Additional info on the Kraaklink page.

Camille Hesketh, soprano
Juan Parra Cancino, electronics

Camille Hesketh (b. Vancouver, Canada, 1980)
Ms Hesketh completed her Bachelor's in Music at the Vancouver Academy of Music in 2003 with Phyllis Mailing and David Meek, and continued her graduate studies at The Royal Conservatory of The Hague, Netherlands with Maria Acda, Barbara Hannigan, and Manon Heijne.  She has received awards & scholarships from The Canada Council for the Arts, The BC Arts Council, The Vancouver Foundation and The Leon & Thea Koerner Foundation.  Ms Hesketh has performed new commissioned works with the Nieuw Ensemble (Netherlands), Modern Baroque Opera (Vancouver), the Shanghai Int’l Multicultural Festival, as well as in the Lucerne Festival (CH) with conductors Daniel Reuss and Pierre Boulez.  Ms Hesketh is currently a member of the Nederlands Vocaal Laboratorium.

PROGRAM: Tilburg, 17 september

John Chowning..............Voices                                      13'
Yannis Kiriakides.............dead cat/live cat                      8'
Juan Parra C..................Tu Recuerdo Manda                  7'
Ton Bruynèl....................Denk mal das denkmal              7'
James Tenney...............Voices                                       10'
Richard Karpen...............Il nome                                     15'

PROGRAM NOTES

Dead cat/live cat (from 'escamotage')( 2005)
What can we really know about something that we cannot percieve ?

A magician comes on stage to perform the old ‘cup and ball’ routine but things don’t seem to go as they should. His female assistant has an obsession with quantum physics with a particular fixation for Schrödinger’s Cat, the famous gedankexperiment of the Austrian physicist, which describes how, if we take reality to a quantum level a cat can be both dead and alive at the same time.

Yannis Kyriakides (1969)
Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969 and in 1975 emigrated with his family to Britain. After travelling for a year with his violin in the near east, learning traditional music, he returned to England to study musicology at York University, later being drawn by the music of Louis Andriessen to move to The Netherlands, with whom he studied under at the Hague Conservatory.
At that time he also had the inspiring opportunity to collaborate as composer on three projects with the maverick conceptual sound artist Dick Raaijmaakers and the director Paul Koek. He currently lives in Amsterdam.

Tu Recuerdo Manda (hommage a Victor Jara) (2007)
With this piece I challenged myself to integrate both my emotional and aesthetic influences in music. The text is a reconstruction of various lyrics of the Chilean  songwriter Victor Jara, passing from love to political declamation, from sadness to hope. The computer's relationship to the voice searches for its own timbre universe, without being intrusive. More than a duo, this piece aims to take Jara's musical legacy and spread it over two persons.

Text:
Throughout the night and day, It seems like I hear the rain, I hear a whisper.
It is a free song, that wants to offer itself to whoever holds its hand in an endless chain. It makes sense if it resonates in the veins of who dies singing the truth. I am not afraid of your threats, you patrons of misery. You want to hide your infamy But the color of murderers won't wipe away from your faces. Don't lose your hopes. The sun will return. The night will leave.
Our life has not been made for surrounding it with hate and sadness.
It is not enough to be born, to grow, to love, in order to find happiness.
The greatest cruelty is gone. Now your eyes are filled with light, and your hands with honey. And my hands are the only thing I have, they are my love and my sustenance.

Voices (2005-07)
“Voices” is a play of  imagination evoking the Pythia and the mystifying effects of her oracular utterances in such reverberant spaces.  A single soprano engages a computer simulated cavern with her voice when the Pythia’s voice becomes the voice of Apollo.  The computer  allows us to project sounds at distances beyond the walls of the actual space in which we listen – to create an illusory space. The pitches are based upon a division based in the Golden Ratio, from antiquity, rather than the traditional division and octave.   Selected pitches of the soprano’s voice line are then tracked by the computer running a program written by the composer in MaxMSP, a powerful synthesis/processing  programming language developed by Cycling '74.   The soprano’s voice is transmitted from a small microphone to the computer where it is spatialized, mixed with synthesized sounds and then sent to the surround sound audio system.

John Chowning (1934)
John M. Chowning was born in Salem, New Jersey.
He studied composition in Paris for three years with Nadia Boulanger,and doctorate in composition from Stanford University in 1966.
Chowning discovered the frequency modulation synthesis (FM) algorithm in 1967.  In 1973 Stanford University licensed the FM synthesis patent to Yamaha in Japan, leading to the most successful synthesis engine in the history of electronic musical instruments. He taught computer-sound synthesis and composition at Stanford University's Department of Music and was founder and director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), one of the leading centers for computer music and related research.

Denk mal das denkmal (1984)
This piece, written originally for bass baritone and tape, was intended to be a comment on the redundancy of erecting war memorials, and a sarcastic comeback to bureaucratic attempts to allow people to forgive and forget.   The title itself, a play on words, roughly translated.."think badly of the memorial" sets the ironic tone of this somewhat political piece. This arrangement by WireGriot enhances the behaviors of the tape by means of real-time spatialization.

Ton Bruynèl (1934- 1998)
Ton Bruynèl was born in Utrecht January 26th 1934.
From 1952 to 1956 he studied piano with Wolfgang Wijdeveld at the Utrecht Conservatory of Music and composition with Kees van Baaren. He focused enthusiastically on the French musique concrète. He chose his instrumentation with the reproduction of concrete sounds in mind, and oriented himself with the Electronic Music Studio at the universities of Utrecht and Delft , later renamed the Institute for Sonology. In 1957 he established his own studio in Utrecht - the first private studio in The Netherlands - specializing in writing music which combines electronic and acoustic sounds. In the 1970s and 1980s he taught electronic-composition at the Utrecht Conservatory.
His compositions Chicharras  and Adieu Petit Prince earned Bruynèl an award at the 1986 International Festival for Electronic Music in Bourges, France.

Voice(s) (1982-83)
For female voice(s) with optional and variable instrumental ensemble and multiple tape- delay system.  This piece, originally 18 minutes in length,  was written for Joan La Barbara and Morton Subotnick as a timbral exploration on the harmonic series of D.  Instructions are to improvise on the series while following the score’s indications of temporal density. Arranged for solo voice and digital delay system by C. Hesketh & J.Parra.

James Tenney (1934-2006)
James Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado, where he received his early training as a pianist and composer. His teachers included Eduard Steuermann, Chou Wen-Chung, Lionel Nowak, Carl Ruggles, Lejaren Hiller, Kenneth Gaburo, and Edgard Varèse. He was active in the field of electronic and computer music, working with Max Mathews and others at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. He taught at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of California, and was Professor of Music at York University in Toronto.

Il Nome (1987)
Il Nome for soprano and tape was composed in 1987. The text, 'Il nome di Maria Fresu' is by the Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto. Maria Fresu was one of the 84 people killed in the August 2 1980 bombing of the train station in Bologna, Italy (attributed to the neo-fascist group "Avanguardia Nazionale"). She was blown beyond any identification. The names of those killed by this bombing form a memorial on a wall of the reconstructed train station. Along
with Zanzotto's poem, the text for 'Il Nome' includes a short passage from the libretto of Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo". 'Il Nome' was composed for the soprano Judith Bettina whose voice is also the basis for much of the tape part. Recordings of breaking glass, a single note played on a violin and a tomtom were also used. The recorded sounds as well as some purely synthetic sounds were processed in various ways using the resources of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustic at Stanford University.

Text:
And the name of Maria Fresu
keeps exploding
at dinnertime
in every pot
in every pan
in every mouthful
in every belch-exploded and disseminated-
in millions of forgettings, comas, burps/

From Monteverdi's Orfeo
You are dead my life, and I am breathing?
You have left me never to return, and I remain?
No.

Richard Karpen (b. 1957)
Richard Karpen is a native of New York, where he studied composition with Charles Dodge, Gheorghe Costinescu, and Morton Subotnick. He received his doctorate in composition from Stanford University, where he also worked at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
He has been the recipient of many awards, grants and prizes including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the ASCAP Foundation, the Bourges Contest in France, and the Luigi Russolo Foundation in Italy. Along with numerous concert and radio performances, his works have been set to dance by groups such as the Royal Danish Ballet and the Guandong Dance Company of China. Karpen's compositions have been recorded on a variety of labels including Wergo, Centaur, Neuma, Le Chant du Monde, and DIFFUSION i MeDIA.
He was Founding Director of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington and currently serves as Divisional Dean for Research in the College of Arts and Sciences.