JAMES DASHOW

Workshop - The Dyad System

The Dyad System consists of the manipulation of two levels of musical information: the synthesis of electronic sounds (and their transformations) and the generation of musical structure rigorously derived from sequences and combinations of intervals (the dyads). Sound synthesis is based on the very same intervals (dyads), hence the music for acoustic instruments and for the computer generated sounds are derived from the identical master structure. The exact way in which this happens, the criteria for determining the various stuctures, is a fundamental part of the musical composition: the composer works both in the classical sense of following his ears and in informatics in the adaptation of the system according to his musical-stuctural intentions. Many sound examples will be presented together with the digital synthesis algorithms that produced them; furher examples will illustrate the possibilities of timbral development by means of the System resources in combination with post-production techniques commonly available with many commercial DAWs. Passages from several of the composer’s works will be discussed in detail to illustrate how a fundamental musical structure for live performers is developed in the electronic domain with these techniques.

James Dashow has had commissions, awards and grants from the Bourges International Festival of Experimental Music, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Linz Ars Electronica Festival, the Fromm Foundation, the Biennale di Venezia, the USA National Endowment for the Arts, RAI (Italian National Radio), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller Foundation, Il Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte (Montepulciano, Italy), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Prague Musica Nova, and the Harvard Musical Association of Boston. In 2000, he was awarded the prestigious Prix Magistere at the 30th Festival International de Musique et d'Art Sonore Electroacoustiques in Bourges.
A pioneer in the field of computer music, Dashow was one of the founders of the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale at the University of Padova, where he composed the first works of computer music in Italy, and has taught at MIT, Princeton University, the Centro para la Difusion di Musica Contemporanea in Madrid and the Musica Viva Festival in Lisbon; he was invited by the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello in Venezia to teach an intensive series of workshop/masterclasses in digital sound synthesis techniques applied in particular to compositional practices, and to various aspects of the spatialization of sound. He was composer in residence at the 12th Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, and he continues to lecture and conduct master-classes extensively in the U.S. and Europe. Dashow served as the first vice-president of the International Computer Music Association, and was for many years the producer of the radio program "Il Forum Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea" for Italian National Radio. He has written theoretical and analytical articles for Perspectives of New Music, the Computer Music Journal, La Musica, and Interface, and is the author of the MUSIC30 language for digital sound synthesis. He was the subject of an extended interview published in the Computer Music Journal (Summer, 2003).
His music has been recorded on WERGO (Mainz), Capstone Records (New York), Neuma (Boston), RCA-BMG (Roma), ProViva (Munich), Scarlatti Classica (Roma), CRI (New York), BVHAAST (Amsterdam) and Pan (Roma).

James Dashow website: www.jamesdashow.net