Composing Sic Transit, scored for percussionist and CADI (Configurable Drumming Machine), was quite the adventure! CADI was created by composer-technologists Scott Barton, Steve Kemper and Troy Rogers, then students in the Composition and Computing Technologies PhD program at UVA. They founded the company EMMI, and have created several fascinating music performance robots. Steve set up CADI at my home studio. He and composer Peter Traub worked with me on developing a Max patch to control the robot arms, and I spent hours experimenting with it. Often my ears would tire before my mind would! This version of the program did not have control over the strength of each hit, so the percussion instruments were reverberating loudly. I wanted to created fixed and improvisatory sections for both the live performer and CADI. It was quite a conceptual challenge to work through, but I found the interaction of computer controlled performance with a live performer compelling, and played with interactions where the live performer and CADI have to be in exact sync, and others where they inhabit the same sonic space, but each go their own way. Sic Transit was premiered by Ross Karre on a program I shared with composer Steve Antosca in the dome room of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC on 3/16 & 3/17/11 . My colleague I-Jen Fang performed the Charlottesville premiere in our own dome room, in Jefferson’s Rotunda, here at UVA on the 2011 TechnoSonics Festival. She recorded it at The Sound, a wonderful local recording studio, for an upcoming CD of my music. She also performed the Charlottesville premiere in our own dome room, in Jefferson’s Rotunda at UVA on the 2011 TechnoSonics Festival. You can view that performance on Youtube.
