David Rosenboom, Courtesy of CalArts
David Rosenboom, Dean of the Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts, is releasing a new double-CD anthology titled Deviant Resonances—Live Electronic Music with Instruments, Voices and Brains, on Ravello Records in March 2019.
Featuring several CalArts-affiliated performers such as Sarah Belle Reid, Micaela Tobin, Marja Liisa Kay, Gillian Rae Perry, Amy Knoles, Andrew McIntosh, Andrew Tholl, and Ashley Walters, Deviant Resonances advances the concept of “creative listening,” where Rosenboom uses the act of “listening” as an instrument in the composition.
“Imagine the intertwining counterpoint of sounds as an arboretum of musical vines,” Rosenboom says in an interview with Parma Recording News, “always twisting, touching, threading through, and branching out into new and uncharted territory. It’s about active, imaginative, creative listening.”
The first track, Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones, is an epic piece lasting more than 35 minutes. Rosenboom achieves a resonant sound by analyzing electrical signals coming from the brains of two imaginative performers. A third performer calibrates a computer system to the responses of what he calls “imaginative listening.” This system adapts to the brainwave activity of the first two performers and builds a symphony ranging from quiet beginnings to climaxing crescendos.
After 30 years as the Dean of the School of Music, David Rosenboom will step down to join the regular faculty on July 1, 2020. Mr. Rosenboom has had a profound impact on music education at CalArts as well as achieved great acclaim as a pioneer in American experimental music. Numerous retrospectives celebrating the influence of his work on a global scale have taken place in recent years, including a 50-year retrospective of his music presented in a series of performances at the new Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2015), a six-month exhibition of his work with brainwave music at Centre Pompidou-Metz in France (2015-2016), a four-month exhibition of his work in computer music at Whitechapel Gallery in London (2015-2016), and a retrospective of his music for piano(s) at Tokyo Opera City Recital Hall (2016). During the 2017-2018 season his music was presented in a composer-pianist portrait at El Centro de Experimentación del Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a feature of his recent live electronic music with brainwave performers at Le Centquatre in Paris, a performance of his music for piano and electronics at The Annenberg Center in Philadelphia, and in a concert including several new premieres at REDCAT.