Chris Brown & Thea Farhadian | Solos and Duo Performance

Name: Chris Brown & Thea Farhadian | Solos and Duo Performance
Start: 2025-01-15T19:30:00-08:00
Location: 660 Lomita Dr, Stanford, CA, United States, California 94305

Schedule

Wed, 15 Jan, 2025 at 07:30 pm

UTC-08:00

Location

660 Lomita Dr, Stanford, CA, United States, California 94305 | Stanford, CA

CCRMA presents a live performance by Chris Brown and Thea Farhadian.
First set: Chris Brown will perform sections of "RhythmiChrome”with interactive electronics and video, and Thea Farhadian will perform to the experimental film "Brutiage."
Second set: Electroacoustic improvisations. Chris Brown, grand piano with live computer processing and Thea Farhadian, violin with live computer processing.
The concert is in part a CD release for Farhadian's new album, Tattoos and Other Markings (Other Minds Records).
https://www.otherminds.org/recordings/
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FREE and Open to the Public
In person: CCRMA Stage, The Knoll 317
Directions, parking, accessibility: https://music.stanford.edu/venues-facilities/venues/ccrma-stage
Livestream: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/live
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Chris Brown, composer, pianist, and electronic musician, makes music with self- designed sonic systems that include acoustic and electroacoustic instruments, interactive software, computer networks, microtonal tunings, and improvisation. His compositions are designs for performances in which people bring to life the musical structures embedded in scores, instruments, and machines. His early work featured electroacoustic instruments he invented and built, like the Gazamba (1982), an electric percussion piano featured in Alternating Currents (1984), for the Berkeley Symphony and three soloists. He designed and built his own computer-controlled analog signal-processing system for the environmental sound piece Lava (1992), for brass, percussion, and live electronics. Talking Drum (1995-2000), was a MIDI network installation that explored polyrhythm, distance, and resonance in large architectural spaces. He is a member since 1986 of the pioneering computer network music band The Hub, which received the 2018 Giga-Hertz Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany. Throughout his career he has composed solos for acoustic instruments with interactive electronics using software he writes for his compositions and improvisations. Since 2005 he has written music in just intonation, often integrating rhythmic structures that parallel the proportions used in their tunings. Recordings of his music are available on New World, fo’c’sle, Tzadik, Pogus, Intakt, Rastascan, Ecstatic Peace, Red Toucan, Leo, and Artifact Recordings. He has also performed and recorded music by Henry Cowell, Luc Ferrari, José Maceda, John Zorn, David Rosenboom, Larry Ochs, Glenn Spearman, and Wadada Leo Smith; as an improvisor he has performed and recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, the Rova Saxophone Quartet, William Winant, and Frank Gratkowski. From 1990-2018 he taught electronic music, theory, composition, world music, and contemporary performance practice as Professor of Music and Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) at Mills College in Oakland.
https://cbmuse.com/
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Thea Farhadian is a performer/composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work extends over a wide range of disciplines in projects including solo violin and interactive electronics, acoustic improvisation, solo laptop, radio art, and scoring experimental video. Her solo pieces for violin and electronics combine a classical music background with extended technique, digital processing, and extensive improvisation.
Generally speaking, Farhadian’s solo work comprises an aesthetic range from more textured, noise-based sound to more tonal and microtonal realms employing free tonality and extended technique. Her first solo album, Tectonic Shifts (Creative Sources), features real-time processing to create twisted echoes, jagged rhythms and microtonal landscapes and was highly praised by reviewers internationally (“What separates her from the typical...tedium- transmitting specimens is the ability to render the most absurd-sounding complications with sensible unambiguity. Furthermore...she’s not afraid of highlighting the magnetism of a romantic modernity through the use of purer tones across transitional environments.” -Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes). In her collaborative projects, she has worked with such artists as Tomomi Adachi, Kim Anno, Chris Brown, Shelley Hirsch, Heike Liss, Silvia Matheus, Amy X Neuburg, Tim Perkis and Dean Santomieri.
Her work has been heard internationally at the Issue Project Room, the Downtown Music Gallery, in New York City; Galerie Mario Mazzoli, Sowieso, and Quiet Cue in Berlin; the Center for New Music, the Room Series, and Meridian Gallery in San Francisco; the Center for Experimental Art and the Aram Khachaturian Museum in Yerevan, Armenia; and the International Women's Electroacoustic Listening Room Project at Bimhaus in Amsterdam, among others.
Farhadian started as a violinist and played in the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano for ten years. She has an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from San Francisco State University and an M.F.A. in Electronic Music from Mills College.
http://www.theafarhadian.com/