Professional Development: Field Trips: Spring Runouts: the Princeton Laptop Orchestra and New Strategies with DJ Spooky

During the first week of April 2006, PMP took two “runout” trips to innovative music events. Both events focused on the rising influence of electronics in concert music. The first, on Tuesday, April 4, was the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, cleverly nicknamed PLOrk. The second, on Thursday, April 6, was “New Strategies with DJ Spooky,” an evening of diverse, mostly solo acts, curated by the young deejay.

PLOrk was founded by two Princeton professors, Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, both of whose work treads the line between composition and computer science. Trueman builds electronic instruments and participated in PMP’s “New Frontiers in Music: New Instruments” event in March. During this concert, which took place in Princeton’s Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall, about fifteen students sat on cushions onstage with Apple iBooks on their laps connected to specially-designed hemispherical speakers. Pieces on the program were contributed by Trueman, Cook, Paul Lansky, Brad Garton, Curtis Bahn and Tomie Hahn, Scott Smallwood, Seth Cluett, and Ge Wang.

The program also featured three well-known guest artists, composer and electronic musician Pauline Oliveros, So Percussion, and tabla master Zakir Hussain. In Oliveros’s work, her accordion’s sounds were transmitted to and processed by the PLOrk ensemble. So Percussion and Hussain performed in the final piece of the concert, a partial improvisation that also featured Trueman on violin. The percussion quartet, whose members include Douglas Perkins, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting, and Lawson White, were limited to pushing buttons on keypads to process Hussain’s playing, who was free to display his drumming virtuosity and wowed the audience.

Two days later, Symphony Space, at 95th and Broadway in New York, hosted “New Strategies with DJ Spooky.” Spooky, whose given name is Paul Miller, hosted several of his musical friends and colleagues for an evening of performance that he likened to a mix-tape.

Matthew Shipp, a promising jazz pianist, opened the program. After his set, Vijay Iyer took the stage. Iyer is also a pianist, but he complements the traditional instrument with electronic music, playing piano and laptop simultaneously. Guillermo E. Brown, a percussionist and electronic musician, sang and performed on a heavily modified guitar and additional tech equipment, a “solo performance system” he has called the Explorer.

Pamela Z sang and performed with body-based technology, so that her gestures and movements determined the sounds she created, integrating elements of spoken word poetry. A club deejay, Rob Swift, spun a hiphop set and displayed his skill on turntable, joking that the audience was quiet. “Feel free to make noise,” he encouraged us.

DJ Spooky performed with Ben Neill, a composer and inventor of the “mutantrumpet.” Spooky offered a multimedia piece also meant for the club; projections juxtaposed footage of Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and Outkast. The final performer was Suphala, a young tabla player who has studied with the same Zakir Hussain PMP saw perform that Tuesday. She played solo on the drums and then layered her performance with a composition she played from her iPod. A group improvisation didn’t quite get off the ground, and DJ Spooky invited the audience to an after party.

PMP’s trip participants had mixed reactions to both events. Both concerts presented experimental technologies and performance techniques, and the integration of pop and deejay culture can still appear forced or uneven. However, whatever succeeds out of these experiments will no doubt pave new paths for future musicians and their relationships to technology.