Tickets include full-day museum admission.
Ringing Minds
Since the late 1960s, David Rosenboom has made works exploring extended musical interface with the human nervous system. Ringing Minds—collective brain responses interacting in a spontaneous musical landscape (2014), created in collaboration with computational neuroscientist and musician, Tim Mullen, and cognitive scientist and performer-composer, Alex Khalil, offers a significant step forward in the evolution of this paradigm. Using a technique called hyperscanning, the brains of several musical listeners are treated as one hyper-brain to investigate concepts about complexity and structural forms manifested concurrently in music and multiple brains, along with resonances that can be detected within and between listeners and performers. In Ringing Minds, resonant patterns detected in the hyper-brain’s activity are sonified with a field of ringing, electronic sound resonators. Two musicians, one with an electronic violin and another with a unique xylophone-like instrument made of stone, called a lithophone, respond to activity in this sound field. When, in turn, the hyper-brain responds to sounds created spontaneously by the musicians, the resonator field undulates, as if stones were being tossed into a vast sonic lake, and we hear their ever expanding ripples.
Choose Your Universe
In his writings on Propositional Music, David Rosenboom describes a method of composing that always reaches back to an important principle for each new beginning, which asks, “What will be the domain of distinction and thought in this work from which the means for delineating the entities that will receive compositional attention and choice making may emerge for each musical action?” This process of continuous beginnings belies the very idea of style. A genre-less musical world thus unfolds. In Choose Your Universe, David Rosenboom, with Yamaha Piano/Disklavier, electronics, and violin, is joined by trumpet virtuoso and composer, Daniel Rosenboom, to create an assemblage in time drawing from several major works: In the Beginning: Etude III (Keyboard & Two Oranges) (1980)—from Rosenboom’s In the Beginning series of nine major works composed between 1978 and 1981, Tango Secretum (2006)—referring to writings by Francesco Petrarca and poet, Martine Bellen, Music for Unstable Circuits (1968 and later versions)—both digital and analog, Kicking Shadows (2007)—referencing James Brown and Zen master, Chi-fo (a.k.a. Feng-Seng), excerpts from the concert-length work for piano and interactive software, Bell Solaris (1998), and excerpts from Rosenboom’s major opus for soloist with instruments and computer synthesis/processing, Systems of Judgment (1987). Choose Your Universe highlights the vast range of musical types David Rosenboom has traversed in his musical life.
David Rosenboom (b. 1947) is a composer, performer, conductor, interdisciplinary artist, author and educator known as a pioneer in American experimental music. Since the 1960s David Rosenboom has explored the spontaneous evolution of musical forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, multi-disciplinary composition and performance, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art and literature, interactive multi-media and new instrument technologies, generative algorithmic systems, art-science research and philosophy, and extended musical interface with the human nervous system. His work is widely distributed and presented around the world. He holds the Richard Seaver Distinguished Chair in Music at CalArts where he is also Dean of The Herb Alpert School of Music. David Rosenboom is a Yamaha Artist.
Tim Mullen is a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, educator, and artist. He is an alumnus of UC Berkeley (B.A.) and UC San Diego (M.S.,Ph.D), and is a frequent lecturer internationally on cognitive and computational neuroscience topics. He is currently CEO at Syntrogi Inc and Director of Syntrogi Labs, developing novel solutions for decoding brain signals. He is also a musician and artist whose work in audiovisual new media, exploring real-time interactions between the brain and body and external environments, has been presented nationally and internationally. He is a Creative Director for the San Diego classical arts organization Mainly Mozart. There he serves as founding director of the annual Mozart & the Mind festival, a series of concerts, presentations, and interactive media and neurotechnology exhibitions exploring the impact of music on our brains, health, and lives.
Alexander Khalil is an ethnomusicologist, performer, and composer. His Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, San Diego, explores the aural aspects of the chant tradition of the last remaining chanters of the church of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in Istanbul, Turkey. This work was informed by his own experience as a chanter of the Greek Orthodox Church, trained by Ioannis Mestakides, head chanter of the church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem. Aside from this work, Alex has spent significant time studying language and performance practices in China, Japan, and Indonesia. He has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the department of Cognitive Science, UCSD, where he has conducted research that investigates connections between music pedagogy and the development of temporal perception.
Daniel Rosenboom (b. 1982) is a creative and prolific trumpet artist, composer, and producer. As a soloist, collaborator, and bandleader, he has been featured on major stages and in festivals around the world. Daniel plays regularly with the Daniel Rosenboom Quintet and several other ensembles, and has twice toured the world as multi-platinum pop singer Josh Groban's trumpet soloist. He also records regularly for motion pictures, television, and video games, and has performed with many of the elite musical groups and orchestras in Los Angeles. In January of 2014, he founded the independent record label, Orenda Records, in an effort to promote his community of like-minded musicians in Los Angeles and beyond. Daniel holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music, UCLA, and California Institute of the Arts, and is a Yamaha Performing Artist.
