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)
Wind Blown Rain
Mara Helmuth
Clarinet and Tarogato: Esther Lamneck
Video: Alfonso Belfiore
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)
Mara Helmuth, Esther Lamneck and Alfonso Belfiore: Wind Blown Rain
Wind Blown Rain was inspired by natural processes and forces involving water. Water metamorphoses between many opposing states: from a gentle drizzle to a stormy downpour, from a tiny droplet to a crashing ocean. Life on earth is dependent on water, and also at its mercy. This piece focuses mainly on the transformed sounds of rain, and its reflections in the tárogató sound. Samples were recorded in Venice and Ascea, Italy. The music was composed in Italy in the summer of 2025 at Wassard Elea Artist’s residency in Ascea by a computer music composer and a performer/real time composer. While most of our previous collaborations have relied solely on the sound of the performer’s instrument for the computer part, in this piece the instrumentalist interacts primarily with music created from natural recordings and their processed transformations. A third artist created the video part in response to the music from his own water-related video recordings. The video component of Wind Blown Rain is a visual meditation on the natural landscape, filtered through the inner rhythm of rainfall. Created with images generated and modified using artificial intelligence, the editing alternates slow-motion sequences, crossfades, and subtle variations to evoke a dilated sense of time. The environment, immersed in rain, transforms gradually, suggesting a fragile balance between presence and dissolution. The visual work accompanies the music as a mental landscape—fluid and contemplative.
About the artists
Mara Helmuth (b. 1957), internationally known computer music composer/researcher, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025. Her research explores sonification, granular synthesis, wireless sensor networks, Internet2, and RTcmix. She is Professor at College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati, where she received the George Rieveschl Award for Scholarly / Creative Works at in 2023. She served on the International Computer Music Association board of directors and as President. D.M.A.: Columbia Univ., earlier degrees: Univ. Ill. U-C.
Clarinet and Tarogato: Esther Lamneck
The New York Times calls Esther Lamneck “an astonishing virtuoso.” She has appeared as a soloist with major orchestras, with renowned chamber music artists and an international roster of musicians from the new music improvisation scene. http://www.estherlamneck.com/
Video: Alfonso Belfiore
Alfonso Belfiore is a composer and visual artist whose work explores the relationships between sound, image, movement, and perception. Former professor of electronic music at the Conservatories of Florence and Padua, he has collaborated with international institutions, creating performances, sound installations, and multidisciplinary projects that merge musical innovation with digital art. His recent work investigates memory, dreamlike space, and the fragile line between reality and imagination.
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 electronic music composition and serves as the director of multi-channel Sound Lab at Institute of Music at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University(NYCU) in Taiwan.
His music, written for both acoustic and electronic media, has been recognized with selection/awards from Pierre Schaeffer International Computer Music Competition (1st Prize/2003), Città di Udine International Contemporary Music Competition, Musica Nova (First Prize/2010), Metamorphoses, International Computer Music Conference(ICMC, Best Music Award/2011/2015/2022),Taukay Edizioni Musicali call for Acousmatic Music(Winner/2019), and RMN Classical Electroacoustic call for work(Winner/2023),Polish International Electroacoustic Music Competition (Finalist/2023), KLANG International Acousmatic Composition Competition(Second Prize/2023) , and Musica Nova (First Prize/2010).
Percussion: Vitalia Agrba (Ensemble 404)