Posted on Thursday, March 02, 2023
Kansas City Kansas Community College will welcome more than 60 composers and performers to the Electronic Music Midwest Festival March 10 and 11 on the KCKCC Main Campus.
These musical artists will present their research and compositions in the field of new (contemporary “classical”) electronic and electro-acoustic music during eight concerts (each no longer than one hour). Concerts will be at 10:30 a.m., 1:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. each day in the KCKCC Performing Arts Center, 7250 State Ave. All performances are free and open to the public.
The events will be presented with a 3D “immersive” sound system, and some pieces will feature performers on acoustic instruments or new or repurposed electronic control systems such as gaming devices and video-tracking systems. The featured performer on several concerts is percussionist Scott Deal, professor and director of the Donald Louis Tavel Arts and Technology Research Center at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).
The first festival was in 2000 when it was presented at KCKCC under the name “Kansas City Electronic Music Festival.” In 2001, the festival continued at Lewis University as “Electronic Music at Lewis - 2001.” EMM is the result of a consortium formed in 2002 between KCKCC, Lewis University and the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Since its beginning, EMM has programmed more than 1,000 new electroacoustic compositions, and composers have traveled from around the world to share their music with audiences in the Midwest.
The festival exposes KCKCC audio engineering and music technology students to new sounds, technologies and emerging software techniques. Audio engineering students also gain experience of working in a fast-paced event production environment, assisting throughout the event.
“We all hear movie and television soundtracks that are not traditional music – more ‘soundscapes’ or spooky sound-collages,” said Ian Corbett, coordinator of the audio engineering program. “Some of the people who developed the technology to create and manipulate those sounds have presented research projects that spawned commercially available techniques at EMM in the past.”
Category: Arts and Culture
Keywords: Music