Monique Buzzarté

“Black Hole”

Black Hole is an expanded version of a music/video solo excerpted from Big Room (2003), an evening length collaborative dance score by Pauline Oliveros and Monique Buzzarté commissioned by Morgan Thorson with video by Eleanor Savage of Morgan Thorson and Company.

Oliveros provided a conceptual framework for the composition with computer processing, while Buzzarté selects and performs sounds in real time. Nothing is pre-recorded. As sound comes into the microphone it is recorded by the computer and played back at different times The delays are transformed by algorithms and sounds are “displayed” aurally in geometric patterns within a quadraphonic speaker system. The ten different patterns are selected algorithmically for a web of moving sounds in space.

The processing system is called the Expanded Instrument System, or EIS, which is a continually developing electronic sound processing environment designed to provide improvising musicians control over various interesting parameters of sound transformation. This version of EIS uses a Max/MSP patch programmed by Stephan Moore under the direction of Pauline Oliveros.

“Mioritza - Requiem for Rachel Corrie”

byAlice Shields
for trombone and tape (2003)

Biography

Monique Buzzarté, trombonist, is an avid proponent of contemporary music, commissioning and premiering many new works for trombone--alone, with electronics, and in chamber ensembles. Ms. Buzzarté's recordings include John Cage's Five3 with the Arditti Quartet (Mode 75: John CAGE: Vol. 19 - The Number Pieces 2) and Dreaming Wide Awake with the New Circle Five (Deep Listening 20). Since 1983 her New Music from Women: Trombone project has supported the expansion of the trombone repertoire. An author and educator as well as a performer/composer, Ms. Buzzarté has published research on the brass music of women composers and received residencies in 2003 at Create@iEAR Studios and in 2002 at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts for the development of an interactive performance system for the trombone. Her advocacy work for women in music included coordinating efforts which led to the admission of women members into the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997. Ms. Buzzarté is certified to teach the meditative improvisation techniques of Deep Listening. Buzzarté is one half of the duo Zanana.

“Powering Up/Powering Down” is sponsored in part by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), and the UC San Diego Department of Music in connection with the departments of Visual Arts, Music, and Literature at UCSD along with the UC Riverside and Los Angeles campuses.