Highlighting the 60-year history of electronic music composed for loudspeaker systems built around and above the audience and performed by Harvard University educator and composer Hans Tutschku, “36 Loudspeakers for 2 Ears” includes Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge; Edgar Varèse’s Poème électronique (famously performed in 1958 at the Brussels World’s Fair over hundreds of loudspeakers designed by the architect Le Corbusier and the composer/architect Iannis Xenakis); John Chowning’s Turenas, the very first computer-music work created with “the simulation of moving sound sources”; multichannel works by the Belgian composer Annette Vande Gorne and the British composers Jonathan Harvey and Jonty Harrison; and pieces by William Schottstaedt and Mark Applebaum.
Ponder this 1960s recording of the mind-scrambling Stockhausen piece, and consider how it will sound piping through EMPAC’s new 36-speaker system while you sit in its midst:
“36 Loudspeakers for 2 Ears” will take place at EMPAC in Troy, New York, on February 22 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $18, $13, and $6. For more information, call (518) 276-3921 or visit https://empac.rpi.edu/.