians including Elliot Galvin, Benedict Taylor and Jenn Kirby, and supported Mariam Rezaei. Megan is studying a PhD at Royal Northern College of Music, where she has been appointed the Lucy Hale Doctoral Composer in Association with Drake Music, from 2021. Her project is focused on the creation of works for Disabled musicians, new instruments and AI, placing accessibility at the beginning of the compositional process. Her music has been performed most recently at Kings Place, Grachtenfestival in Amsterdam, Arts by the Sea Festival in Bournemouth and IKLECTIK. She is currently Composer in Residence with CoMA London. Megan has an MMus in Advanced Musical Studies from Royal Holloway University and BMus Composition from Brunel University. She is incredibly proud to have studied with: Colin Riley, Christopher Fox, Jennifer Walshe and Mark Bowden. In 2018, Megan founded and curated Soundling Festival for International Women’s Day in London. In 2023, she was Artistic Director of the Lucy Hale Music & Disability Festival in Manchester. She is a committed advocate for equality and diversity in new and Classical music, and accessibility of live music.
Dafne Vicente-Sandoval is a bassoonist who explores sound through contemporary music interpretation and electroacoustic performance. Her research has translated into an intuitive investigation of the bassoon’s complex acoustical properties, embracing the elusive behavior of overtones as well as the countless possibilities in timbral shadings and idiosyncratic tunings. Her instrumental practice has led to the creation of a significant body of solo pieces in close collaboration with a handful of composers (Éliane Radigue, Jakob Ullmann, Alvin Lucier, Peter Ablinger, Phill Niblock, Catherine Lamb, Tashi Wada). A graduate of the Paris Conservatory and the Musik-Akademie Basel, Vicente-Sandoval currently lives in Paris. She has published essays in Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, Revue et Corrigée, Blank Forms and Sound American magazines. Recent releases include Ullmann's Müntzers stern/Solo II on Edition RZ, Niblock's NuDaf on XI Records and Minos Circuit on Portraits GRM/Shelter Press.
Italian cellist Deborah Walker is a new music performer and improviser based in Berlin. She is interested in multiple forms of music creation related to the exploration of sound and interaction with other art forms. She has played at many festivals such as I Suoni delle Dolomiti, Italia Wave, ZKM in Karlsruhe, Centre Pompidou (Paris and Metz), Festival dʼAvignon, Festival Nomad in MʼHamid (Morocco), Switch ON (Malaysia) and tours regularly in International venues and Festivals. She is a member of ensemble Dedalus and of the improviser orchestra ONCEIM. She has worked with composers like Pascale Criton, Éliane Radigue, Philip Corner and Phill Niblock, both in solo or in ensemble. Since more than a decade Deborah plays regularly with violinist Silvia Tarozzi. Their repertoire includes both contemporary and experimental works, as well as transcriptions of Italian traditional folksongs from their birthplace, the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy. After a Master in Music and sound composition at the University of Paris 8, Deborah completed a PhD at the University of Lorraine on the work of Fluxus artists in Reggio Emilia and Cavriago collaborating with Rosanna Chiessi and her editions Pari&Dispari, with a focus on the work of American cellist Charlotte Moorman.