E-tudes

Performance/installation for 6 keyboards, Disklavier, live electronics and 200 headphones

E-tudes is an interactive installation/performance for 6 keyboards, Disklavier, live electronics and 200 headphones, exploring the notion of appropriating music within the immediacy of its performance. In E-tudes, six pianists playing keyboards simultaneously perform various compositions from the repertoire. I plunder, process and combine the MIDI and audio signals from the keyboards in real-time through an idiosyncratic algorithmic system. E-tudes is simultaneously a performance and installation where the performers use headphones to monitor themselves in order not to reveal the original compositions that provide material for the computer processing. The audience instead chooses between listening to different headphones distributed through the space playing various possible outputs generated by the computer. E-tudes therefore attempts to challenge traditional notions of performance practice, audience participation and sound representation and causality by plundering keyboard performances as they occur.

E-tudes is composed using the SuperCollider programming language and combines the use of live electronics, improvisation, real-time computation and generative music to create a result which is unfixed, responsive and which changes for each performance of the work. It also seeks to explore new types of performance practice through new technologies establishing alternative forms of exchange between composer and performers, between performers within an ensemble and between performers and audience.

Download E-tudes Booklet