MUSIC

Nameless Sound presents Pauline Oliveros in a Live Telematic Trio with Ricardo Arias and Chris Chafe. Presented in collaboration with REMLABS at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music.

Featuring:
Pauline Oliveros (pictured, New York) – accordion
Ricardo Arias(Colombia) – balloon kit
Chris Chafe (California) – cello, electronic celletto

Pauline Oliveros returns to the Nameless Sound concert series for a performance at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music. This telematic performance uses Internet2 technology to connect Oliveros in Houston to Ricardo Arias in Bogota Colombia and Chris Chafe in California for a live improvisational performance.

Houston native Pauline Oliveros is a senior figure in contemporary American music. Her career spans fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. Today she is Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. Since the 1960's she has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. She is the founder of "Deep Listening," which she describes as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds.

This is Oliveros’ fifth concert with Nameless Sound. It is the latest chapter in her long history with the organization, which began under her guidance ten years ago as the Pauline Oliveros Foundation Houston. The concert is also a continuation of Oliveros’ ongoing exploration of telematic performance. Oliveros will perform in Houston, on the accordion. Using Internet2 technology, which supports a long distance connection and low latencies, fellow improvisers Ricardo Arias and Chris Chafe will join her live on screen.

For the last 24 years, Ricardo Arias has used sound to improvise and compose with. He uses unconventional instruments and found objects as sound sources for his work. Since 1992, he has focused almost exclusively on the balloon kit, a number of rubber balloons attached to a suitable structure and played with the hands and a set of accessories, including various kinds of sponges, pieces of Styrofoam, rubber bands, etc. Using this contraption as his main instrument, he collaborates with a large pool of experimental and improvising musicians from around the world. Since 2007, he is the Assistant Professor in the Art Department at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

Chris Chafe is a composer, improviser, cellist and music researcher with an interest in computers and interactive performance. Chafe is the director of Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, where he also teaches. An active performer either on the net or physically present, his music is heard in Europe, the Americas and Asia. He also creates gallery and museum music installations with biological, medical and environmental "musifications" featured as the result of collaborations with artists, scientists and MD's.

In conjunction with the concert, Pauline Oliveros will meet with the Composition Seminar at Rice University.  This Seminar is FREE and Open to the Public Friday, November 18 from 2:00 - 3:20PM  at the Wortham Opera Theatre at the Shepherd School of Music, Rice University.