Violinist/composer Mari Kimura will present a demonstration/lecture on her creative process of ONE, multi-lingual, interactive audio visual mini-opera. Mari will demonstrate her use of “MO”, a bowing motion sensor developed by IRCAM’s Realtime Musical Interaction Team, which tracks her musical expression in this project. ONE, a mini-opera in four acts (Birth, Youth, Conflict, Cure), with the theme of “love, humanity, faith and global solidarity.”
[May 31] Making of ONE, multi-lingual, audio visual mini-opera
Mari Kimura
Sat, May 31 2014, 7-9pm
Admission: FREE
Location:
Harvestworks
596 Broadway, #602 | New York, NY 10012 | Phone: 212-431-1130
Subway: F/M/D/B Broadway/Lafayette, R Prince, 6 Bleecker
Violinist/composer Mari Kimura will present a demonstration/lecture on her creative process of ONE, multi-lingual, interactive audio visual mini-opera. Mari will demonstrate her use of “MO”, a bowing motion sensor developed by IRCAM’s Realtime Musical Interaction Team, which tracks her musical expression in this project. ONE, a mini-opera in four acts (Birth, Youth, Conflict, Cure), with the theme of “love, humanity, faith and global solidarity.” This event is sponsored by Tokio Marine Nichido.
Mari Kimura teamed up with award- winning Japanese movie director Tomoyuki Kato’s creative team from Japan, Yoshito Onishi (Image Programing) and Chisako Hasegawa (Visual Producer), creating a large- scale composition for an ensemble and herself on stage. Mari uses the state-of-the-art motion sensor technology “MO” developed at IRCAM interacting with audio and video in real time, and for today’s performance, multi-lingual vocalist Jin-Xiang Yu will apprise the vocal part, singing and interacting with computer with the text in Japanese, Chinese, English and French, joined by the Cassatt String Quartet. ONE is commissioned by Harvestworks with funds from New Music USA’s Commissioning Music/USA program, which is made possible by generous annual support from the NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs as well as endowment support from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Helen F. Whitaker foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trust.
ONE was premiered at River-to-River Festival 2013 at the Michael Schimmel Auditorium in NYC, with vocalist Kyoko Kitamura and the Cassatt String Quartet. Mari will give an intimate look inside her MaxMSP program in detail opening up ‘behind the scenes’ to demonstrate how she interacts with MO sensor and interactive graphics, collaborating with Tomoyuki Kato’s creative team in Japan. She will also perform and demonstrate her other works using MO with interactive audio visual works, discussing how motion sensor is used NOT as a ‘trigger device’ but a tool to extract musical expression of a human performer. She will premiere a solo violin version of ONE.
Mari Kimura is at the forefront of violinists who are extending the technical and expressive capabilities of the instrument. As a performer, composer, and researcher, she has opened up new sonic worlds for the violin. Notably, she has mastered the production of pitches that sound up to an octave below the violin’s lowest string without retuning. This technique, which she calls Subharmonics, has earned Mari considerable renown in the concert music world and beyond. She is also a pioneer in the field of interactive computer music. At the same time, she has earned international acclaim as a soloist and recitalist in both standard and contemporary repertoire.
As a composer, Mari’s commissions include the International Computer Music Association, Harvestworks, Music from Japan and others, supported by grants including New York Foundation for the Arts, Arts International, Meet The Composer, Japan Foundation, Argosy Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts. In 2010 Mari won the Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition, and invited as Composer-in- Residence at IRCAM in Paris. In May 2011, Mari was presented in a solo recital at the Bohemian National Hall in NYC by the Vilcek Foundation, in recognition of her ground- breaking work as a foreign-born artist; subsequently she was named one of 2011’s 45 individuals as “Immigrants: Pride of America” by the Carnegie Corporation, published in the New York Times. Mari’s latest CD, The World Below G and Beyond, is devoted entirely to her own compositions and focuses on works using Subharmonics and interactive computer music. In October 2011, Mari presented her “I-Quadrifoglo”, her first string quartet with interactive computer at New York’s Symphony Space, commissioned by the Cassatt String Quartet through 2010 Fromm Foundation Commission Award from Harvard. Mari’s work has been featured in major publications including the New York Times written by Matthew Gurewitsch, and in Scientific American written by Larry Greenemeier.
As a violinist, Mari has premiered many notable works, including John Adams’s Violin Concerto (Japanese premiere), Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIII (US premiere), Tania Léon’s Axon for violin and computer (world premiere), and Salvatore Sciarrino’s 6 Capricci (US premiere), among others. In 2007, Mari introduced Jean-Claude Risset’s violin concerto, Schemes, at Suntory Hall with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. The cadenza she wrote for the concerto, incorporating advanced Subharmonics, was subsequently published in Strings. In November 2010, Mari appeared as a soloist with the Hamburg Symphony performing John Adams’ Dharma at the Big Sur, under the direction of Jonathan Stockhammer, conductor.
In 2013, Mari inaugurated a new summer program as the Director of “Future Music Lab” at the Atlantic Music Festival in collaboration with IRCAM. The program focuses on high-level performers using the latest technology. Since 1998, Mari has been teaching a graduate course in Interactive Computer Music Performance at Juilliard.
