elektronik2001.html

Organized by CarillonConcertsBerlin in cooperation with the Electronic Studio of the Technical University of Berlin
and with the support of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Initiative neue Musik Berlin e. V.

Ed Osborn was born in 1964 in Helsinki, Finland. He is a sound designer and composer from California and studied at Wesleyan University, Connecticut (diploma 1987) and Mills College, California (diploma 1993). He has performed, exhibited, lectured and held residencies throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. The recipient of many awards including a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Stipendium in 2001 and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and is on the faculty of the Visual Art Department at Brown University. Ed Osborn's sound art pieces take many forms including installation, sculpture, radio, video, performance, and public projects. His works combine a visceral sense of space, aurality, and motion with a precise economy of materials. Ranging from rumbling fans and sounding train sets to squirming music boxes and delicate feedback networks, Osborn's kinetic and audible pieces function as resonating systems that are by turns playful and oblique, engaging and enigmatic.

Click here to listen to an excerpt of Osborn's Elevation performed by Jeffrey Bossin on the Carillon in Berlin-Tiergarten

Elevation is very quiet and lasts about eleven minutes. Osborn describes the electronics as "a set of slowly drifting chords made up from sine tones and are meant to be played through three loudspeakers, two on the ground and one suspended from the tower. The harmonies on the tape slide around very slowly. The carillon part is primarily intended to work with this background so that the gradul changes in harmony are highlighted against the steady pitches of the carillon. In particular, sections of the piece where a single chord is repeated several times are intended to foreground the slowly changing beat patterns set up between the pitches from the carillon and the ones on the tape. Electronic tones create beats that emerge and then gradually disappear. The carillonneur plays a series of short, simple, slow motives made of quarter notes and eighth notes and individual whole note chords. They are set in the range from a to b¹ and encompass at most a ninth but usually smaller intervals such as sevenths, sixths, fifths and fourths and are grouped in modules each of which is repeated several times. Elevation is the ideal beginners piece of music for carillon and electronics. It requires only a minimum of preparation and can be played prima vista using a stopwatch. Its soft sounds offer a welcome contrast to dynamic and dramatic works such as Vox veterrima and it works well as a quiet and meditative section of a program.