CONTACT: PETER ALEXANDER
100 Old Public Library
Iowa City IA 52242
(319) 384-0072; fax (319) 384-0024
e-mail: peter-alexander@uiowa.edu

Release: Immediate

Electronic Music Studios will present Sonic Circuits Festival Sept. 20

IOWA CITY, Iowa -- The Electronic Music Studios of the University of Iowa School of Music will present the "Sonic Circuits V Festival of Electronic Music," a program of works by composers from around the world at 8 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 20 in Clapp Recital Hall on the UI campus. This event will be free and open to the public.

"Sonic Circuits" is an international series of performances of electronic music written by composers working in many different countries around the world. The festival is coordinated by the American Composers Forum, which invites works from all composers working in electronic media. A pool of recommended works is selected from all those that are submitted, and then made available to host presenters around the world.

The UI presentation of "Sonic Circuits V" is one of 19 events worldwide that make up the current festival. These include performances before live audiences of works for sound tape, video, and live performers with tape, as well as radio broadcasts of a CD of the tape works.

The UI performance will include a tape piece by Lawrence Fritts, the director of the UI Electronic Music Studios, as well as works of various types by composers from North America and Europe. The full program comprises seven works:

--"Galileo's First Glimpse" for video and tape by Craig Harris, the executive editor of the electronic journal Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and Lorren Stafford;

--"Hard Cash (and small dreams of change)" for tape by Katherine Norman, an electronic music teacher in London;

--"Thought Forms" for tape by Fritts;

--". . . into all crevices of my world" for piano and tape by Craig Weston, who teaches composition, music theory and electronic/computer music at Iowa State University;

--"Something Else Again" for piano and tape by Alicyn Warren, an assistant professor and associate director of the Virginia Center for Computer Music;

--"Le Renard et la rose" for tape by Robert Normandeau, a composer on the faculty of the University of Montreal; and

--"Slammin' " for percussion and tape by Anne Deane, a composer and researcher at the CREATE Studios of the University of Santa Barbara.

Performers at the UI presentation will be pianists Jana LaHood and Brook Cuden, and percussionist Brett Paschal, all students in the UI School of Music.

Lawrence Fritts has been director of the Electronic Music Studios at the UI School of Music since 1995. His recent acousmatic work "Minute Variations" has recently been released on a CD on the Innova label, along with works by other leading acousmatic composers. The piece was presented at the Futura 98 Festival Acousmatique in Lyons, France. It has also been recently performed in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Glasgow and Thessaloniki, Greece, as part of the International Computer Music Conference.

Fritts has completed a doctorate in musical composition at the University of Chicago, where he studied with some of the leading figures in contemporary music. His music has been performed in Chicago by the Contemporary Chamber Players, the University of Chicago New Music Ensemble, New Music De Paul and New Music Chicago. His electronic works have been featured in a series of concerts at Columbia College and have been broadcast in the United States and Europe. He has been interviewed on National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Company about the history of electronic music.

The Sonic Circuits V Electronic Music Festival is supported in part by the Rockefeller Foundation.

9/11/98