FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY As with any American city, the dominant feature of the Knoxville soundscape is the almighty car. With an extension of the interstate zooming only a few blocks from downtown, and a multi-lane surface road separating the University of Tennessee from the city centre, the empire of the automobile isContinue reading “Knoxville, Tennessee”
Author Archives: Musicworks
Richard Windeyer
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY Sitting behind his drum kit and laptop, Richard Windeyer manages the energy of the dance floor, while his colleague Sabrina Reeves emcees the evening’s events. A slow folk ballad suddenly ramps up to 120 bpm; the room pauses for a dance-off; the tempo returns to a slow gaitContinue reading “Richard Windeyer”
Avatar Orchestra Metaverse
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY Avatar Orchestra Metaverse is a global collective making new music within the virtual-reality platform Second Life, an online three-dimensional program that allows users to interact through in-world avatars (users’ digital representations within a given online environment). The Orchestra had its beginnings in early 2007 with the coalescence in SecondContinue reading “Avatar Orchestra Metaverse”
loK8Tr
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY They weren’t going to speak with me. Maybe it was just a he or a she, rather than a they. I didn’t know. An e-mail exchange was possible, but I wanted to meet face to face. I tried cajoling the members of the online musical project with theContinue reading “loK8Tr”
Scenocosme’s Kymapetra
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY The title Kymapetra is a combination of two ancient Greek words, kyma meaning a wave or vibration, and petra, which means stone. Every stone is forged by time—broken, polished, composite, or fossilized—and each has a natural history and vibration. In the interactive installation Kymapetra, five stones surround a bowlContinue reading “Scenocosme’s Kymapetra”
Linda Bouchard’s Murderous Little World
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY Couple Linda Bouchard’s vision and sound with poet Anne Carson’s texts, engage the talents of a host of collaborators, including extraordinary musicians Guy Few, Joseph Petric, and Eric Vaillancourt, give it all several years to cook, move, splinter, and coalesce, and you have Bouchard’s multimedia performance piece Murderous LittleContinue reading “Linda Bouchard’s Murderous Little World”
Pheeroan akLaff
Pheeroan akLaff believes in drums first, rather than last. He can drive an ensemble forward with the machine-gun attack of his snare and the rolling thunder of his bass and toms, compounding and enriching the music with dense polyrhythms, or using the metallic shimmer of his cymbals to surmount it all with a luminous, celebratoryContinue reading “Pheeroan akLaff”
Jeff Morton
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY I imagine that what I hear echoing off the walls of the white-cube gallery is the proceedings of a robot congress, a cacophonous, fevered debate on robot rights—and not a single little robot agrees with any other. I detect strains of barely recognizable melodies, guitar riffs, the squeals ofContinue reading “Jeff Morton”
Cassandra Miller’s Unclassifiable Concert Music
If you had just commissioned Cassandra Miller to write a new piece of music for you, she might get the ball rolling by chuckling and then asking you, “What do you sing when you’re in the shower? What was your favourite song as a kid? What would you be if you weren’t a musician?” ThenContinue reading “Cassandra Miller’s Unclassifiable Concert Music”
Eliot Britton
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY By his own account, Eliot Britton’s music treads dangerous territory. “I represent huge problems with art music and the whole idea of art music,” he says, and goes on to describe how in his compositions within the context of his Ph.D. in music research at McGill University, he’s inchingContinue reading “Eliot Britton”