The TIMARA department was well-represented at this year’s SEAMUS conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The Society for Electroacoustic Music in the US holds a conference each year featuring works by nationally renowned composers and juried pieces by students and professional composers. TIMARA tudents, faculty, and staff traveled to the conference to share multichannel compositions and multimedia performances. Junior Rachel Yee and visiting assistant professor Eli Stine shared ambisonic compositions. Yee’s work, The Fragility of Humanity, was first written for TECH 203, a multichannel composition course taught by Stine. Stine’s work, Where Water Meets Memory, features recordings of oyster reefs recorded by Stine at the Anheuser-Busch Coastal Research Center (Oyster, Virginia). Aresty performed ‘Inkling,” a mixed media composition featuring resin-embedded contact microphones with found objects.
Maya McCollum’s work, Unbalanced, Disintegrating, is a multimedia performance featuring electric violin, stop-motion animation, a wearable sculpture, and projection mapping. The piece joined the long list of TIMARA students who have won the Allen Strange award for best student composition including Rachel Gibson, Hunter Brown, Mitchell Hermann, Eli Stine, and Ben Dorfan. To create the work, McCollum says, “I mined the USDA Forest Service archive, finding documentation from the past hundred years on natural and man made decay in the environment (bark eating beetles, tent caterpillars, fires, pollution etc). I enlarged this documentation into different forms of projected material- a large collage environment and a smaller projected quilt to be worn on my skirt. In this piece, I explore our constant struggle to rebalance the natural world, seeking to fix problems of which we are often a cause. I therefore attempt to synthesize myself into the animated collage environments, both by projecting on my physical form and by meshing the violin sounds, the sounds I am visibly producing, into the sonic space.”
