It is that time of year again. Presented by the UB Music Department and the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, the annual June in Buffalo Festival for 2008 will take place on the UB Amherst Campus, from Monday, June 2, through Saturday, June 7. The long-running annual new music festival, now in its fifth decade, departs from its usual format every few years and explores an overarching theme. This year’s June in Buffalo festival will focus on “Music and Computers,” drawing in some of the world’s most illustrious and innovative composers, researchers, and teachers in the field. The different kinds of musical forms involving the use of computers being presented include algorithmic, interactive, multimedia, electroacoustic computer music, and acousmatic music, a form of electroacoustic music that is based on musique concrete, and that is composed for and exists only in a recorded format to be heard by an audience through loudspeakers.

The senior faculty at this year’s June in Buffalo represents a diverse and international group of composers and pedagogues, including Charles Dodge, Cort Lippe, Roberto Morales, Miller Puckette, Morton Subotnick, Ben Thigpen, and Hans Tutschku. Among the leading experts on computer music, their careers span the breadth of the ever-evolving genre, from its inception in the 1970s through to the present day.

Morton Subotnick

David Felder, professor of composition at UB and director of the Center for 21st Century Music, has been the artistic director of June in Buffalo since 1985, when he resurrected the festival after a five-year hiatus. Since taking over the reins of June in Buffalo, Felder has emphasized the importance of meaningful interactions between the senior composers at each year’s event and the emerging composers, who are usually advanced graduate students who use the opportunity both to expand their knowledge and to have their compositions performed at an internationally recognized venue. The composition students who appear at June in Buffalo have undergone a rigorous application process—last year about 20 of the 100 plus applicants made the cut. Sometimes the results of this synergy can be gratifyingly surprising, as happened at last year’s event. Each of the half dozen or so works for percussion written by emerging composers and performed by the group known as the red fish blue fish Percussion Ensemble at a free afternoon performance, were less pretentious, more original, and more enjoyable to listen to than the works of a couple of well-known senior composers that had been performed the previous evening by the same group. Works by the emerging composers at June in Buffalo are usually presented at the free, afternoon events, and generally are not be missed.

Some of the world’s leading performers of contemporary and computer music are among this summer’s resident ensembles and soloists. From Europe comes the Ensemble for Intuitive Music, a German ensemble founded in 1980 in what was then East Germany, long known for the performance of music considered taboo by the former Communist government, as well as members of Germany’s acclaimed experimental chamber music group Ensemble SurPlus. Other featured groups include the members of the widely renowned New York New Music Ensemble and the Slee Sinfonietta, UB’s own professional chamber-orchestra-in-residence. Other distinguished performers will include bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood, the Paris-based early music and new music specialist who impressed local audiences in several performances as a visiting professor some years back as well as at last year’s festival, and the Swedish classical guitarist and new music pioneer Magnus Andersson.

Among the senior composers at this year’s June in Buffalo, Morton Subotnick is probably the most recognizable. Subotnick, born in 1933, teaches at the Music School of the California Institute of Arts in Valencia, a suburb of LA, and is best known for his 1967 work, The Silver Apples of the Moon, the first work ever commissioned by a major record company, appearing on the Nonesuch label. Subotnick studied with the renowned French composer Darius Milhaud, and the American modernist composer Leon Kirchner at Mills College in Oakland, and has composed for acoustic instruments. When he started composing for electronic music, Subotnick went against the then prevalent, academic composers in the field, whose highly abstract electronic music concentrated on pitch and timbre, avoiding any audibly discernible patterns and ignoring rhythm almost completely. Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon and his 1968 work, The Wild Bull, also released on the Nonesuch record label, were both written in a rhythmically vigorous structural mode that the traditional classical music audience could more easily relate to, while still utilizing manipulations of pitch and timbre that orchestral instruments were unable to create. The uses of these techniques allowed Subotnick to claim a much larger audience for his music than had generally been the case with other electronic music, and the strongly rhythmical nature of these two works in particular appealed to several modern dance companies who successfully choreographed them.

Subotnick has continued to compose electronic music that focuses on the live playing of the performers, maintaining an important link to the great tradition of classical music. His 2007 work, The Other Piano, dedicated to the late Morton Feldman, will be performed at this year’s festival. Feldman, a composer whose reputation has soared in recent years, founded June in Buffalo, and Subotnick’s The Other Piano is “other” to the 1977 work by Morton Feldman that is titled simply Piano, and which Subotnick heard at its premiere. Subotnick writes, “In creating The Other Piano, I tried to capture a sense of this pre-verbal embodied musical experience by staying close to basic musical qualities. The work unfolds slowly and with emphasis on the small changes in pitch, time and loudness that bring meaningfulness to our expression. The Other Piano is for piano with surround sound processing. It has four continuous sections: Within, Lullaby, Alone and Rocking. Each section has its own distinct character as well as a special approach to how the piano sound is processed throughout the space of the auditorium. For instance, Lullaby unfolds slowly with great care taken to the details of exact timing of each note as well as the subtle evolving changes of the melody. Individual notes are captured by the computer and form lingering chords that float through the auditorium.”