Event

Steven Takasugi, Composer

Just-noticeably Human (JNH): Musical Humanness in the Age of Digital Automation

January 30, 2024 (Tuesday) — 5:15 PM to 7:00 PM

Lerner Center
Penn Music Building
201 S. 34th Street, Room 101

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ABSTRACT

The concept of “just-noticeable difference,” borrowed from psychophysics, is not a specific compositional tool or metaphor, but a general one that students might apply to any musical parameter that concerns them in their work. I believe it is a composer’s inquiry into perception from an intuitive, metaphorical vantage point. This lecture applies this concept to experiential material and form in the troubled age of automation, in hopes of computer-assisted, technologically critical artworks.

BIO

Steven Kazuo Takasugi, born 1960 in Los Angeles, is a composer of electro-acoustic concert music. This involves the collecting and archiving of recorded, acoustic sound samples into large databases, each classifying thousands of individual, performed instances collected over decades of experimentation and research, mostly conducted in his private sound laboratory. These are then subjecting to computer-assisted, algorithmic composition, revised and adjusted until the resulting emergent sound phenomena, energies, and relationships reveal hidden meanings and bewildering contexts to the composer. Against this general project of fixed-media is the addition of live performers, described as an accompanying project: "When people return..." This relationship often creates a "strange doubling" playing off the "who is doing what?" inherent with simultaneous live and recorded media: a ventriloquism effect of sorts.

Takasugi received his doctoral in music composition at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently an Associate of the Harvard University Music Department. He is a 2022 Creative Capital Awardee, a 2016 Riemen and Bakatel Fellow for Music at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the recipient of awards including a 2010 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, four Ernst von Siemens Foundation Commissions, and a Japan Foundation Artist Residency in Tokyo. He received four invitations to MacDowell including both the Hargraves-Newcomb and Olmsted Fellowships, the Aaron Copland Bogliasco Fellowship in Music, as well as residency fellowships at Yaddo, Brush Creek, VCCA, Civitella Ranieri, and Bogliasco. His work has been performed extensively worldwide. Takasugi is also a renowned teacher of composition associated with masterclasses in New York City, Singapore, Stuttgart, Tel Aviv, Darmstadt, Bludenz, Dublin, Melbourne, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught at the University of California, San Diego, Harvard University, California Institute for the Arts, and the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo. Takasugi is also an extensive essayist on music and was one of the founding editors of Search Journal for New Music and Culture. He has organized numerous discussion panels and fora on New Music including colloquia and conferences at Harvard Music and the Darmstadt Forum.

ATTENDANCE & REGISTRATION

This event is free and open to the public. If you attend in person, there is no need to register. We ask that you join us in person if at all possible, but for those of you who are unable to physically attend we encourage you to participate via Zoom. Please return in this fall for a registration link to attend virtually.

ABOUT COLLOQUIUM

This lecture is part of the 2023-24 Penn Music Colloquium Series. The Department of Music's main Colloquium Series showcases new research by leading scholars in music and sound studies and composers both in the United States and internationally.  All Music Colloquia will take place in Room 101 of the Lerner Center on Tuesdays at 5:15 PM.

Featured image: Laura Bianchi courtesy of Bogliasco Residency Center