Lunch Concert 2A
The second lunch concert of ICMC HAMBURG 2026 takes listeners on a journey through different cultures and technological approaches. The focus is on transformation: how are traditional instruments, natural sounds, or even everyday noises reinterpreted through the lens of computer technology and artificial intelligence?
The international composers are once again partly supported by Hamburg’s Ensemble 404, which bridges the gap between academic composition and vibrant performance.
Program Overview
Sprinkle
Huixin Xue
Late Shift
Benjamin Broening
Fall and Rise
Wan Heo, Wan Heo and Wan Heo
Squeakeasy
Jonathan Wilson
I dreamed of Naïma
Christopher Dobrian
Free-Wheelerish (a movement from the suite Things Ain’t What They Used To Be)
Mark Whitlam
About the pieces & composers
Huixin Xue: Sprinkle
This piece seeks to explore new timbres and performance techniques for the pipa, aiming to integrate the language of electronic music with the instrument’s sound in order to present a novel acoustic effect.
The pipa uses an unusual strings A #D E #G.
About the artists
Composer: Huixin Xue
Pipa Performer: Yinghan Liu
Computer Music Designer: Shihong Ren
Huixin Xue is a Chinese composer, music producer and Music AI researcher. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Music AI at Shanghai Conservatory of Music, an exchange student at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre. She graduated from the Music Engineering Department of Shanghai Conservatory of Music both for her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
Her pieces won numerous awards, including The Honorable Mention of the 2024 Sound Chain International Electronic Music Composition Competition (the only Chinese winner among the 6 winners worldwide). Her work was presented at the 2025 ICMC. Her pieces have been performed at major festivals. She also has participated in over twenty commercial music creation projects.
During her doctoral studies, she participated in the development of the AI Music Therapy Pod at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, co-developed SongEval, the first aesthetic evaluation dataset for AI-generated songs, and contributed to organizing the Automatic Song Aesthetic Evaluation Challenge at ICASSP 2026.
Benjamin Broening: Late Shift
Late Shift explores the liminal light of dusk as shadows lengthen, the bright colors of day darken, and the familiar world is gradually transformed. A comparable transformation takes place in Late Shift: the flute and electronics slowly descend to lower registers over the course of the piece as flute sounds are gradually replaced by whispering percussion sounds in the electronics.
About the artist
Benjamin Broening’s music has been called “adventurous, thoughtful, eloquent, and disarmingly direct.” His orchestral, choral, chamber and electroacoustic music has been performed in over twenty-five countries and across the United States by many soloists and ensembles.
Broening is recipient of Guggenheim, Howard and Fulbright Fellowships, and has also received recognition and awards from the American Composers Forum, Virginia Commission for the Arts, ACS/Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Jerome Foundation and the Presser Music Foundation among others.
Trembling Air, a Bridge Records release of his chamber music recorded by Eighth Blackbird, has been praised as “haunting” and “enchanting” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), “magical” (Fanfare), “other-worldly” (Gramophone), and “coruscatingly gorgeous” (CD Hotlist). Critics have called Recombinant Nocturnes, a disk of music for piano recorded by Duo Runedako “ breathtaking” (World Music Report) and “deep, troubling” (François Couture). Nineteen other pieces have been released by Ensemble U: in Estonia and on the Centaur, Everglade, Equilibrium, MIT Press, Oberlin Music, Open G, Métier, New Focus, Ravello and SEAMUS record labels.
Broening is founder and artistic director of Third Practice, an annual festival of electroacoustic music at the University of Richmond, where he is Professor of Music. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Cambridge University, Yale University, and Wesleyan University.
Wan Heo, Wan Heo and Wan Heo: Fall and Rise
Fall and Rise is the second episode of my previous solo cello piece, When It Falls. Drawing from the same inspiration, which was the fallen leaves on the ground at Jeolmul Forest in Jeju Island, Korea, with a variety of colors and shapes, this version for amplified violine and electronics focuses more on the timbre of the instrument. Particularly, transitions between normal to harmonics, different fingerings, and how they create different textures and sonorities.
Recording of When It Falls and field recordings from Jeolmul Forest were processed using modular synthesis, creating certain atmosphere to the piece. Pitch and rhythmic materials for the violin was extracted from spectral analysis of the recordings which gives the sonic coherence to the three different sound sources.
About the artist
Wan Heo is a Korean-born composer based in Chicago. Her works have been performed internationally in South Korea, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Spain, and throughout the United States. Her percussion solo Unveiled Future is published by Alfonce Production.
Wan’s music has been commissioned and featured by Darmstädter Ferienkurse, SEAMUS, Yarn/Wire, VIPA, among others. She received an Honorable Mention for the Christine Clark/Theodore Front Prize in the IAWM New Music Search.
Her doctoral dissertation explores the vulnerability of South Korea’s sonic environments through field recordings made at Buddhist mountain monasteries. Works from this project have been presented at NYCEMF, the Composition in Asia Conference, and NSEME.
Wan is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University. She holds a B.M. in Composition from Ewha Womans University and an M.M. in Composition from Florida State University. She is currently ABD in the Ph.D. program in Composition and Music Technology at Northwestern University, where she works under the guidance of Alex Mincek, Stephan Moore, and Jay Alan Yim.
Jonathan Wilson: Squeakeasy
Squeakeasy was written for Maja Cerar during the COVID-19 pandemic from late 2020 to the early summer of 2021. The composition was conceived from my accidental discovery of a metallic chair that was loosely bolted to a metal patio set and could pivot in such a way to create an ear-piercing, yet irresistible screech. The timbral qualities of that chair intrigued the composer to determine the various sonic transformations that could be realized after recording that initial sound, which quickly led to pairing the electronics with the violin because of the multimbral similarities observed between them. Additional recordings of squeaky wooden surfaces, such as a wooden chair and floorboards, were included to enhance the timbral relationships between violin and electronics. The composer’s decision to explore their timbral relationships was partly inspired by Denis Smalley’s “Base Metals” by relating metal-based and wood-based sound families from the electronics to different violin timbres or extended techniques such as col legno, glissando, tremolo, pizzicato, ricochet, and natural and artificial harmonics. The structure of this composition alternates between sections with performer + electronics and cadenzas with amplified violin, which could be loosely described overall as a concertino for amplified violin based on the virtuosic elements of the violinist’s performance. The sound of the violin is amplified throughout the work by the electronic performer’s patch that was programmed on Max/MSP. The performer of the electronics triggers each instance of fixed media from the laptop while the performer follows both the score and a counter/timer that is displayed on a separate computer monitor.
About the artist
Dr. Jonathan Wilson’s works have been performed at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, ICMC, SICMF, SEAMUS, NYCEMF, MUSELAB, NSEME, Napoleon Electronic Music Festival, Iowa Music Teachers Association State Conference, and Midwest Composers Symposium. He is the winner of the 2014 Iowa Music Teachers Association Composition Competition. Jonathan has studied composition with Lawrence Fritts, Josh Levine, David Gompper, James Romig, James Caldwell, Paul Paccione, and John Cooper. In addition, studies in conducting have been taken under Richard Hughey and Mike Fansler. Jonathan is a member of Society of Composers, Inc., SEAMUS, ICMA, and the Iowa Composers Forum.
Christopher Dobrian: I dreamed of Naïma
I Dreamed of Naïma for vibraphone and interactive computer system references a composition by John Coltrane in fragmented and distorted fashion, as if recollected in a dream. The computer program, written in Max for Live, senses the sound of the vibraphone, and algorithmically adds its own sounds to extend and elaborate the instrumental sound. The 7-minute piece mixes composition and improvisation, with the computer performing interactively and responsively (with no attending technician needed), such that each performance is unique.
About the artist
Christopher Dobrian is Professor Emeritus of Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology in the Department of Music, with a joint appointment in the Department of Informatics, at the University of California, Irvine. He is a composer of instrumental and electronic music, and taught courses in composition, theory, and computer music. He conducts research on the development of artificially intelligent interactive computer systems for the cognition, composition, and improvisation of music. He has published technical and theoretical articles on interactive computer music, and is the author of the original reference documentation and tutorials for the Max, MSP, and Jitter programming environments by Cycling ’74. He holds a Ph.D. in Composition from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied composition with Joji Yuasa, Robert Erickson, Morton Feldman, and Bernard Rands, computer music with F. Richard Moore and George Lewis, and classical guitar with the Spanish masters Celin and Pepe Romero. Dobrian has been an invited Fulbright specialist at the Korean National University of Arts, the University of Paris-Sorbonne, McGill University in Montreal, and the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, and has been a guest professor at Yonsei University, Taiwan National Normal University, University of Paris 8, and the National University of Quilmes in Argentina.
Mark Whitlam: Free-Wheelerish (a movement from the suite Things Ain’t What They Used To Be)
The movement from a longer suite—titled in reference to Duke Ellington’s big band jazz classic, released over sixty years ago—offers a gentle provocation, contrasting traditional approaches to jazz improvisation with emerging paradigms in human–AI interaction. Combining real-time machine learning and deep learning tools, the piece stages a live collaboration between improvising human musicians and generative AI agents. Central to the work is a subversion of the established technique of the contrafact, whereby new melodies are composed over pre-existing chord progressions. Here, the process is inverted: AI agents are tasked with reharmonising composed melodic lines, thereby disrupting the expected harmonic framework. This indeterminacy both encourages and challenges the performers to find new musical responses.
Leveraging technologies including Somax2, RAVE, Mosaïque, and Google MediaPipe within MaxMSP, the system enables algorithmic agents to act as both collaborative and disruptive partners in the performance loop. These agents generate unexpected musical gestures and offer novel, interactive visual and audible modalities that stimulate and provoke the performers. The result is an evolving musical language that emerges from the entangled dynamics of this extended network of human and machine improvisers.
About the artist
Mark Whitlam has been a professional musician for 25 years, having toured internationally with UK jazz luminaries including Andy Sheppard, Iain Ballamy and Jason Rebello (Sting) and Mercury Prize Nominee Eliza Carthy. Recent collaborations have included work with Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp). He has also collaborated with Mercury Prize His compositions and performances have received airplay on BBC radio 2, 3 ,6 and Jazz FM, with TV credits including HBO’s miniseries Industry. Mark teaches in the UK at Bath Spa University and BIMM University, where he is a senior lecturer. He is mid-stage in his PhD in Composition at the University of Bristol, UK, exploring the affordances offered by generative AI agents in the liminal space between composition and improvisation. He also has a keen interest in the links between actor network theory and 4E cognition in the space of human-AI mediated music-making.