Hitchcock Etudes & Kubirck Etudes by Nicole Lizée – Cowboy Rounds by Ian Dicke
Nicole Lizée - Called a “brilliant musical scientist” and lauded for “creating a stir with listeners for her breathless imagination and ability to capture Gen-X and beyond generation”, Montreal based composer and video artist Nicole Lizée creates new music and video from an eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, glitch, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Lynch, and 1960s psychedelia.
Her commission list of over 50 works includes the Kronos Quartet, BBC Proms, San Francisco Symphony, National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Australian Art Orchestra, NYC’s Kaufman Center, Powerplant, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, So Percussion, and Eve Egoyan.
Nicole was awarded the prestigious 2013 Canada Council for the Arts Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music. She is a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow (New York City/Italy) and recently received a 2016 Lucas Artists Fellowship Award (California).
Hitchcock Études and Kubrick Études are volumes 1 and 2 of the The Criterion Collection: a series of glitch-based pieces that delve into the worlds of iconic films and filmmakers - each with a unique cinematic style - that have made a marked impact on her aesthetic, forming an idiosyncratic exploration into the marriage of glitch and concert music. The premise is centered around her ongoing preoccupation with the fallibility of media. Technology has the potential to fail and can fail in spectacular ways, creating fascinating sounds and visuals. How to capture and replicate those beautiful mistakes?
Each work is constructed around damaged and deconstructed audio and video from specific films from the auteur’s canon. The resulting errors and imperfections are woven together to create a sonic landscape over which accompanying piano material - itself emulating the traits of broken or malfunctioning media - is performed live.
Cowboy Rounds by Ian Dicke
Ian Dicke (b. 1982) is a composer inspired by social-political culture and interactive technology. Praised for his “refreshingly well-structured” (Feast of Music) and “uncommonly memorable” (Sequenza 21) catalogue of works, Dicke currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of California, Riverside. His music has been commissioned and performed by ensembles and festivals around the world, including the New World Symphony, Alarm Will Sound, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, ISCM World New Music Days, and the Atlantic Coast Center Band Director’s Association. He has received grants, awards, and recognition from the Barlow Endowment, Fulbright Program, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, New Music USA, New York Youth Symphony, ASCAP, and BMI, among others. In addition to his creative activities as a composer, Dicke is also the founder and curator of the Outpost Concert Series in Riverside, CA and is a former co-director of Fast Forward Austin, a music festival held annually in Austin, TX. For more information on works in progress, upcoming performances, commissioning, and score rentals, please visit www.iandicke.com.
Cowboy Rounds is a song cycle for piano/vocalist and live electronic processing. This work “remixes” source material culled from the John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip, an ethnographic field collection hosted online by the Library of Congress.
Cowboy Rounds reexamines oral tradition and ownership through the lens of today’s internet-driven free culture movement. The folk recordings within the Lomax archive do not represent a final, unchangeable document, but rather a snapshot of each song, unique to its time, place, and performer. The lack of copyright in these field recordings invites current and future generations of musicians to continue developing the songs, either through digital manipulation of the recorded material itself or reconstructing elements of the recording through live performance. In that sense, Cowboy Rounds is a work deliberately caught between the ideological constructs of permanence and ephemera while building an intersection between new technologies and old traditions.
