Making New Waves 2007

Maarten Altena Ensemble (NL)

Since 1980 the Maarten Altena Ensemble has developed itself from an improvisation group into a meeting point for various musical dialects of the last millennium; 9 musicians and one conductor of different nationalities, coming from the world of old music, new music, pop, jazz, and improvisation, bring their practices together in a structural, vital and especially mysterious way. As such the MAE has a strong attraction to musicians and composers who don't want to fit into academic categories. Ways of playing and composing which were separated before and couldn't even stand to be close to each other now generate from tones, colors, sounds and noises a musical art which corresponds with the spirit of the times. All the scores the MAE performs are being enriched, deepened and sharpened with sounds, noises and improvised musical gestures. Concerts are always a thrill because the musicians apply detail on the spot in an alternation of listening and reacting.

MAE's music
Apart from compositions of founder Maarten Altena the MAE regularly performs arrangements of music from the past and present (e.g. Machaut, Byrd, Dowland, Satie, Varèse, Lucier and Monk), compositions from a growing crowd of composers who write for the ensemble ( e.g. Alison Cameron, Gilius van Bergeijk, Cor Fuhler, Steve Martland, Martijn Padding) and theater-productions (music theater with the poet Remco Campert, an opera by Richard Ayres, a balletproduction with dancegroup Leine and Roebana). The MAE also regularly works with guest-musicians (e.g. Roscoe Mitchell, Derek Bailey, Anthony Braxton, Butch Morris and John Zorn).
A MAE renszeresen dolgozik vendégművészekkel is, mint Roscoe Mitchell, Derek Bailey, Anthony Braxton, Butch Morris és John Zorn.

The group
Despite all its various activities the MAE has a unique unmistakable sound and a charisma, probably described best as musical sex-appeal. The aesthetics of this sound was guarded through the years by artistic director Maarten Altena: "The MAE is composed out of characters and personalities. The music that is performed represents these characters and their backgrounds, but always with the aim to produce group music. The group has often compared itself with a modern city. A city is the territory of different people with different backgrounds, colors, lifestyles, cultures, likes and dislikes. But a city is also a character in itself- there is a big difference between for example Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, New York and Rome. And which city does not have its own structure, vitality and mystery? Structure, vitality and mystery; for me those are the elements of all interesting music."

Peter Adriaansz (USA)

was born in Seattle in 1966 and studied composition and organ at the conservatories of The Hague and Rotterdam, where his teachers included Louis Andriessen, Brian Ferneyhough and Peter-Jan Wagemans. He completed his studies with distinction in 1994.
From 1993 Adriaansz has worked as a composer receiving numerous commissions and performances from among others ARRAY Music (Toronto), the Aurelia Saxophone Quartet, California EAR Unit, ensemble Continuum (Toronto), Crash Ensemble (Dublin), the Doelenensemble, eNsemble (St. Petersburg), Ives Ensemble, ensemble KORE (Montreal), Maarten Altena Ensemble, ensemble MusikFabrik, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and Symphony Orchestras, the Nieuw Ensemble, ensemble Omnibus (Tashkent), Orkest de Volharding, the Schonberg Ensemble, Slagwerkgroep Den Haag and the Ural Philharmonic (Yekaterinburg) as well as writing for ensembles with more unusual instrumentations for specific projects. His works are performed and broadcast with great regularity world-wide and have featured on many stages, from the Holland Festival to Huddersfield and from Tashkent to Toronto.
Over the years he has built up special working relationships with the Ives Ensemble, Slagwerkgroep Den Haag and individual musicians such as pianist Gerard Bouwhuis, percussionist Arnold Marinissen and electric guitarist Wiek Hijmans: ensembles and musicians dedicated to the exploration of new sounds and forms. 
Adriaansz’ music is characterized by a formalist stance and a high degree of conceptualism, in which sound, structure and audible mathematics are the main ingredients. In recent years an increasing interest in flexibility and variable forms can also be observed in his work.

Nicolas COLLINS (USA)

New York born and raised, Nicolas Collins studied composition with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University, worked for many years with David Tudor, and has collaborated with numerous soloist and ensembles around the world.  He lived most of the 1990s in Europe, where he was Visiting Artistic Director of Stichting STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin. Since 1997 he has been editor-in-chief of the Leonardo Music Journal. He is currently Chair of the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 
Recent recordings are available on PlateLunch, Periplum and Apestaartje. His book, Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking, was published by Routledge in 2006.

Yannis KYRIAKIDES (CY)

Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969 and as a result of the Turkish military occupation in 1974 emigrated with his family to Britain. After travelling for a year with his violin in the near east, learning traditional music, he returned to England to study musicology at York University, later being drawn by the music of Louis Andriessen to move to The Netherlands, with whom he studied under at the Hague Conservatory. At that time he also had the inspiring opportunity to collaborate as composer on three projects with the maverick conceptual sound artist Dick Raaijmaakers. He currently lives in Amsterdam, with his wife and son.
As a composer he strives to create new forms and hybrids of media, synthesizing disparate sound sources and exploring spatial and temporal experience. He has focused in the majority of his work on ways of combining traditional performance practices with digital media. The sensory space where music happens is a particular preoccupation, and for this end a way of bypassing the conventional structures of how music is presented is sought.
The question as to what music is actually communicating is also a recurring theme in his work and he is often drawn to the relation between emotion and language and how that defines our experience of music.
He regularly composes works for ensembles such as ASKO (NL), Icebreaker Ensemble (UK), Ensemble Integrales (GER), and MAE (NL), of which he is the artistic director. Other collaborations include MusikFabrik (GER), Orkest de Volharding (NL), Nozferatu (UK), Palmos (Gr), London Sinfonietta (UK), LOOS (NL), Percussion Group Den Haag (NL), Zephyr Quartet (NL), Esprit Ensemble (CA), Nsemble (RU), Ensemble Cantus (Cr), and others. As an improviser he is involved in the Amsterdam electronic improv scene, he has a regular duo with Andy Moor (the Ex) called Red v Green, and is a member of the dance-music improvisation group Magpie.
His has written over fifty compositions, of which recent large scale works include: Strobo (30') for six percussionists, glass and stroboscopes; Scape (80') for video and ensemble ; Spinoza (or I am not where I think myself to be) (90') music theatre; Subliminal: the Lucretian Picnic (45’) ensemble, video, live electronics; Lab Fly Dreams (25’) BBC commission for ensemble and electronics, the Buffer Zone (60’) music theatre, Escamotage (70’) music theatre (FNM Staatsoper Stuutgart) and Wordless (50’) 12 electronic portraits for headphones and PA.
Upcoming projects include a music theatre work on a new text by Daniel Danis with Theatre Cryptic (Glasgow), a multi-media piece in collaboration with video artist HC Gilje for MusikFabrik (Köln)/ZKM (Kalsruhe), and a suite of pieces based on industrial era telegraphic codes for his own ensemble MAE (NL).
In September 2000 he won the Gaudeamus composition prize for his composition a conSPIracy cantata – which was regarded by The Wire magazine as ‘a modern classic in the making’. Together with Andy Moor and Isabelle Vigier he founded and runs the CD label for innovative new electronic music, UNSOUNDS. 
Also teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.

Alvin LUCIER (USA)

A trailblazing force in psycho-acoustic music, avant-garde composer and performer Alvin Lucier was born in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1931; educated at Yale and Brandeis, he also spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship before returning to Brandeis in 1962 to teach and conduct the university's chamber chorus.
His breakthrough composition, Music for Solo Performer (1964-65) for Enormously Amplified Brain Waves and Percussion, was the first work to feature sounds generated by brain waves in live performance;
Biological stimuli played an increasing role in Lucier's subsequent work as well, most notably through his notation of performers' physical movements.
Acoustical phenomena, meanwhile, was the subject of 1970's landmark I Am Sitting in a Room, in which several sentences of recorded speech were simultaneously played back into a room and re-recorded there dozens of times over, the space gradually filtering the speech into pure sound.
1980's "Music on a Long Thin Wire" was a further extension of Lucier's fascination with the physics of sound -- a conceptual piece featuring a taut 50-foot wire passed through the poles of a large magnet and driven by an oscillator, the amplified vibrations yielded beautifully ethereal results.
A professor at Wesleyan University from 1970 onward, Lucier's later works additionally included a number of sound installations as well as works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra.

Felix PROFOS (CH)

was born 1969 in Switzerland and studied composition mainly with Roland Moser in Basel. Since the mid-nineties he has written music mostly for instrumental groups, sometimes making use of simple electronics or video. He usually writes about 2 pieces a year, recently obsessed with irrational repetition patterns, unison and microtonal melody. His favourite performers are the Maarten Altena Ensemble, avantgarde-hardcore rock band Steamboat Switzerland and his wife, pianist Tamriko Kordzaia.

Henry VEGA (USA)

born in New York City, is dedicated to the creation and promotion of electro acoustic music. In a handful of years he has been involved as teacher, technician, composer and performer on productions of theatre, dance and concert music that focus solely on modern artistic trends. As a composer Vega has received commissions to work with choreographers, theatre directors and video artists while his devotion is focused on computer interactive performance.

His music has received first prize from SCI, Honorable Mention from the Hungarian Radio EAR competition and was a selected finalist at the Gaudeamus Composition Contest 2004 in Amsterdam for his work "Alibi". Vega's works have been performed at venues in Cuba, the United States, Korea, Europe and Australia and at festivals such as ICMC, SEAMUS, Sonic Residues, the Scarborough EA Festival, Primavera en la Havana, Sonorities, Aural Tick and the Florida EM Festival.
In 2003 he founded "The Electronic Hammer" with Diego Espinosa and Juan Parra, a group dedicated to performing new and recent works for percussion and computers allowing composers with limited or expert knowledge of computers to compose freely for this meta-instrument.

His work "Idoru in Metals" is recorded on the ICMC 2005 CD which took place in Barcelona.

Vega has studied composition at Florida Intl. University with Orlando Garcia and Kristine Burns, at the University of North Texas with Jon Nelson and at the Institute for Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague where his mentors, Paul Berg, Joel Ryan and Kees Tazzelar, guided him in programming and improvisation as well as composition. During these years Vega has also had the opportunity to study composition with Franco Donatoni, Earl Brown, James Tenney, Francis Dhomont and Christian Wolff.
He is currnetly a PhD candidate at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast under the guidance of Michael Alcorn.