Friday October 24, 2014
8:00 pm
Winifred Smith Hall
Claire Trevor School of the Arts
UC Irvine

The Gassmann Electronic Music Studio in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at UC Irvine presents Hammer & Hair: The Music of Neil Rolnick in concert Friday October 24, 2014 at 8:00 p.m. in Winifred Smith Hall on the UCI campus. Admission is free; no ticket is required.

The composer will give a pre-concert lecture titled “Integrating Music and Media” that afternoon in Winifred Smith Hall at 4:30 pm, free and open to all. He’ll discuss some of the ways he establishes relationships between different media and arts onstage.

The concert will feature Rolnick performing solo works for computer, and graduate students of UCI performing his chamber works Digits for piano and computer, Fiddle Faddle for violin and computer, and Hammer & Hair for violin and piano.

Much of composer Neil Rolnick’s work connects music and technology, and is therefore considered in the realm of “experimental” music, yet his work has always been highly melodic and accessible. Whether employing electronic sounds, improvisation, or multimedia, his music has been characterized by critics as “sophisticated,” “hummable and engaging,” and having “good senses of showmanship and humor.”

Rolnick pioneered the use of computers in musical performance beginning in the late 1970s. He has performed his music around the world, exploring digital sampling, interactive multimedia, vocal, chamber, and orchestral works. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s he was responsible for the development of the first integrated electronic arts graduate and undergraduate programs in the U.S., at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s iEAR Studios, in Troy, NY.

This concert is the first event in the eighteenth season of the Gassmann Electronic Music Series at UCI. For more information about the series, visit http://music.arts.uci.edu/dobrian/gemseries

Neil Rolnick’s official website is here.