Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States National Conference 2000.(Critical Essay)

University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, USA, 9-11 March 2000

The annual meeting of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) brought over 150 composers, researchers, and educators to, the University of North Texas (UNT) for three days of music, papers, and panel discussions. The conference was very well planned, and it successfully showcased local student talent as well as several new facilities at UNT: the reconfigurable 400-seat Lyric Theatre--which was particularly well-suited for the presentation of tape music, and the 1,066-seat Winspear Auditorium--in which a concert of music for tape and instruments was presented each evening.

Several corporations donated loudspeakers and audio equipment to the conference. The Lyric Theatre, for instance, was equipped with an arsenal of Genelec loud-speakers placed around the audience, allowing the music to be diffused with pristine clarity.

The tape music of several composers highlighted particularly well the conference theme of sound diffusion. Christopher Morgan, Co-Director of the conference, presented Graphomania 823, which eloquently captures in two sections the beauty of the mechanistic "techne" surrounding the act of writing. Craig Walsh's Junket and Adrian Moore's Superstrings were both exciting thrill rides of phantasmagoric gestural whirring. Paul Koonce's subtle Breath and the Machine navigated the physical processes of instrumental sound-making in which sound diffusion emphasizes spatial acoustical response over sheer gestural motion. Conference Director Jon Nelson diffused Scatter, in which the differential velocities of sound objects is part of the compositional formalism. Other works by Jonty Harrison and Pete Stollery also addressed the conference theme in very effective but divergent ways.

Two concerts of tape music were presented in UNT's Sky Theatre planetarium that featured choreographed star projections and computer-generated animation. Although the quality of the audio playback system there did not seem as high as the other venues, compositions by Terence Pender, Scott Wyatt, Mara Helmuth, and others worked particularly well.

Music for tape and solo instruments was also well-represented at the conference. Paul Rudy's Degrees of Separation--Grandchild of Tree slowly incorporated the live tickling of a cactus amplified with contact microphones into a captivating texture. Douglas Geers's Turnstile for violin and tape alternately treats beautifully simple melodies with moments of virtuosic exuberance. In A River from the Walls, for flute and tape, Linda Antas skillfully interlaces a particularly ...