Newsletter no. 30
Newsletter no. 30
Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration Project
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EDITOR’S NOTE | OUTCOMES | ACTOR BUSINESS | AWARDS AND HONOURS | OPEN CALLS
Tribute to Kaija Sariaho
The ACTOR community lost a member of our International Advisory Board in May this year. The world lost one of the greatest composers of all time, whose transcendent, but always enlightening orchestrations capture ephemerality, mystery, the cosmic, the deeply personal, the ineffable. Many of us lost a dear friend who taught us so much over the years about what it means to live the life of an artist, engaged in a difficult world.
Kaija’s dedication to her art was unwavering, particularly through her operatic works in the latter part of her life, indeed right up to end as she battled brain cancer. Kaija forged a world of beauty, sensitivity, truth, and deep meaning. The ACTOR community expresses its deep sense of loss and sympathy to her family: her husband, composer, media artist, and educator Jean-Baptiste Barrière, her son, writer, theatermaker, and translator Aleksi Barrière, and her daughter, conductor and violinist Aliisa Neige Barrière.
Creations & Productions
The stars are aligning for Pulitzer laureate, Roger Reynolds. In a singular convergence as he approaches his 90th year later in 2024, unflaggingly dedicated to his mentorship of UC San Diego students, Roger has recently been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His archive is the subject of a Library of Congress Special Collection, and his creative output has never been stronger. He is lovingly portrayed as the subject of a forthcoming documentary film by Kyle Johnson, FOR A REASON, and this Neuma double-album showcases the works featured in the film.
CD 1
1 . DREAM MIRROR [SHARESPACE I, 2010] 22:28
Pablo Gómez Cano, Guitar
Paul Hembree, Computer Musician
2. SHIFTING/DRIFTING [SHARESPACE IV, 2015] 23:29
Irvine Arditti, Violin
Paul Hembree, Computer Musician
CD 2
1. HERE AND THERE (2018) 32:48
Steven Schick, Speaking Percussionist
2. SKETCHBOOK (for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1985) 24:41
Liz Pearse, Low female voice accompanying herself at the piano
Paul Hembree, Computer Musician
2 CD set includes digipak and a 44-page booklet in a slipcase
The album is available at BANDCAMP. Follow the link to listen to the album!
ACTOR's EduFilms
ACTOR's EduFilms are back, with two new installments! In EduFilm 3, "Timbre and Culture," we explore the role of timbre and cultural background in forming our emotional responses to music. In EduFilm 4, "Timbre and Cover Songs," we investigate timbre's role in distinguishing cover songs from their originals. Many thanks to ACTOR collaborator Lena Heng and ACTOR student member Jeremy Tatar for their tireless work in devising the concepts for these videos, and to Patrick Hart for his brilliant animation and sound design work. Stay tuned for EduFilms 5 and 6, coming in autumn 2023!
Publications
New publications involving ACTOR members have been made available:
E. Britton, D. Arbez, P. Hart & K. McPhillips (2023). Performing corporate culture: Analysing meta-narratives and online interactivity through Quigital. Contemporary Music Review. Published online: 10 Jul 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2023.2228601
The article “Diversity in Music Corpus Studies” by Nicholas Shea, Lindsey Reymore, Christopher William White, Ben Duinker, Leigh VanHandel, Matthew Zeller, and Nicole Biamonte, which discusses the anti-discriminatory alignment system used by the TiPS project, has been accepted for publication in Music Theory Online 30.1 (2024).
For the full bibliography, please visit ACTOR publications.
Presentations
ACTOR Summer School
From July 9th to 12th, the first Timbre and Orchestration Summer School (TOSS) took place in Thessaloniki, Greece, organized by ACTOR postdocs Ben Duinker and Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez, and ACTOR collaborator and UdeM postdoc Kit Soden. The summer school was hosted by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with on-site support by Asterios Zacharakis and was held around the TIMBRE 2023 conference.
For five days, an international cohort of 55 students from a variety of academic institutions across Europe and North America as well as independent researchers and practitioners, met at the Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation to learn from leading voices in Timbre research about this multifaceted field as it pertains to orchestration in a broad sense.
As part of the organizing committee of the summer school, we are very proud of this accomplishment, and we are very thankful to the tutors involved and to everyone who supported the event along the way. The ACTOR Central committee is currently discussing the viability of continuing with the summer school in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that it is an important formative workshop for young research scholars and music practitioners.
Follow the link to read the detailed description of activities!
So Curious!
The podcast series So Curious! produced by the Franklin Institute has produced an entire season dedicated to exploring the world of music through the lens of science. The Science of Music. Episode 3 "The Sound of Music: Timbre, Synthesizers, and Orchestration" features an interview with Stephen McAdams in which he speaks about timbre in its relationship to orchestration. Follow the link to listen to this great podcast! Read more
TiPS Project
The Timbre in Popular Song (TiPS) ACTOR project has been awarded a SSHRC Grant: “Interactions of Timbre, Texture, and Form in a Multi-Genre Popular Music Corpus”, applicant Nicole Biamonte, co-applicant Leigh VanHandel, collaborators Lindsey Reymore, Ben Duinker, and Christopher William White. The grant is for $157,222 over three years (2023-26).
Project Updates
Robert Hasegawa - Interim Director
ACTOR would like to announce that Director Stephen McAdams will be on sabbatical leave from September 2023 through August 2024. Associate Director Robert Hasegawa will be Acting Director for this period.
robert.hasegawa@mcgill.ca
Workshop Updates
ACTOR Y5 Workshop
Last July, from the 3rd through the 5th, the Director of ACTOR Stephen McAdams welcomed members to the Y5 Workshop, which concluded the fifth year of activities of the project. Involving over 50 participants in person and approximately 20 participants virtually, via Zoom, the event was warmly hosted by our fellow ACTORians at the Université de Strasbourg. Last year at Y4 back in Calgary, seeing that plans for a workshop in Europe in 2023 had been cancelled, Mathieu Schneider graciously offered to help. Since then, he and his team rose to the occasion and worked tirelessly to offer us all a great and exciting event!
We were thrilled to see our colleagues again, especially those who had not attended the Y4 meeting after COVID. Eleven workgroup sessions were organized, including an insightful roundtable discussion organized by our host, which was followed by a wonderful concert featuring our very own Pierre Michel. While building the ACTOR community, members had an opportunity to get updates on various projects, network, and form new collaborations.
The annual workshop also included the first ever Focus Talk with collaborator Roger Reynolds, five selected student presentations, 12 lightning talks, and three collaborative student grant reports as well as brief reports from the Project Director, the Training and Mentoring Committee, and the Knowledge Mobilization Committee. The three newly elected student representatives were introduced and the third edition of the Mentorship Program was launched. We all got to see first-hand the new EduFilms being developed under the supervision of postdoc Ben Duinker.
We would like to thank all workgroup leaders for the time invested in the organization of each session, our students for their assistance in many areas, and our hosts and co-organizers of this event Mathieu Schneider, Pierre Michel, and Alexandre Freund-Lehmann along with the technical support team of MISHA. A word of gratitude is also due to you, our members, for participating, researching, and helping us bring timbre and orchestration to the forefront of scholarship, practice, and public awareness.
We are looking forward to seeing you all again next year in Vancouver!
Committees
ACTOR Diversity Committee
Following our discussion during the Diversity Workgroup meeting at the Y5 workshop in Strasbourg, we have decided to form an ad hoc ACTOR Diversity Committee, whose aims are presently twofold:
To facilitate the cross-pollination of the Diversity Workgroup's research projects with other ACTOR workgroups, thereby encouraging the idea that these projects are defined by more than the "diversity" in their topics, scope, or repertoire.
To support ACTOR researchers, project PIs, and workgroup leaders in developing strategies for research design, pedagogy, and outreach that celebrate inclusivity and diversity in topics, scope, repertoire, and intended audience.Any ACTOR member is welcome to take part in this committee, and we especially welcome students. We plan to meet several times throughout the year and provide an annual report during the plenary sessions at the Y6 and Y7 workshops. Please note that this Diversity Committee is distinct from the Diversity Workgroup.
If you have ideas for this committee's duties, would like to join, and/or have any other thoughts, we'd love to hear from you!
To that end, please contact Ben Duinker at benjamin.duinker@mail.mcgill.ca.
Student Representatives
We are pleased to announce that our three student representatives for the 2023-2024 academic year have been elected:
Executive Committee (EC) – Rebecca Moranis, PhD student (music theory), CUNY Graduate Center
Rebecca Moranis is a first-year music theory PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. Rebecca’s research interests include timbre and memory, spanning the fields of contemporary and 20th-century analysis, music cognition, and computational music theory. She co-authored “Rhythm Contour Drives Musical Memory” with Mark Schmuckler, recently published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics (2023). Rebecca presented her research “Choreographing Orchestration: A Novel Method for Analyzing Orchestral Timbre through Ballet” at the ACTOR Y5 Workshop and Timbre 2023 conferences this summer and co-presented “Poetic Meter: A View from Music Theory” with Joseph Straus at MTSNYS and NECMT in 2023. She holds a Master of Arts in music theory and a Bachelor of Music in flute performance with a minor in mathematics from the University of Toronto. Rebecca is the co-chair of the CUNY Graduate Students in Music Conference, and previously was the Vice President, Communications, of the University of Toronto Math Union.
rmoranis@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Training and Mentoring Committee (TMC) – Francesco Maccarini, PhD Student (Computer science), Université de Lille
Francesco Maccarini is a PhD student in Computer Science at the Université de Lille. With a strong background in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, he is currently focusing his research on Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods for orchestration. Francesco's primary goal is to explore how AI can enhance the creative process in symphonic writing, fostering a collaborative environment between human composers and AI systems. His research is driven by a solid understanding of music theory, as he seeks to develop models and representations that effectively capture musical concepts within computer systems. In addition to his academic pursuits, Francesco is an accomplished amateur violinist, having started playing at a young age and participating in various musical experiences, including performances with orchestras and chamber music ensembles.
francesco.maccarini@univ-lille.fr
Knowledge Mobilization Committee (KMC) – Simon Jacobsen, PhD student (Music Perception), Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg
After receiving his Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Science in Engineering Physics from Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany, Simon started his PhD in Kai Siedenburg's Music Perception and Processing Lab. His research project focuses on modelling musical instrument identification under realistic acoustic conditions. He has been a student member of ACTOR since May 2022.
simon.jacobsen@uni-oldenburg.de
ACTOR Mentoring Program
We are glad to announce the third edition of the ACTOR Mentoring Program. Consisting ofone-on-one meetings between mentor and mentee pairs, the main goal of this program is to provide emerging scholars, post-docs moving toward tenure-track academic positions, andstudents with guidance and resources so they can develop as a highly skilled, knowledgeable, and networked cohort of scholars and practitioners.Starting in October, each pair involved would have one 30-minute online session per month scheduled by the mentor/mentee themselves according to the academic calendar; that is, October-December (3 sessions) and February-May (4 sessions).Mentoring fields available in the program include:
Careers/Jobs/Cover letters
External funding/Grants
Presentations/Abstracts
Research Methods
Writings/Research Outputs
If you are interested in participating, whether it is as a mentor or a mentee (or both!), please fill out the Mentoring Program Intake Form by 1 September, 2023. This will only take a couple of minutes of your time.
Besides the obvious benefits to mentees, we believe this is a great opportunity for more accomplished scholars to share their expertise and take advantage ofthe mentoring experience. That’s right! Mentors can gain a lot from the experience as well. Not only can they discover personal fulfillment, but also find continuous learning opportunities, establish new relationships, improve work proficiency, increase professional credibility, develop self-awareness, boost coaching skills, and more, so don’t miss out!
Contributing to TOR
We encourage all ACTOR members to share their research (in progress or completed) with the ACTOR community via the Timbre and Orchestration Resource (TOR). This may include an article, blog, or video submission containing information on project ideas, experiments, external resources/tools, teaching materials, analysis, or anything related to timbre and orchestration that you deem relevant. We believe that only in doing so will we truly benefit from the expertise and feedback from the world-class team of scientists, artists, and humanists involved in ACTOR. If you have any questions about the submission process, please contact Kit Soden. Read more
