VIBRA artist presentation: Wayne Siegel

Organizer: ARTEC in collaboration with VIBRA.

Monday, November 13th 2017 at 7:30 PM at Kunsthallen in Trondheim.

The American composer Wayne Siegel was invited by me to Trondheim and Kunsthallen to give a lecture. He has worked as a composer in many years doing live electronics, interactive dance, multimedia works, among other things.

Siegel has worked as a composer in Denmark since the 1970s, when he moved there from the USA to study with Per Nørgård. It has been written about Siegel that he “settles comfortably into an American minimalist tradition and is, as such, a foreigner in Denmark. But at the same time, his music, and its use of technology and electronics, is also a development that has taken place in collaboration with Danish, Nordic, and European colleagues, and the research conducted at DIEM (Danish Institute for Electroacoustic Music, where Siegel has been a long-time director) has undoubtedly become a particularly Danish version of the work with electronics and music.”

As part of the lecture, Siegel performed the piece Two Hands (not clapping), which is a work for solo performer and computer. In the piece, the performer’s hand movements are captured by a video camera, analyzed, and transformed into musical sound. The images from the computer’s built-in camera are divided into twelve fields, each controlling a sound. The sounds are activated by hand movements that appear as a kind of ritual, where the performer is something between a conductor and a magician. Two Hands (not clapping) was commissioned by Dark Music Days (Reykjavik) in 2010 with support from the Danish Arts Foundation.

The lecture was held with support from ARTEC NTNU.

Wayne Siegel performs Two Hands (not clapping). Foto: Gina Sandberg