Joel Chadabe

As composer and performer, Joel Chadabe has toured worldwide with interactive electronic systems since 1969. His performances include the Venice Biennale, Wellington Festival, Aarhus Festival, De Isbreker, New Music America, Inventionen, Ars Electronica, and New Music New York. Recent recordings are on Deep Listening and CDCM labels.

His book Electric Sound has been widely praised and his articles have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Fulbright Commission. He is currently president of Electronic Music Foundation.

“I've been composing and performing with electronic systems through most of my professional life. From 1966 into the 1970s, I worked with synthesizers and other equipment, including the CEMS System, a large synthesizer system built for me by Robert Moog; Daisy, a random signal generator built for me by John Roy; and a PDP-11 minicomputer. In 1977, I bought the first Synclavier, a digital synthesizer / computer system built by Sydney Alonso and Cameron Jones, and with the help of Roger Meyers, my partner at the time, began to program it. In 1986, I began to work with a MIDI system consisting of a Macintosh computer, Yamaha synthesizers, and software developed at Intelligent Music, a software company in which I was seriously involved. It was good luck that my life has been synchronized with the development of electronic equipment. As I have gotten older and weaker, the equipment has gotten smaller and lighter.
    In my work with electronic systems, I compose the instrument rather than the music. This means creating a palette of sounds that the instrument will play and creating a process that defines the way that the instrument will react to a performer. An instrument that I create typically generates its own information in addition to what is provided by a performer, so that its output influences the performer at the same time that the performer influences the instrument. This mutually influential relationship is the basis for what I call 'interactive composition', a way of making music where the composition takes its form as the result of performer / instrument interactions.
    After Some Songs is a series of short pieces, several of them based on jazz classics. While some of the songs are recognizable, others are too abstract to be recognized, and there are some original compositions mixed in. In 1966, with the intention of enhancing the beauty and strong character of the originals, I used a computer to generate Settings for Spirituals, settings for a group of spirituals sung by Irene Oliver. That work pointed me towards several other compositions including, in 1985, Several Views of an Elusive Lady, based on Stella By Starlight. The merging of popular musical traditions with aristocratic traditions and technology has been an interest of mine for quite a while.
    In performing After Some Songs, which I recorded with Jan Williams, Bruno Spoerri, and Reto Weber, I'm interacting with the instrument while Jan and I are following each other, matching sounds and gestures, letting the music unfold as the result of our conversational relationship, with the other musicians joining in. This particular way of performing has been very satisfying for me. For one thing, I'm always delighted that such sophisticated and innovative technology can produce such a lyrical and musical result. For another thing, it is particularly rewarding to create a space within which performers can work with technology to produce a result that I often find so surprising and magical.”