[Friday @ 11:00am – 12:30pm, room 9]
Daedelus, Rachel Rome, Eran Egozy, and Ramon Castillo
Abstract
Four faculty-artists from different institutions reflect on the opportunities and challenges of teaching music performance with electronic and digital instruments, with a special focus on how their creative practice informs their pedagogy.
Biographies
Daedelus has been an instigator of electronic music culture for the past 20-plus years. A fore-figure of Los Angeles’ beat scene, they have released more than 20 LPs, countless EPs, remixes, and additional productions on labels such as Ninja Tune, Brainfeeder, Dome of Doom, and more. As a performer they’re synonymous with performative controllers, from the Monome to computer-free modular, and have played 1,000-plus shows across six continents at venues ranging from the underground Low End Theory to festival main stages such as Coachella. Now a founding faculty member for the Berklee College of Music’s new EDI (electronic digital instrument) program, Daedelus has begun to live up to their Greek mythological namesake.
Rachel Devorah Wood Rome practices improvisation with bespoke electronics, both analog and digital, and with French horn, her mother tongue. Sometimes she puts notes on a page. She is interested in superhuman prolongation, opaque complexity, the re-signification of archaic tools and materials, and parallels between the physical properties and social meanings of spaces. She creates aural, and sometimes also visual, structures that seek to reveal and reframe habits of auto-echolocation, situating one’s self with/in/among sound/space/time. She values machines for their patience. Her research and teaching practices amplify critical agency in the use and design of sonic media.
Eran Egozy, Professor of the Practice in Music Technology at MIT, is an entrepreneur, musician and technologist. He is the co-founder and chief scientist of Harmonix Music Systems which developed the video game franchises Guitar Hero and Rock Band, selling over 35 million units worldwide and generating over $1 billion in annual sales. Eran and his business partner Alex Rigopulos were named in Time Magazine’s Time 100, Fortune Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40, and USA Network’s Character Approved awards. His current research and teaching interests are interactive music systems, music information retrieval, and multimodal musical expression and engagement. His recent projects include *12*, an audience-participation work for chamber music were audience members use their mobile to musically interact with the stage musicians, and Tutti, a massively multiplayer mobile-audience performance piece where the entire audience becomes the orchestra. Eran is currently developing ConcertCue, a program-note streaming mobile app for live classical music concerts. ConcertCue is featured in concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New World Symphony, and is the recipient of a grant from the Knight Foundation.
Ramon Castillo, D.M.A., is a composer, performer, music technologist, improviser, and educator with a focus on live expressive performance using unconventional instruments and techniques. His compositional output includes works for Minecraft/video games (as instruments), robots, syntesizers, and traditional acoustic instruments. His long-term creative project Autumn Ate Everything integrates much of the above in a solo-performance package. A list of instruments Ramon has performed in public: Trumpet, Horn, Guitar (electric, acoustic, classical, guitar synth), Bass, Percussion (mostly mallets and aux), Piano, Cello, Banjo, Toy piano, Melodica, Voice, Bass ukelele, Baton (conductor’s), Balinese gamelan (gong, gangsa, reong, kempli, pokok), Javanese gamelan (Lou Harrison’s Si Betty), Synthesizer, Robot, Laptop/iPad/Electronic Digital Instuments, guitar pedals (as a musical instrument), sound-reactive video synth, Otamatone, Minecraft (as a musical instrument).