Lunch Concert 6A
Concert 6A forms a bridge between the distant past and a radically digital future. It is a search for the edges of the audible—whether in the almost imperceptible silence of a saxophone, in the raw 1-bit synthesis of early computer music pioneers, or in the lament of the Gorgons on a reconstructed ancient instrument.
Program Overview
Apparizione del Silenzio
Yisong Piao
tibone
Miller Puckette and Kerry Hagan
A Hatful of Feathers
Marc Ainger
chime
Tiffany Skidmore and Patti Cudd
Cyanotypes
Patti Cudd
Gorgons’ Cry
Konstantinos Karathanasis
About the pieces & artists
Yisong Piao: Apparizione del Silenzio
Apparizione Del Silenzio does not contain “silence” itself—at least, not in the conventional sense of an absence of sound. Instead, it is built upon sounds that lie at or beyond the threshold of human perception: vibrations outside the usual spectrum, the friction between air and metal, the dissipation of sound waves in space—those margins of sound that are ignored, inaudible, yet undeniably existent. The apparition of silence is therefore neither stillness nor emptiness, but the manifestation of a presence perceived as silence. It is a non- sonic sound: at the limit of hearing, silence ceases to signify absence and becomes another mode of existence.
The piece is written for tenor saxophone and electronics, combining fixed media with live processing of hyper-amplified micro-sounds from the instrument. Semi-improvised passages invite the performer to enter the interstice between sound and silence, where breath, touch, and hesitation become part of an almost inaudible voice.
The generative logic of the work is not the appearance of silence, but its presentation: silence here is not what is conventionally called “silence,” but a subject that reveals itself through its auditory traces.
About the artist
Yisong Piao (b. 1992, China) is a Seoul-based composer specializing in electroacoustic and instrumental music. His works have been presented at ICMC 2023 (China), ICMC 2024 (Korea), and ICMC 2025 (Boston). He is a researcher at the Center for Research in Electro-Acoustic Music and Audio (CREAMA), focusing on microtonality and algorithmic approaches in composition.
Miller Puckette and Kerry Hagan: tibone
Miller Puckette and Kerry Hagan present an improvisation on 1-bit synthesizers. Rather than pursuing chip tunes or similarly low-bit music, the duo navigates a range of possible timbres in an exploratory performance.
About the artists
Miller Puckette and Kerry Hagan began focused collaborations on academic and musical projects in 2014. Together their duo has performed in North America and Europe. They have introduced novel synthesis algorithms through new performances. Their work explores timbre, spatialization, real-time computer processes, algorithms, interaction design, performance practice, and performance systems.
Marc Ainger: A Hatful of Feathers
In A Hatful of Feathers for Alto Flute and Computer, the flutist creates a music in realtime that is informed by expanded possibilities, using traditional and extended techniques. The work builds from Willian Sethares’ research into spectra and tuning.
The computer analyzes the pitch, amplitude, and spectral content of the flute playing (including all of the sounds created by the mechanism of the flute, such as the sound of the keys), interacting with the live sound in various ways (stretching/contracting and/or spatializing various spectra, retuning spectra, granulating and creating micro-glissandi, etc). We use a custom Max/Msp patch using some well-known spectral and spatial techniques, along with some extensions of these techniques.
About the artist
Marc Ainger (USA) has developed an idiosyncratic body of work that embraces a wide range of music/sound and music/sound-making. He is interested in the relationships between the real and the imagined – the ways in which the visceral world of sound and sound production inform our imagined worlds of sound, and the ways our imagined worlds, in turn, inform our concrete experiences.
Performances of Ainger’s works have included the New York Philharmonic Biennial; the INA/GRM; the Royal Danish Ballet; CBGB; Late Night with David Letterman; the Goethe Institute; the American Film Institute; SIGGRAPH; the Palais de Tokyo (Paris); FolkwangWoche NeueMusik(Essen); Gaggego!(Gothenburg); the Joyce Theater (New York); Guangdong Modern Dance; and New Circus artists. Awards include the Boulez/LA Philharmonic Composition Fellowship, the Irino International Chamber Music Competition, Musica Nova Prague, Meet the Composer, and the Esperia Foundation.
Tiffany Skidmore and Patti Cudd: chime
Patti Cudd performs “chime,” for percussion and fixed media, composed for her by Tiffany M. Skidmore. “chime” requires 2 snare drums, 6 crotales, 12 distinctive beaters, and 2 bluetooth bone conduction, wireless speakers. Each speaker is affixed to the underside of one snare drum. All 6 crotales are placed on a single drumhead. The performer plays a complex series of patterns moving between bare drumhead and unmoored crotales using combinations of beaters. Mechanistic, unpitched patterns begin to merge with melodic, pitched elements that sometimes bend to ultimately become a metallic wall of overtones as the line between electronic and live acoustic sound comes into and out of focus. This piece was premiered by Cudd at the VT New Music + Technology Festival in May 2023, ICMC represents the premiere of a revised version of the electronics and the first time Patti will use the bone conduction speakers that were originally intended for this piece.
“chime” happens on three planes: a long, liquidating chiasmus meets two rotating pitch constellations.
About the artists
Composer/Associate Director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative Tiffany M. Skidmore has held faculty positions at the University of Minnesota, Virginia Tech, and the University at Buffalo (SUNY), where from 2023-2024, she held the Birge Cary Chair in Music Composition. In 2025, she was Visiting Professor at McGill University, in residence at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology. She is Co-Founder, Executive Director, and Artistic Director of 113, producing the Twin Cities New Music Festival, guest residencies, and concerts throughout the world.
Dr. Patti Cudd is active as a percussion soloist, chamber musician and educator. Patti is a member of the acclaimed new music ensemble, Zeitgeist. Her other diverse performing opportunities have included CRASH, the Minnesota Contemporary Ensemble, Minnesota Dance Theatre and the Borrowed Bones Dance Theater.
As an active performer of the music of the 21st century, she has given concerts and master classes throughout North America, Asia, Europe and South America. As a percussion soloist and chamber musician, she has premiered well over 200 new works.
Patti Cudd: Cyanotypes
Cyanotypes, with their characteristic white imprints on a deep blue field, transcend mere photographic representation; they serve as blueprints that reveal the essence of objects through their negative form. This transformative process redefines the concept of the “object,” not as a fixed entity, but as an echo, a trace, or an imprint of presence. In this conceptual framework, cyanotypes become a metaphor for the translation of physical and temporal phenomena into abstracted impressions. Inspired by this principle, Cyanotype’s Five Studies approaches the vibraphone not through its direct sound or physicality, but as a series of rhythmic imprints — sonic blueprints that capture the vibraphone’s articulate and resonant characteristics.
The vibraphone is renowned for its shimmering sustain, dynamic control, and ability to produce both melodic and percussive textures. In Cyanotype’s Five Studies, these qualities are refracted through the instrumental language itself, emphasising the vibraphone’s unique ability to articulate rhythmic patterns with clarity and tonal nuance. This work creates a rich sonic landscape for exploring how vibraphone rhythms can be abstracted, deconstructed, and re-imagined as imprints within sound.
Each study acts as a sonic cyanotype, distilling the essential rhythmic and timbral gestures of the vibraphone into textures that evoke the original instrument’s expressive potential without relying on straightforward replication. The vibraphone’s capacity for sustained tones and nuanced dynamic shading allows for a complex rendering of rhythmic articulation, translating percussive strikes into lingering tonal shapes. The five studies function collectively as a blueprint series—each revealing different facets of the vibraphone’s character through a process of mediation, exploring articulation, rhythmic complexity, timbral contrast, and dynamic variation.
By conceptualising the work as an imprint rather than a direct transcription, the piece invites listeners to reconsider the relationship between source and representation. It challenges traditional notions of musical interpretation by emphasising the transformative potential of the vibraphone to embody and reinterpret its own characteristic sound patterns. The blue-white dichotomy of the cyanotype process parallels the interplay between presence and absence in sound—notes articulated and decayed, rhythm asserted and refracted, the physical gesture and its sonic echo.
Ultimately, Cyanotype’s Five Studies proposes a dialogue between visual and auditory art forms, grounded in the shared concept of imprinting. Just as the cyanotype renders the visible object in reverse contrast, this work explores how musical objects—rhythms and timbres—can be refracted through mediation to reveal new expressive dimensions. The vibraphone becomes both subject and medium, transforming its distinctive voice into a series of articulate, resonant imprints, inviting a deeper engagement with the ephemeral nature of sound and the processes of artistic representation.
About the artists
Patti Cudd is an American percussionist, educator, and new-music advocate. A member of Zeitgeist and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls, she specializes in contemporary percussion, electroacoustic music, and commissioning new works. Cudd has performed internationally, recorded widely, and collaborated with leading composers to expand the modern percussion repertoire.
Elainie Lillios is an American composer whose music explores sound, space, and the physical experience of listening. Her works often blend acoustic instruments with electronics, field recordings, and subtle timbral shifts. Lillios’s music has been performed internationally and is known for its immersive, textural quality and imaginative use of resonance and sonic detail.
Konstantinos Karathanasis: Gorgons’ Cry
This programmatic composition is inspired by the 12th Pythian Ode, written by Ancient Greek poet, Pindar, in honor of a formidable Aulos player. When Perseus, aided by goddess Athena, beheaded sleeping Medusa, the only mortal of the three sister Gorgons, the two immortal Gorgon sisters, Stheno and Euryali woke up, realized the crime and chased the culprit with terrible cries and laments. Athena listened to the Gorgons’ cries and created Aulos, a double pipe-double reed wind instrument to imitate them.
In contrast to the ancient poet, and profoundly stirred by ongoing contemporary reports of femicides, the composer interprets this myth from a feminist perspective. Medusa is portrayed as a tragic victim of patriarchy, and the Gorgons cry out in extreme anger, mourning the lost beauty of their sister.
In modern days, Archeomusicologists study fragments, or entire pieces of excavated Auloi from various sites and eras to recreate exact replicas to learn more about the sounds and performing techniques of this long-lost instrument. This piece is based on a Pydna aulos, an instrument entombed in Macedonia, Greece at about the 2nd half of the 4th century BCE. Melodic materials derive from the archaic Spondeion scale that was used to accompany certain religious processions.
The computer alters the aulos sound in real-time based entirely on custom combinations of variable delay and FFT algorithms, without using any prerecorded materials. Gorgons’ Cry is the first composition in the modern repertory involving aulos and live electronics.
About the artists
Konstantinos Karathanasis as an electroacoustic composer draws inspiration from modern poetry, artistic cinema, abstract painting, mysticism, Greek mythology, and the writings of Carl Jung. His compositions have been performed at numerous festivals and received awards in international competitions, including Musica Nova, SIME, SEAMUS/ASCAP, Música Viva and Bourges. Recordings of his music are released by SEAMUS, ICMA, Musica Nova, Innova, Equilibrium and HELMCA. Ravello Records released in March 2026 his solo album Resonant Mythologies with the support of the University of Oklahoma. Konstantinos holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University at Buffalo. He serves as Professor of Composition & Music Technology at the University of Oklahoma. More info at: http://karathanasis.org
CALLUM ARMSTRONG is an award winning multi-instrumentalist specialized in Early Music. For over a decade, Callum has devoted a great deal of his time to the revival of ancient Greek and Roman auloi. He has a YouTube channel, the ”The Aulos Collective” which is dedicated to how auloi were made, played, and used, in collaboration with the luthier Max Brumberg. Callum regularly performs internationally as a soloist, in various ensembles, and works as a composer, teacher and session musician for film and computer games. Recently Callum was the subject of the documentary ‘Callum Armstrong the Aulete’ which won 1st price from the Ierapetra international film festival.