IDEAS Performance: Cartography Event

Guest Speaker: Samuel Dunscombe, DMA Student, UCSD (photo by Thembi Soddell), et al. Date: March 20th, 2014 Time: 5pm-7pm Location: Calit2 Theater, Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego Host: Shahrokh Yadegari, Director, IDEAS

DESCRIPTION/ABSTRACT: This immersive sound performance is organized by Music grad student Samuel Dunscombe with Miyuki Inoue, Judith Hamann, Kouhei Harada, Chris Goliski and Michiko Ogawa. It is the second in a series of nine performances staged in the 2014 season of the Qualcomm Institute IDEAS series. Cartography Event is an immersive sound performance piece devised by Samuel Dunscombe and realized by a collective of musicians from Japan, Australia and the United States. It will be presented at the end of a three-day working residency in the Qualcomm Institute. The event will be both for acoustic performance and live electronics. The piece examines the use of gesture -- both physical (the micro and macro movements required to play an instrument, as well as movement and positioning throughout the performance space), and hypothetical (musical gestures, sound objects, live processing) – as a means to articulate, or map out, a space. The process of mapping is multi-modal, and it includes the use of sound, sight, touch, and the obfuscation and problematization of these sensory experiences. Communication of the score will be achieved via wireless-networked cell phones. The score itself will not be a traditionally notated work, but rather, a combination of text instruction, graphic symbol, and notated pitch, that will grant more freedom of movement (literally and figuratively) to the performers Three performers (clarinetist Michiko Ogawa, computer programmer and audio engineer Kouhei Harada as well as visual artist and vocalist Miyuki Inoue) will appear telematically from Tokyo, Japan, while the other three members (Dunscombe on clarinet, cellist Judith Hamann, and percussionist Chris Golinski) will perform live in San Diego. SPEAKER BIO: Samuel Dunscombe arrived in Fall 2011 at UC San Diego, where he is working toward a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree from the Department of Music. He was born in Melbourne, Australia, where he lived most of his life. Dunscombe attended the now-defunct Victorian College of the Arts, receiving a Bachelor of Music Performance: Clarinet, with honors. He earned a Master of Music Performance degree in composition and computer music from the University of Melbourne, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Art (Sound) at RMIT University. In his artistic practice, Dunscombe explores the tension between Western traditions of contemporary classical music, sound art, free improvisation, and electronic music performance. He uses clarinets and the graphic programming environment MaxMSP, in conjunction with abstracted, real-world sounds (field recordings). In work that is highly exploratory in nature, both sonically and conceptually, Dunscombe takes real-world, real-instrument, and electronically-generated sounds which twist and morph into each other, creating an unstable sonic terrain that challenges traditional boundaries between music, the real world, and the electronic interference (noise) that has become so ubiquitous in the modern age. For more, visit www.samueldunscombe.com.