Frank Gratkowski – saxophone
David Wessel – live electronics (from California on the Internet)
United by the shared innovatory impulses of the fields of contemporary jazz, separated by the 10000 km, between Budapest and Berkeley (California) , the “analogue” sax player, Frank Gratkowski and David Wessel, a pioneer in the use of virtuoso external controllers for computer music, perform and improvise together through the ether.
Center for New Music & Audio Technologies, University of California at Berkley
David Wessel began performing professionally as jazz drummer in high school. He studied mathematics and experimental psychology at the University of Illinois and received a doctorate in mathematical psychology from Stanford in 1972. His work on the perception and compositional control of timbre in the early 70’s at Michigan State University led to a musical research position at IRCAM in Paris in 1976. In 1979 he began reshaping the Pedagogy Department to link the scientific and musical sectors of IRCAM. In 1985 he established a new IRCAM department devoted to the development of interactive musical software for personal computers. He joined the music faculty at the University of California Berkeley in 1988 and is co-director with Edmund Campion of the the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT).
He is particularly interested in live-performance computer music where improvisation plays an essential role. He has collaborated in performance with a variety of improvising composers including Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Coleman, Ushio Torikai, Thomas Buckner, Vinko Globokar, Jin Hi Kim, Shafqat Ali Khan, and Laetitia Sonami has performed throughout the US and Europe.
In computer music performance Wessel favors the enactive approach, which is a performance practices designed from an enactive view of musical perception, cognition, and motor control are described. It emphasizes the role of sensory-motor engagement in musical experience. The enabling elements required for the approach include, rich and precise gestural interfaces, connectivity devices, real-time gesture analysis and mapping software, richly controlled sound synthesis and processing, and the composition of musical worlds in the form of generative algorithms worthy of extensive exploration. These practices in human-instrument symbiosis require a commitment on the part of musicians to develop both refined motor skills and engagement in the development and refinement of real-time software.