and the Scholarly Lectures Series present:
Dr. Harry Bulow and Dr. Mark Applebaum
Lecture: "Whatever Happened to Modern Music?"
Dr. Harry Bulow
Performance: "S-tog"
Dr. Mark Applebaum
assisted by Mr. Al Wojtera, Director of Percussion, Radford University
Whatever Happened to Modern Music?
Harry Bulow explains the crisis in the arts in the twentieth century, and clarifies the role of
modernism and the effect it has had on post-modernist art. His discussion will examine the role
of modernism in music, art, dance, and philosophy.
S-tog is a constellation of possible artificial influences (on the musical thoughts and organizing principles governing the product of a free improvisation) which is mapped onto a discrete durational scheme derived from one particular found system-the Copenhagen metro system (which itself influences the thoughts and organizational principles governing the product of another larger and ongoing group/metropolitan improvisation).
To play S-tog is to take a journey, the parts of which relate to the terrain traversed (or train stations passed), which in turn correspond to an absolute time-line. In other words, players improvise freely along their chosen paths but must respond in any conscious way to abstract textual provocations that are provided in the score and occur at specific times. S-tog is not a musical object, but rather a process of musical exploration confined by a selectable but rigid temporal frame.
S-tog was composed in 1991 during a residency in Copenhagen. Since its 1991 premiere in Denmark it was adapted for a 1993 collaboration with David Tudor and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, explored over the course of one year by the S-tog Trio, and performed as a theater piece in Tokyo by the Japanese ensemble, MANUFACTURE. Tonight's performance will employ three electro-acoustic sound-sculptures of my own design and construction: the mousetrap, the mini-mouse, and the duplex mausphon.
Harry Bulow received his B.M. degree in music education from San Diego State University (1975) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in music theory and and composition from UCLA (1978, 1983). He studied composition with Aaron Copland, Peter Mennin, Henri Lazarof and Henry Mancini. His works have received numerous awards including 1st Prize at the International Composers Competition in Trieste, Italy, the "Oscar Espla" Prize from the city of Alicante, Spain and 18 consecutive awards from ASCAP. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina where he teaches music theory, composition and computer application.
Mark Applebaum was born in Chicago in 1967. He received his B.A. from Carleton College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego, where he studied with Brian Ferneyhough. His solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, and electro-acoustic music has been performed throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia with notable premieres at the 1992 and 1994 Darmstadt, Germany Summer Sessions, the 1994 Young Nordic Music Festival in Sweden, Italy's 1995 Festival Spaziomusica, and ICMC '99 in Beijing.
Applebaum has received commissions from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, the American Composers Forum, the Jerome Foundation, MANUFACTURE (Tokyo), and Zeitgeist, among others. His music has been performed by artists such as the Arditti String Quartet, the Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble, Anthony Davis, Harvey Sollberger, and members of Speculum Musicae. Recently he has completed a solo piano work, commissioned by Betty Freeman for Leonard Stein's Los Angeles Piano Spheres series. In 1997 Applebaum received the American Music Center's Stephen Albert Award and the Hincks Residency Fellowship at the Villa Montalvo Artist Colony in Northern California.
Applebaum is also active as a jazz pianist and received the 1994 Jazz Society of Southern California Prize for a series of live simulcast concerts of his music performed by his jazz trio on KSDS (San Diego Jazz Radio). He builds and improvises with sound-sculptures made of junk, hardware, and found-objects mounted on electro-acoustic sound boards; Mousetrap Music, a CD of sound-sculpture improvisations has been released on the Innova label. Innova will also release an upcoming CD of Applebaum's computer music in January of 2000. Applebaum has taught at the University of California at San Diego and served as the Dayton-Hudson Visiting Artist at Carleton College. He has been a faculty member at Mississippi State University since 1997.
About the Sound-Sculptures:It was in 1990 that I designed and constructed my first sound-sculpture, an instrument called the mousetrap, out of junk, hardware, and found objects mounted on an electro-acoustic soundboard. Typically, I play three instruments: the three-legged, table-sized mousetrap, the mini-mouse, a smaller instrument designed to sit on the music desk of a piano so that I can play both new and old instruments together, and the duplex-mausphon, a two-tiered affair.
The instruments consist of threaded rods, nails, wire strings stretched through a series of pulleys and turnbuckles, plastic combs, bronze braising rod blow-torched and twisted, doorstops, shoehorns, ratchets, steel wheels, springs, lead and PVC pipe, corrugated copper plumbing tube, Astroturf, parts from a Volvo gearbox, a metal Schwinn bicycle logo, and mousetraps. The pickups are 50õ surplus piezo contact elements; there are eight pickups on the mousetrap, four per stereo side; the duplex mausphon is also a stereo instrument with one pickup on each of its two levels; mini has one pickup.
I play the sound-sculptures with my hands and with a number of different strikers and gadgets including Japanese chopsticks, knitting needles, combs, thimbles, plectrums, surgical tubing, a violin bow, and various wind-up toys, tops, etc. Located in the midst of the sculptures is a mixer and a small rack of electronic signal processors with their associated triggering pedals, mostly junky analog delays, early-era pitch transposers, unnatural reverbs, and the like. Signal-to-noise ratio has never been my greatest concern.
There are many compelling aspects about these instruments (but, admittedly, drawbacks as well): their diverse sonic landscapes (which obscure a focused sonic personality), their hybrid material constitution (which require diverse performance techniques), their miniature and portable nature (which limit their acoustical presence and necessitate electronic components), their unconventional and low-tech sensibilities which suggest broad creative responses (which in turn interact more remotely and tenuously with a mythic "communal musical discourse"), their uniqueness (which severely diminishes the development of a multi-user performance canon or common practice), their postmodern appropriation of disparate vernacular elements signifying a diffusion of transgressed cultural locations (their postmodern appropriation of disparate vernacular elements signifying a diffusion of transgressed cultural locations), etc.
Like all things in life one weighs advantages and disadvantages. At this point in my creative development, the exploration of these instruments makes me think about music deeply. That's a big advantage.
