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THE BODY OF YOUR DREAMS by Jacob TV (Ter Veldhuis)
(2002--revised 2004) (BUMA/STEMRA)
A SHAKING OF THE PUMPKIN (2007) by Michael Gatonska (ASCAP)
DIGITS (2005) by Neil Rolnick (BMI)

Pianist Kathleen Supové is not only one of the most acclaimed interpreters of contemporary music in this country, but also an artist who is continually evolving an answer to the question of what music gets presented and how it gets presented. She has commissioned, premiered and performed countless works by emerging and important composers and, in always being at the forefront of seeking out new voices, she has established herself as an integral part of recent music history. Ms. Supové presents concerts under the name of The Exploding Piano. In recent seasons, she has developed The Exploding Piano into a multimedia experience by using electronics, theatrical elements, vocal rants, performance art, staging, and collaboration with artists from other disciplines. Much of this has been developed during her years in residency at The Flea Theater in Tribeca. The Exploding Piano concerts have taken place these past two seasons in universities, conservatories, and performance spaces throughout the US. This past season, she was a featured artist at the Ussachevsky Memorial Festival in Claremont, CA, as well as the NIME 2007 Festival in NYC. During this upcoming season, she will be a guest artist at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco and the Music On The Edge series at University of Pittsburgh. Supové has also appeared with The Lincoln Center Festival, The Philip Glass Ensemble, Bang On a Can Marathon, Music at the Anthology, Composers’ Collaborative, Inc., and at many other venues, ranging from concert halls such as Carnegie to theatrical spaces such as The Kitchen to clubs such as The Knitting Factory, The Stone, and The Cutting Room. She has already commissioned a large body of works for piano and electronics, as well as works for the Yamaha Disklavier. In 2001, Ms. Supové became a Yamaha Artist. Her most recent CD, INFUSION, appears on the Koch International Classics label. Other recordings can be found on the Tzadik, CRI, New World, Innova, Neuma, Bridge, Centaur, OO, and XI labels.

“THE BODY OF YOUR DREAMS”
“The Body of Your Dreams”, for piano and boombox (soundtrack) was commissioned by Deutschlandfunk and composed December 2002, revised in 2004. It is based on spoken word samples from an American television commercial about the Ab Tronic Pro: a kind of belt that produces 3000 muscle contractions in just ten minutes. Pitch and rhythm of each and every piano tone is determined by one-liners from the commercial. The composition is a kind of work out for the pianist too, who has to be in good shape...(adapted from Jacob ter Veldhuis’s note in the score). Some quotes from the soundtrack: “It’s one of the easiest ways ever to get your body in the shape you want it.....You can use it while watching television, doing the dishes, mowing the lawn....you decide....”etc.

“A SHAKING OF THE PUMPKIN”
Music for this piece was written for Ms. Supové and with the intention of creating a continual refreshment of compositional structures, piano techniques, and sound forms from beginning to end; the composition pushes towards diversity in the levels of music environments and relationships rather than a single or fixed point of view. The overall shape or formal unfolding of the music is loosely based on a series of songs from the Seneca that celebrate and honor both plants and animals during the Fall harvest season. To accompany such events, pumpkins and squash were dried and used as rattles. The optional bass drum being placed over the piano strings is not only symbolic in this way, but it is also asked to perform as an amplified filter that selects/reveals spectral content that will add both girth and nuance to the overall piano sound(s).

“DIGITS”
Obviously, digits are what we use both to play the piano and to operate computers. This piece makes some fairly extreme demands on both types of digits. The piano part, written for Kathleen Supové, exploits her incredible technique to play a bit more than is humanly possible. The computer, which plays only sounds that originate from the piano, integrates with the live playing in a way which is seamless and, hopefully, a bit magical. Digits is a composition for solo piano and digital processing. The pianist must bring virtuoso technique to the performance, and the processing is designed to amplify the piano’s sound in ways that are both subtle and arresting.  All the processed sound comes from the piano. There can also be a video component of the piece. Designed by R. Luke DuBois, using Jitter, the video track processes live images of the pianist’s fingers (her digits) as she performs the piece, and projects them on a screen inside or above the piano lid. The overall effect of the piece is of a classical, virtuoso piano sonata, in which the piano itself has been bent slightly out of shape, amplified, and multiplied, and the images of the player’s fingers are brought directly to the audience and manipulated to complement the music.

Dutch ‘avant pop’ composer JacobTV (aka Jacob Ter Veldhuis, 1951) started as a rock musician and studied composition and electronic music at the Groningen Conservatory, where he was awarded the Dutch Composition Prize in 1980. During the eighties he made a name for himself with melodious compositions, straight from the heart and with great effect. ‘I pepper my music with sugar,’ he says. Jacob TV is preoccupied with American media and world events and draws raw materials from those sources. His work possesses an explosive strength and raw energy combined with extraordinarily intricate architectural design. Long queues at the box office for the four-day Jacob TV Festival in Rotterdam in 2001 already attested to his growing popularity. He has become one of the most performed European composers. His works were recently performed by such orchestras as The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Russian State
Academy Orchestra and the Düsseldorf Symfoniker, and by soloists such as Branford Marsalis, James Galway, Arno Bornkamp, Kathy Supové, Kevin Gallagher and Evelyn Glennie.  His so called boombox works, based on speech melody, like THE BODY OF YOUR DREAMS,became world famous. Various choreographers, like Hans van Manen, have been inspired by his music.  His ‘coming-out’ as a composer of ultra-tonal, mellifluous music reached its climax with his video oratorio Paradiso. May 2007, the Whitney
Museum of American Art organized a 3 day JacobTV  mini festival in New York City. In 2007 the box set trilogy, an anthology of his work with 12 hours of audio and video was released by Basta. www.bastamusic.com <http://www.bastamusic.com>
www.jacobtv.net <http://www.jacobtv.net

Michael Gatonska studied composition with K. Penderecki,  M. Stachowski, and Z. Bujarski at the Academy of Music in Krakow, Poland, and with E. Tanenbaum at the Manhattan School of Music.  His music has been performed by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, the Hartford Symphony, the Pacific Symphony, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and twice he participated in the Minnesota
Orchestra Reading Sessions & Composer Institute.  He has recently written a solo work for the electric-cellist Jeffrey Krieger, and his string orchestra work Transformation of the Hummingbird was recorded by SONYC and released this past June on Albany Records.

Since he moved to New York City in 2002, Neil Rolnick’s music has been receiving increasingly wide recognition and numerous performances both in the US and abroad. A pioneer in the use of computers in performance, beginning in the late 1970s, Rolnick has often included unexpected and unusual combinations of materials and media in his music. He has performed around the world, and his music has appeared on 13 CD’s.

Though much of Rolnick’s work has been in areas which connect music and technology, and is therefore considered in the realm of “experimental” music, his music has always been highly melodic and accessible. Whether working with electronic sounds, improvisation, or multimedia, his music has been characterized by critics as “sophisticated,” “hummable and engaging,” and as having “good senses of showmanship and humor.”

 Works completed in 2007 include Hammer & Hair for violinist Todd Reynolds and pianist Kathleen Supové; Love Songs for the Albany Symphony, with soloists Theo Bleckmann and Todd Reynolds; and The Bridge for the Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire ensemble. In 2006 Rolnick completed the iFiddle Concerto for the American Composers Orchestra, with soloist Todd Reynolds, which was premiered in Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York. In 2006 he also wrote Uptown Jump for the trio MAYA, and Segal’s Billboard for harpist Jacquiline Kerrod, and Innova Recordings released his 13th CD, Digits, which received enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times and in Time Out New York.

Rolnick teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, where he was founding
director of the iEAR Studios.