MIVOS quartet is devoted to performing contemporary music.   It was founded in 2008 by violinists Olivia DePrato and Joshua Modney, violist Victor Lowrie, and cellist Isabel Castellvi.  They met while pursuing a master’s degree at Manhattan School of Music in the Contemporary Performance Program.  Since their inception they have performed and premiered works by both young and established composers including Anna Clyne, Juan Calderon, and Kirsten Broberg.   They have performed at venues such as The Stone, Issue Project Room, the Bretch Forum and for the American Music Center at the Chelsea Museum.  Recently they have collaborated with clarinetist Ned Rothenberg for a performance of his quintet for clarinet and string quartet, which they will be recording on Tzadik records in the fall of 2009.   

 Hard Data (for String Quartet) is a data-mining, sonification, and visualization project that uses statistics from the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as source material for an interactive audiovisual composition based around an open-source “score” of events. Using Xenakis’ understanding of formalized music as a starting point, DuBois draws upon a variety of statistical data ranging from the visceral (civilian deaths, geospatial renderings of military actions) to the mundane (fiscal year budgets for the war) to generate a dataset that can be used for any number of audiovisual compositions.The intention of the project is to recontextualize the formal stochastic music in the context of real-world statistics, and to provide a compositional and metaphoric framework for creating an electroacoustic music relevant and significant to our time. 

String Quartet #3: “The Essential”

for string quartet and brain waves

composed by Dave Soldier & Brad Garton

and performed by the CNS Symphony Orchestra

String Quartet #3 “The Essential“   

Dave Soldier and Brad Garton, June 2009

For my third string quartet, we choose to return to the essential quartet, that which is pure. To attain this ideal, one would bring to existence a string quartet untouched by human hands.

The piece is constructed as follows:

1. We selected a favorite string quartet, Schoenberg’s Second, scherzo movement.

2. We retained the original pitches and extirpated all of  his rhythms and phrasing marks, rewriting them completely at our whim

3. The string players record our “enhanced” score

4. In performance, they place the instruments on chairs, and sit behind on other chairs. They trigger sections of their own playing using electroencephalograms: the brain waves are projected for the audience to see. The amplitude threshold of the brain signals trigger the entry of their various parts, while frequency and slope are derived to trigger transformations, including changes in tempo and pitch.

There are two movements

1. Fourier Transformations

This is the original Schoenberg second movement in amplitudes of frequency distributions without a time dimension: all frequencies (pitches) used in the piece are played simultaneously, in amplitudes (volume) which are the product of the number of times the pitch is played and the volume used. It is thus quite short in duration, and could be listened to music lovers in a hurry, as it is identical to the original version of the piece, containing all of the same information.

2. Exobiology: I breathe the air on other planets

Expanding time to a variable fractal dimension in our second movement, the recorded phrases are triggered by the performer’s minds. Performers may use motor actions, such as eye closure or isometric muscle presses, to trigger variable brain waves from the cortex and transform their prerecorded performance.

An epigram and further analysis for The Essential Quartet is a western blot (Figure 1) prepared by acquiring two violins, a viola, and a cello, boiling them (or boiling followed by varnish  extraction with benzene), and displaying their entire constituent proteins on the basis of molecular weight on a polyacrylamide gel. This provides all essential information on the string quartet and is completely identical to the original.

The CNS Symphony Orchestra  

Mari Kimura, Curtis Steward, violins & brainwaves
Herve Bronnimann, viola  & brainwaves
David Eggar, cello  & brainwaves
Brad Garton, Dave Soldier, conductors