By Kate Rix

Composers of New Music — that is, composers who reach for both traditional and electronic instruments to challenge the popular definition of music — may or may not incorporate lyrics, but they definitely collaborate. Like luthiers of old, composers studying and working at Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) work together crafting tools that change the ways that audiophiles, electronic musicians, composers, and sound artists do their work.

So when composers from one of France’s major New Music institutes come to CNMAT as part of a new artistic exchange program, they can visit music’s future. Given the Bay Area’s culture of innovation, CNMAT’s building on Arch Street is like an inventor’s workshop where designing new ways to make music is all in a day’s work.

Meanwhile in Nice, the Centre National de Création Musicale (CIRM) is part of a French tradition of training electronic musicians in the conservatory. There is a big audience for New Music in France and more financial support for its performance, so composers can develop their work in a performance-based environment.
 
Together, CNMAT and CIRM are fostering the next frontier of New Music invention and music-making.

“Our students get a completely new perspective on what’s possible in music,” says Edmund Campion, one of CNMAT’s co-directors and a composer whose creative connection to CIRM paved the way for the exchange program. “It’s fundamental to CNMAT. We want our music out in the world being heard. And it just so happens that in France, New Music is very much alive. It’s an experience that our young composers must have.”

Aaron Einbond, a Ph.D. candidate in music composition at Berkeley, is one of those young composers. Einbond was at CIRM last year, as part of the program, and presented a piece in a major French New Music festival in November. He’ll head back to Paris later this year to work at another major music institute.

“At CNMAT we think about how we’ll put a piece of music together, how the sounds will be organized,” Einbond says. “Part of what I took away from the teachers at CIRM was to put the tools out of my mind for a moment and think about the sonic experience.”

Campion’s work with CIRM’s director François Paris got the Berkeley-Nice program off the ground. CNMAT’s other co-director, David Wessel, was also instrumental. Later, CNMAT Associate Director Richard Andrews helped build it into an official program, by securing a grant from the French-American Fund for University Partnerships.

  In addition to working at CIRM, American students like Einbond may take courses at the Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis and the Conservatoire National deRégion de Nice. The same holds true in the opposite direction. So far two French students have participated in the exchange program, attending courses in Berkeley’s Music Department and developing projects at CNMAT. Their work is performed in concerts on campus, and they take home exposure to many new tools, including interactive composition software.

While French students enjoy the exposure to new materials, American composers appreciate the depth of French musical training in New Music. Each country has its own style and approach, which helps make for a harmonious collaboration.

“The French have a greater affection for older technologies,” says Einbond, seated in CNMAT’s spacious performance space. “One of the teachers wanted to play a piece that was only on reel-to-reel tape. I had definitely never seen a reel-to-reel machine. Here you wouldn’t even hear about it. There may be one in the garage here, but I’ve never seen it.”

This difference shows up at all levels of music-making, Einbond continues, including the way composers critique one another’s work. While musicians at CNMAT might ask how a certain sound was made, at CIRM composers use a specific vocabulary, based on the ideas of Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concréte. As an example, in France, Einbond notes, composers talk about a piece’s texture, or “grain.”

Trained on both the piano and the clarinet, Einbond composed a piece in France for MANCA, a New Music festival organized by CIRM that brings new compositions to the public in venues from Nice to Monaco. Einbond’s piece incorporated a live bass clarinet with processors that both modified the live clarinet and integrated pre-recorded music Einbond had made using the computer. The clarinet sounds alternately sweet and melodic, evoking passages of early American jazz, and later percussive, with keys clacking and no air in the instrument at all.

The public and media really take notice of the festival, which fills large venues and even attracts politicians stumping for votes. “There’s a really national and regional pride about this music, that it’s happening in Nice,” Einbond says.

This November, Einbond will present another piecein France with a colleague, a French composer who came to CNMAT on the Berkeley-Nice exchange program. Edmund Campion will also present Practice, a composition for computer and orchestra, with the Nice Philharmonic.

“It’s not a normal orchestral piece,” he says. An elaborate computer-driven part is “played” by a keyboardist who is on stage with the orchestra. These two elements communicate via software. “What’s interesting about these challenges is they confront very directly the function of the orchestra,” Campion observes. “It’s a challenge for orchestras to perform with electronic components. They are used to highly formalized behaviors and things happening in a clearly predictable way. Normally, this kind of thing would happen as a one-time experiment. We’re making a change in the way New Music works in the world. It’s not experimental anymore. We’re beyond that.”