Performance Beyond Place: Music and Dance on Internet2

Internet2 Day Concert:
4pm, Charles Davis Concert Hall, UAF

The lights go down on the audience as composer Veronika Krausas begins a brief explanation of her new string quartet about to receive its world premiere. After she completes her comments, the members of the quartet lift their bows and begin Il sole e l'altre stelle written in memory of the late Canadian pianist Eugenie Ngai. As the sounds of the quartet envelope the audience, an acrobat/dancer improvises choreography to the music and is projected onto a large screen on the stage. If this all sounds like a typical contemporary music, multimedia event, you're right, until you realize the string quartet is at the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida, the composer and acrobat are at the USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles and the audience is in Fairbanks, Alaska. This cross-country collaboration isn't some futuristic fantasy, but part of a real event taking place Thursday, March 23rd 2006 at 4:00 pm. The title for this fantastic display of cutting edge music and technology is Performance Beyond Place: Music and Dance on Internet2.

Thanks to breakthroughs in networking technology from organizations such as Internet2 and pioneering research by Dr. Brian K. Shepard, Assistant Professor of Pedagogical Technology at the USC Thornton School of Music this type of musical and artistic collaboration is now a reality.

The University of Alaska at Fairbanks will hold an “Internet2 Day” on March 23rd 2006 to introduce the university and community to the many new possibilities of research, collaboration and creativity opened up by Internet2 connectivity. As the capstone to the day’s events, there will be a musical performance and teaching presentation featuring musicians from the New World Symphony in Miami, Florida, the USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, CA, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, and a special appearance by Ian Bousfield, principal trombonist of the Vienna Philharmonic.

The program will begin with Ian Bousfield presenting a masterclass to low brass students at the University of Alaska. Mr. Bousfield, who will be in residency at the New World Symphony at the time, will work with UAF students on interpretation and performance of low brass excerpts from the standard symphony orchestra repertoire.

Following the masterclass, Veronika Krausas, faculty composer at the USC Thornton School of Music will discuss her new string quartet Il sole e l’altre stelle, written in memory of the late Canadian pianist Eugenie Ngai, and introduce the musicians from the New World Symphony who will present the world premiere. As the quartet is being performed in Miami, the audio will be streamed to both Los Angeles and Fairbanks. In Los Angeles, Robert Drummond will shoot an acrobat/choreographer’s performance for live video capture and create real-time video art backgrounds for the final visual stream bound for Alaska. In Fairbanks, the video stream will then be combined with the audio streaming from Miami to create the finished product for the audience.

At the conclusion of Il sole e l’altre stelle, Dr. Scott Deal, Professor of Percussion at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks will take the stage for a percussion duet with Dr. Morris Palter, freelance percussionist in San Diego, CA. The duo will be performing the world premiere of Coccolith, a new work for two percussionists and electronics composed expressly for performance over the Internet. Dr. Palter’s side of the performance will also be streamed from the USC Thornton School of Music.

New World Symphony String Quartet members: Violin: Piotr Szewczyk, Hannah Cho, Viola: Jennifer Richson, Cello: Naomi Gray

Low Brass Students of Dr. James Bicigo, Associate Professor of Music, UAF: Murphy McCaleb, Brandon Newbold, David Martinson, Kawa Ng

The Technology:

Thanks to pioneering research into the area of high-quality music capture and delivery by Dr. Brian K. Shepard, Assistant Professor of Pedagogical Technology at the USC Thornton School of Music, the technological breakthroughs of the next-generation internet known as Internet2 are now available to musicians and performers. For this event, all video will be captured from the “firewire” output of digital (DV) video cameras and combined with stereo audio recorded at 48KHz (higher quality than CD audio). The audio and video will then be streamed uncompressed to each of the locations involved in the performance at data rates approaching 60Mb/sec. By comparison, the standard DSL or Cable Modem usually runs in the neighborhood of 500Kb-3Mb/sec. Because of the high bandwidth capabilities of Internet2, the video and audio signals can maintain their full fidelity and reach their destination with the same quality with which they were captured.