Evening Concert 1B

This evening concert marks a special collaboration between the international ICMC community and Hamburg’s music scene. At its center is Ensemble 404 from the Hamburg University of Music and Drama (HfMT). For this occasion, a video wall will be specially installed in the Friedrich-Ebert-Halle to highlight the synergy between sound and image.
The program ranges from intimate solo pieces with computer support to complex ensemble compositions and large-scale video works.

This Evening Concert is open to the public. Those without a conference pass can purchase a ticket here.

 

Program Overview

Machinarium
João Pedro Oliveira

Fantasy for Viola and Computer
Richard Dudas
Viola: Zeynep Sertoğlu (Ensemble 404)

Neuro Translation Engine
Vincenzo Russo
Flute: Giusy Panzanaro
Clarinet : Yuriy Nepomnyashchyy
Cello: Antonio Lo Curto
Piano: Valentina Donato
(Ensemble 404)

Climate II for piano and computer
Rikako Kabashima
Piano: Valentina Donato (Ensemble 404)

Jamshid Jam
Jean-François Charles and Ramin Roshandel
Setar: Ramin Roshandel
Live electronics: Jean-François Charles

Delicate Anticipation
Kotoka Suzuki
Percussion: Michael Murphy

Air-Carving Bamboo
Yu Chung Tseng
Percussion: Vitalia Agrba (Ensemble 404)

 

About the pieces & artists

João Pedro Oliveira: Machinarium

Machinarium unfolds as a journey through an imaginary city of machines, where mechanisms seem to think and structures begin to breathe. Layers of image and sound interlock like gears, evoking a world in which the boundary between living organism and industrial artifact becomes uncertain. 

About the artist

Composer João Pedro Oliveira holds the Corwin Endowed Chair in Composition for the University of California at Santa Barbara. He studied organ performance, composition, and architecture in Lisbon. He completed a Ph.D. in Music at the University of New York at Stony Brook. His music includes opera, orchestral compositions, chamber music, electroacoustic music, and experimental video. He has received over 70 international prizes and awards for his works, including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023, the Bourges Magisterium Prize, and the Giga-Hertz Special Award, among others. His music is played all over the world. He taught at Aveiro University (Portugal) and Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil). His publications include several articles in journals and a book on 20th century music theory. 

 

Richard Dudas: Fantasy for Viola and Computer

This work for solo viola and real-time audio processing in Max is a composed extension of some prior improvisational works using Max. It was written in part as an exploration of Bohlen-Pierce tuning (in the electronics), which divides the perfect twelfth into thirteen unequal justly-tuned steps. The viola part is pitted against this, performing in standard twelve-unequal-steps-to-the-octave tuning, juxtaposing and combining several different musical fragments, each with its own character and mood. All sounds in the electronics are live: they are derived from the sounds of the on-stage violist. Max audio processing includes formant filtering to provide a vocal quality to the transposed and resonated viola sounds.

About the artists

Richard Dudas holds degrees in Music Composition from The Peabody Conservatory of Music of the Johns Hopkins University, and from The University of California, Berkeley. He additionally studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, Hungary and the National Regional Conservatory of Nice, France. In addition to composing music for acoustic instruments, he has been actively involved with music technology since the late 1980s. As a computer musician, he has taught courses at IRCAM, and developed musical tools for Cycling ’74. Since 2007 he has been teaching music composition and computer music at Hanyang University in Seoul, Korea.

Viola: Zeynep Sertoğlu (Ensemble 404)

 

Vincenzo Russo: Neuro Translation Engine

In the future, global societies remain marked by a multitude of languages, dialects, idiolects, and diverse phonetic and cultural systems. Despite advances in AI-driven translation, fundamental limits persist in the loss of emotional nuance, imprecise interpretations, and gaps between what is said and what is perceived. A team of computational linguists and neuroscientists develops an advanced artificial entity: the Neuro Translation Engine (NTE), capable of surpassing traditional textual or acoustic translation. The NTE does not translate words, but the neural intentions behind language. It stimulates a specific area of the human brain, the resonance cortex, designed to receive universal neurosensory patterns. The result is a world where everyone can speak their native language while perfectly understanding others. Linguistic diversity is not diminished but enriched through mutual comprehension. The composition for ensemble and electronics illustrates how the NTE processes, transforms, and reconstructs communicative material. Through sound transformation techniques, the acoustic material is dematerialized, representing the machine’s “internal work”: the conversion of complex signals into a unified code. The final sound is entirely electronic, devoid of recognizable references to the original ensemble. It forms a new language, perceived as a pattern directly interpreted by the brain.

About the artists

Vincenzo Russo (1995) holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Naples “Parthenope.” He began his musical studies in Composition for Visual Media at the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples under the guidance of the late Maestro Lucio Lo Gatto. In July 2025, he completed the second-level degree (Master’s degree) in Composition. Alongside his academic work, he is active as a composer, arranger, and music producer, working from his own recording studio.

Flute: Giusy Panzanaro
Clarinet : Yuriy Nepomnyashchyy
Cello: Antonio Lo Curto
Piano: Valentina Donato
(Ensemble 404)

 

Rikako Kabashima: Climate II for piano and computer 

This work was composed based on a variety of ideas inspired by climate change. In recent years, translating insights from the natural world into my own compositions has become an important experiment in my creative practice.
In particular, this piece draws inspiration from the rapid climate fluctuations caused by global warming, a pressing issue worldwide. Each measure in the work is specified in seconds rather than traditional beats, and there is no fixed meter. Within each measure, rhythms are performed improvisationally according to the given duration.
This approach allows for different rhythms and nuances to emerge in every performance, reflecting the ever-changing nature of the climate itself.

About the artists

Rikako Kabashima was born in Kagoshima, Japan, in 1996. She began studying piano at the age of three and later pursued composition at Senzoku Gakuen College of Music in Tokyo. After completing her undergraduate studies in 2021, she entered the master’s program in composition at Toho College of Music, where she studied with Kazuro Mise and Hitomi Kaneko, and explored computer music under the guidance of Takayuki Rai. She earned her master’s degree in March 2025.
Her works have been selected at international festivals including the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF) in 2023, the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Piano: Valentina Donato (Ensemble 404)

 

Jean-François Charles and Ramin Roshandel: Jamshid Jam 

The sonic dust of a country that has been burned to the ground several times over the centuries and yet has formed some of the most elaborate and highly sophisticated musical structures to have ever existed. According to Persian myths, Jamshid, who ruled during several centuries, was responsible for inventions ranging from the manufacturing of weapons to the mining of jewels to the making of wine. He is also credited with the discovery of music. This is what brought the Jamshid Jam duet together: the search for music at the crossroads of the Radif tradition (Persian classical music) and the development of musical instruments such as the turntable and live electronics.

About the artists

Ramin Roshandel grew up in a family surrounded by artists; his luthier dad, his painter uncle, and his setar instructor, Farshid Jam, had strong influences on him as a teenager. Ramin worked with the renowned Mohammad Reza Lotfi at Maktab-Khāne-ye Mirzā Abdollāh. As a composer, his works have been performed by Jack Quartet, the University of Iowa Center for New Music, and Ligament Duo, among others. Ramin holds a PhD in Music Composition from the University of Iowa. He served as a lecturer at Iowa State University in Spring 2026 and is teaching music composition at Augustana College in Rock Island, USA. More info: ramin-roshandel.com

Jean-François Charles is Associate Professor of Composition and Digital Media at the University of Iowa. He creates at the crossroads of music and technology. As a clarinetist, he has performed improvised music with artists ranging from Douglas Ewart to Gozo Yoshimasu. He worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen for the world premiere of Rechter Augenbrauentanz.
Ramin Roshandel & Jean-François Charles have worked on several projects together. Roshandel was the setār soloist for the premiere performances of Charles’ opera Grant Wood in Paris in 2019. They performed together as part of the live soundtrack composed by Charles and Nicolas Sidoroff to the 1923 Hunchback of Notre-Dame movie, a commission by FilmScene with premiere performances in November 2023 in Iowa. In 2025, they composed and performed a series of 13 concerts with the Red Cedar Chamber Music ensemble.

Setar: Ramin Roshandel

Live electronics: Jean-François Charles

 

Kotoka Suzuki and Michael Murphy: Delicate Anticipation

This work is written as part of the series “In Praise of Shadows,” inspired by Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay of the same title, written at the birth of the modern era in imperial Japan. The essay describes how shadows and negative space are integral to traditional Japanese aesthetics in music, architecture, and food, extending even to the design of everyday objects. As Tanizaki explains, “We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates… Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.”

The focus of the first of its sequence, “In Praise of Shadows” for three paper players and electronics is placed on the collective loss of the tangible in our modern life, analogues to how the excessive illumination of Edison’s modern light affect Japanese aesthetics and culture. Following this work, “Orison” is composed for three music box players and electronics. The work is further inspired by the voices of children of war, both from past and present, speaking and singing about hope, peace as well as sorrows arising from their personal experiences. These melodies, presented as empty spaces on the music score, reveal as they are fed through the music boxes.

In the third part of the sequence, “Delicate Anticipation,” written for a solo percussionist, electronics, and lights, shadow is the central focus, honouring the “patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates”. Positioned behind the scrim, the percussionist is only visible as a shadow while performing with lights and instruments primarily of metal and skin, manipulating patterns of carefully choreographed shadows. The title derives from the English translation of the essay, which describes the sensation of gazing at the silent liquid in the dark depths of a Japanese lacquerware bowl. As Tanizaki writes, “What lies within the darkness one cannot distinguish…. …the fragrance carried upon the vapor brings a delicate anticipation.”

About the artists

Kotoka Suzuki’s work engages deeply with the visual, conceiving of sound as a physical form to be manipulated through the sculptural practice of composition. Artists such as the Arditti Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and Mendelssohn Chamber Orchestra (Leipzig) have featured her work internationally through numerous venues and broadcasts, including BBC Radio 3, Schweizer Radio, Lucerne Festival, Heroin of Sound Festival, Ultraschall, and ZKM Media Museum. Suzuki is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto.

Percussion: Michael Murphy
Michael Murphy is a Chinese-Canadian percussionist praised by The New York Times, Opera Canada, and The Herald. He has toured across North America, Europe, Scandinavia, and Asia, performing with ensembles including the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra, and Philharmonisches Orchester Freiburg. A leading advocate for new music, he has premiered concertos by Alice Ping Yee Ho, Liam Ritz, and Bob Becker and champions contemporary repertoire internationally.

 

Yu Chung Tseng: Air-Carving Bamboo 

“Air-Carving Bamboo Music” premiered at the 2025 C-LAB Sound Arts Festival_DIVERSONICS . This work is an Acousmatic / electroacoustic music. The material comes from the composer’s field recordings of bamboo colliding on the shores of Emei Lake in his hometown of Hsinchu County in Taiwan. Through editing and transformation using DAW software, and incorporating feedback material from AI Somax 2 on some of the bamboo collision rhythms, the work was finally organized into an electroacoustic music piece.
In terms of performance style, the composer wanted to differentiate themselves from traditional purely played electroacoustic music, creating a synesthetic aesthetic experience for both the ears and eyes, and letting electroacoustic music visible .
The composer invited percussionist Hsieh Yi-chieh to wave glow sticks in the dark, as if drawing out or sculpting the electroacoustic music in air, a technique akin to “grabbing music from a distance.” This presentation method, besides giving electroacoustic music a performative quality, greatly enhances the visual appeal, auditory appeal, and sonic dramatic tension of the performance. Postscript: Having composed electroacoustic music for more than 2 decades, the composer occasionally wants to dabble in this area, slightly transcending the aesthetic/philosophical view of “sound-only/purely auditory” in Acousmatic / electroacoustic music listening.

About the artists

Yu-Chung Tseng, receiving his DMA from UNT in Texas, is a professor of computer music composition and the director of Sound Lab at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University(NYCU) in Taiwan.
His works have received performances at festivals and conferences,
including Taiwan-CLAB, ICMC(19 times), NYCEMF, Musicacoustica, SICMF, SMC2016
,Visiones Sonoras Festiva, La Hora Acusmatica, FIME, MUSLAB, and Musica Nova.
His music has been recognized with selection/awards from Pierre Schaeffer International Computer Music Competition (2003 1st Prize), Città di Udine International Contemporary Music Competition(2019 Winner), Musica Nova (2010 First Prize), Metamorphoses (2006-2010 Finalist), ICMC Region Best Music Award(2011/2015/2022), RMN Classical Electroacoustic(2023 Winner), KLANG International Acousmatic Composition Competition(2023 2nd Prize), Musica Nova (2025 1st Prize) and ICMC2025 Best Music Award.

Percussion: Vitalia Agrba (Ensemble 404)

 

Volunteers

Technical Director / FOH
Giovanni Dinello

Sound Engineering
Luciano Correa

Light Design
Gabriel Saber, Lukas Becker

Stage & Sound Assistance
Adrián Velasco

Production
Valentina Donato
Haewon Sim