Enjoy!
- Seda

Watch&Read
Art of Noises (1913) by Luigi Russolo

Poème électronique by Edgar Varèse (audio only)

Poème électronique by Edgar Varèse (original video)

Background on Poème électronique

Guero by Helmut Lachenmann (video)

Excerpts in the podcast come from:
CD 1: Electro Acoustic Music: Classics, Neuma Records, 1990
CD 2: Lachenmann, Piano Music / Marino Formenti, Col Legno, 2003

Those of you who can make it to the concert on Friday will hear something very extraordinary. I will be improvising a contemporary cadenza to the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th concerto using a live-electronics framework by composer Edgar Barroso.

In the concert on Friday I will insert an electro-acoustic improvisation into the middle of Beethoven’s notated cadenza demonstrating how different elements from within the concerto are perfectly suitable for such an experiment.

I hope to see many of you at the concert on Friday, if you cannot make it to the concert you will be able to hear a recording on my website, www.sedaroeder.com. I am really excited about this unprecedented experiment, and am looking forward to your comments.

Fri, April 15
8:00 PM
Paine Hall, Harvard University
$5 students
$8 general

Tickets can be purchased at the Harvard Box Office, or at the door.

Presented by the Harvard-Radcliffe Chinese Students Association.
Chinese Symphonic Masterpieces II
proudly presents:

Plum Blossom Country
composer Masaaki Hayakawa

Journey to the West
Double Concerto for Flute and Erhu
World Premiere; Co-commissioned by CSM
composer Oliver Caplan (Harvard SEAS Staff)
soloists Kevin Leu ’11, Flute; Charles Vanijcharoenkarn ’11, Erhu

Music director Hanjay Wang ’11

In this episode of Blackbox, I would like to give you a short introduction on the development of new playing techniques to create such new sounds. I will also show you a two examples for such interesting sounds from my own repertory: the “fishing line” section from “Lacrymae” by Murat Yakin and the “e-bow+mallet+plucking+whistling” section from “Drifting through the Echoes of Time” by Turgut Erçetin.

Enjoy!
-Seda

Links for further exploration:

In this episode I am going to show you that dissonances are actually as such not the reason why some of us find contemporary music uncomfortable. You will see that when we are provided with a steady beat, and a clear rhythmic structure, we can take even the most unbearable dissonances.

Enjoy!
–Seda

PS: next time when you listen to a popular song by Björk or Röyksopp try to imagine the music without the beat. Then you will also see how dissonant some of the most popular songs actually are. If you want to try this out just click on the links below:

Röyksopp: A Higher Place
Björk: Possibly Maybe

You can download a copy of the program, which is authored by the German composer Klaus Hinrich Stahmer, here:

Seda on Bayern 2 Radio

(In case you only want to hear the playing, skip forward to 46:00 minutes.)

Enjoy!

Tristan Chord

For many of us, contemporary music is defined by its extensive use of dissonances: intervals that -when played simultaneously- sound clashing, and not really in harmony, for some ears even disturbing. But there is something very important here to keep in mind: dissonance as such is not necessarily something unpleasant or unnatural. Composers like Bach, Mozart, Chopin, all used dissonances. With one important point however, when these composers used dissonances, and created tension they always resolved it.

Today I would like to bring three examples for the different uses of dissonance by Mozart, Chopin and Wagner, and show you how these composers handled dissonance and paved the way for the future composers.

– Seda

As always please don’t hesitate to contact me with questions or comments. Enjoy!

–Seda

The other one is an extraordinary contribution to the electro-acoustic music scene in North America: Hydra. Hydra is a so to speak loudspeaker orchestra specially designed for the performance of electro-acoustic music.

The concerts will take place at Paine Hall at Harvard University, on December 10 and 11 starting at 8pm, there will also be a late night concert on December 10 at 10.30pm with a large scale electro-acoustic work by Francois Bayle.

Our performance will take place during the Friday concert. Hope to see many of you there!

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As you all know in this podcast series I usually talk about contemporary music, but this time I would like to focus on music that is new not in the sense that it was composed recently, but that is new because it is still undiscovered for the wider public: the piano sonata op. 88 in g-minor by Robert Fuchs.

Fuchs was a contemporary of Brahms and in today’s episode I compare two pieces by these two composers.

Please leave me a comment if you like the podcast!

Best wishes,
– Seda

Here is the full recording of the piece from my performance at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival:

If you would like to listen to a live performance of Zellen-Linien, you are kindly invited to my upcoming performance at MIT’s Kilian Hall on September 25, at 8pm.

I am looking forward to seeing you there, and as always please let me know if you have any comments on this podcast either by simply emailing me at seda@sedaroeder.com or using the comments field below.

– Seda